CS Lewis Symposium 3/3: 21st Century Apologetics -- Ward, Craig, Ramsden, Sears, Williams, Wolfe

ladies and gentlemen welcome welcome back to st. Margaret's church for this CS lewis symposium a delight i know there are one or two who have just arrived now so a particular welcome to you for part of this day before we start this session I did want to say thank you on behalf of the Westminster Abbey Institute particularly to dr. Michael ward for his part in bringing this two days together I know in talking to my colleague come and Vernon white who's also been very heavily involved what a significant part you've played in this and that today wouldn't be happening without your energy and input so we're most grateful to you thank you thank you very much thank you cannon Tremlett good evening yes can I echo his thanks to Vernon white it's such a shame that Vernon has lost his voice and that we haven't heard from him today because really he is the progenitor of this whole event it was he who back in January last year 2012 for saw that this anniversary was approaching and wondered what the Abby Institute might achieve by way of marking it and so he got in touch with me and we had a chat about what might transpire so thank you and thanks also to Claire Foster Gilbert the director of the abbé Institute Oh alas has gone down with shingles so she also is order combat today but she also has played a huge part in making this thing happen and finally thank you to all of you for coming and especially those of you who have given so generously to the costs of the memorial that will be unveiled tomorrow if you are still wishing to give to this project you might be interested to know that there's an overflow memorial project and tomorrow at the end of the Thanksgiving service there will be a collection in aid of a new CS Lewis scholarship at the University of Cambridge this is the idea of Professor Helen Cooper who holds the chair in Medieval and Renaissance English that Lewis was the first occupant of she has devised with the people at Cambridge a new CS Lewis studentship in Medieval and Renaissance literature so if you wish to give to that please come ready to do so tomorrow at the service and gifts by cheque can also be accepted before we actually begin the panel discussion let me just alert you to something that will happen right at the end of it and it's highly appropriate on this occasion when we're about to memorialize Lewis in Poets Corner that we should hear one of his poems we've already heard a reason from Malcolm kite but at the end of the panel discussion I shall ask professor Don King to come and read Louis's poem the apologists evening prayer which seems an appropriate way to round off discussions tonight professor King is working on a new comprehensive edition of Lewis's poetry which will be published next year by Kent State University Press on our panel tonight I'm pleased to welcome professor William Lane Craig research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology California the author of many books including divine foreknowledge and human freedom and God time and eternity Michael ramzan director of the Oxford Center for Christian apologetics and honorary fellow of Wickliffe Hall Oxford the Reverend dr. Jeanette Sears writer and speaker who did her PhD at Manchester and postdoc at Harvard she's the author of a murder in Michaelmas pig's progress and has a special interest in the Inklings and Dorothy L Sayers Peter s Williams is philosopher in residence at the Damaris Trust and a writer and Christian apologist he's the author of CS Lewis versus the new atheists and skeptics guide to atheism and last but not least dr. Judith Wolf's fellow of some John's College Oxford co-editor of CS Lewis and the church essays in honor of Walter Hooper and general editor of the Journal of Inklings studies please really welcome our panel before we come to their questions I'm going to ask each of the panelists to make a very brief opening statement about what they regard as especially valuable or interesting about Lewis's work in Christian apologetics and what we might learn from his legacy today so bill Craig all right thank you dr. Ward has invited each of us to say 300 words or less about quote those aspects of Lewis's apologetic work which we regard as especially valuable and especially worth learning from here are my 296 words CS Lewis lived through and wrote during the height of the positivist era in Oxford the times of AJ air and Anthony flue of verification ISM and the alleged meaninglessness of religious ethical and metaphysical discourse he lived to see the crumbling of positivism and the advent of post-modernism I am so grateful that Lewis never succumbed to the bullying of verification ISM or the blandishments of post-modernism he was consciously and uncompromising Lee a pre-modern man a dinosaur as he put it I am he declared a rationalist reason can apprehend truth and truth is objective and knowable he bucked conventional wisdom by presenting a variety of arguments for God's existence and it rejected the relativity of history arguing for the historical veracity of the Gospels record of the life of Jesus of Nazareth Lewis was thus a champion of both natural theology and Christian evidences as such he modeled for us a well-rounded Christian apologetic on behalf of what he called mere christianity if I may speak personally my own has been inspired by lewis's model I have self-consciously focused on the defense of mere Christianity based upon the twin pillars of God's existence as demonstrated by natural theology and the resurrection of Jesus as established by historical critical studies of the New Testament finally on a practical level Luis has been a model to me of the Ministry of the published word I'm struck by the fact that through the legacy of the works he left behind Luis has reached far more people for Christ since his death than he ever did during his life this has motivated me personally to try to produce in my own small way a body of published work which I hope in God's providence may outlive me as well now Michael Ranson well what I learned from Luis now working as a full-time Christian apologist was really very simple and was said so beautifully and so eloquently in the lectures here this afternoon and if you weren't here for those then you certainly need to get hold of the recordings and in one sense it was very simple truth has a revelatory function and one of the functions of truth it helps you to see things as they are rather like if someone comes and gives you a complicated lecture and you have no idea what they said and someone turns to you in a couple of minutes tells you and sums it up beautifully on receiving the explanation you normally respond by saying oh I I see and you feel like you suddenly see something not just simply that you understand it but you now see something you unable to see before and what I found through Louis's writings was he helped me to see things as they were we don't even bother praying for that which we can't even imagine to be true and in a world of growing skepticism and the kind of hostility that's already been referred to CS Lewis was a master at presenting the truth to help us see things as they are both about the person of cry the world we live and who we are and one of the