Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You can't let a non believer simply wave his hand and say, oh, that's stupid.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Lewis gives us the medieval mind on these four things, but also the biblical mind.
[00:00:09] Speaker C: If I find in myself a desire for which nothing on this planet or in this life can satisfy, I find that I've been made for a different world.
Welcome back.
A very successful first episode. We left talking about C.S. lewis's works of fiction, of which there are many. And we'll probably round back to this at some time in the next couple of years and really do some deep dives on this stuff.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: But how do you know it was successful?
[00:00:42] Speaker C: The studio's still intact.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: Oh, so it's done. That's what you mean?
[00:00:47] Speaker C: There's no smoke or steam coming from any of the podcasting equipment, and Luke hasn't had a nervous breakdown.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Oh, that works.
[00:00:54] Speaker C: I have a low bar and we're good to go.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: But we have cleared it.
[00:00:57] Speaker C: Yeah, we have cleared it. We stepped over it.
So we gotta go to nonfiction, and that'll kind of introduce our final two topics, which will be C.S. lewis as theologian and apologist and C.S. lewis as philosopher. So I will pass the ball first to Mattie. No offense to you. Way.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Then take it.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: Let's start with nonfiction. Yeah.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Before we get to his work as a theologian, I'd really like to talk about his work as a scholar. And I think sometime we forget a little bit that he was an English professor. That was his occupation before, you know, being a good story for children author and a good fiction author. He was a scholar, and he was a classicist, and that's really shown in his work.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: What is a classicist?
[00:01:42] Speaker B: So he was a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature. So he was very, very knowledgeable about what we would in the literary world called the classics.
[00:01:54] Speaker C: Yeah. His wheelhouse. What starts with, like, Beowulf, would you say, or does he go?
[00:01:59] Speaker B: I would say even before Beowulf, Tolkien, his wheelhouse is the ancient Nordic, Scandinavian myths.
Fantastic. As a linguist. Oh, my word. We should have. He should have his own episode.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Well, that's all the languages of the.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Oh, yes.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: The Lord of the Rings.
[00:02:19] Speaker C: He develops his own functional languages.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: He developed his language and then developed the world that the language functioned in. That was how good of he was.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Okay. But some dude did that in the boy's dorm. He gets beat up.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Yeah. No, it's not the same.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: It's a different world. It's a different world.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: Okay, but. So the discarded image is his attempt at making the modern reader, or, for his case, the mid 19th century, 20th century, 1900s reader be able to comprehend what the classics meant, what the medieval thinker was thinking, and why. Fantastic work of scholarly work.
Very good stuff. Another thing that I think is really amazing about his nonfiction work is, well, obviously Mere Christianity, which you absolutely love.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I do. I can't confirm.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Yep.
One thing that I think is adjacent to his work as an English professor and his work as a good writer is the Four Loves. And I think this one's actually really interesting to read side by side with Till we have Faces, because Till we have Faces is the fiction version of the Four Loves.
And if you don't know what the four loves are, those are the four Greek words for love. And Lewis gives us the medieval mind on these four things, but also the biblical mind about these things, and brings a lot of Augustinian orders of loves, which is I find fascinating.
[00:03:54] Speaker C: Louis is heavily influenced by Augustine, which, again, same guy as Augustine. They're twin brothers.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: The Order of Morris made it into popular conversation about six months ago. Remember that?
[00:04:06] Speaker B: No, the J.D. vance thing when he quoted.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: When he was talking about Order of Luck.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Oh, yes.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Orders of affection. And so all of a sudden, everybody who came, those who were epidemiologists, were now experts on Augustinian. Augustinian or De La Horse.
[00:04:21] Speaker C: But for a guy. And again, it's just the breadth of who he was as a person. He's an expert in medieval literature. Oh, yeah. And then Augustine slides into the picture, and he actually tutors on Augustine when he.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Well, it's because Augustine has such an impact on medieval literature.
[00:04:37] Speaker C: Yeah. And it does. But that was part of his tutoring experience. He learns Greek, and then he ends up reading Augustine. And it's just a life well lived is kind of where we're going with that.
Yeah. Let's get into Mere Christianity now, because this is the open door.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:54] Speaker C: This is so good.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Okay. So I don't feel like I should have the corner on Mere Christianity, So I read it kind of probably after seminary.
I did most of my reading in this way after seminary. So, you know, we had a. We had a Christian classics literature class. There's always been a literature class in our catalog since day one. There was also typing, by the way.
