where the message is embedded.
WILLIAMS:
I’d just like to pick up on that in talking about Lewis’s em-
brace of the transcendental values of Truth and Goodness
and Beauty. I think that the church historically here has
been pretty good on keeping the importance of Truth and
the Word of God and so on, and of course, Goodness and
morals and ethics. The church is very big on 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, and incorpo-
rates Truth and Goodness, and the widest transcendental
value is Beauty. I think Lewis should be a prod and a re-
minder to the Western church to not take our eye off the
place of Beauty in church, in liturgy, in communication, in
apologetics.
WARD:
Thank you. Judith, do you want to add anything to that?
WOLFE:
Well, I completely agree with Peter. I mean, if we look at
Lewis’s productivity, I think emulating him will become a
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very frustrating task, but if we look at 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, the self-discipline and so forth. And what
fruits arise from that is not up to us, but we can certainly
cultivate those habits and see what comes.
WARD:
Thank you. One thing that occurs to me is this: Michael
Ramsden, you’re in charge of the Oxford Centre for Chris-
tian 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 Lewis never went though
apologetic training. In fact, he was a bit of a lone wolf. For
a couple or three years of his most formative period in his
middle teens, he wasn’t even schooled in the English Public
School system, but was privately tutored, one-to-one, by
William Kirkpatrick. He wasn’t part of a school. And I think
that’s not unimportant in understanding Lewis’s abilities,
that he was to a certain extent a “Free Thinker”; he wasn’t
trammelled by expectations and conventions in the same
way that most of his contemporaries were.
I read once that, of the top ten patent holders at ICI,
who hold the greatest number of patents, four out of those
ten had not received a university education. Which is ex-
tremely interesting. There can be a way in which we squelch
originality by over-training people. So it may be that the
great new apologist who’s going to wow the twenty-first
century is not even at a school. Who knows?
The second question from the audience is going to
come from Dr. Jerry Root. Jerry is a representative of the
Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois. The Wade Center
is the primary collection of Lewis’s papers and documents; it
was established first of all in the 1960s by Professor Clyde S.
Kilby and it’s now the central place in the world if you want
to study anything to do with Lewis. Jerry is on its Advisory
Board. So, Jerry, what is your question?
ROOT:
This is picking up on Dr. Mattson’s question. The book C. S.
Lewis: Defender of the Faith concludes, “Lewis himself was his greatest apology; the apologetic that walked in shoes.”
Could you comment about his humility, his magnanimity,
panel discussion
45
his willingness to shoulder the weight of his neighbour’s
glory, and how this lends to his persuasiveness as an apolo-
gist and as a Christian?
WARD:
Who would like to come in on that?
RAMSDEN: I feel, as the most humble member of the panel, I should comment first. [ Laughter] I think the point you make is a
very good one. If the gospel is true, it should be seen as well
as heard and, most of all, seen in the life of the Christian.
And it’s very interesting that, if we were to say, “Look, close
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. If you look at the book of Galatians, which we know
to be one of the earliest of all the epistles and the books
that we have in the New Testament, Paul 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, “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. 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 . . . you
don’t need me to recite it. Some of you know little songs that
you’ve learned by heart, listing all of those characteristics.
Now, I find that really interesting. What the apostle
Paul is saying there is, “Bite me,” but in a very nice way.
[ Laughter] 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 the person of
Christ.
I think that’s one of the reasons why we like people like
C. S. Lewis. 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 feel half way through his talk
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part one—symposium
that you want to go up onto the platform and give him a
big hug [ Laughter] because he’s so gentle, and his demean-
our and his manner of delivery is very attractive. I think it’s
something that we need to recover and maybe become even
more challenging 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 we were.
So I’m sure it was part of how Lewis commended his
own message—through his own lifestyle and embodied by
all those letters he wrote. I think it was a general principle,
wasn’t it? He tried to respond to every letter he got. I mean,
I struggle responding to my emails! I would love
to know
what he would’ve made of email! Maybe he would’ve seen
that as some form of demonic attack. I don’t know. That’s
how I feel, but . . . [ Laughter] . . . but it just shows how he valued the person. They had taken time to write to him: he
wanted to write back to them. And he did.
SEARS:
Speaking as someone who did actually give John Lennox
a hug once . . . . [ Laughter] As I get older and lots of my friends are having to care for elderly relatives and as my own
mother gets older and so on, 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. Moore as she got older; for his wife, Joy,
when she was ill; and for lots of neighbours and relatives
and, particularly, his brother as well. And for animals, he
loved animals and he cared about nature.
And there’s just that caring attitude, that taking re-
sponsibility for someone who’s got a need. If you’re there,
you’re the one who looks after that person, despite what it
means clearing up off the floor, or whatever. Lewis was re-
ally right there in his caring.
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47
WOLFE:
And I think that one important thing about humility in par-
ticular is that, for Lewis, humility was not just a spiritual vir-
tue, 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 or
anything like that, but rather he emphasises 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, I think.
