[uplifting music]
>> I have to say that
I think you're very very
lucky to be here tonight.
To be able to listen to Jim,
and some of his
reflections about CS Lewis.
And Jim, I wonder,
have you lectured much on CS Lewis?
Have you made a career out
of talking about CS Lewis?
>> No.
I've rarely mentioned publicly
any reminiscences about Lewis.
The reason why is that very early on,
when we started Regent College,
we had Eberhard Bethge,
who came to speak to
us about his friendship
with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
And I appreciated his wonderful
loyalty to his friend,
and the fact that he wanted his name
to be forever recognized.
But I also saw a tragic aspect of it
in that Bethge really
had lost his identity.
He was Bonhoeffer's friend.
And Bethge disappeared.
And I think one of the important things
about the Christian life
is that God individuates
us like nobody else.
And that His kindness to us
is to give us space to be ourselves.
So, this adulation of Lewis mania
almost as a cultural industry
is just a bit overwhelming.
And so, those are the reasons
why, when I was younger,
and I didn't think I was
obviously a mature enough
Christian to do it.
I never really mentioned
my connection with Lewis.
That's only recently
that I gave two lectures
at the CS Lewis Institute a few years ago.
And that was really the only time.
But never lectured on him at Regent.
And so my wife, who already
of course was very cautious
about this side of my life, because,
we got married after
Lewis went to Cambridge.
And so she never really
saw Lewis as I did.
Oh, she says my claim to fame
is that I once saw him at the bus stop.
[laughing]
>> So Jim.
CS Lewis though, was quite
an inspiration for you
in may ways, wasn't he?
>> He was.
>> I'm trying to get the chronology right.
When you were in Edinburgh,
in your 20s, and Lewis was in Oxford,
you're an undergraduate in
Edinburgh, and the BBC talks
that became Mere Christianity,
the broadcast talks,
would have taken place during the war,
and perhaps The Screwtape Letters
would have been published.
What was your first awareness of Lewis?
>> It actually wasn't in Edinburgh.
He was not really publicly
recognized at that time.
It was only when I went to Oxford in 1945,
and then began to meet him on
a regular basis after 1946,
that I then discovered who Lewis was.
>> When did you first meet him?
>> Well, in my second year at Oxford,
I shared an apartment
with the head of the Orthodox Community,
who was a professor of Russian history.
His name is Nicholas Zernov.
And he was a good friend of Lewis.
So, when we shared our apartment together
for the next seven years,
we used to have Lewis
over to our apartment
with a group of other Christian
dons at the university.
About once a month, we would
have a kind of potluck supper,
on a Saturday evening,
and he was a frequent
member of that group.
>> What are some of your
recollections of Lewis
as a person, what was
your impression of him,
and what was his reputation around Oxford?
>> He was basically shy.
But an Irishman has to have wit.
But humor is a smokescreen to intimacy.
And so, he didn't let himself be known.
In spite of all the,
sort of, legendary ideas
about his friends.
It was a very artificial
environment it was, Oxford, really,
after the war.
It was shaken up by the
war, but it was still
a pretty artificial environment.
And so, when you're a bachelor
don living in college,
and you're having
breakfast, lunch, and dinner
with your colleagues, you
do create protective shields
as to really getting known.
And Lewis did this with humor.
But one of his bete
noirs, one of his enemies
that really gagged him
all the time at Maudlin,
was AGP Taylor who was a
professor of modern history.
And ironically, two of his nephews
became strong evangelical young Christians
and we used to have them
for lunch every Sunday
when they were students.
So just in preparing
for this talk tonight,
I phoned up Dennis Alexander,
one of the nephews who's now just retired
from a distinguished
professorship in Cambridge.
And I said Dennis,
why was your uncle so
antagonistic to Lewis?
Well he said, he almost complained to us
that Lewis talked at breakfast.
And there was a taboo in the common room
that nobody spoke to
each other at breakfast.
[laughing]
It was still certainly
from the night before.
And one of the Latin
words that I delighted in,
because my Latin was
limited as a schoolboy,
was the word crespula,
which means the morning
after the night before.
So breakfast was crespula time.
But of course, behind that was also
the outrage of an atheist
who was militant about being an atheist.
That there was a Christian
there, speaking so vocally.
And one of the things that we
had in the common room life,
both in the junior common
room, but it was also
verboten in the senior common room,
never said, spoken about,
but the undergraduates
could be fined if at the dinner table
they spoke about women, or
they spoke about religion.
And so religion was
concealed like your kidneys.
You don't about your kidneys.
And you don't talk about your faith.
And so, this outspoken polemicist of faith
was an outrage to that culture.
>> Yeah.
So Lewis more widely within Oxford,
there was an antipathy toward him
when he came out as a popular writer,
and when he came out as an
apologist for the faith.
>> Well, they looked upon
it as cheap publicity.
If he was a serious scholar,
he wouldn't be popular
with the press, or with the public.
>> Yeah.
>> And so the outrage is that
he really defied the
canons of scholarship.
And so three times over,
he was passed over for a professorship.
He was a fellow of the college,
and he lived in a culture
where you didn't need to have a doctorate.
When I started doing my doctorate,
my colleagues rather snootily said,
why do you need a scholar,
why do you need a doctorate?
A really bright mind
doesn't need a D.Phil.
That's for the second class.
Teachers of the university.
So there was all that kind of snobbery
that was part of the
culture that we lived in.
But Lewis, of course,
he had three first class degrees.
And he was trained of course in grades,
which meant that he was trained
as a textual scholar of Greek and Latin.
That was his first first class degree.
He was also trained as a philosopher,
and when he first started
teaching at University College,
his first appointment after the war,
he was a philosopher.
But then while he was teaching philosophy,
he decided he really wanted
to do English as well.
English literature.
And so in one year,
he went through the three year program
and got a first class
degree in literature.
>> And a first class degree for
a North American audience,
like a first class
is not just like getting an A.
That's a first, is a
very very distinguished
award, isn't it?
>> It really is, yes.
It really is.
>> You have talked before, Jim, about how
Lewis's talk to the RAF pilots,
and his broadcast talks,
that need to be seen within
the context of the war,
that everybody had their war work to do.
>> Yes.
>> Is that what you think drew him out
as an apologist, and as
a lay Christian leader?
>> Yes, I think those of us,
for example, as a student
in Edinburgh University,
I did my war work by going
onto the roof of the university
with a helmet and a bucket of sand,
and a scoop of a spade to
remove any incendiary bombs.
And that was my war work.
Well, Lewis had been
wounded in the first war,
so he was legitimately
exempt from the second war.
But his first bit of war
work was to be a home guard,
which after the debacle
of Dunkirk meant that,
home guard against invasion,
didn't have anything more
than brooms, and sticks.
I mean all the armament was
lost in the debacle of Dunkirk,
meant that we were pretty defenseless.
So, we all, as men,
did our own, women too,
running ambulances and other services.
We all had to do war work,
whether we're in the army or not.
And so Lewis did life, he
used to in the early mornings,
go round the streets of the high street,
on home guard duty.
It was pretty dull stuff,
because there was nothing happening.
And then he decided that he
would do further war work,
which was to boost the
morale of the air force
during the Battle of Britain.
And he had one of his alumni,
who was an Anglican priest
from Sydney, Australia.
