Gregg Quiggle and Jerry Root | The English Reformation and C. S. Lewis

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by doctors Greg Quiggle and Jerry Root. And we're going to be discussing not only a trip that they're taking coming up, a study tour that they're going to be doing, but we're also going to talk a little bit about the Reformation, the English Reformation, as well as C.S. Lewis. So welcome, guys. It's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks, James, for having us on. Yeah, so Greg, why don't I start with you? Give us a little bit of information on the tour that you're going to be taking, what that's going to look like, you know, all those kind of things. Well, it's in May, May the 23rd to June the 1st, this coming May. And it's an opportunity for you to spend some time in London and Oxford. We're going to look at the English Reformation. So we'll do some things relative to that. And then we'll also look at John Wesley, help you understand the importance of Wesley and his impact on the English speaking world. And then from there, we will shift to figures like George Mueller. Some of you may be familiar with Mueller's work, friend of Spurgeon and Dwight Moody. And then we'll move on to end by looking at C.S. Lewis and a little bit at J.R.R. Tolkien. And Jerry and I have done this before. It's a lot of fun. I think it's an opportunity for you to get a chance to see a lot of things. Jerry and I spend a lot of time interacting with you both formally and informally. So we really enjoy not only getting a chance to meet people and show them things, but it's kind of a way for us to talk about ideas with people. And we really think that a lot of these things have real currency as it relates to our lives today. So this isn't just some sort of academic stuff that happened a long time ago. We think this connects to the kind of issues that we face today. And the things we see generate lots of discussion on the bus when we go from place to place. And we have time then to go deeper if a different wants to have a question. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, one of the things that we do that's probably different than some tours is we try to have dinners together virtually every night. And as part of that, we have time for short lectures and question and answers. So you have ample opportunity to talk to us about what you saw, to sort of debrief and ask questions and process. A lot of these tours, it's kind of like trying to drink out of a firehose and you don't have opportunities to process, you know, what was that? Are we in Belgium? What day of the week is it? So we try to give people opportunities to process and ask so they can really sort of react with what they're seeing and think about it. Yeah. Well, if I can give a little testimony, I mean, I've been on these tours with you. I haven't been on one with Jerry, but I've definitely been on them with Greg and then Mike McDuffie. And they're some of my favorite memories. I mean, even just like the little weekend trip we took from I was teaching over in Ireland. Greg and Michael gave me a private tour of Germany. Amazing. And it's exactly what they're describing. There's a lot of discussion that happens. You're at a site. You're not just getting the regular old tour. You're able to ask questions, go deeper, really get some questions answered. And so I just encourage everybody, if you're looking for something to do in May, when do they need to have when do they need to be signed up? The sooner, the better. The sooner, the better. Yeah. So sign up. The sooner is better. Yes. I think you are going to have information available. There's a website people can sign up and there is a discount for early bird signers. So we would encourage you to we know God's will for your life. You may not be aware of this, but we have prayed extensively about this. And we know that we know this worked for a guy named William Farel getting John Calvin to stay in Geneva. I just got back from a Swiss tour. So, so, yeah, we. We really believe in these things and we think it's we really think they're valuable. Yeah. Where did you where did you teach in Belfast? I was I was only in Belfast very quickly. It was a small Bible college and I can't remember the name of it right offhand. Belfast Bible College. Yeah. So I was there and then we moved fairly like it was only there maybe one or two days. And then we drove down to Greystones in Ireland right on the Irish Sea, which was just a sleepy little town. One of the coolest places I've ever been in my life. A little Irish town on the Irish Sea. YWCA. That's where Moody had their summer. Yeah. Really fantastic times there. So maybe we go to Belfast or Ireland in the summer program. Yep. Yep. See the things you're going to learn on this tour. That's right. That's right. Well, let's start because I mean, when I think about the English Reformation, I realize and I'm humbled by how little I know about it. I am a German Reformation guy. You know, Luther, I'm familiar with. I've been to Germany