ways he did that as well which I know has stuck with me and influenced my own apologetics immensely is his love for language and the importance of words it's hard to read almost any of his apologetic work and not realize he spent a huge amount of time on the defense of words I'm sure this has affected me in all kinds of ways I happen to own the 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary which I keep in my study and regularly use as someone once said it's not the most interesting book to read but it does explain every word as you go through and it gives you it gives you achieved a sense of what do these words mean and where might that meaning have changed in my audience and how might I recover this vocabulary so that people can see this truth and respond to it Jeannette says well I love Lewis not just because of who he was not just for his writings but also because of how he talked about his writings how he described his methodology and gave us pictures of how to do it which makes us feel that perhaps we can do it as well which is really rather important and so first of all I love the way he describes his works of apologetic his nonfiction his popular theology as works of translation and I love the idea of that being translation that you're translating something that can seem quite complicated or dull or too deep perhaps people feel they can't understand Christian doctrine the faith has it's been handed down but Lewis translates it for us into words we can understand into images into wonderful stories we actually want to read and he said that this was really easy in one of his letters he says he wants to start a school of translation that it's a trick that anybody can learn and we all ought to be able to do it so I think that's really encouraging from him that he wants everyone to do that and then secondly I love the fact that he described his works of fiction as works of supposition and the idea that they're suppose and that can think well what if what if something happened what if there was another planet with different species on it but they were in the same trouble as we were and they needed saving or what if there are talking animals in a medieval forest and they also have a king who's one of the animals who is like a dying and rising god and you can get to know him in that context so I love the idea of supposes or supposition the what-if side of his stories and that all writers are creating other worlds and so the other with a capital o that he wants you to meet in his other world really is God and I think he does that brilliantly in his works of supposition and lastly another word ending in shun you've had translation supposition and now imitation because I think it's Lewis the man as well that we love as well as his works isn't it we've even had films about his life how many Oxford academics how films made about their love lives it's not usually that's interesting so the fact that we love him he he did attempt to imitate Christ the imitatio Christi he attempted to live like Christ and we all know that phrase what would Jesus do well I think you can often ask yourself what would Lewis do or think or say and often you'd be absolutely spot-on but I think so that's what the third channel that leads to my admiration my inspiration perhaps emulation as well but um can we expect another Lewis I don't know perhaps we want to talk about that tonight perhaps it will be someone or something completely different to Lewis as Aslan did say to Lucy in Prince Caspian when she was wanting Aslan to come and save them again with a big roar and save them in exactly the way he had in the first story Aslan said to her probably dear one I can't remember if he said dear one on this occasion but probably dear one things never happen the same way twice so perhaps God's got something very different for us Peter Williams researching my recent books yes Lewis versus the New Atheists it struck me that Lewis had been the old-fashioned kind of atheist who takes philosophy seriously as an atheist Lewis rejected scientism one might say that the atheism of Lucretius save Lois from the positivism of a Jair moreover Lewis didn't lurch from the mistakes of modernism to the mistakes of post-modernism his love of philosophy produced neither a narrow rationalism nor a romantic anti rationalism but a pre-modern wisdom Louis knew that reason requires faith in rational insight and he recognized the value of empirical facts without rejecting the transcendental facts of truth goodness and beauty so Lewis attended two arguments against naturalism and for theism in mere christianity he brilliantly popularized the sort of moral argument for god to vote by WR so Lee's Gifford lectures on moral values and the idea of God however it's the reasons that Lewis gave for abandoning a naturalistic worldview that resonate most incessantly today it's not only in reading say alvin plantinga's anti naturalism argument from evolution that one is reminded of lewis's Aintree naturalistic apologetic in miracles it's frequently in reading norm theistic scholars like Thomas Nagel and neo hair or Raymond Tallis one counts for eight Louis's philosophy from his fiction his philosophy often uses story to elicit rational insight consider Louis's meditation in a tool shed his fiction fleshy is out a philosophical skeleton allowing us to to imbibe the atmosphere of a philosophy I particularly enjoy the abolition of man through that hideous strength Louis teaches us the importance of being nourished by a community of scholarship including voices of dissent jointly dedicated to following the argument wherever it leads and finally Louis helps us transcend the chronological snobbery of our own age through the reading of older books not least those by Lewis himself thank you and now Judith Wolfe thank you as I recently wrote I was struck by something that Richard Dawkins said in a recent debate with Rowan Williams at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford a member of the audience asked him what sense he could make of the senseless tragedy of the violent death of a young child and Richard Dawkins stared at her and said I don't see any problem or tragedy here it might be sad for the mother but it's nothing other than the workings of evolution and I think Lewis came to the same conclusion that for the purely evolutionary thinker there is no problem of evil because there is nothing that qualifies as evil the natural evolutionary order gives us no standards of justice or goodness and therefore also nothing that can count as violating them and therefore constituting evil and so for the purely evolutionary thinker are very deeply human responses of a literature indignation at evil must be written off as pure illusions so when Lewis came to God I think it was not so much as a foolproof answer to the problem of evil or other problems like it but rather as a reality that accommodated made possible our feelings in their full range of outrage and indignation and so forth something that made the problem of evil and others like it possible in the first place and I think that this approach to apologetics of not starting from prepackaged abstract nicely arranged rational arguments but rather from attentiveness to the full range of what makes us human and seeing what view of the world