Babbington, Canon Babbington
as he became later.
And he said Lewis, we need
you to do your war work
by giving spirited addresses
at the Sunday morning chapel
at the airfields.
And so knowing that these
chaps were going to fly up,
perhaps, on Monday, and
never come back again
in the Battle of Britain,
it was serious business.
And so, when his colleagues asked him
what war work he was doing he said, well,
my preaching is really war work.
So that's the kind of
thing that also created
a very different person,
Dr. Lloyd Jones, was
Harley Street specialist,
actually assistant to the
King's physician, Lord Horder.
And he did his war work by
commuting as a Welshman,
back to Wales, to do
pulpit supply on Sunday.
He never had any seminary training.
He never preached a sermon in his life.
But in the exigencies of
war, you did your war work.
I mean,
those of us handling incendiary bombs
had never handled them
before, but we did war work.
And so, what Lloyd Jones
did was to start preaching.
And then after the war, decided
that he was much more called
to be a congregational
preacher than he was
to be a doctor.
Brilliant as he might
have been as a doctor.
But you see, within
that, those categories,
we're also compartmentalized.
And so to the end of his life, Lloyd Jones
wasn't very convinced whether really,
CS Lewis was a Christian.
And the irony of speaking to you tonight
is I spent all my time
as a senior member of
intervarsity from 1949,
to 1970, and never once was I able
to convince the intervarsity
that Lewis could be a speaker.
And the graduate's fellowship
of which I was chairman also,
again I tried to woo them,
but they had an evangelical mentality.
Lewis was really not quite
orthodox as a Christian.
[chuckling]
>> I bet they regret that now.
[laughing]
Jim I wonder if one of the
lessons for spiritual formation
from Lewis is,
if war time exigency is in a sense,
called him out into
ministry, and into kind of
the ministry that in a sense,
his apologetic ministry
that would have such an impact,
there were some very, in a
sense, quiet, silent years
between his conversion in 1929,
and the emergence as a public
Christian intellectual,
a public writer, in which he
faithfully went to chapel.
In which he was faithful
to Christian disciplines.
And in which, he wasn't a convert
that was immediately put on the platform.
But there were years,
there were many years there
where he just went about the business
of faithfully being a Christian.
>> Yes.
Well can I, before we get
into that question, because,
this is reminiscence,
and so I have to be sharp
and disciplined in what I'm responding to.
We need to start combining his war work
in Mere Christianity, because
that's a very important
part of his identity today.
But Lewis was called upon by the BBC,
before the war, to give
some lectures, and he did.
But in the war,
the head of the religious broadcasting
had read his book, The Problem of Pain,
which was published in the spring of 1940.
And the motivation for
writing The Problem of Pain
was the pain of the blitz.
Was the pain of Dunkirk.
Was the whole tragedy of
the suffering of people
who were bombed out of their homes.
And many losing their lives.
So in the context of The Problem of Pain,
the head of the BBC,
religious section, said,
well, Lewis, we need you
to boost the morale of the nation.
So that should be your war work too.
And so, rather cajoled,
because he was not willing to do this,
he didn't want to be a public figure.
Lewis then did a tentative
series of talks on
good and evil,
in a universe that makes sense.
And, it was those first broadcast talks
that then he was cajoled
to do a second series,
which he then did on
council, he thought, well,
we have to communicate,
what is the Christian faith?
So he called upon a Roman Catholic,
and a Presbyterian, and an
Anglican, and a Methodist.
Senior pastors,
to really collaborate with him
on what would be ecumenically, vocalizing
the central truths of Christian faith.
And then the third
section, or the third time
he spoke on the air for
these broadcast talks
to boost the morale of the nation,
was on the subject of Christian behavior,
on the ethics of Christian living.
Well now, you have to realize
that all this was in the milieu
that we were fighting what
we thought was a right war.
And that we were against evil.
And that Nazism, and even though
we were not aware of the
Holocaust taking place,
nevertheless, there was a strong sense
that we were fighting the forces of evil.
And so when you read Tolkien's work,
or when you listen to
this Mere Christianity,
that Lewis communicated,
both of them echoing
two devastating wars, but
especially the second war
was the war of evil against Nazism.
So we go back now to the other question.
>> Okay.
Well I'm just wondering your sense
of Lewis's own formation, is often
with a figure like Lewis, there's a period
of sort of impression and expression,
of formation, where a
sort of quiet preparation
so that when the time came, he was ready.
When he was called upon to
speak, he was able to speak.
>> Yes.
>> And it seems to me that
there were years there
where he was just quietly faithful.
>> Yes.
He was.
And I think all of us need to recognize
that one very important
part of our spiritual growth
is that seeds are sown as
they are in the garden.
Don't remove them by psychoanalysis.
Let them grow.
And so seeds sown in childhood
will mature in adulthood.
And so, I think that what was an echo
right through Lewis's life,
was that he had an evangelical grandfather
on his mother's side.
And the echoes of being an
evangelical never left him.
So he had that echo within him.
He reacted against it, as
we all do when we're young,
against the heritage that we've had.
But certainly that was
one seed that was sown.
And then I think another
seed that was sown
was his mother's love.
And he loved his mother.
And the tragedy that Lewis felt
when at the age of 10, he
was left without a mother.
And a week later, he was shipped off
to a private school 1000 miles
away from no one else there.
Into England, to get a proper accent.
Crazy.
And so, Lewis said of
that period of his life,
it was as if the continent of Atlantis
had slipped under the waves.
And I stood on an isolated, heaving rock
in the middle of a dark ocean.
And then there fell over him
this great cloud of
alienation and loneliness
that marked a great deal of his life,
for the rest of his
life, until he discovered
the wonder of marriage,
but that came very late.
So, those were some of the seeds,
and so when he goes through
this phase of deism,
before he reaches theism,
deism really was the
religion of his father.
And the frustration that he
had with his own prayer life
as a small boy, when he
went to boarding school,
where he had been taught
to have the discipline
of saying his evening
prayers, was he said,
I used to articulate my prayers
as if I was hearing my father's voice,
who himself was a frustrated lawyer
that wanted to become a politician.
So when the two boys were
caught stealing apples
as Augustine, they'd been
obviously caught stealing apples.
So Lewis and his brother
were caught stealing apples,
they would be brought on the carpet,
and their father would
start to reprimand them.
And then forgetting that he
was addressing small boys,
thought of himself as being
in the House of Commons,
giving a speech, like Burke.
And quoting Burke, for the rhetoric
of what he was
communicating to small boys,
well the small boys thought
that they had been forgotten
and they would slink off.
And then roaring like a bull,
father would remember
what he was really doing.
So, when Lewis started
his prayer life at school,
his prayer life was saying
his prayers properly.
And he could never properly address God.
And so, that was his father's voice,
and so, like Lewis, many of us
discover that our initial devotional life,
later in life, needs a sabbatical.
So, when people ask me, what do I do
with my neurotic prayer life?
Well forget it.
Take a holiday.
[laughs]
And then perhaps later
you can start again.
And that's the kind of thing
that I think Lewis did
in his personal life.
But when you listen to him in his book
on the prayers that he
addresses to Markham,
and that was published posthumously,
this was very humorous.
You can hear the echo of all the things
that he had struggled with himself.
