00:00:31.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:38.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:04:22.000It's skeletal structure of which he fleshes out all of their writings.
00:04:26.000But Mortimer Adler, the philosopher at the University of Chicago, the last editor-in-chief of the last edition of the Encyclopedia of Britain.
00:04:33.000Yeah, I actually bought all of them, but keep going.
00:05:19.000And I saw him lecture one time, and he said he didn't think he became educated till he was 60 years old.
00:05:25.000So a student shot up his hand and said, if you didn't think you were educated till you were 60, you must have a standard by which you could make that judgment.
00:05:52.000If you're in a reading group and you're going to discuss a novel each week, you know, maybe you're going to discuss C.S. Lewis's A Great Divorce, or the next week you might read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
00:06:02.000And some idiot says, oh, hey, this week, let's read War and Peace.
00:06:06.000And nobody shows up to the meeting because they're all guilty.
00:06:09.000Nobody could read War and Peace in a week.
00:06:11.000But I started thinking, what if you had a group discussion where you read one of those ideas a week?
00:06:17.000102 in 10 years, you'd have some approximation to being what you might consider an educated person.
00:06:24.000And I've had groups like that too, where we've read through those essays and discussed them and so on.
00:06:30.000We could talk about the great books of the West.
00:06:32.000It's not cheap, but I encourage everyone to buy it.
00:06:35.000And I was actually exposed to it by another thinker I think really highly of.
00:06:40.000So C.S. Lewis, kind of up there in the pantheon of great Christian apologists, can you just share briefly, did he ever struggle with his faith?
00:06:52.000And if so, how did he get to a place to be such a clear author and defender of Christianity?
00:07:01.000Well, when you say struggle, I don't know exactly what you mean.
00:07:05.000When his wife died, certainly there was a grief, but I don't think that the grief that he experienced in any way put his faith in jeopardy, as some people want to suggest.
00:07:16.000Instead, I would say the struggles that he had are the struggles anybody should have when they realize that what they know is not complete.
00:07:26.000We'll never get a last word about anything.
00:07:28.000Any truth you know could still be paught more deeply.
00:07:31.000It could be applied more widely and so on.
00:07:33.000So Lewis wrote this two different quotes.
00:07:36.000One is a statement he made in a sermon he preached at Oxford University called The Weight of Glory.
00:07:41.000And he said, if our religion is objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent, for it's precisely the puzzling or repellent where we begin to discover we do not yet know and need to know.
00:07:56.000So Lewis was never afraid to lean into the realm of things he didn't understand because he knew there were riches behind those things.
00:08:22.000The great theologian Lucy Pevensey in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in the second book, Prince Caspian, she sees Aslan, the Christ figure of those books, for the first time on her second trip into Narnia.
00:08:36.000And she says to him, Aslan, you're bigger.
00:08:42.000But every year you grow, you'll find me bigger.
00:08:45.000So consequently, there's those kinds of doubts in Lewis and those kinds of questions, but they're the questions that are not leading to existential despair.
00:08:54.000They're the kinds of doubts that all of us should have when we're on the threshold of new discovery, new awe, new wonder, and ultimately new worship.
00:09:03.000So there's three books I want to talk about throughout this hour that I think are very readable to the ordinary person.
00:09:12.000Mere Christianity, a screw tape letter is an abolition of man.
00:09:17.000And it's hard to even rank them because they're different.
00:09:20.000But we're going to start with Mere Christianity.
00:09:22.000I believe it is a great starting point for anybody that is thinking about the Christian faith.
00:09:27.000And it's also a fabulous book if you've been a Christian for 40 years.
00:09:31.000It's equal in its profundity and its depth and also its wisdom.
00:09:39.000I want to also plug your book, though, Doctor, The Neglected C.S. Lewis.
00:09:44.000I want to ask you about the arguments you make in that book as well throughout the hour, but I do want to make sure we lay the foundation of C.S. Lewis's incredible work.
00:09:54.000Look, it's hard to trust anything anymore.
00:09:56.000Our most important institutions are systematically being destroyed.
00:11:17.000His book is The Neglected C.S. Lewis that I encourage you guys to purchase and read and study.
00:11:23.000But let's talk about Mir Christianity.
00:11:25.000Dr. Mere Christianity, as we mentioned, was originally given in a time of crisis during the Blitz on the BBC radio and then was turned into the book.
00:11:35.000I believe he added and clarified and edited some of the radio broadcasts.
00:11:39.000Mere Christianity is one of the best-selling Christian books ever.