can accommodate that is something that we should emulate as apologists and indeed as Christians more generally thank you all very much now to our questions and the first one is one that canon vernon white despite having lost his voice managed to croak out to me during one of the breaks and it's a very important aspect of lewis's thought perhaps lewis's most serious work of apologetics was his book miracles a preliminary study and canon white was asking about what the panel thought of lewis's argument in miracles about the the apologetic value of reason itself about how reason may be understood as itself relatively supernatural to to our material organisms and therefore indicative perhaps of something which is fully supernatural so panel what do you make of miracles well it was something that i mentioned in my opening remarks how very contemporary lewis's discussion of the the problems of a naturalistic worldview in trying to account for the nature of human rationality is it's something that's still very much being discussed in the philosophical literature today the most recent edition of the the world's biggest circulating philosophy of religion journal from the Sophia Christie for example had a an article in it by a contemporary philosopher defending CS Lewis's argument for miracles and interacting with alvin plantinga's similar argument that he gave a number of years ago in Warrenton proper function where alvin plantinga specifically footnoted that his argument bought some similarities with the argument that lewis has given so it's still very much alive and as I say it's actually I think increasingly a point of tension that you can see a theist writers recognizing within a naturist eight worldview so if you read Thomas nagels recent book mind and cosmos there you past use of labels book read like good grief am I reading miracles by say Louis no I'm reading a book by an atheist philosopher of mind wrestling with how do I can you put reezy intranet rustic worldview I'm saying in the end we don't know how to I don't see how to and indeed he says I really hope that God is not a patient enough but but he's really struggling to try and find a way of doing it yeah I I remember speaking in an Oxford University College about 18 years ago and the master of the college had started out life in that place as an undergraduate student on his postgraduate degree there became a lecturer there seen he went up through the ranks ended up as master of the college and I was speaking in Chapel that Sunday evening and he happened to be there and it was full and at the end he said could you come back to my study for a drink so I thought either I'm going to be told off or asked a question thankfully it was a question and as he handed me a glass support he simply said you know when I was in when I was a young academic here we all used to make fun of CS Lewis and we even had a debate in this College about shutting down the chapel because it was obsolete and thought we should convert it into a second library would be more useful to the students who were here and I'd actually used one of my points had been from miracles and I'm CS Lewis's arguments and comments about reason and how do we account for the process of reason and how can we trust reason itself and then he said to me you know we used to make fun of him he says but if you he says today in the chapel it was filled there wasn't a single spare seat he said if you went in to the senior common room of my college every dawn I know is reading a CS Lewis book right now and so I think this is one of the remarkable legacies of Louis he we think of people as being prophetic and we often use that term tip about telling the future I mean any good Old Testament scholar will tell you that's the minor use of the word prophecy biblically it's all about telling the future is about interpreting the times and I think Lewis was able to interpret the times by revealing things as they really were and just show naturally where it would go and I think that's one of the reasons why it's still so contemporary and why almost any book on apologetics you pick up today is almost bound to have a Lewis Lewis quote as a matter of fact maybe someone should write a book on apologetics without Louis quotes in it and see what would happen but and I remember to my shame on the reason question that you raised coming up with this argument myself one day as a postgraduate student with a with my professor of philosophy who described himself as a born-again atheist and we were at 2:00 a.m. and I came up with this argument from reason and I was so impressed with myself and thought wow I could write this up and then realize that about 3:00 a.m. having finished a conversation at 2:00 that actually Louis had already said that and I just momentarily forgot where he'd already put it subconsciously so I think that's just some demonstrators how he gets into your mind and imagination even when you're not conscious that he's necessarily with you thank you Bill Craig would you like to chime well I would just say that one thing that we need to keep in mind with respect to these arguments and I think this is such a perfect illustration is that contemporary Christian philosophy which is experiencing a tremendous renaissance stands on Louis's shoulders and moves beyond him it's not as though we should simply read CS Lewis's the final thought on these arguments Alvin Plantinga in particular has developed us our evolutionary argument against naturalism with tremendous rigour and precision that Louis didn't have what Louis grasped in a kind of rough-and-ready way Plantinga has developed in a very meticulous and rigorous way to show that if our cognitive faculties are the product of naturalistic evolutionary processes then we cannot have any confidence in the reliability of our cognitive faculties but if that's true it's self-defeating because you can't have any reliable confidence in the reliability of those faculties in telling you that naturalism is true or that this argument is correct so planning is says that naturalism has a built-in defeater and so cannot be rationally affirmed and so I would just encourage all of us who are studying apologetics not to take Lewis as the final word but to use him as a springboard for further reflection further advancement in developing these arguments thank you and what I would like to add to that as well is that when I read Miracles as a teenager you know I was reading a book of really quite sophisticated philosophy as a teenager who normally would be reading about pop music or rock stars or whatever and Lewis was such a brilliant communicator but I was absolutely riveted and it felt like the most exciting subject I'd ever read and it was great to know that as a Christian reason was on my side somehow instead of it being reason versus faith I as this young tiny Christian as it were could actually have reason on my side when I was relating with non-christians and so it was a tremendous encouragement on that level - thank you all right from the value of reason to the dangers of imagination this is a question from Sarah du Nord Wall who describes herself as a poet what do we have to do to ensure that our imaginations don't lead us into spiritually dangerous places who would like to come in on that well I think Lewis was