multiple times. But the English Reformation is something I'm not sure I have a lot of context for. So why don't we dive in there and talk a little bit about the English Reformation? What its significance was, who was involved, you know, what was going on there? Okay, how about if I do that since you're the C.S. Lewis guy? Okay, but Lewis talked about it. Yeah. I probably know a lot more than I do, but he's not here. So in his stead, I will credit it. It's messy. And there are two things going on there. And it's at multiple levels. You have a political piece and you have a theological piece. And the political piece has to do with the Tudor family and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, or as they say over there, dynasty. And the short version is that the Tudor family had established themselves, Henry VII. And the older son who was supposed to take over actually died. So it fell to Henry VIII to take over. And Henry told his boy, whatever you do, you have to have a son. If you don't have a son, the English people will never accept a female monarch. And so he is, he marries his brother's widow. She's Spanish. It becomes clear that she is not going to bear more children. They've only had one surviving child, a girl. And so he decides he needs to divorce. Her name is Catherine of Aragon. He needs to divorce her. In addition to which, there's a young woman that's come over from the French court. And he is smitten with her, Anne Boleyn. And so this is a win-win. He gets a young wife and he has this opportunity to get a boy, he believes. His problem is Catherine of Aragon has a nephew whose name is Charles V, who happens to be the Holy Roman Emperor. And in order to get a divorce, Henry VIII needs the Pope to approve it. Catherine puts pressure on her nephew. Her nephew, in turn, puts pressure on the Pope. I warned you this was confusing and messy. And so the divorce attempt is blocked. And the short version is that by the time the smoke clears, Henry has broken with the Church of Rome. And you end up with a church that is led by the monarch. So the monarch is the head of the church of Rome. Henry himself is probably predominantly Roman Catholic. So you have kind of a non-papal Roman Catholic sort of thing. He has six wives before this is over. The first wife he divorced, Anne Boleyn, the second wife. She does not have a male child. Her only surviving child is a girl. He eventually beheads her. Then he marries Jane Seymour. Jane Seymour does have a boy but dies shortly after birth, Edward. Then he is briefly married to a Protestant German woman, Anne of Cleves. The stories abound about exactly what happens, what, yeah, the short version is he doesn't like her for whatever reason.

Reason, so shortly after she arrives, he sends her off to a convent and says, nice to know you, divorces her, marries Catherine Howard, a young woman who's Roman Catholic, who is very gregarious, interested in younger men. There are probably affairs. She is divorced, and then he marries an older woman for companionship, Catherine Parr. So divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survives. After all this, we have a boy. He's a Protestant, Edward VI. When Henry dies, Edward VI takes over. England is Catholic or Protestant briefly. Edward has tuberculosis, probably. He dies. And then his half-sister Mary becomes queen. She's Roman Catholic. England goes Roman Catholic again. She marries the king of Spain. She dies. Then the third child of Henry, Elizabeth, is a Protestant. England becomes Protestant again. She puts in place, yeah, I know, she puts in place what's called the Elizabethan settlement. It's kind of a midway Protestant thing. She dies without marrying, and they go up to Scotland. There's a relative up there, Jimmy Stewart. He's just finished shooting It's a Wonderful Life. So he comes down and he becomes James I, and the story goes on. But you can see there's convolutions and stuff going on here. On the bottom level, there's theological stuff going on, and important theological stuff. And I'll make this short. There's really three theological ideas that are going on underneath all the political stuff. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. What is the church? Is the church the Pope, the hierarchy? Or is the church what's called the priesthood of all believers? Is it an organism or is it an organization? Second, how are you reconciled to God? Is it through the organization via the sacraments or is it through justification by faith alone and Christ alone as he's found in the Bible alone? Third, and I think this is the one that matters the most. Who or what has the right to define what we must believe and what we must do? Is it the Bible or is it the Bible plus especially the Pope? And that becomes the main wedge. And those who are Protestants tend to argue Bible only, justification by faith alone, and the church is an organism, priesthood of all believers. So you've got two pieces going on. You've got this piece up here with the politics, but underneath you've got