>> I wonder if that's a
real theme in his life,
is his unanswered prayer of
when his mother was dying.
The inability to pray
at, was it at Malvern?
At school.
And then all his life, he was fascinated
with causality and prayer,
and how do we understand
how prayer, our actions change
God's actions and so on.
And then, he tried several
times to write on prayer.
And then finally he
happened upon this idea
of writing a series of fictional letters.
There's a way that you can
understand his whole biography
as the loss and recovery of prayer.
>> Yes.
So as a good Anglican, of
course he loved a prayer book.
And he didn't want modernizing
clergy to change the service.
So, he was a man of the status quo,
as far as the sacramental use
of the prayer book was concerned.
>> He said he believed
in liturgical change,
one or two words a century.
>> Yes.
[laughing]
That's right.
>> Can we just, before we leave
the theme of Lewis's suffering.
>> Of what?
>> Before we leave the
theme of Lewis's suffering.
>> Yes.
>> You've spoken of some of his suffering
and his relationship with his father.
I'm thinking also of
his alcoholic brother.
And you've talked about
the context of the war.
But,
what was the role of
suffering, do you think,
in forming Lewis as a mature Christian?
>> Oh I think Lewis goes
through a very clear,
radical changes in his
attitude to suffering.
From an academic study in the don's room
on the problem of prayer, even though
when he's talking, doing
about this during the war.
And then, recent, then afterwards
with the death of his wife,
his second book, which was so passionate.
And it was so intimate.
And it was so, just so
explosive, almost volcanic.
>> The Grief Observed?
>> About The Grief Observed, yes.
So, it's light and day,
the range through which
he went through suffering.
So I think that,
I don't think that Lewis
would think of himself as a sufferer.
I think all of us normalize suffering,
this is just who I am, it's normal for me
to have an alcoholic brother, it's normal
to have an absentee father.
Although he felt the
tragedy of the fact that
he rarely ever saw his father
after the war, in fact,
one of the most poignant
letters that Lewis wrote
was when he was wounded,
having been invalid out from the trenches.
And was in a London hospital.
And he said, dad,
we've been somewhat distant to each other,
and I expect it's our
public school education that does it.
Because, you know, when you
have this public school life,
it's totally distinct from the home life.
So he was recognizing
that that was a source of
estrangement with his father, too.
But he called on his father
for his, to come to him.
For six months, his father never replied.
And so, although at the end
he was very tender hearted,
when his father was dying of cancer,
and was nursing him toward
right at the end of his life,
in between, there was a
blank between son and father.
So, yes.
That was the real suffering I
think that Lewis went through.
But there was all the suffering
of living in a hostile environment,
an artificial environment,
which Oxford was for many of us.
>> He also wrote of course about joy.
What was the role of joy,
and what did he mean by joy?
When he wrote about it?
>> Well it started as a joy of a child.
The joy of doing things
that he and his brother
could share together.
I think the joy of recognition
and common emotions
is a source of joy.
But when you read of course,
his book on joy, you realize that
he philosophizes and develops it later.
But I think that primitive joy
is the joy of being recognized
when you have a companion
as his brother was.
It's like my grandson, we used to have a,
in our garden, two Japanese maples,
and they had low branches,
and you could hide there.
It was lovely for our grandchildren
to hide in these branches.
But one day, my six year
old, Stephen, said grandpa,
I'm hiding here.
Yes, I know you are, you're
playing hide and seek.
Oh it's no fun playing hide
and seek if you're not found.
And so a child needs the
experience of being found.
And so, the question that
we ask about Lewis is
childhood with his brotherhood,
it was close together.
Was, were they ever found?
So all this stuff about the ethic,
and all the stories that
took place upstairs,
away from the parental world,
is all, I think, expressive
of what became formative in
his imagination later, yes.
>> But he also talked about joy
in the sense of homesickness and longing,
and a kind of desire that
finally would lead him to Christ.
>> Well of course, when you're a child,
in a public school, and you're
living most of your year
in that kind of environment,
you're not at home.
So Lewis didn't know home life
like many of us know home life.
'Cause he went from public
school to university,
well, to the trenches, and then of course
to academic life, and so,
Lewis never had a normal home life.
And when he did have a home in Oxford,
that's another story, but
he had a hell of a life.
[laughing]
With his...
his so called
adopted mother.
>> Mrs. Moore.
Jim, coming back to some of
your own recollections of Lewis,
you were quite inspired by him as a,
as a lay Christian, and in your own life,
you have been very devoted to
seeing lay people be
articulate about their faith.
Was Lewis quite a key influence
in that calling for you?
>> He was immensely influential.
Because, here I saw a man
who was as intelligent in his faith
as is he was in his professional skills.
And I've seen the converse as
the norm in our church life.
Where people with high intelligence,
professionally highly successful,
are playing Mickey Mouse with their faith.
And this to me, gives me more anger
than anything else I've ever had.
What a waste to the
community of God's believers,
of the body of Christ,
that our professional
identity matters more to us
than our identity in Christ.
And because it matters more to us,
that's why we pursue professional skills,
rather than have intelligence
in thinking theologically.
Thinking hard about our faith.
And thinking with
discipline about our faith.
So the great attraction
that Lewis now has for you,
is that he is not only the mere Christian,
but he is the iconic Christian
that you want to be in your generation.
You want to have a faith
that is as intelligent as what
you have in the marketplace.
Perhaps more so.
Because you have such
pressures in the marketplace.
So Regent was set up not to be a seminary.
It was set up to say that
intelligent Christians
need intelligent education.
As Christians, to be Christians.
>> Was the example of CS Lewis
part of what inspired you to leave Oxford
for the vision of doing
something like that at Regent?
>> Not really, no.
No I think I was on a different journey.
Which I really couldn't share
with anybody at the time.
What happened to me was that
was a debacle of the war,
we were put into circumstances
that would be quite
unusual for other times.
And so, my first job,
when I volunteered for RAF intelligence
and my professor had
selected me to do this.
They had their quarter that day,
and I was the end of the interview.
So curiously after finishing my degree,
which I was permitted to do
under those circumstances.
I was then drafted to
be the first geographer
to a regional planning
authority in Britain.
And that was the client valley authority
where the client had been bombed,
and the ship building yards.
And so, the replanning
of the west of Scotland
for the brave new world after the war,
was the beginning of regional planning.
But very quickly, I saw
that, in the circumstances
that none of us had been trained in,
for regional planning as a profession,
that my colleagues were more anxious
to support the legitimacy
of the profession,
than the legitimacy of the jobs
that they were supposed to be doing.
And so I got disenchanted
with regional planning
after just 18 months.
So, I wasn't going to be
a professional in regional planning.
Then I go to Oxford, and
the school of geography
is in a mess because it had
been hijacked by the war
to be the headquarters
of naval intelligence.
And so the geographers were all producing
handbooks for naval intelligence.
Now they were busy trying to build up
their professional identity,
having been hijacked
into the military needs, you see.
And so now geography was,
they were repeating the same thing
that I saw with the planners.
And so, from the very beginning,
I decided that if my professional pursuit
was to uphold the professional status,
then it was empty.
And so, in 19...
Oh, it was in the mid 50's, that
Bertrand Russell was invited
to be the distinguished
professor of philosophy at U York.
City University.
And the dean thought he had gone aplomb.