00:11:43.000What is in that book that is so powerful and why should we study it?
00:11:48.000Well, Lewis basically underscores a pilgrimage to faith that I think grows out of his own experience.
00:11:55.000He had been an atheist and he works his way through the morass of atheism and its supporting worldview materialism, works his way through agnosticism, comes to a place where he causes the reader to look at Jesus Christ.
00:12:10.000And they may have anger with the church.
00:12:13.000They may have anger with some friend of theirs who hurt them, but he wants them to focus on Christ.
00:12:18.000One thing that's interesting, too, quickly, he begins with what I call the shared imagination.
00:12:23.000Lewis has 31 different ways he uses the word imagination.
00:12:27.000One of them is called the shared imagination.
00:12:29.000And that's when you enter into a shared experience with your reader so that you're on the same page at one place at least.
00:12:37.000You may diverge after that, but he wants to begin there and then bring his reader into a more inferentially developed understanding of a particular idea.
00:12:47.000And I was with my friend, and we were at Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco.
00:12:53.000We were riding bikes along the coast and we came up to this place where the waves were breaking on the rocks.
00:13:59.000And I said, then how can you make the judgment that there's nothing in any of those books that might count against what you're thinking now?
00:14:06.000I said, I don't think you have the reach to do that.
00:14:08.000And then C.S. Lewis, I said, said, negative knowledge is always harder to assert than positive.
00:14:13.000For me to say there's no spider in this room, I'd have to check every nook and cranny to make the claim stick.
00:14:20.000I could see a spider screwing across the floor.
00:14:23.000Proofs for God's existence are more complex than that, but nevertheless, the analogy works.
00:14:28.000Negative arguments are harder to assert than positive ones.
00:14:32.000I don't think you have the credibility to make that judgment.
00:14:34.000Give me an honest agnostic, I said, over a dishonest atheist.
00:15:15.000And when we make a judgment, what's the standard of those judgments?
00:15:18.000We may disagree about the judgment, but if there's no standard, then all judgments whatsoever are nonsensical.
00:15:25.000In one of his literary critical works, Lewis said, all judgments imply a standard.
00:15:29.000And he's looking for a transcendent standard that overarchs rulers and ruled alike, not a hypocritical standard where I do one thing and I apply something different to you.
00:15:40.000So consequently, if there's that standard, we begin to see that all of us fall short even of our own standards.
00:15:47.000I believe in a high ideal of love, but sometimes I have sharp words with the people I say I love most in the world.
00:15:52.000I'm cooked even when I apply my own standard.
00:15:55.000And if I become honest at that point, and some humility begins to sink in at that point, I then become honest enough to know that there's something lacking in my life.
00:16:06.000I also become honest enough to know that maybe I need some forgiveness.
00:16:10.000And that makes me open to wanting to turn towards the Christ who has the power to forgive and who loves unconditionally.
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00:17:20.000So, Doctor, let's talk about the abolition of man.
00:17:23.000It is a profound book, but it's interesting.
00:17:28.000You could make the argument, especially if you read it when it was originally published in the 1940s, that C.S. Lewis was complaining about something that wasn't that big of a deal in the sense that, okay, it's a children's book, The Control of Language, a Critical Approach to Reading and Writing, which was published in 1939.
00:17:47.000And he makes this mass almost a prophecy, a prediction of where this is going to head and talking about moral subjectivity versus the natural law.
00:17:57.000But it turns out that C.S. Lewis was not being hyperbolic.
00:18:27.000But the thing is, though, he was very present.
00:18:30.000He saw ahead of time where problems were going to come.
00:18:34.000And the educational institution is one area.
00:18:37.000And he's talking about we're not paying enough attention to the kinds of ideologies that are inculcated into students' minds when we don't pay attention to their textbooks.
00:18:47.000He's writing this when he does the abolition of man in the 40s.
00:19:29.000He talks about the fact that Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was at a waterfall.
00:19:34.000The account is recorded in Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, 1803.
00:19:40.000He's at the Coral Inn waterfall on the River Clyde, and he sees these two tourists watching the cataract, and one of them says it's pretty, and the other one says it's sublime.
00:19:52.000And Coleridge endorses the one who says it's sublime and disagrees with the one who says it's pretty.
00:19:57.000He doesn't disagree with the fact that both of them were making comments about the objective reality of the waterfall, but one of them was making a more robust statement about it.
00:20:09.000It has a platonic ideal of waterfulness, as opposed to the one saying it was just pretty.