this theological piece. And you're going to get a lot of things that are going to come out of this. This is why you have to go on tour with us. It takes us at least a week to explain all this to you. And spend most of the time on Henry's wives. Like C.S. Lewis, I can't clarify that for you. No, I think he would see the same two things you saw, the political piece and the theological piece. But he said the way the theological piece has been depicted has not always been accurate. He wrote one book called, he's got 73 books. He wrote 56 in his lifetime. The rest he wrote after he died. No, actually they were essays gathered up that had been published in journals and stuff and were brought under common cover after he died. There's 73 titles out there. But one of the books he wrote, sort of his magnum opus, was English Literature in the 16th Century, Excluding Drama. To write that book, he read every book that was written in English in the 16th century. He read every book translated into English in the original language it was written, German, French, Italian, Latin, and in translation. So his judgments would be fair-minded and objective. It took him 18 years to write it. He wrote boatloads of other books while he was writing it, but he's the only person I know who read thoroughly both sides of the Reformation. And he said the Catholics thought the Protestants were antinomian against the law. The Protestants thought the Catholics were Pelagian, works-oriented, salvation. He said both sides were wrong. You could find a Pelagian among the Catholics and you could find an antinomian among the Protestants, but you had to bottom fish and find the worst example of the other side. So consequently, you had these people trying to silence debate instead of getting a better understanding by engaging with the other person in a dialectically safe environment. And it was Erasmus who said, I basically believe what Luther believed, but I'm upset at Luther for splitting the church. And I think that the church, it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if they could have had legitimate engagement rather than vilifying the person who disagreed with them. You get somebody like Mary who became queen of England, and she doesn't agree with these guys, so she cuts their heads off. Well, you get people to get on board if they think they're going to get their head cut off. But then Elizabeth did the same thing. She had people that, after she became the head of the church and she was a woman, they didn't want a woman head of the church, she killed people. You don't hear about that because you hear about the side that won, the Protestant side or the Catholic side. But you could get down to real theological differences if you wanted to, but you've got to get past the tendency to want to project and dismiss and blame and hold to your own particular points of view. But both sides had some things right. Both sides could have benefited by engagement and dialogue. That's what I think. You've got a church historian here. He might disagree. Well, here's what complicates this, and here's why that was virtually impossible. You're living in a world where the idea that there could be varieties of theological ideas in a single political unit was untenable. Because? Because of their concept of Christendom. So, like I mentioned, I just came back from Switzerland. Why did Protestants put to death Anabaptists? Why did Catholics... So, why is everybody killing everybody? The reason is because they're functioning in a concept in a worldview, if I can use that word, where church and state are seen as distinct but not separate. So the idea that you can have a multiplicity of religious ideas within a single political sphere is simply that they can't conceive of that. So what they're doing, their model is the Old Testament. And so they go back and they say, well, what do you do with the false prophet? Well, you kill him. And if you don't, what happens? Well, we pay. So why is Zwingli killing these guys who were really his students? Where did they get their ideas? They got their ideas reading the New Testament in Greek with him. And they come to different conclusions on baptism, and then he's standing out by the river saying, well, if they want to be baptized, tie a rope around them. We'll really baptize them. How is he doing that? He's doing that because the idea that there can be variations of theological ideas within a single political sphere is an idea that is a modern idea. That's a post-Enlightenment idea. Actually, no, it's a post-Reformation idea because the Reformation talked about the priesthood of every believer. So all of us could go to the text and read the text and then engage in dialogue. Yes. To benefit from that. Yes, except they were not capable of extending that into a model that allowed for that to function. You get it in the United States, for example. The myth in the U.S. is, well, the pilgrims came for religious freedom. Well, they also hung Quakers. I'm a Quaker. Yeah. So, no, they came here to practice it.