A distinguished professor.
But this distinguished
professor was an atheist.
An avowed atheist.
And the board of governance
still had the lingering
of a Christian origin, as
a Christian university.
Oh, we have to rescind it.
And so, the chairman of the board
rescinded the appointment
of Bertrand Russell.
Well, he was of course furious.
And so with his pride so piqued,
he then revived an essay
that he had written in 1929,
which was called, Why
I Am Not a Christian.
And now he makes it into a book
with a lot of other essays,
Why I Am Not a Christian.
And the professor of classics
in New Zealand, Auckland,
was a friend of mine, was
visiting us in Oxford.
And he said, we need to have
12 Christian professionals
to write on why within our professions,
we're still Christians.
So the book is called Why
We Are Still Christians.
Well as I started writing
I said, no, I can't.
I can't write that.
It's not that I'm defending
my profession as a Christian.
I'm a person.
In Christ, that's my identity.
And so really, my profession
is not significant,
for that particular journey
of my own spiritual life.
And so, my long,
lonely
struggle,
has been to be a person,
and not a professional.
Now, that doesn't mean to say
you don't have professional skills,
you don't have the significance
of the academy behind you,
you have all that.
But in a sense, that
was a different journey
and that's why, eventually, I left Oxford.
But there were others, which were
too detailed to quote here.
>> Well I remember you
saying once that you thought
what we needed was to
raise up 10,000 CS Lewises.
>> And so now, that's what we want.
We don't want you to
adulate Lewis any more.
Be another Lewis.
>> Jim, you've also talked
about the importance of genre,
that Lewis wrote in so
many different genres.
And that this is necessary
to the communication of the gospel.
What's most important about that?
>> I think the importance
about that, Bruce, is that
shallow truths require
a shallow genre.
So, two and two make four.
And the genre is mathematics, okay.
Fine.
But the deep truths about the
encounter between God and man
are so deep, so mysterious,
that we need all the human genres
by which to communicate
our Christian faith.
So the deeper is the
communication of truths.
The more diverse have to be
the genres of communication.
And so this was a wonderful way in which,
because of his training
as a classical scholar,
as a philosopher, as a literary critic,
in all these areas, Lewis was prepared
to express all the genres.
Poet, essayist, scholar writer
of very profoundly significant books like
his Oxford volume on the 16th century.
His study of Milton, these
are profound scholarly works.
But he also writes children's stories,
he also writes science fiction.
He also multiplies his
faith through letters.
We were awed, in the
period that I knew him
between '47 and '53,
at the fact that he was always responding,
it was well known to us
that Lewis was always writing faithfully
to every correspondent.
In fact, Lewis's dread every morning
was the tramp of the
postman's feet at the door.
>> Bruce: The daily postal inquisition.
>> The daily post.
And the daily burden of dealing
with his correspondence.
But that's Lewis, you see,
and that's why you love him,
because, there isn't a genre
that you love to live in
that he hasn't communicated to you.
>> Related to that, there's this sense of
the role of imagination
in the Christian life.
And of a mythopoeic
imagination, a sense of
not just genre, but also, this large sets
of fantastic mythopoeic imagination.
Why is that so important
for the spiritual life?
>> Saul Bellow, in one
of his later novels,
when he was yearning about the boredom
of his humanist professional life,
and it's tragic that he died, really,
disenchanted with all his life
and his career as a Nobel
Prize winner in literature.
Gives us this pathetic picture
that the contemporary person
is like a little bird on a fence,
twitting away, explaining everything.
Explanation cannot explore mystery.
The language of the soul is
the language of allegory.
And symbolism are sky hooks,
that give us awareness of transcendence.
So, we have to be aware
that God in creating us
in His image and likeness,
is the source of mythology.
But, and this shocks evangelicals.
How can you talk about
Christianity as being mythopoeic?
Well, because you can't explain it all.
And we have to recognize that therefore,
God has so created us
that he's created us to be aware
of worlds beyond our canon.
Of mystery beyond our understanding,
and that's what the
mythopoeic world is about,
so, it's common to all
people and to all religions,
because we are all created in
the image and likeness of God,
whether we believe it or not.
So it's part of our human
constitution, to be mythopoeic.
>> I wonder, you may
not like this question
but I'll ask it anyways.
What for you is Lewis's
most important book?
If you were to go to a desert island
and could only take one
book, which book would it be?
>> Well, I did have the
privilege of asking Lewis, when
he was leaving Oxford, to go to Cambridge,
and I was getting married, and therefore
was moving out of this
arrangement with Nicholas Zernov,
and so, prudently I knew I
wouldn't see much more of him.
And so, even though we parted in '53,
it was about '56, I think
it was the autumn of '66,
the fall of '66,
that I saw Lewis.
And I said you know, there's a thing
I've always wanted to ask you.
What do you think is the
most important message
that you wanted to communicate
in all your writing?
Oh, no reflection needed,
immediately he said, well,
it's all contained in my three lectures
that I gave at Newcastle to
the faculty of education on
the abolition of man.
It's all there.
In other words, when you read that,
he's against reductionism.
And of course he saw it
with logical positivism
as a form of major reductionism
in philosophy, there was,
really the atmosphere
of Oxford at that time,
you couldn't be a philosopher
unless you were a logical positivist.
Except there were one or two
who sort of sneaked
out of it Isaac Berlin,
that went into history
of ideas, from cover,
to take cover from that.
But, there was also of
course, the reductionism
that was taking place
in literary criticism.
And that's what he was
immediately attacking.
And then he said, and long
with that little book,
is also my last novel, Till We Have Faces.
And I think he was still suffering
from what had happened
in '53 when he wrote it,
because the publisher said, oh Lewis,
you may have done alright
with previous writing, but,
we're not going to circulate
more than 1000 copies,
so they never printed
more than 1000 copies
while he was alive.
And they didn't sell.
And so, it's long after Lewis
that people have begun to appreciate
the depth of his insights
in Till We Have Faces.
In other words, you have
to become like Psyche,
that has given your life to another,
in order to understand
what he was talking about.
>> It's interesting
that he wrote that too,
after he was married, isn't it?
>> Yes.
And I think we see, in
a veiled autobiography,
of Lewis himself, as Orual, to begin with.
And of the slave as the
academic Oxford don,
who was all rationalism.
And then of course, there is
this amazing Christ figure,
of Psyche, that also is to be identified
with his wife, and her
suffering, and her death.
So I think all of that
is veiled in the novel.
There are layers and
layers within the novel.
>> Back for a moment
to The Abolition of Man and reductionism,
he talked in The Abolition
of Man of men without chests.
That we become shrunken creatures,
when we lose an ordinant
response do the world.
>> Yes.
Well he would say that men without chests,
are those Christian psychologists today,
who are saying, remove
the category of the soul.
In other words, when you
focus on physicality,
and forget the soul, or forget the person,
you've lost an element
that is so significant
for the sheer mystery of being human.
>> One of the other
areas where I think Lewis
has been so enormously
important for evangelicals,
is the recovery of the sense
of the great tradition.
I'm thinking of his introduction
to the Sister Penelope's edition
of Athanasius on the Incarnation.
Where he uses those phrases,
he talks about the need
to have the clean seabreeze of the century
boring through our minds.