a great believer in intellectual chastity I think that's probably how he would put it perhaps and that our minds have to be open to God and God's Spirit and I think it's part of our our daily spiritual discipline here what we open our minds to is incredibly important and I think Lewis was a very disciplined person and certainly took this very seriously what what he fed his mind on and so I think he would say it he would place it in our daily spiritual disciplines probably wouldn't he that that was the most important thing and that's because the visual was so important to him what we look at is incredibly important and of call it becomes part of our brains forever so we have to be very careful what we look at that it's something in line with with what God would want yes in fact he he talked about disciplining disciplining his imagination even before he was a theist let alone a Christian if I myself may make a brief comment on this point I think one of Lewis's Louis's own ways of answering this question would be to say that the imagination needs to be operated in consort with with the reason that imagination which just runs amok without any rational control over it is not the imagination as Lewis understands it it's the it's merely the imaginary it has no necessary value in itself it's just like the the muddle of visions which flood through our minds at night in our dreams the natural or the organ of meaning the imagination needs to needs to submit its findings to the natural organ of truth for for an adjudication to be made about the value of those meanings are they true are they false and that of course is the substance of his great war with Owen Barfield his good friend who believed that the imagination could apprehend truths that reason was not capable of reaching and seus Lewis made the very clear distinction that we've heard about earlier this afternoon that reason is the organ of truth whereas the imagination is the organ of meaning but the imagination has to submit to the judgment of truth and I think that when he became a Christian later on he saw this organ of truth not only as reason but also as revelation and so on adherence to revealed doctrine was always something that he held on to as a means of disciplining his imagination and keeping it in its bounds just as Coleridge of course does when he frets about his wayward imagination in the early and harp for example and then goes back to dr. Anna's as reigning it in thank you anybody else would I think I know dr. kite is funny we're up here we've got people in the audience here who know more about this than I forgotten more about this and we actually learnt in the first place I think addressed this question specifically in his lecture I think very very well so I'm gonna refer you back to him to to that recording and claim that I had all of those thoughts in my head before he presented them so eloquently this afternoon anyway thanks let's move on to a third question from Jenny Peterson which rather picks up on the point that Jeannette was just making about the importance of what we look at the question asks Louis wrote and broadcast before the current era with its cultural dominance of visual media in film and television in what ways might these new visual media inhibit or enhance Christian apologetics I can say something about the way in which it can enhance the reach of Christian apologetics I think that YouTube is an incredible tool for apologetics and world evangelization because through the internet these materials get into all sorts of contexts where persons would never read a book or have access to library materials and I have found that making a YouTube archive of talks debates interviews panels of this sort will reach thousands sometimes hundreds of thousands of people through YouTube so we as Christian apologists need to be very aggressive and proactive in using YouTube in the Internet to disseminate these materials thank you I mean I have a feeling Michael you do you know more about this than us but I have to admit I've been very skeptical about the new media often fueled by you know the comment that YouTube Twitter and Facebook we're going to merge into a new URL you twit face com and I I think maybe that's coming from seeing the irresponsible use of it and it's quite interesting I guess if you if you look at Louis's biography biographical life he became a voice to the nation through his broadcast talks during the Second World War when actually there were no competing media which is why he became such a household name and he did so so responsibilities so responsibly without a glib apologetic but speaking in a situation where hundreds of thousands of people were dying and the cost was very high which I gave a reality to what he did then I think sadly maybe a lot of irresponsible and sensationalist voices came into the media and I think a lot of Christians sort of recoiled from that slightly thinking I don't want to be tired of that brush maybe maybe there was a bit of a vacuum left I have a feeling if he were here he might well say look nobody really view much about radio you know back then it was quite a new medium to put this kind of thing and you should fully engage with it I think that's what he would say I mean you you may have the better incitement no I'm sure you're right I mean Louis was one of the first media Dom's wasn't he he and his mortal and colleague AJP Taylor they were a new breed and yes it was a very modern medium the wireless I mean not the radio and the wireless what do we mean by wireless now something quite different just think a word as one about Christian youths of media in in the less overt way and Bill's talking about that Christian apologetics and the way in which you can communicate that in two different situations through YouTube and so on but I think that our engagement with with say Christian film writers and filmmakers and so on especially can take that leaf out of Louis's book of of the suppose 'el of doing things not in the in the sort of direct here's the gospel presentation with an altar call at the end kind of a way but in that in that way of teasing the imagination of the little the arrows of sunlight that Malcolm was talking about earlier today to get people thinking in terms of the big the deep spiritual moral issues of life the universe and everything to get people thinking about Christ first you have to get them to think getting people thinking about life the universe and everything opening up those issues that in itself is a really positive part of of the engagement that I think Christians are caught T in today's media and of course we're not just wanting people to think we're wanting them to love if we're going to be Christians and the irony is is that we want to portray God's love and loving relationships in the right way in visual media and written media so for people who perhaps only look at that in order for people to then leave that in a way and then actually be involved in real relationships with God with other people in the church and so on how can we hopefully follow in Lewis's footsteps in giving media portrayals of goodness that are interesting and captivating yes yeah this what was it you twit face com this new phenomenon which results in a large extent in in globalization national boundaries now mean much