But it was always. When I was a student here, it was always against choir. So if you weren't in choir, you could take Christian classics. And we weren't teaching this kind of stuff in Christian classics. So I was less familiar with certain things. But I've always had a philosophical bounce. So I started reading more mere Christianity. I was reading this thing. I am embarrassed. I haven't read this yet. So you just get. It's so good. It's so accessible.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Every. Every Christian should read.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: It's fun.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Every Christian should read.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Remind me, Maddie, when did you graduate from here?
[00:05:43] Speaker B: 2018.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: 2018. So you had my apologetics class maybe at night.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: I had. It was the guinea pig class. So it was the first time we ever done it. Yeah.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: Kirsty.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Kirsty.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Yeah, so we, we did. It was a Monday night class and we.
It was like once a week we met, I think it was, it was like what, maybe eight. Eight of us.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: Yeah, it was late.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Yeah, it was late and we just kept going.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: So fun.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: It was so fun.
[00:06:09] Speaker C: So the thing about an evening class is you don't worry about the bells.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: And they were with me. No. So it was fun. And then that grew. So we didn't have a. We had a. We used to have an apologetics elective during J term. We had a J term and then we had that one credit night class and then we went to a one credit day class. Then we two credit day and it's more now three credit classes. These are very. I think we need to be able to engage our minds in these things too. And it's, it's good and, and it's funny because I've always felt a bit under qualified.
I'm not, but you always. The more you learn, the more you realize you don't know everything or maybe anything sometimes but Mere Christianity. So good. I did teach a Mere Christianity class undergrad through Covid.
They asked me, in a weak moment somebody asked me to teach, would you do Mere Christianity?
Three credits Bible college. And I said yes without really looking at my calendar. Anyway, it was a lot of work, but it was good. It was really.
[00:07:07] Speaker C: Mere Christianity was the first book I read after learning about the discipline of apologetics.
So I got through Bible school and started my undergrad at Crown and ended up coming into contact with an apologetics ministry. By happenstance, I was looking for a job and there was one next door to where my brother in law was going to high school.
Faith search.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: Faith search. Yeah.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: So I applied is desperately in need of a job. I applied for this desk job at face Search International, Dr. Don Byerly. And I'd never heard of apologetics.
So to impress them for the second interview I read Dr. Byerly's book surprised by Faith.
And I went into the interview aggressively and I said, where has this been all of my life?
And I told him to his face. I said, if I would have known this as a 16 year old, I would have been a completely different Christian growing up. And I didn't know it. And after, you know, I got hired. I worked for Faith Search for eight years before and during seminary. And the very first book I read after that was Mere Christianity, because this whole world of apologetics was opened up to me. It's like, oh, there are reasonable explanations for why we are who we are. That makes sense. And this is kind of the turning point where we can focus on Lewis as a theologian, and this is where he gets the most flak, is because he's not a good theologian, he's a thinker, he's an apologist, he's a philosopher.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: He didn't even claim to be a philosopher.
[00:08:34] Speaker C: Well, yeah, he didn't. He is a philosopher, but that's the thing about philosophy, right?
[00:08:39] Speaker A: What really is a philosopher?
[00:08:41] Speaker C: He opens Mere Christianity by saying, I'm not a good theologian. This is just the way I think about the faith is more or less how he opens mere Christianity. And it's never.
I've never understood the criticism that Lewis isn't a good theologian, so we should disregard him because the point of view from conservative and even confessional Christianity is we don't need Lewis to be a good theologian, we have the good theologians. But making that theology relevant and applicable and accessible is the work he does in Mere Christianity, which is why I love it so much as a work of apologetics. What are you looking up?
[00:09:20] Speaker A: It's just. It's so good you just decided to read it again?
I could read anyway. This is a heavily annotated copy. So it's so three. What we know is Mere Christianity today is three chunks of broadcast talks, Christian behavior and beyond personality.
So you can read this. The broadcast talks with what we talked about during the launching pad. Yeah. Fireside chats, if you will. So it's really fascinating. He says that he's just a Christian, he's a. An Oxford don, he's a literary guy, he's an author, a Christian, he said of not the particularly high or particularly low or any other particular sort. And then he gets into the analogy of the rooms and the hall, which.
[00:10:06] Speaker C: Is the building block for all of Mere Christianity.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: So that's the mirror part. M E, R E. Yeah.
[00:10:13] Speaker C: So from, from the perspective of denominational Christianity, where we worry about things like ecumenism and, you know, it's like for us to have unity, we actually have to agree on that's not where Lewis is Going.
The analogy Lewis uses is the house with the rooms. And he says, sooner or later, you gotta get into a room. You can't live in the hallway. But we have to recognize we're all living under the same roof.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Oh, so good it is. And so in theology, so there's systematic theology and dogmatics.