The way they wanted to. But they certainly were not willing to extend that to anybody else. So the idea of toleration, when that's the framework, then the notion that you're going to have debates on these theological issues without them being matters of life and death, which seems ridiculous to us, is as ridiculous to them because the way they're framing things is, and the other thing you have to put in all of this is, look, 40% of the infants are dead before they reach the age of 10. The plague is going through. In Geneva, when Zwingli is there, 25% of the population dies from the black plague. Well, why? Well, the simple answer is God's mad. You walk into church and what's carved in stone over the door in these things, the last judgment. So death and the anger of God and Jesus as the judge and what brings forth God's anger? Well, they've read the big, fat part of the Bible we don't read too much. You didn't tear down the high place. You didn't, you're marrying, all this other stuff. So the notion of religious purity and only one correct way, and so those ideas that are really dear to us as Americans, the right of the liberty of conscience. And it is, I think it has its roots in the Reformation, but when Luther is standing there saying my conscience is held captive to the word of God, a few years later, he's telling the princes, kill the peasants. No, I'm not going to extend them the same thing. So because they don't have a framework yet where there can actually be a state, where there can be multiple interpretations of the same text functioning together. Yeah, it's interesting. So let me just circle back to a few things that I think you said there and ask some questions about them. So number one, it feels like there's this sort of tension. I think I'm articulating this right. There's a tension between the hierarchical structure, the political side of this, where it needs to, in some way, shape or form, we could say control, but that seems more pejorative. We might say protect the theological grid and thus protect society, right? So this whole political container that we're working with is, in part at least, designed to maintain societal order and, on some level, appease God. Yes, because God gave them the sword. It's their responsibility to use the sword to coerce not only moral behavior, but theological orthodoxy. Yeah, and that's where we would jump off. Sorry, go ahead, Jerry. Eventually, the thing changes where that rigidity sort of softens. So what did provoke the change? You get people who are revival preachers, right? You get back to John Wesley, maybe, and you're talking 150 years after the English Reformation. Yeah, it's going to start through. So you get something like the Edict of Nantes in 1598. I'm working without a net here, where they suddenly say to Protestants, France has a problem. Their next king in line is a Protestant. Now what do we do? And he cuts a deal. This is the famous Paris is worth a mass. So he says, I'll make a deal. I will become a Catholic, but you need to tolerate these people, these Protestants. Well, not that long later, here comes Louis XIV, I think it is. I'm mixing up my Louis. And he revokes it, and they start prosecuting them, or they start persecuting them again. So it really isn't until the full blossoming of the Enlightenment and really America that has this, and it's not even in our Constitution. It has to be in the amendments, the Second Amendment that says government shall make no law. That's a wild idea in the Western world. Do you guys know what role the French Revolution plays in this? Like I've read, I think it's a book called The History of Liberalism, if I'm getting the title right. It's Monet. Or Manet, sorry, Manet. And he talks about it in terms of as France goes into a more liberal society, liberal in the sense of governing, you know, philosophy as opposed to right versus left. But as France goes into that liberal philosophy, the church's political power is essentially stripped. It becomes more of a moral and spiritual entity within the society, and thus an opinion as opposed to a claimant of fact. And then that sort of, so that sort of history, and I'm not, I'm just, I know that's post-Reformation, but it feels like those are the sort of markers we could put down to say, look at it moving in this direction. Like there's a moving and a stretching, right, of saying, no, the state is just going to kind of take this over, and they're going to begin relegating the theological to the side because we're done fighting over all these theological issues. Go ahead, Jerry. Well, I would say most of the Enlightenment philosophers were not friends to anything that was going on in the church per se. They may have been put off by some of the bad things that were done in the church, but the Enlightenment's driven by a bad philosophy. And I think some of it's with Descartes. Descartes was a Christian. He claimed to be, at least, a Christian. And there was a belief that everything beyond the moon was immutable. Everything from the moon to the earth was immutable. Then they saw the supernova in Cassiopeia, and they said, wow, something is mutable beyond the moon. So Descartes says, my word, I thought all these things where I thought was wrong. So he begins to doubt everything he thought. So he's over-egging the pudding at that point. And he said, how am I going to know about anything? What's my epistemology going to be? Prior to that, epistemology was verified by three