00:20:14.000And the authors of the Green Book, the book he's trying to deconstruct, say Coleridge had no right to make that judgment.
00:20:21.000They weren't saying anything about the waterfall, but only something about their own feelings.
00:20:25.000And what they did was they dissected the reality of the waterfall from any claim that the people were making.
00:20:32.000But it gets worse than that because the authors of the Green Book, Gaius and Titius, as Lewis refers to them, they're making a judgment about Coleridge.
00:20:41.000Coleridge's judgment is based on the reality.
00:20:44.000Their judgment is not based on any reality whatsoever, but they're making a judgment and they're trying to assert it.
00:21:55.000That's incongruous with the reality that should support that emotion.
00:21:59.000If you see a person who's morose in a situation that's happy, you need to have respect for that also.
00:22:06.000If I'm going to a birthday party to celebrate with my friends, I want to go have a happy time.
00:22:11.000If I get a phone call on the way that my friend was hurt in a car accident, I probably will call the friend who's having the birthday and say, something's come up.
00:22:21.000And I go to the hospital, see my friend there to grieve with them, to be with them, to mourn with them, and so on.
00:22:27.000But you don't go spoil the birthday party because the emotion that's congruous with the accident is not congruous with the experience of the party.
00:22:36.000So Lewis is talking about it in that regard.
00:22:41.000If they can be just, then there must be a standard to judge whether this is the accurate sentiment or not.
00:22:47.000So I think that's the way Lewis is using that concept.
00:22:50.000I was moved and it was curious to me, and I'm not exactly sure why, maybe you can help me understand why Lewis decided to bring in the Tao or the T-A-O.
00:23:02.000I'm not sure the pronunciation or the Tao, the way, which again, as soon as I hear the way, I think of kind of a hearkening back to core Christian theology.
00:23:11.000But he was making an argument that I think of a universality of the human beings, you know, posture towards a specific telos, right?
00:23:34.000He uses the word, you could say Tao if you want, or Tao, but he uses an Eastern word and he defines it this way.
00:23:42.000The Tao is a doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain things are really true and other things really false to the kind of thing we are and the kind of thing the universe is.
00:23:52.000He uses an Eastern term because he wants to show, even in a Western world, these ideas are not merely Western.
00:24:00.000In the appendix of that book, he gives quotes from all kinds of readings.
00:24:05.000He gives quotes from Confucius's Analects.
00:24:08.000He gives quotes from Western philosophers, Plato, Aristotle.
00:24:12.000He gives quotes from Muslim scholars, Jewish scholars, Christian scholars, philosophers, all across time immemorial and across culture, because he's trying to show this concept of understanding reality so that I can begin to approximate truth is really important.
00:24:29.000Now, the abolition of man is a pre-it's almost an introduction to Christianity by introducing people to the way we should be thinking about life if we're going to think well.
00:24:40.000And if I think well about the reality, Lewis says, I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
00:24:51.000If a person turns their eyes to reality, it opens the door for them to discover what's undergirding all of reality, and it's supernatural.
00:24:58.000He gave a lecture at Oxford University called on the English syllabus.
00:25:03.000This is in 1930s, just a few years after he had become a Christian.
00:25:08.000And he said to the students, we have fulfilled our whole duty to you as your teachers, if we can help you see some given tract of reality.
00:25:18.000So let's say I help a student get to a book and help them to interpret what the author is saying well in a way that's coherent and consistent with what the author intended.
00:25:28.000Sometimes that's benefited by getting a community around the text so I can benefit from the perspectives of the people there, but it's still a perspective rooted in the reality of the text itself.
00:25:38.000And Lewis saw if a person got connected to reality well, they can develop beyond that to the reality that undergirds all other reality in our world.
00:25:49.000It's a very important book, Abolition of Man.
00:25:52.000In the words of St. Augustine, if you argue with reality, welcome to hell.
00:25:57.000So now I want to focus on your book because abolition of man and mere Christianity are usually actually not neglected.
00:26:04.000So tell us, what is the neglected C.S. Lewis?
00:26:08.000Well, first off, that's a book of mine, not the book.
00:26:11.000I've got a bunch of books on Lewis, but the thing about this book, I like to write books about Lewis that look at things that other people are not writing about.
00:26:23.000But Lewis's best books, hand down, are his literary critical works.
00:26:28.000And again, he's helping his readers see something of reality there.
00:26:32.000And you can develop habits by doing that that will benefit your eyesight when you look or cast your gaze anywhere.
00:26:39.000So we wanted to take, my friend Mark Neal and I did this together.