less than they did touches upon our next question from rod Miller is Louis really growing in a steam in Britain besides the Poets Corner Memorial and if so is there a particular aspect of his writing or thinking that is fueling the growth and in the related point why is Louis more popular in the US than in the UK so we have one American and four Brits on the panel I don't know bill if you would like to touch on the popularity in the u.s. I think Alister McGrath is probably right when he says in his biography of Lewis that what happened in the United States is that Lewis connected with surging American evangelical Christianity since about 1948 in the United States with Billy Graham Carll fh henry Harold Hawking gay and so forth evangelicalism was born and has come to displace the old mainline Protestant denominations in the United States as the most culturally significant expression of Christianity and evangelicals connected with CS Lewis and rightly or wrongly they saw him as one of them in a sense and I think that has fueled enormous popularity in the United States with Louis Lewis's mere christianity transcends denominational boundaries as well and makes him appealing I understand from discussions with some of my colleagues that Lewis is tremendously popular in the Mormon Church and that a good many Mormon people are moving away from traditional LDS doctrine which thinks of God is a physical humanoid being on a planet in outer space to a more classical theism of God as a transcendent creator of the universe so Lewis is having incredible influence even within so unexpected a denomination or confession as the Mormon Church thank you I think there are two points to make about the British reception of Lewis one is that now that he's been dead for fifty years he's moved from a very annoying Cantera almost threatening contemporary to a classic writer whom one can appreciate from a distance almost as a primary source so to say about which one can debate and so forth so there's a certain certain distance and classical status that allows people to talk about him in new ways but the second point I think is that as as you said I think it's not so much that more people are reading him but rather that it's become more suitable for polite society to talk about it I think that people have been reading him in their closets and academics in particular have been reading him in their claws all this time but now that people like Rowan Williams or Alister McGrath and some others have stepped up and engaged with him publicly and on a rigorous level it's suddenly possible to talk about him as I say in polite society to look slightly further afield it's also interesting to note that in countries like Germany for example where there is a strong division and speaking now as a theologian in countries like Germany where there is a strong division between Lutheran's or Protestants and Catholics it seems to be mainly the Catholic academics who are engaging with Lewis and doing so very in a very lively way than the Lutheran's because for the Catholics he is a champion of a natural theology and approach to God as in some way continuous with human reason and so forth whereas the the Protestant theologians who are very strongly I'm emphasizing a theology of the Cross of discontinuity between God and the world are quite wary of him so there's a much stronger confessional divide I think at least among theologians in those countries than here I'm tempted to I agree with Louis now being a classic and so having a different status and that making a big effect I'm tempted to say that people become popular when someone can make money out of them and it's certainly the case that with the film's now we all know that the films of the Narnia chronicles came on the back of the Tolkien films in many respects and obviously huge amounts of money being made out of those and so that and of course they're very filmic stories so that that makes a lot of sense but probably the writer who has been the main Christian novelist recently in this country has been GP Taylor who has written Christian novels originally got a huge amount of money for them but as soon he says as soon as he started to be called the next CH Lewis he was dropped like a hot brick by the media and everybody so there's it's a two-edged sword ready thank you in addition to the written questions that have been submitted I've asked to people in the audience to ask a question and I've asked them because they each represent a very significant Louis institution in the United States so could the person with the roving microphone come up to the third pew here and ask a question of Stanley Madison dr. Stanley Mason who is president of the Lewis foundation who have over many years restored Lewis's home the kilns and run many successful Oxbridge conferences so Stan what question do you have for the panel well thank you Michael actually I pondered Europe your invitation to come up with a question and as I did I was kind of amused with the question that I came up with but it is a sincere question and that is I think one of the things that most amazes me about Louis is simply the extraordinary prodigious nature of his work you know when William Lane Craig said before he goes you'd like to leave a body of scholarship behind the you know that would really make a statement and prove to be generative a lot of good but when one Ponder's the fact that here was a single person now we know he was single descent she was not married so they could see what he wrote enough like who's had no children but in point of fact we heard earlier today that he has a big family I think Malcolm made their very clear write the DNA was it Malcolm who at that point Allister no it was Aleister right Aleister where is he but he had a big family I mean he related to so many people whether it was in pubs working in the kitchen at home for mrs. Moore as when he makes very very clear on command I mean his life was anything but that of a eunuch driven to publish works and yet here he we commonly say over 40 published works thousands of letters and Walter yeah Michael you work with Walter and I think I heard that the three volumes published there are only something like 40% or less of the total body of correspondence that he wrote with a pen with the pen remind you so I don't know how in the world a human being who is not a professor with a big endowed chair about who was in fact a tutor working with students one-on-one so incredible engaged his life I marvel at it I really do and the phrase that came to me was it was a case of incarnation apologetics that is his life was so invested in every idea every person when you say he pursued words with great penetrate I wonder if you'd comment and that those of you who've known people who work closely with him or in your own reading with him if you've had that same sense of being overwhelmed knowing yourself how diligent it is to write one book thank you very much so I think the question might might boil down to emulation how can we possibly consider emulating someone who's sort of a giant among men is it possible what should we even try yes I think we well we need to we need to listen to God we need to be like I was thinking earlier of the green lady on pair Alandra who before she answers a question she's quiet and she's