things, authority, reason, and experience. And a lot of the reformers said authority, reason, experience, and Scripture. So anyway, but generally they would say authority included Scripture, authority, reason, and experience. So here's Descartes who says, well, the things that that produced for me didn't give me the truth. So therefore, I'm doubting what I heard. Doubt is a rational activity. I think, therefore I know. So he begins with reason alone. And on the English side, you had the empiricist philosophers like John Locke, who was also a Christian, who said, that's wrong. It's experience. Reason writes on the blank tablet. The mind's like a blank tablet. C.S. Lewis said, if the mind was a blank tablet before the experience, it would be a blank tablet after the experience. It has to bring something to the experience in order to remember, to be able to compare, to see the superlative, big, bigger, biggest, to make sense of the experience. So not only was Locke messed up in that regard, Mortimer Adler, the philosopher, said that these guys, these Enlightenment philosophers and empirical philosophers were ignorant men. I had this conversation with him once and I said, what do you mean ignorant? These were brilliant men. He said, I didn't say they weren't bright, but they were not read well. They didn't read anything more than two generations back. If they had read the Theaeetus by Plato, Locke would have never made the mistake he made, but they were operating basically from a foundation that's vacuous. And so they made these mistakes. And I think the history of philosophy has been, you know, in tatters ever since. But I do think that there have been some in the church who have been able to bring something more foundational and it's objective. Like C.S. Lewis says, if there is nothing objective, you can't make a judgment. All judgments are claimed standard. What's the standard? Yeah, it's either self-referential or else it's a party that gains control in a sentence and then marginalizes those of difference. You want an objective standard that overarches, as Lewis says, rulers and rule alike. And that sort of feels like, you know, that threefold authority, whether it's authority, logic, and reason. Is that what you said? Authority, reason, and experience. Authority, reason, and experience. Thank you. It does feel like that authority piece is part of a big part of what's being negotiated as part of the Reformations. Yeah, and what's going to happen, James, you asked what happened. Well, what happened is the Thirty Years' War where Europe is decimated, and it's supposedly a religious war. And the other side is almost all the state churches lined up on the side of the monarchies. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't, when we think about those wars of religion, we're thinking about them from our, we're almost thinking about them anachronistically. It's, you know, as if the church had an army somewhere. But it really wasn't that. It was this sort of...

Weird merger between, or foreign merger for us, of, you know, political power and theological rationale. Well, but the difference is, in the United States, you get the sacred cause of liberty, where you get a theological argument to overthrow the king. Right. You're not getting a theological argument to overthrow the king on the continent or in the British Isle. And so Christianity is processed as pro-democracy, pro those sorts of things, in the United States in ways that it isn't. And I think Europe is still reeling under that. The church is seen as repressive, anti, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, institutional and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, now, there are lights, Wesley is one of the guys that is, although he certainly hates the American Revolution, he is enough of a social activist and is engaged in the kinds of things that wins the respect of people because of his work among the poor, that changes the way that Christianity is processed in the British Isles. People don't realize what a towering academic Wesley was, too. I've held in my hand a grammar that he wrote that included an English grammar, a German grammar, a French grammar, a Greek grammar, a Latin grammar, and a Hebrew grammar. He wrote them all. He was so conversant. He taught at Oxford University for 26 years. Wow. You don't realize that. He was a towering academic. Let me pivot a little bit to the intellectual thought. And let's sort of shift to Lewis a little bit because I'm interested to understand how Lewis fits into the whole English Reformation thing. Like, part of what he seems to be doing is trying to course correct from within a fairly tumultuous situation. And he's so genius at it that it almost, it's like, he's critiquing everyone who's trying to do something else. But what is Lewis's primary goal? What is animating Lewis in his writing? I think two things. One, his concern for truth. Yeah. And two, his concern to evangelize. Okay. So, in other words, to win people to the truth. But he's not trying to win them to any little nuance of the truth. He's trying to win them to mere Christianity, Christianity that is centered in Christ. He doesn't care what church a person goes to. I mean, he made a choice. He's a high church Anglican. That was his decision. But he wasn't trying to coerce people to one or the other. He wants to win them to Jesus. And I think that this was true with virtually everything he did on his evangelistic side. He