00:26:44.000We wanted to take books that people weren't reading that we thought were really important and introduce the reader who maybe got to Lewis through the Narnian books or through his Christian apologetics, introduce them to these other rich resources in Lewis.
00:26:59.000And they're really, actually, I think they're apologetic too, because he does faith integrated thinking about these great books.
00:27:06.000There's one book, for example, Lewis wrote called English Literature in the 16th Century, Excluding Drama.
00:27:13.000To write that book, he read every book written in English in the 16th century.
00:27:18.000He read every book translated into English in the original language, it was written, French, Latin, Italian, and in translation, so his judgments would be fair-minded.
00:27:27.000And consequently, it took him about 18 years to write it.
00:27:30.000He wrote it for the Oxford History of English Literature.
00:28:37.000In the beginning of my freshman year, I became a Christian, read through my Bible from cover to cover that day, and I try to do that every year ever since.
00:28:45.000But somebody introduced me to Lewis, and I started reading Lewis, and my faith started to develop.
00:28:52.000And when I would share Christ with the guys I was playing football with, they would ask me hard questions.
00:28:57.000I didn't know the answers to questions, but I found Lewis was a rich source of answers to their questions.
00:29:02.000I go to graduate from college, and a person wisely said to me, You do not get an education in college.
00:29:09.000You lay a foundation for your education.
00:29:12.000And commencement, the graduation exercises, means you will now commence your education by building on that foundation.
00:29:19.000Pick an author who will take you places and make that author your life study.
00:29:23.000I think he could have said, pick an artist or composer, a period of history, pick a worldview, whatever it might be.
00:31:31.000There's also, sometimes people say to me, if Lewis was alive today, what would he say?
00:31:35.000And I say, nobody could answer that question.
00:31:37.000That'd be like using Lewis like a ventriloquist uses his dummy.
00:31:41.000You begin to espouse your own ideas through him.
00:31:44.000But you could take what he did say and you could see its immediate application to circumstances today.
00:31:51.000You mentioned about how the abolition of man is something that's so contemporary by virtue of the things he's dealing with.
00:31:59.000If you take, he would often write a book in propositional form and then write the same concept in imaginative form.
00:32:06.000And his imaginative complement to the abolition of man is that hideous strength, the last of his science fiction books or science trilogy.
00:32:20.000And if you read that book, you would think you were reading today's newspaper.
00:32:25.000Lewis shows the crisis that goes on in the world that's in that book.
00:32:30.000The people who deny reality, the people who use that as an opportunity to assert their own worldview in a tyrannical sort of way and control people and so on.
00:32:41.000And you just say to myself, oh my word, how did he know this stuff?
00:32:48.000I think they were contemporaries, but how ahead of the curve prophetic people like Orwell and Huxley and Lewis and Kessler were is just amazing.
00:33:05.000You are also a professor of evangelism.
00:33:09.000For people that are not sure whether or not they believe in Jesus or they believe in God, take two minutes and close the show with a call to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.
00:33:23.000There's nothing more important than knowing that the God who created us loves us deeply and unconditionally.
00:33:31.000And consequently, because of that, he invites us into relationship with him.
00:33:36.000We who have been estranged by him, we who have made rationalization and excuses for our bad behavior.
00:34:23.000I asked her about her family, found out there was a lot of estrangement in her family.
00:34:28.000I found out that her boyfriend had gone to Florence to study art, and he had come back the day before to tell her he met somebody better in Florence.
00:34:35.000This was a woman who was broken in her heart, broken in her relationships and estranged.
00:34:40.00020 minutes, she's supposed to ask me questions.
00:34:43.000She hasn't asked me a single question.
00:34:45.000I know her life and I know where her hurting is.
00:34:49.000And I know where the target is for the gospel.
00:34:51.000And I said to her, Allegra, I know you got to ask me your questions for your survey, but I've been sent here to tell you something as each of us have been sent into the world that God wants to redeem and reconcile to himself.
00:35:03.000She goes through her questions, asks me what she wants to ask, and I said, what were you sent here to tell me?
00:35:07.000I said, Allegra, the God of the universe knows you and he loves you.
00:35:15.000Allegra, he knows you and he loves you.
00:35:19.000Sometimes you have to say it three times for it to sink through.
00:35:22.000I said, Allegra, he knows you and he loves you.
00:35:25.000And she bursts into loud sobs and she says to me, but I've done so many bad things with my life.
00:35:31.000And I could tell her, God forgave her and loved her.