listening to my level and she only answers when she knows what melville wants her to say so I'm tempted just to sit here quiet and feel the Lord shows me what to say it's a question of calling isn't it and when God gives a calling he also empowers you to do that that he's asking you to do and so thank God that he did call Luis to that work and that he empowered him to do it and we all have different callings and it's possible that even if we only wrote one book that might be the thing that converts thousands we only have to think of the Lord Jesus himself who never wrote any of his stories down and look at the effect he's had built well John Wesley once distinguished in an address to his Methodist ministers between what he called innate abilities and acquired abilities and if we don't have the innate abilities that a CS Lewis had you're not going to be able to produce that body of work but nevertheless there are acquired abilities that we can all strive for and I'm thinking here of things like self-discipline time management setting of priorities having a vision for writing if that's what we feel called to do and I think that these kinds of abilities can be acquired and can help us to be surprisingly productive one method that I've adopted in my work is what Jan and I called the turtle method which is like in the story of The Tortoise and the hare the turtle just by steady slow plodding eventually wins the race and so if you can just write a paragraph one morning or a few pages that day it's incredible how after the weeks go by it begins to accumulate and so I do think that through these kinds of self disciplinary abilities one can maximize whatever innate potentialities the Lord has given us so as to try to produce a body of written work for those of us who are called to be writers that will hopefully be read even after we're gone thank you you know I've had a working relationship with Professor Alister McGrath now for 15 years and when that started I thought gosh every time he writes something I should really buy it and read it and the dear man's almost bankrupted me so I think some people have a natural writing gift some people you pray that they wrote slightly less but III think we as a as a cultural so maybe sometimes even as a church we haven't always encouraged people in the expression of their faith through the arts not as an illustration of something else but as a vehicle of communication for that something and so and I think we've paid the price for that in in some in some ways we haven't recognized the role the vehicle by which this this can happen and you look at Jesus Christ too and many senses was a metaphorical theologian he he wasn't making complex theological points and then illustrating them four stories for children the parable he told was the vehicle by which he was delivering his theology it wasn't the illustration of something else and I think that's something that the arts are uniquely gifted to do it becomes the medium in the vehicle by which things can be passed on and I think that's the one part of Lois I know someone asked the question earlier that we really need to see encouraged again where people can find the expression to poetry through novels through short stories radio plays to really engage with people out there but through that medium where the message is embedded all the way all the way through it thank you yeah I'd just like to pick pick up on on that and talking about what I said about Lewis's embracing the transcendental values of truth and goodness and beauty and I think that the church historically here has been pretty good on keeping the importance of truth from the Word of God and so on and of course goodness and morals and ethics the church is very big and talking about ethics but has frankly largely dropped the ball on beauty but beauty encompasses the other two and beauty is that which is truly worthy of being admired of admiration and incorporates truth and goodness and the widest transcendental value is beauty and I think Lewis should be a prod and a reminder to the Western Church to not take our eye off the place of beauty in church in liturgy in communication in apologetics Thank You Judith do you want to I don't think too that well I completely agree with William I mean if we look at Lewis's productivity I think emulating him will become a very frustrating task but if we look at the the habits of mind and of heart that he cultivated then those are something that we certainly can emulate the attentiveness to others that you mentioned stan did self discipline and so forth and what fruits arise from that is is not up to us but we can certainly cultivate those habits and see what comes thank you one thing that occurs to me is that Michael you are in charge of the Oxford the Christian apologetics and I teach in an apologetics program for Houston Baptist University we're trying to train up young apologists but it occurs to me that the Loess never went through apologetic training in fact he was a bit of a lone wolf he he was not schooled even in the English public school system for a couple or three years of his most formative period in his in his middle teens he was privately tutored one-to-one by william Kirkpatrick he wasn't in a school and I think that's that's not unimportant in in understanding Lewis's abilities that he was he was to a certain extent a free thinker because he wasn't trammeled by the expectations of his contemporaries in the same way that most of his contemporaries were I read once that of the of the top patent holders those are I see I who hold the greatest number of patents in the top ten such people I think four out of those ten had not received a university education which is extremely interesting there there can be a way in which we we squelch originality by over training people so it may be that the apologist the great new apologist who's going to - wow the 21st century is not even at a school who knows the second question from the audience is going to come from dr. Gerry root so could the microphone come down to this first pillar here a Gerry Feud hold your hand up or stand Thank You Gerry is the representative of the wave center Wheaton College Illinois the Wade Center is is the primary collection of Louis's papers and documents it was established first of all in 1960s by Professor Clyde s Colby and it's now the central place in the world if you want to study anything to do with Lewis and Jerry is Omni the advisory board so Jerry what is your question and so as Michael Ward on the advisory board um this is picking up on dr. Matson's question the books es lewis' defender of the faith concludes Luis himself was his greatest apology the apologetic that walked in shoes could you comment about his humility his magnanimity his willingness to shoulder the weight of his neighbor's glory and how this lends to his persuasiveness as an apologist and as a Christian thank you who would like to come in on that Wow why I feel probably is the most humble member of the panel I should comment I I think the point you make is a very good one if the gospel is true we've already heard about it today it's been the theme it should be seen as well as heard and most of all seen in the life of the Christian and it's very interesting I think if we were to say look close your eyes