said, most of my books are evangelistic. And he meant even his literary critical works. And he defined it by saying it this way. We don't need more books by Christians about Christianity. We need more books by Christians about other subjects with their Christianity late. So that all of a sudden, we have a view that incorporates all of life. He said once, I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun is risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. So he's a really faith-integrated liberal arts kind of guy. And I think you could lead a person to Christ from virtually all of his books. Even his pre-Christian books have some semblance of a man who's longing and groping for something. Where's his longing going to take him? Eventually his longing took him to Jesus. But he did what he called his hot gospel. He started the Oxford Socratic Club at Oxford University where they would have a debate where a non-Christian would read a paper one week and the Christian would respond. The next week a Christian would read a paper and a non-Christian would respond. They'd have dialogue. It seemed something impossible by today's standards. We don't believe in dialogue. We just believe in assassinating people we disagree with. Lewis really wanted discussion. And so he had the Socratic Club, but with the goal that hopefully he could win over the non-Christians to see the sense of the Christian life. And then he also would go and work with the American, I mean the RAF, Royal Air Force chaplains to help them be effective in sharing the gospel with these men who were dying in droves during the Battle of Britain. And so he would work with army chaplains. He also would preach at churches. He didn't consider himself a preacher per se, but if people asked him to do that, he would go. He also wrote books in Christian apologetics. He also did work with the BBC on the radio. All of it was evangelistic. If this is the truth, then it's worth speaking about and so on. And so Lewis was faithful, faithful to it. And he didn't get off onto the side issues. He stuck with pointing people to Jesus. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. I feel it's a little odd. I came to Lewis through Harry Blomires. Yeah, I've met Harry Blomires. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You probably read The Christian Mind. I read The Christian Mind. I was teaching a class and it was the required text that they asked me to use. And so I was like, well, I'm not... Tell them who Harry Blomires is for your listeners. So a student of C.S. Lewis, as I understand it. And so I just hadn't really gotten into Lewis. I mean, obviously, I knew who he was, but Harry Blomires's book, I think, is reflective of a lot of the things you're talking about with Lewis. Because what Blomires is really arguing is that you've lost a truly Christian viewpoint in society at all. And so anytime that Christianity is brought into any sort of, anytime Christians are engaging in some sort of argument, they're really arguing, I might say it like, from within the box as opposed to outside the box, you know, from a Christianized logic, maybe, but not really with a Christian mind as he was looking for it, a truly Christian perspective. And so I think, you know, your comment, like part of the reason you couldn't see a Christian debating a non-Christian, you know, in a reasonable way in the same way that C.S. Lewis set it up in the Socratic sessions, partially because we just don't have it anymore. We don't have Christians who could argue it in the same way that maybe it was happening back then. And so anyway, coming at Lewis from Blomires, I think I've always had a little bit different angle on Lewis just because of I'm sort of tainted by Blomires. You know, I'm reading him through that screen. I don't know what you think about that. Yeah. That's a bad screen to read through, but Blomires was a good man and his idea on the Christian mind, you know, it's, he talks about its sacramental cast. It's view of authority. It's view of truth and so on. And I think he's right, but he's, he's actually the Christian mind. It's a faith integrated liberal arts Christian mind. And you take it to virtually any subject. That doesn't mean he understands every subject, but it means that he wants to look at things through that grid because he's able to establish the true grid. If I come to a truth, that truth I could speak with confidence, but I have to speak of it with in an open hand because I haven't explored the depth of that truth nor seen all of its applications. It might have application to things, questions I haven't even asked yet. So therefore every truth I know can go deeper and it can be applied. So hold it with confidence as a sure word, but hold it with humility because it's not a last word. That's very Blomiresque. Yeah. Yeah. I really loved his book. I mean, I thought it was fantastic and resonated with it so much. And then when I came back and started reading Lewis, I was like, well, it's obvious where he's getting it from. You know, you can kind of see in Lewis all of these different ideas that were there, but he's writing at a different time than Lewis is, you know. When Lewis and Lewis's brother, WH Lewis, published the first publication of Lewis's letters, which is called Letters of C.S. Lewis, he has an introduction to that book and there's a two page appreciation of Lewis written by Harry Blomires. And you can get some of the ideas in Blomires own words.