He talked about history
as the great viaduct
that runs across the ages that looks,
you know, so high up in the valley,
so low from the mountaintops.
What is the importance for Lewis,
of being formed in the great tradition,
and what can we learn from him?
>> Well, I think for Lewis,
to be in the great tradition
was at the same time, to live
very much a balanced life.
So yes, he was in the communion of saints.
Yes, he could appreciate
what his spiritual director,
because that's really to
all intents and purposes,
what Sister Penelope was,
she was one of his
closest spiritual friends,
that he disclosed secrets to
that he disclosed to
no man, I don't think,
other than his wife, later, perhaps.
But she may not have had
time to tell, his wife,
what he told Sister Penelope.
So I think the great tradition
was his understanding of the continuity
of the Christian faith through history.
But he was also a man of
the foothills, he tells us.
Not very high, not very low.
He didn't climb the heights, in mysticism,
and he certainly didn't climb the depths
and the kind of facticity of faith.
So, he modestly says, I'm
a man of the foothills.
That's why he was a mere Christian.
But the mere Christian was of course,
a Christian in continuity with all faiths.
>> What did he mean by
chronological snobbery?
>> Chronological snobbery was
that everything that's modern
is fine, and anything
that's medieval is passe.
And so, he despised
the young scientists who
had no sense of history.
In fact, there was a
lot of social snobbery
in Oxford against science.
There wasn't in Cambridge,
but there was in Oxford.
And so it's ironic that
it was an Oxford scientist
that became Lord Cherwell.
Actually, Lord Cherwell, who became
the scientific advisor
to Winston Churchill,
has revolutionizeD warfare because,
never has science and technology
been more harnessed to war, than to place.
And so it was the war
that suddenly erupted
where all these young
scientists come into Oxford,
and they had no fellowships.
We couldn't place them in fellowships.
Because the fellowships were
all preempted, most of them,
by the humanities, you see.
So Lewis lived in that culture.
And so, when he is,
what's the novel that...
>> That Hideous Strength?
>> That Hideous Strength,
is very much the talk
of the young scientists
in the common room,
coming from Australia and
New Zealand, totally brash
about what Oxford was
or Oxford manners were.
And of course it was these, and
also, it was young Americans
who were beginning to get married to
dons, for the first time,
and it was they who
started the whole notion
of having a mixed college.
Anathema.
When I said in 1950 I
was going to get engaged,
oh, Houston.
We're so sorry.
[laughing]
We thought better of your
scholarship than that.
>> Oh my goodness.
>> That was a monastic world, you see.
So, both against science,
and against women.
That was the world,
that Lewis was brought up in.
>> Jim, the theme this evening,
we're talking about CS Lewis,
but also about spiritual formation.
I wonder just,
what would be some of the key things
that you think we can
learn about CS Lewis,
in terms of spiritual formation?
If there's anything we haven't touched on,
are there things that you can
particularly learn from him?
>> Well, I think spiritual
formation for Lewis
is an anachronism.
If Lewis was here tonight,
and you were asking him,
now tell me, Lewis,
what have been the stages
of your spiritual formation?
He would look at you and say,
what in the world are you talking about?
>> Un self conscious.
>> So there's a cliche
that we've developed
about spiritual formation,
that is very much post war.
I think what we were
facing in war was much more
the radicalism of living
with good and evil
on a cosmic struggle.
And so therefore,
the therapeutic need for
us to change our feelings
is a post war, American culture.
It's not part of that
vocabulary that we find.
I know this is very
disappointing to those of you
who want to make Lewis an
icon for spiritual formation,
but of course there's a sense in which
we all need spiritual formation, so, yes,
our maturity in Christ,
we all need to see.
But Lewis would probably say
don't make a big deal of it.
Now that's shocking, isn't it?
>> Jim one last question
before we open it up to
others for questions.
And this in a way is
very personal for me, is,
no other writer besides maybe
Richard Baxter has helped me
long for heaven.
And so I'm thinking about Lewis on heaven.
His sermon, Transposition,
his sermon The Weight of Glory.
The Great Divorce.
The Last Battle.
I remember when my wife, before she
became a Christian, a non Christian
had given her the Narnia series.
And when she closed The Last Battle,
she cried because she wished it was true.
But there's something in
Lewis that excites, I think,
a longing for heaven.
What can we learn from Lewis about heaven?
>> Well I don't think it's an accident
that he got his clue
about Mere Christianity
from Richard Baxter.
'Cause it's Richard Baxter
who first uses the phrase.
And I don't think it's an accident
that he has such an angst
for heaven, when you reach,
when you read The
Saint's Everlasting Rest.
So, Baxter, and this is a new Ph.D
for somebody, never done before.
Explore how Baxter's influenced Lewis.
Tough job, but I'm sure it's there.
>> Okay.
>> So, that's one element of it.
But I think, heaven for all of us
is when we're on pilgrimage.
And the metaphor of pilgrimage
is very much the metaphor of Lewis's life.
So, you know, Pilgrim's Regress
is a good example of his start into that.
But the theme of pilgrimage
that he got from Bunyan,
of course, is also very clear.
But what lies behind Bunyan's
own metaphor of pilgrimage,
is the...
The pilgrimages in the middle ages,
they were literally to Jerusalem.
So you have this remarkable
culture of pilgrimage,
when you get, for example,
the sister of the King of
Sweden leaving her palace
to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
And I think the impulse for heaven
is that we live in pursuit of the good,
to only then find that we're
in pursuit of the better,
to only then find that there's
no destiny except the best.
And that pursuit of the good
to the better to the best,
is the impulse for heaven.
It's an impulse for pilgrimage.
Here we have no resting place.
Our hearts are restless.
'Til we find our rest in Him, so,
there's this Augustinian element as well,
that lies behind that.
>> Okay.
>> Moderator: We want to
open it up for questions,
and answers, so, we have a mic over here,
and I have a mic here,
and we will come to you,
and just raise your hand,
and you can ask a question,
I have our first person here.
>> [Male Audience Member] I was wondering
if you might comment on
Lewis's views about hell,
and specifically what he believed
about purgatory and The Great Divorce,
and what he might have
thought in that area.
>> Well.
You know, the designation,
the qualification
of the messianic servant
in the old testament,
is the one who loves
righteousness, and hates iniquity.
The great love requires a great hatred.
And so hell is the condemnation
of those who do not love.
And so, Lewis was not
speculating about hell,
in some kind of theological way.
He was just recognizing,
that when you are struggling as he did,
in those first addresses that
he gave, the BBC addresses,
on good and evil.
He saw that just like the
parable of the rich man,
and he's in hell, he's in Hades.
There was a big divide
that was inseparable.
Now, where did he get
this sort of imagination,
also, about hell?
Well, I think he got it from Dante.
I think that the Purgatorio,
the Inferno was a very
vivid picture for him,
and he was teaching Dante
as a regular program.
So there's a Dantesque
source, you might say.
But there's also a contemporary source,
which he had in Charles Williams,
we haven't talked about him, but,
probably, the imagination of Lewis
was more influenced in many ways
by him, than by Tolkien.
Tolkien created his own
private imagination,
but there was a more
collective imagination
that was related to the life of the church
that we find in his other friend.
And perhaps the somewhat coolness
between Tolkien and Lewis towards
the end of their life was,
that first of all Tolkien
thought he had imitated too much
from what's his name.