and imagine a thoroughly uncompromised an uncompromising Christian and then we were to say what figure came to mind the answer is probably someone who was quite difficult awkward hard thoroughly outspoken maybe and it's very interesting the the kinds of things we would immediately put into that but if you look at the book of Galatians which we know to be one of the earliest you know of all the epistles and the books that we have in the New Testament amongst you know one the very first then the the poor there has several concerns one of which is what is the real gospel and what isn't the real gospel but then he has another concern the Apostle Paul in Galatians which is well what is the true characteristic of a Christian and he tells us how to tell the true person who is a Christian from the fake um in Galatians 5:22 he says there's a fruit of the Spirit just one fruit and when you taste that fruit it should taste of love joy paste you know it needs me to recite it some of you know little songs that you've learned all of those characteristics by heart now I find that really interesting what the Apostle Paul is saying there is bite me but in a very nice way and he's saying look if someone is claiming this is true and real in their life you should be able to taste it in their life and what you should taste should be this love and this peace and this joy and this gentleness and so on if however what you taste is murder Envy lust strife you have the right to question their claim to have had this transforming life-changing encounter with a person of Christ and I think the reason why we like people like CS Lewis I mean I also have the privilege of working very closely with a guy called Professor John Lennox who you know if you ever heard him speak you you feel halfway through his talk you want to go up onto the platform and give him a big hug because he's so gentle and in his demeanor and his manner of delivery and that is very attractive and and I think it's something that we need to recover and maybe become even more challenging maybe at times as Christians ourselves to say well what does the church look like what what does it taste like does it taste like this because that's what we're told it should and so let's not be compromising about that let's be thoroughly uncompromising when it comes to things like is this fruit does it taste like this in our life and I think the church would be a lot stronger and have a much larger platform for its message if if we were and so I'm sure it was part of he commended his own message through his own lifestyle but embodied by them all the letters he wrote I think he was a general principle wasn't it he tried to respond to every letter he got I mean I struggle responding to my emails and I'd love to know what he would have made of email or maybe he would have seen that some form of demonic attack but it was just he valued the person they had taken time to write to him he wanted to write back to them and and he did Thank You Jeanette yes speaking of someone who did actually give John one that's a hug months I've started now as I get older and lots of my friends are having to care for elderly relatives and my mother gets older and so on and the word carer is starting to take on a whole new meaning I'm starting to see Lewis as a carer he cared for so many people throughout his life obviously for mrs. more oh she got older for his wife joy when she was ill and for lots of his neighbors and relatives and particularly his brother as well and and for animals he loved animals and he cared about nature and there's just that caring and taking responsibility for you know if someone's got a need and you're there you're the one who looks after that person whatever it means clearing up off the floor or whatever Lewis was was really right there in his caring thank you and I think that one important thing about humility in particular is that for those humility was not just a spiritual virtue it was also an intellectual virtue it was not something that you had to tie yourself in some sort of spiritual knot to achieve making yourself seem worse than you really are anything like that but rather he emphasizes again and again in his writings that a good writer is one who makes you not look at him but rather makes you see through the lens that he is seeing through and this outward movement of the mind and of the eyes towards the reality out there and our way of seeing it rather than looking at ourselves is something that he valued very much in literature and in scholarship and therefore also embodied in his life quite naturally as part of that I think thank you Peter the famous aphorism when he mill estate has sprung to mind which is this humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less thank you Bill do you have anything to add to that well I think Jerry is right in reminding us that we've got to walk the walk as well as talk to talk but I have to say I think it's striking really how little of CS Lewis's personal life comes through in his works apart from say surprised by joy he doesn't put himself forward he doesn't tell anecdotes about I was walking into quad the other day and spoke to this professor or a student said this and that to me really you can appreciate his apology dick works without knowing anything about mrs. Moore or his brother or his life so I don't think it's true that the effectiveness of his work depends upon his living it out in his personal life I was really surprised by a lot of his personal life when I read McGrath's biography of Lois there there's his work stand on their own I guess is what I'm trying to say independent of his life because in most cases the man doesn't intrude into his books in a personal way which is perhaps a mark of humility itself hmm yes I think he deliberately tried to keep himself off stage as much as possible and that's part of what mayor christianity is about isn't it because he's not wanting to say this is my religion he's wanting to say this is the broad central mainstream of the faith to which pretty much every Christian could subscribe but I myself he says I'm not I'm a very ordinary layman of the Church of England which is a statement you see what he's trying to say that he's not he's not extraordinarily virtuous he's just ordinary he's neither particularly high nor particularly low nor particularly anything else he's not trying to convert you to a particular brand of Christianity or indeed churchmen ship within Anglicanism he's just wanting to give you something beyond all the denominations or within all the denominations I think we should come to our last now and after which I will ask Don King to come and read the poem this final question comes from AJ Finch what particular books or articles of Louis have impacted the panelists especially and should be better known today Wow well going gosh where do we begin you know example the abolition of man his leches a very short book three lectures the abolition of man I think is again is one of those very prophetic books about our about our times should be read next - Aldous Huxley's brave new world for understanding the modern world and his defense there of the the objectivity of beauty of knowledge and things but also on the other extreme not wanting to go into a sort of shallow rationalism that we've talked