There's ethics and there's apologetics.
So as you progress down that spectrum, you have to be more precise, dogmatically. You know, Lutherans and Baptists are going to agree on a lot of things ethically.
I'm trying to not make any jokes here.
And we probably have ethical agreement with a Muslim, even we can be pro.
[00:11:16] Speaker C: Life with a Muslim.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: Yes. And I mean, there's things to talk about there, probably, but it's true.
Roman Catholic apologetics still, some of the best.
[00:11:27] Speaker C: Still Peter Kreeft.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
But we're going to have major disagreements when we get into which of these confessions are we following. And to the outside, you might think, well, this is stupid. What are you even talking about? On the inside, it does matter.
But what really matters is that we get them into the house. And I don't think any of us. And the beauty of being a Lutheran is that you don't have to put every Catholic or Baptist in hell.
It really isn't the thing. There's an attractiveness to. Yes, this is correct. Yes, we want to get this right. Yes, we think this is right or we wouldn't be whatever.
But there is room here, and he wants to get people into the house, and I think he does a great job of it.
[00:12:07] Speaker C: There's something to be said for allowing for disagreement, but at the same time, those disagreements, they don't mean that the topic is unimportant, like it matters what you believe about topics with which there's very strong and distinct disagreements. That's not Louis. Louis is concerned about the house, and he's not concerned about the room, which is why I think the apologetic arguments that he makes are so much more valuable than us freaking out about his eschatology. Because we read the Last Battle right now.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: I will read. Okay, right at the end of his preface where he's talking about the rooms in the hall.
When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.
If they are wrong, they need your prayers all the more. And if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them.
That is one of the rules common to the whole house.
This is so good.
[00:13:05] Speaker C: Yeah, it's great.
Anything more you want there? Before I get into apologetics, Strong on.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Natural law, it's the idea that the mere part of mere Christianity, the idea that there are certain things that we all believe in, whether we know it or not. So if you're new to the genre, he's going to start writing about the dao, the life force, intentionally using non Christian language.
And he's coming in the back door on everything, like Malcolm Gladwell and inviting.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Those who have no idea what Christianity is and using language that the common person could maybe even possibly agree with.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: To get him into. Yeah, very helpful. So things like we all believe in right and wrong that we. The one who says I don't believe in wrong when you wrong him will be quite offended nonetheless. And he just goes through all of these things, answering one objection after another. And then he gets to Christian behavior and starts to describe what it is that Christians actually believe that informs their behavior. So he talks about how off putting the Christian sexual ethic is to the non Christian. And so that's. And how seductive that has been. Tim Keller's line that our culture has been catechized by sex, that we have changed our theology to accommodate a culturally permissive view, promiscuous view of sex. And so he says people are upset with the Christian view of sex. And so then he gets into the nature of the family and the purpose of sex and procreation and our posterity and all those things. And what he's pointing out is that the other side, if you will, like there's one side of this doesn't have answers to these things. He's very winsome about this. Maybe I'm probably a little less winsome about it because I know C.S. lewis, but the idea that you can't let a non believer simply wave his hand and say, oh, that's stupid. How do you believe in a book full of fairy tales? Well, what do you think it is?
Why do you think it's a book full of fairy tales? Tell me about your fairy tale.
[00:15:08] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that. Tell me about your dad. That's so prevalent.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: When we were teaching that class together, did I do the materialist fairy tale?
That's so embarrassing. All those things that I do, they're embarrassing to me. I don't enjoy it. But the students remember, which is why.
[00:15:27] Speaker C: I occasionally let you sing the Epistemology.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Song, but you've never sung the Epistemology, so I will not do it here.
[00:15:32] Speaker C: My relation, relationship to the Epistemology song is the exact same relationship to Bob the Tomato in the male song at the end of a VeggieTales episode.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Yeah, no, no, but that's not. It's not just the song, it's your relationship with me.
[00:15:43] Speaker C: More or less.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Polite derision.
[00:15:45] Speaker C: Exactly.
So again, we've got to off ramp this pretty quickly, but I want to talk about C.S. lewis's apologetics argument, which there are many.
He does have apologetics arguments from natural law. We're not going to cover those here. That's fine because it's just too much.
The first argument we're gonna talk about is the argument from desire, which is my favorite one because when you say it out loud, it sounds like there's no substance to it. And then you think about it and.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: You'Re like, oh, wow, that's actually really good.
[00:16:14] Speaker C: Oh, that's really great. And so Lewis's argument is everything for which humans have a natural desire for has something accessible that fills it.
If you're hungry, cheeseburgers exist.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: That's always an idealist.
