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In particular, in ''Mere Christianity'', Lewis emphasizes the Orthodox "Christus Victor" model of Christ's work to the exclusion of the Roman Catholic model which holds that Christ was "penalized" by God in our place. In that book, Lewis also emphasizes the Orthodox "theosis" understanding of salvation to the exclusion of the Roman Catholic thought that salvation includes being "pardoned" or "forgiven" by God. Finally, Lewis did not believe in a penal hell, choosing instead the Orthodox understanding that hell is the experience of Divine Love by a person who did not develop the capacity to love on earth, regardless of whether or not they are a Christian (see ''The Great Divorce'' and ''The Last Battle''). In short, Lewis was a universalist in the way that Orthodox Christianity teaches universalism, believing that God loves all his creatures now and throughout eternity, and we experience "hell" only as much as, and so long as, we choose not to conform ourselves to Divine Love. Like the Orthodox, Lewis believed that we could all legitimately expect (but not predict with certainty) apokatastasis, universal salvation (see ''The Great Divorce'').
===Criticismand Church Life===
The late Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a respected Calvinist theologian who had the opportunity to speak personally with Lewis about these matters and who was critical of Lewis, said in Christianity Today, Dec. 20, 1963, that C.S. Lewis's view of salvation was "defective" because Lewis "was an opponent of the substitutionary and penal theory of the Atonement." Lloyd-Jones would also have the ''very same'' sharp criticism of Orthodox theology as represented by such modern Orthodox theologians as Vladimir Lossky and , Christos Yannaras, and such ancient Orthodox theologians such as St. Gregory of Nyssa , and St. Athanasius. Lloyd-Jones's novel The Protestant and Roman Catholic penal theory of the atonement and its associated understanding of a penal hell is taught by Roman Catholics and Protestants but is still denied by the Orthodox and C.S. Lewis.
Lewis had occasion to visit Greece and visit Orthodox churches there. C.S. Lewis has been quoted as saying that of all the liturgies he'd ever attended, Lewis preferred the Greek Orthodox liturgy to anything that he had seen in the West, Protestant or Roman Catholic. Lewis also claimed that of all the priests and monks that he had ever had the opportunity to meet, the Orthodox priests were the holiest, most spiritual men he had ever met. Lewis was also a sacramentalist, stating in ''Mere Christianity'' that: "There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names -- Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord's Supper."