about of you of uniting of seeing the way through this modernist post modernist dilemma that the world has got itself into and the way he resolves that and his defense of those kind of values in in essays like the poison of subjectivism and defeat at arte which is a particular flavor of my name the abolition of man there's an interesting book about the abolition of man which is too little known roots by the by Lord Hailsham sometime Lord Chancellor who thought very highly of the abolition of man himself and wrote a little book about it called values collapse or cure so you're there with with Quintin Hogg anybody else want to come in on those well I think that there are some essays and works of Lewis that have gained new popularity that have been mined quite a lot recently and I think they furtively Tata and the poison of subjectivism and so forth belong to those that have been worked up by people like Alvin Plantinga and very interesting in rigorous ways I think that there are some other essays whose main argument her idea hasn't really been touched upon very much at all by academia and I think that transposition in particular and the funeral of a great myth as well are some of those and I'm sort of waiting to see whether people will pick those up and and make something of them in the way that things like miracles have have been made something off so those would be some of my recommendations I suppose Thank You Juliet oh it's like almost any of his letters really I've been amazed reading through his letters how I can read them almost like lectio divina where it's like contemplative reading there's so much of his faith in there so much good advice so much of God and he can't write a dull sentence it's fantastic Michael my most surprising lewis learning experience by far was buying a copy of the Screwtape Letters read out loud by John Cleese I never thought Basil Fawlty would teach me theology I tried reading the book I think I've read the first six in one day and was almost like it was too rich I put it down and forgot about it I discovered those and I listened to one a day in my car and discipline myself to press stop and not go any further this is when I had a cassette player and and it was a remarkable experiment both hearing them read out loud and also just thinking and reflecting on actually just how much again was packed in there it surprised deceptively simple but actually much deeper and and I think opens up the whole question of is there a spiritual realm to life and does it interact with us is there a battle and struggle that's going on around us that we're not aware of and yeah it's if you can get hold of it and even get hot anymore but try try John Cleese reading reading the Screwtape Letters it's being read this week isn't it on Radio 4 by Simon Russell Beale and there's also they should have got Michael McIntyre there's also recording by Andy Serkis lots of actors are wanting to take this do we have any offerings from the silent panel for me as I shared in my opening remarks it hasn't been so much any particular work of Lois that has been fluent shil so much as it has been his serving as a role model of Christian apologetics as a young student for me Francis Schaeffer and Edward J Cornell were more shaping influences on my thought and then later Alvin planica but Lewis as a role model I think has been important in his defense of mere christianity and his endorsement of the project of natural theology and christian evidences in defense of the Christian faith and in that role model I follow and try to emulate Lewis thank you I think answering for myself I would say one of one of Lewis's works which ought to be better known is the essay with the terrible title blast balls and flail ins fears a semantic nightmare which has actually been quoted from several times today in the definitions of imagination as the organ of meaning and reason as the natural organ of truth it's a terrible a terribly titled essay if Lewis had called it the importance of metaphor in all our knowing everybody would have flocked to this essay it's a it's a very deep and seminal case that he makes it and it should be better known as regards my own favorite work I think I would probably cite his last novel till we have faces Louis himself regarded that as easily his best work I understand that Rowan Williams thinks most highly of that of all of Louis's works and I share that opinion it's an amazingly deep rich mysterious novel which is hard to conceptualize hard to understand except while you are reading it because it is truly mythic I think you have to enjoy it in order to understand it and to enjoy it you have to read it and reread it and then reread it we're approaching our last few minutes so I think at this juncture I may ask professor Don King to come and close proceedings for us by reading this poem the apologists evening prayer after which we can draw proceedings to close so Don as one who's been reading Louis's poetry for forty years I would add that some of you might want to begin reading Louis's poetry the apologists evening prayer was not published until 1964 but it appears in a letter in 1942 and I think it picks up on the question that Jerry asked just a moment ago the apologists evening prayer from all my lame defeats and Oh much more from all the victories that I seemed to score from cleverness shot forth on thy behalf at which while Angels weep the audience laughed from all my proofs of thy divinity thou who would give no sign deliver me thoughts are but coins let me not trust instead of thee they're thin worn image of thy head from all my thoughts even from my thoughts of thee o thou fair size fall and set me free Lord of the narrow gate and the needles I take from me all my trumpery lest I die Thank You Don and please thank the panel ladies gentlemen as the panel leaves on behalf of the Dean and chapter I'd like to express our thanks to Michael in particular Michael has been a key agent of this whole project Vernon has driven it as far as we're concerned I'm thrilled to be looking forward to dedicating the memorial to CS Lewis tomorrow in Poets Corner but this has been a wonderful curtain-raiser and a wonderful inspiration for many of us who don't know CS Lewis as well as we might and are now determined to get to know him better as one who read Screwtape Letters and others when I was a teenager was very much inspired by them very much encouraged by them it's wonderful to have been brought back to CS Lewis in this way and I'm myself grateful for today looking forward to tomorrow but please since Michael has asked us to thank the panel please thank Michael I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else you

Channel: evidence4faith

Views: 10,588

Keywords: C.S. Lewis, CS Lewis Symposium, Christian Evidence, apologetics, Christianity, God, theism, religion, Narnia, Aslan, theology, philosophy, Alister McGrath, Malcolm Guite, Michael Ward, William Lane Craig, Michael Ramsden, Jeanette Sears, Peter S. Williams, Judith Wolfe, rational argument, imaginative fiction, 50th anniversary, memorial, Dawn Treader, miracles, Westminster Abbey, Alvin Plantinga, poetry, poem, story, atheism, naturalism, The Screwtape Letters (Book)

Id: jgnbr-68Vws

Length: 71min 52sec (4312 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 18 2014