[00:16:28] Speaker C: Yeah.
If you're thirsty, you get a drink and you satisfy that thirst. If you're tired, you can sleep and you satisfy that. But then he says, if I find in myself a desire for which nothing on this planet or in this life can satisfy, I find that I've been made for a different world. And it's the appeal to eternity that we have. It's probably if I'm gonna be unf and a little bit too clunky on the explanation. The argument from desire is Lewis's answer to the God shaped hole. Yeah, you know that I need something for which temporal material things can't provide. And it's his argument for God and I love it.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: It's also worked out in his. Isn't it a sermon? It's also an essay, but the weight of Glory, really beautiful articulation of that in how it practically looks in the Christian life too.
[00:17:27] Speaker C: That's the thing with Lewis is the way he presents it. You get trapped, you get sucked in and then you're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. The second one, the one that I teach most frequently here in our classes, is his argument from morality.
And really you can go round and round and round on this. The easiest way to do the argument for morality and what I do regularly so the students roll their eyes at me is I draw on the board a squiggly line and I say, what is that?
It's a squiggly line. And then I ask him, how do you know?
Because I know what a straight Line looks like. And that's the argument for morality, is that we know something is wrong because we know something is right. And it's God in his transcendence that provides us with the right, with the standard. That's his argument for morality.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: I love how he acknowledges that people disagree. Yeah. So a lot of times when we talk about the argument of right and wrong, we say, well, there are certain universal truths that everybody agrees on. I used to say.
This is catagraphic. I shouldn't probably say these things, but beat your mom with a shovel, budge in line at the water fountain, or torture babies for fun.
[00:18:40] Speaker C: One of those things is not like the other two, but you know those things.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: You should not do these things.
[00:18:44] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: You should not torture babies for fun, you should not beat your mom with a shovel, and you should not budge in line at the drinking fun.
[00:18:49] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:18:49] Speaker A: And we all. We all know that, but we kind of. But there are. Is there a conceivable culture where these things are permissible? And Lewis says it doesn't matter because the fact that there is a right and wrong to every culture, you know, how squiggly is your line? Is it a horizontal squiggly line or is it a vertical. It doesn't matter. That Just that alone. And so it totally takes away all that discussion about. Well, I heard once about, you know.
[00:19:14] Speaker C: Well, and it's. Modern apologists have taken Lewis's argument for morality, and what you get is the pop moral argument, which I love is the quickest way to convert a moral relativist to moral absolutes is to punch him in the face.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: I got the Pillman incident in my.
[00:19:30] Speaker C: Head, but that's how it works. And the last one we gotta get to is his most famous one.
It's probably the most basic apologetic argument for the existence of Jesus called the trilemma. And Lewis is liar, lunatic, and Lord. The three L's evidential apologies like myself add a fourth hell, and that's legend. But you demonstrate that Jesus existed.
[00:19:51] Speaker A: You are the least modernistic evidential apologist that I know.
[00:19:54] Speaker C: Thank you. I appreciate that.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:56] Speaker C: It's the nicest thing you've ever said about it.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: Well, essentially what I called you was a Lutheran evidential.
[00:20:03] Speaker C: The idea is there is no room for your conception of Jesus Christ to say he was a good moral teacher because of who he was and what he did. And so either Jesus knew he wasn't Lord and lied about it, deceiving people. Which good moral teacher goes right out the window with that one, or he didn't know he wasn't Lord, but firmly believed it and wasn't. And are you gonna let a lunatic teach you the Lord, the order of.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: A man who thinks himself to be God? A poach date.
[00:20:33] Speaker C: Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right. I forgot the line in the order of man who thinks he's a poached egg or he actually was Lord. And it's a really almost an airtight argument.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: But the one thing that he not said is that he's simply a good teacher.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: He has not left that option open to himself.
[00:20:49] Speaker C: Yeah. It's a closed door. And that's what the trilemma is. And the trilemma then with that is what's going to let us in the next episode talk about his philosophy.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: I gotta ask him. Okay, so why is that not logicians? Why is that not the fallacy of bifurcation, the false dilemma, but the false trilemma? Why is it not? It's not. But why is it not?
[00:21:10] Speaker C: Because the argument is closed at the end. Right.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: Well, if. What he's pre. He's pre. He's presuming that the Gospels are giving an accurate account.
Okay. Lewis gets ripped on regularly for not having a high enough view of Scripture. The trilemma argument is a false trilemma. It depends upon.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: It depends upon the Scripture being true.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: And this is a. This is a classicist, of course. He believes documents just give reality.
[00:21:39] Speaker C: The intentionally deceptive argue the documents would go out the window. Right.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