WILLIAMS: The famous aphorism on humility just sprung to mind,
which is this: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but
thinking of yourself less.”
WARD:
Bill, do you have anything to add to that?
CRAIG:
Well, I think Jerry is right in reminding us that we’ve got
to walk the walk as well as talk the talk, but I have to say I
think it’s striking, really, how little of C. S. 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 anec-
dotes about “I was walking in the quad the other day and
spoke to this professor” or “a student said this and that to
me.” Really, you can appreciate his apologetic 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 Mc-
Grath’s biography of Lewis. His works stand on their own, I
guess, is what I’m trying to say, independent of 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.
WARD:
Yes, I think he deliberately tried to keep himself off stage as
much as possible and that’s part of what Mere Christianity is
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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 main-
stream of the Faith to which pretty much every Christian
could subscribe.”
“But I, myself,” he says, “am not anyone special. I’m a
very ordinary layman of the Church of England”—which is
a vast understatement! [ Laughter]
But would that we were all that way, in a sense. You see
what he’s trying to say: that he’s not extraordinarily virtuous;
he’s just ordinary. He’s neither particularly High nor partic-
ularly Low nor particularly anything else. He’s not trying to
convert you to a particular brand of Christianity or, indeed,
a particular churchmanship within Anglicanism; he’s just
wanting to give you something beyond all the denomina-
tions, or within all the denominations.
We have our last question now, after which I will ask
Professor Don King to come and read a closing poem. This
final question comes from A. J. Finch: “What particular
books or articles of Lewis have impacted the panellists espe-
cially and should be better known today?”
CRAIG:
Wow, we’re all going, “Gosh, where do we begin?” you know!
WILLIAMS:
Can I jump in?
WARD:
Of course.
WILLIAMS:
The Abolition of Man: a very short book, three lectures. The Abolition of Man, I think, is one of those very prophetic
books about our times; it should be read next to Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World for understanding the modern
world. I like it for its defence of the objectivity of Beauty,
of Knowledge, but also for not wanting to go into the sort
of shallow rationalism that we’ve talked about, for seeing
the way through this modernist/post-modernist dilemma
that the world has got itself into. The way he resolves
that and his defence of objective values (which you also
find in essays like “The Poison of Subjectivism” and “De
Futilitate”) makes it a particular favourite of mine.
panel discussion
49
WARD:
There’s an interesting book about The Abolition of Man,
which is too little known. It’s by Lord Hailsham, sometime
Lord Chancellor, who thought very highly of The Abolition
of Man himself, and wrote this little book about it called Values: Collapse or Cure? So you’re right there with Quintin Hogg, Peter! Anybody else want to come in on this?
WOLFE:
I think that there are some essays and works of Lewis that
have gained new popularity through being mined quite a
lot recently, and I think “De Futilitate” and “The Poison of
Subjectivism” and so forth belong to those—having been
worked up by people like Alvin Plantinga in very interesting
and rigorous ways.
I think that there are some other essays whose main
argument or 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 waiting to see whether people will
pick those up and make something of them in the way that
things like Miracles have been made something of. So those would be some of my recommendations, I suppose.
WARD:
Thank you. Jeanette?
SEARS:
I would say almost any of his letters, really. I’ve been amazed,
reading thro
ugh his letters, how I can read them almost like
Lectio Divina, where it’s like contemplative reading. There is 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.
WARD: Michael?
RAMSDEN: My most surprising Lewis learning experience by far was
buying a copy of The Screwtape Letters read aloud by John
Cleese. [ Laughter] I never thought Basil Fawlty would teach me theology [ Laughter]! I tried reading the book and I think I read the first six letters in one day and it was almost too
rich. I put it down and forgot about it. Then I discovered
those recordings and I listened to them one per day in my
car and had to discipline myself to press “stop” and not go
any further. It was a remarkable experience.
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part one—symposium
Both hearing them read out, and also just thinking
and reflecting on how much was packed in there, really
surprised me. They’re deceptively simple but actually much
deeper, and I think they open 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?” I don’t know if you can get hold of it
anymore, but try John Cleese reading The Screwtape Letters.
WARD:
It’s being read this week, isn’t it, on Radio 4 by Simon Russell
Beale?
WOLFE: Really?
WILLIAMS:
They should have got Michael McIntyre. [ Laughter]
WARD:
There’s also a recording by Andy Serkis. Evidently, lots of
actors are wanting to take the part.
Do we have any offerings from this side of the panel?
CRAIG:
For me, as I shared in my opening remarks, it hasn’t been so
much any particular work of Lewis that has been influen-
tial as it has been his serving as a role model for Christian
apologetics. As a young student, for me, Francis Schaeffer
and Edward J. Carnell were more shaping influences on my
thought and then later Alvin Plantinga; but Lewis as a role
model, I think, has been important in his defence of Mere
Christianity and his endorsement of the project of natural theology and Christian evidences in defence of the Christian
faith . And in that model I follow and try to emulate Lewis.
WARD:
Thank you. Answering for myself, I would say one of Lewis’s