>> Bruce: From Williams?
>> From Williams, yes.
That he had domesticated things too much
at Shinny Cross, you know, taking the bus.
So the metaphor of the
bus to hell, you see,
is very much Williams, you see.
That's not Tolkien.
So there was that influence
that he had on him.
How much more?
How much more do we need?
I think that would really be
enough to say, explain why,
it was such a reality.
In other words, in our
therapeutic culture,
we've lost the notion of sin.
IF you've lost the notion of sin,
you've lost the notion of hell.
Yeah.
>> Over here.
>> [Male Audience Member]
Thank you, thank you so much
for your words, I look up
at the screen and I see
this theme, past watchful dragons,
and I'm kind of enamored
with that metaphor.
And I guess I have kind
of a two fold question.
How do you see Lewis's writings
tiptoeing past watchful dragons,
and now 50 years after his death,
do you think that it
still has the same power
of sneaking past those watchful dragons?
>> Well, I think Paul speaks
of principalities and powers.
I think that
Lewis gives them a kind of human dress
by calling them dragons, you see.
But it's the same reality.
And he also of course, lived with a period
of significant cultural change.
And it's in periods of dramatic change
that perhaps we live more apocalyptically.
So this apocalypticalism that we find
in the Book of Revelation,
is also part of the
apocalyptic imagination
that we see in Lewis.
And I think that world is a world that,
where cosmic forces are challenging
that Christ is lord of all.
Yes.
>> [Female Audience Member]
I think you mentioned that
what would it look like to
have 10,000 Lewises today.
What is that, what do you
believe that looks like?
>> Can you say, I'm sorry.
>> [Female Audience Member]
You mentioned earlier that
you believe that our world today
needs like, 10,000 people like CS Lewis.
And I was gonna ask you,
what do you think that looks
like for our generation,
with our current technology and genres?
>> What would it look like today
to have 10,000 CS Lewises?
>> Oh yes, yes.
>> For this generation.
>> Yes.
Well I think your interest in Lewis
is the beginning of that.
So let the interest grow from
being a spectator of Lewis,
to being a companion of Lewis.
Become his friend.
You see, life is not lived on the balcony.
Life is lived on the road.
So walk the road of Lewis.
>> There we go.
>> [Female Audience Member] What about,
what did CS Lewis talk about the trinity,
and the holy spirit?
>> You'll have to tell me where that went.
>> About the holy spirit?
>> Moderator: What did Lewis think
about the trinity, nature of the trinity,
and also the holy spirit in particular?
>> What did Lewis think about the trinity,
and the holy spirit?
>> Well, Lewis wasn't a charismatic.
[laughing]
But Lewis was Trinitarian.
[laughing]
But, he wasn't involved in the post war
resurgence of interest in the trinity.
So we have to remember,
that we have to place Lewis
in his own cultural
context, and of the trends
that have taken place
since Lewis, you see?
So one of the concerns that I would have,
is don't so readily adopt
Lewis for our own times.
Set Lewis, appropriately,
in his own times.
And we have to say to our shame,
that there was a kind of sleep
over the trinity at that period.
Now, there were a few murmurs about it.
We had a few academic dons in theology,
but it wasn't a big voice
with which they spoke.
That came after the 80's.
In fact, the British Council of Churches,
only published in 1982,
The Recovery of the Trinity,
in British theology.
So, we have to remember that we're blessed
by consciousness of things
that that generation was
not so conscious about.
Now it wasn't that he was asleep about it.
But it just wasn't an issue of the time.
Should have been.
But then, lots of issues
that we should all be awake to, as well.
>> Hi.
There's a sense in which
the passing of CS Lewis
was overshadowed, at
least here in the States,
by that of JFK.
I'm wondering if you can talk about
what that loss was like
to the community at large,
outside of maybe the context
of the United States.
>> You know, two weeks ago when I was in,
a week ago when I was in
discussion with friends,
I suddenly realized I wasn't
hearing what they said.
I'm still hoping that it's
wax that's plugging my ear.
Because I probably need
to get an ear test.
So I need to hear.
>> It was a question about JFK,
the death of JFK overshadowing
the death of Lewis.
And I'm sorry, I didn't hear
the rest of the question.
>> [Male Audience Member]
I just wanted to know
what that looks like outside the context
of the United States, and at large,
how they received that.
'Cause unfortunately,
it's not ignored, but JFK obviously
was a bigger news headline than CS Lewis.
>> Did that overshadow
things in the UK as well?
>> Oh yes, and I think
what we have to realize is
that this has happened again,
because with the death of Princess Diane,
she totally overshadowed
the death of Mother Theresa.
So the culture is very
selective of who are our icons.
But, it's very interesting,
and you know that some
writing being done on this now,
on these three deaths on the
same day of November 22nd,
of Aldous Huxley and other Englishmen.
And what does his death represent?
Well he had heard about
the death of Kennedy,
but almost immediately after that,
he asked for a final shot of
LSD, for his drug addiction.
So he's the icon of the drug culture
that we're trying to run away from.
So we don't remember Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World.
And then you think of the other icon,
which is the Kennedy icon,
with all the womanizing of poor Kennedy.
But we're still preferring
all that adultery
as really celebrating
the joys of our culture,
instead of somebody who
was so much more faithful
to what we believe is truth.
>> [Male Audience Member] What do you see
as the connection between,
think of the hero's
journey mythology, Narnia,
between the seeking after
good, the better, and the best.
And not seeking after
a spiritual formation.
So, for CS Lewis, is he
about going on a journey,
like into Narnia, a
mythical hero's journey,
instead of a spiritual quest,
for spiritual formation?
What is the connection between
seeking the best, and the better,
with the hero's journey, and like, Narnia?
And the whole idea of
journeying somewhere,
versus trying to better oneself?
Through spiritual formation.
>> I think there's a
contrast or a connection
between spiritual formation
and what you spoke about.
It sounds like the spiritual journey,
when you spoke about moving from the good,
to the better, to the best,
and also seeing a connection
to the hero's journey in Narnia,
as opposed to the transformation
of some of the characters in Narnia.
>> Well of course, what lies
at the heart of all of this
is that we're destined to an
eschatological fulfillment
of being born and birthed
in the image and likeness of God.
So there's a future to that.
And that future is to be
transformed by Christ,
into His image and likeness.
And so, if that's the truth of the gospel,
it's truth in all sorts of cultures
and all sorts of ways that
we may communicate in.
So if that's what spiritual
formation is about,
that we're wanting to be transformed
into the image of Christ, let's go for it.
All speed.
>> [Male Audience Member]
How do you obtain that?
If not through spiritual
practices of bettering oneself,
acting on emotion,
how does one obtain that image?
>> Well, that how question
is because you live in
a technological society.
And we need gadgets for everything.
So the questions that we
ask are how to questions.
>> [Male Audience Member]
Well, that's not what I mean.
That's not what the
hero's journey's about.
>> No, but what I'm saying
is, that's our mentality.
Give me the tools, and I'll do the job.
>> [Male Audience Member]
What is the experience
of the journey?
>> Well, I think the first thing is,
that spiritual formation
is the slowest change
that you can ever experience in life.
So it's not instant coffee.
It's not stirred out at Starbucks.
It's something that takes a lifetime.
And at the end of life,
we really don't believe
we're yet Christlike enough.
So, there's an infinitude to it.
There's no end to it.
This side of eternity.
And that's why I like to think
there's an eschatological perspective
about God's purpose in creating us
in His image and likeness.
We're not yet there.
We're in process.
So Godliness, of all the
speeds of human life,
is the slowest speed of all.
In other words, my
dilemma has always been,
that I speak, that I think.
I think faster than I can speak.
I speak faster than I can actualize.
And therefore, I'm totally inconsistent.
>> [Male Audience Member] You can imagine
being a better person,
faster than you can become.
>> Beg pardon?
>> [Male Audience Member] You can imagine
being a better person,
want to be a better person,
faster than you can be one.
>> Oh yes, thank God for
that God-given desire,
to be a better person, yes.
>> Moderator: We've got
another question here.
>> [Male Audience Member] Thank you.
I know a lot of Christian movements,
and evangelicals are guilty of this too.
We try to kind of claim
CS Lewis as one of our own
and fit him into our box.
I've heard Catholics saying no,
he was gonna convert to Catholicism,
or Greek Orthodox people saying,
he was pretty in line
with what we believe.
Was it true that he
was wholly an Anglican,
or was he really kind of
in a category of his own?
[laughing]
>> I've told you he was a mere Christian!
[laughing]
Neither high nor low.
[laughing]
So in the light of that, we have to say
that if we ever thought of
being a Nicaean Christian,
Lewis is on the threshold
of introducing us
into Nicaean Christianity.
Now what does that mean?
It means being post
Protestant, and post Catholic.
And post everything else.
>> But Jim, would it be
important to say though too,
that in the beginning
of Mere Christianity,
he talked about that mere
Christianity as the hall,
that he said you must go into the rooms
where there are the meals, and the fires.
I'm just thinking of the
temptation in our culture,
to live in a kind of
undifferentiated Christianity
without making commitments
to particular communities.
>> Well you should say
more about that, Bruce,
because that's so...
[laughing]
[audience clapping]
You know, your voice has
not been heard very much.
This is your chance.
>> No, I ask the questions.
[laughing]
>> No, I think that's very very true.
You know, we want to be
computer easy, so we have
easy ways of using computers.
We're wanting to have easy
ways of being Christian.
And the cross makes it impossible.
God forbid
that I should boast saving
the cross of our lord Jesus Christ.
So at the moment,
we still have these labels
of being Presbyterian
or Baptist or Anglican and,
you know you go to Texas
and I was there last week,
and was at the temple of the Baptists
who were really saying that this temple
is sighted in Texas so that
all Texans will be Baptists.
Well, that's a noble cause, but,
it's perhaps, we may have
other causes than that.
So yes.
The fact that we have
denominational loyalties,
in some ways, is saying
that as a Christian I don't
want to be spaced out.
I want to be in place.
And place is not space.
So in the particularities of where I live,
this is my community, this is my loyalty.
This is my denomination.
And so, in that sense,
having denominational labels
is like loving the neighbor.
That in space and time, the
contingency of my life is,
this is the space that I'm in.
But, I don't claim that that
space is gonna last eternity.
But in heaven, I'm going
to be a Baptist, you see.
[laughing]
Yes?
>> [Female Audience
Member] Can you tell us
a little bit more your
own spiritual journey?
Share with us.
>> In two minutes flat?
[laughing]
>> [Female Audience Member] I'll wait.
>> No, I've told you my journey.
My journey is the transformation of life
as a person in Christ.
That's all.
>> Moderator: We have
another question right here.
>> [Male Audience Member] Dr. Houston, hi.
Lyle Dorset wrote a book
about the spiritual formation
of CS Lewis, and in that
book he talked about
the importance of correspondence, how,
through correspondence we were able to see
CS Lewis and his spiritual formation.
My question is, in today's age of
social media, different kind of platforms
that are inherently reductionistic,
what do you think about correspondence
and do you think that's
something that we need to
return to, and in what sense?
As it relates to our faith.
>> Did you hear that?
>> What?
>> He's asking a question
about Lewis as a correspondent.
>> Yes.
>> And how much we learn about Lewis,
and how much Lewis and others
were shaped through letter writing.
And how do we recover that today
in the age of social media?
People don't write letters any more.
And how do we recover
sort of what Lewis experienced
as a letter writer?
>> Well I think the
whole cultural atmosphere
that we're in in scholarship,
in the humanities is,
that we're discovering
how important letters are.
That if we're seeing a
biography as portraiture,
like the classical world
saw their great heroes as portraits.
That portraiture of biography today,
is recognizing you need
to know the inner life
of a person through their letters.
And so you really don't know somebody
unless you have read
their letters as well.
You don't know me for example,
unless I can tell you that
in my distant courtship
with my wife who was in
Glasgow and I was in Oxford,
and she wrote to me, you know Jim,
I don't think I've had
enough love to get married.
And so we still have those
love letters I wrote to her
and said, but my darling,
I think I've got enough love for us both.
So, letters are so crucial.
[laughing]
[clapping]
So, a few years ago,
a task that Bruce knew all about, because
he's contributed to the collection.
I collected letters of faith and devotion,
which are letters throughout
the whole of human,
of the church's history, today,
with a lot of contemporary
letters of people in exigencies,
that are quite remarkable for our time,
you know, the letter of
a Holocaust survivor.
How she learned to communicate forgiveness
to enemies that she never could face,
but she sang to, because she learnt
by going into a Lutheran
choir from Budapest,
where she was a psychiatrist,
she could go to Germany,
and she could sing
her forgiveness to audiences
that she knew must contain
some of the survivors of the death squads.
Well, the importance of letters continues.
And so, you know,
I can't stop, all day long, doing e-mails.
E-mails are a form of
letter communication.
So, let your communication
still be a letter.
But let it be on e-mail.
But of course, it takes
time to write a letter.
But it takes time to mature a friendship.
But yes, I think,
look at the letters of the church.
Look at the letters, or
the Book of Revelation.
Look at all the letters of the apostles.
What are they?
The letters.
The communication of faith
has been strongly in
the life of the church.
And this is what dear Bruce
is too modest to tell you,
about his researches,
but he's done terrific research
on the letters of the 18th century.
You should hear him, have
a special session on that.
[laughing]
>> One of the things we've talked about
is the way the letter,
your concern has been for
the recovery of the personal.
And that letters are uniquely personal,
because you can't just address a topic.
The writer is present,
the reader is present,
and the subject is present.
>> Yes.
>> [Female Audience
Member] You spoke about
having intelligent faith.
And not just...
You spoke about having
an intelligent faith,
and how that may have been lost recently,
with our desire to be
intelligent about our careers,
and everything else.
But can you speak about
how that might spill over
into actuality, into living
an intelligent faith?
Not just having one, or receiving
an education about one?
>> What does it mean to
live an intelligent faith,
not just to gain an education,
and when you spoke about
having an intelligent faith.
>> Well I should have perhaps
talked about a holistic faith.
So yes, intelligence matters.
But I think there was a
generation of evangelicals
where the mind matters.
And now I think we live in a generation
where we see the heart
and mind matter together.
So that we need emotional intelligence,
as well as rational intelligence,
as well as spiritual intelligence.
So intelligence is far more holistic
than simply make it cognitive.
So, what we're realizing is,
how can the evangelical be transformed
from being a hyper cognitive believer,
to being a truly holistic,
intelligent believer?
That's the mandate that we have today.
Now there was another question,
yes, at the back there.
>> Moderator: We have one here first.
>> Okay, alright.
>> [Male Audience Member] Dr. Houston,
I wonder if you could connect
your experience at Regent,
and CS Lewis, in two ways.
One, maybe, what do you think CS Lewis
would say is needed most in
theological education today?
And what do you think is most needed
in theological education today?
>> What would CS Lewis say is most needed
in theological education today,
and what do you think is most needed
in theological education today?
>> I think Lewis would demure and says,
but I'm not a theologian.
[laughing]
I can tell you what a Christian needs.
And so,
yes, I think that
all we can project is,
how did Lewis use his
voice against his culture,
in his day, and then,
use that as a projectory
of how you could interpret
it might be used today.
But I suspect we would have
100 different interpretations.
Because we're always seeing
things from our point of view.
That's the difficulty.
So we could all claim him.
But Lewis would probably say,
well I don't know any of you.
[laughing]
This is the thing about Lewis.
He lived with
a strong sense of humor, and
this annoyed his enemies.
Because even in the Socratic club,
when he was debating there,
and of course he got trounced
on one occasion, by...
>> Bruce: Elizabeth Anscombe.
>> Elizabeth Anscombe was a young girl,
and he had to revise his
third chapter on miracles
because of that debate that evening.
But the human side of Lewis
was that every pursuer chasing after him,
he would throw banana skins,
and of course they would
skid on the pavement.
And these banana skins that he sort of
skidded them on, was just his
incongruous sense of humor.
Mugridge was very similar
to Lewis that respect.
Mugridge was also a great humorist.
Now, the significance about medieval humor
that's different from American humor today
is that you need to live
in a structured universe,
you need to live in a
world of right and wrong.
Evil and good.
To understand the
appreciation of incongruity.
And so, Mugridge on one memorable occasion
when I was ahead with him.
I was observing what's
going on and all of that.
This high crusade of evangelicals.
But he said, Jim,
do you notice that there are no gargoyles
on our high rises in our
downtown skyscrapers?
Whereas every medieval cathedral
had its gargoyles at the
drainage point of the roof.
And they're carved at the end of the pews,
so even looking at the high
alter, you had a little giggle.
Now what he was saying
was that we need humor
in order to celebrate
a structured universe.
And therefore, to give
structure to our morality.
So there's a place for
humor in the Christian life.
Well that may be a
diversion from the question.
>> But it was a good journey.
>> [Male Audience Member]
So, thank you for being here.
My question's on The Screwtape
Letters, specifically,
actually Screwtape Proposes a Toast.
I was just kinda thinking like,
being young, it seems like
there is really great
foresight from Lewis in that,
when he tackles democracy and education.
What do you think that he
would say to us as a society,
and as students, if he were here today,
kind of like how he was projecting
the demon's point of
view, their objectives,
with democracy and education?
>> I'm not sure I heard
that either, I'm sorry,
but I think it's about
The Screwtape Letters?
>> [Male Audience Member] With
Screwtape Proposes a Toast.
When he's giving the speech
to the graduating demons.
He's kind of tackling
democracy and education.
And I was kind of curious
like, as a young person,
seems like incredible foresight
with the way that he kind of says
how the demons are gonna use democracy
and the education to kind
of lead us to their side.
What do you think Lewis would say today?
About the, kind of like,
if he were speaking to us
now, with that foresight?
What do you think gave him
that kind of foresight?
>> What would he say about what?
>> [Male Audience
Member] Well it's kind of
about democracy, education,
Screwtape Proposes a Toast.
>> So in Screwtape Proposes a Toast,
the senior demons, they address the issues
of democracy and education.
And our questioner sees
what he wrote there
as quite prophetic.
And so, it's another question about
what Lewis would have said
about, what would he say about
democracy, education today?
Given what he said on that occasion
that seemed so prophetic.
>> Yes, because you see Lewis,
himself was a convert from deism.
And so he knew all the landscape of deism.
And knew it very well.
And what we don't realize is our culture
is founded on deism.
Our human sciences are founded on deism.
And the abstraction of God
inevitably leads to the
abstraction about man.
And so, these abstractions
that we call democracy,
or that we call human rights, or whatever,
that we may focus upon politically,
don't have a personal faith.
So how do we express them,
in such a particularized,
personalized kind of way?
That they reflect the personeity
of God himself, you see.
That's the dilemma that we're facing.
So, one of the things that we
need radically to recognize
in the 21st century as Charles Taylor
has already started to show us,
in The Malaise of Modernity,
is that we radically need
to have new foundations
for our human sciences, and
indeed for theology as well.
It's a bit scary.
>> Moderator: We have
one more question here,
and then we're gonna close.
>> [Male Audience Member]
The pressure's on me
to come with a good one here.
Many of us here at Biola
want to go onto
become Christian scholars, to influence
the university, outside of
Biola, outside of the seminary.
But you spoke on the temptations
of narrow minded academic
professionalization.
I was just wondering if you could give us
disciplines or share ways
we can avoid that pitfall,
in keeping our identity in Christ,
for those who go on to do work in say,
a secular environment.
>> For those that are going on,
Biola students who are going on
and want to make an impact in their world,
and want to make an impact
on the world outside Biola,
how do they do that,
and not become captive
to professional identity,
but maintain a holistic sense
of their identity in Christ?
Still with a strong sense of mission,
wanting to go out and make a difference,
and advance their education,
and the world of scholarship.
>> Well, we all privately,
and it's not legislated at all.
Can't be legislated.
But the Christian life has
to be a sacrificial life.
We have to count the cost.
So, what is the cost of
discipleship for each one of us,
like it was for Bonhoeffer, you see.
Now, we can't necessarily
volunteer for martyrdom
like he was prepared to go.
But unless we live under
the shadow of the cross,
we're not communicating the gospel.
So, that is a personal inwardness
that we have to recognize.
And it's not that we're masochistic.
In other words we don't volunteer,
in a masochistic kind of way, to suffer,
and make sacrifices.
But when we recognize the truth,
then we buy the truth at a
cost, and we sell it not.
So, the truth that's communicated
is always costly truth.
It's not easily gained.
Now, again, when we're more self conscious
about being educators, and self conscious
about the ministries that we're doing,
that's when we find that we have to say,
let God's spirit be in this classroom
so that the way I'm teaching
is that prayerfully, on my knees
before I ever get into the classroom,
I'm praying that the
communication that's given today
is something that is already
contributing to their transformation.
So I'm not imparting information.
I'm seeking for His spiritual transporting
of heart and mind.
So the way we communicate
is appropriate to the truth
that we're communicating.
And that we don't begin a dichotomy
between how we teach, and what we teach.
But it's embodied.
This is a person, that's in front of you,
and he's communicating his
experience in his life,
of what he's teaching.
Those are the kind of people
that will change the world.
So, it begins with a teacher.
And then he pupil follows.
Isn't that so?
>> I think so.
[laughing]
>> We're gonna end there this evening,
let's thank Dr. Houston and Dr. Hindmarsh.
[clapping]
[uplifting music]