of why he was such an appreciator of C.S. Yeah, I'll have to check that out. But anyway, when we think about, like, if we situate Lewis, is, just so I get kind of our, so I can understand it and so the listeners can understand it, where is Lewis in relation to the English Reformation? Is he in the heart of it, or is he after the English Reformation and all of these sort of dynamics are still sort of going on? It feels very unsettled. I think I, I guess I had the impression of England is it was, you know, they, at some point got to the Anglican church and now it's just kind of it. But from what I'm hearing now, it's kind of not quite that. Well, Lewis, Lewis isn't fighting those battles. Yeah. He's engaged with something different. The reformation has been settled. And in England, you know, you had the Church of England. Yeah. So they had a state church and so on. And I don't think Lewis is even engaged in those battles. I think he's trying to awaken the Christians in that state church to something that's significant. Jesus matters. And if you learn about Jesus and what he did for you at the cross, it will be transformative. Yeah. And if it's so transformative, you need to bear the weight of glory. He preached in a sermon called The Weight of Glory. He says there are no ordinary people. You've never met a mere mortal. Every person you meet will either one day be an everlasting horror or an everlasting glory. And the weight of glory is that we need to bear responsibility for those around us so that we would make Christ known to them. So is that a reformation issue? Maybe because he wants to see the reformation of the heart. Is it a historically reformation issue because it's rooted necessarily in the ongoing work that was done back in the 1500s? No. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, Lewis is a 20th century figure shaped by World War I and the events between it and World War II. He dies in 63, is it? Yeah, he died the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. Okay. I don't think shaped by the wars per se. I would say that the work that he did was shaped by that historic context. Yeah, sure. But his views are shaped by Scripture. They're shaped by his concern for truth. And he was a student of that. In a lecture he gave in the 1930s to his students in the English faculty at Oxford University, he says we've fulfilled our whole duty to you if we can help you see some given tract of reality. It was when you come to a book, don't project on that book what you want it to be. Draw from the book what it is and adjust your life and thinking by that. You do that well because God can be found anywhere. Then we think that that will begin to shape your mind and heart in a way where you will discover the demonstrations of God's presence in the world about us. And I think Lewis was pretty confident that those things can be discovered if you just remove the prejudices from people and help them to see with an objective eye. Let me throw you guys a curveball because this is something I've been thinking about and we've been batting around these words. We talked before the podcast about defining our terms. So I want to just throw this out there. Reality, truth. It seems to me that these are slightly different things. And I'm wondering if you have any insight, Jerry, from C.S. Lewis's writing. Does he differentiate reality from truth in some way that would be intelligible for us? Yes, yes. First off, Lewis was an objectivist. And he believed there were objects that are out there, whether they be empirical objects that you can see and touch, tangible things, or they're objects of thought set apart by definition so that you can think about them as an object. And that's reality. Truth is not reality. There are objects and there are subjects, people who are thinkers, knowers. So truth is not reality. Truth is what I think about reality when I think accurately about it. This is a mug. The statement is confirmed by the fact that there's a reality that supports the claim. This is an elephant. That's falsified by the fact that though elephants exist, this is not one. In Greek, you have the word symbol. Yeah, yeah. And it comes from two Greek words, soon with and ballain to cast. I cast two things together, a word for this. The word initially is arbitrary. I could call it a gazortenblat. But if I want to have language, if I want to have communication, if I want to have community and culture, I can't make it arbitrary anymore so that what I say could be understood. We live in a day where you could be any pronoun you want. You could be any gender you want. In other words, language has divorced itself from reality. Lewis writes about it in his book, The Abolition of Man. It's so present. It's happening right now that man dies as a result of his movement away from an understanding of reality and truth and speaking about that reality. And he depicts it in one of his novels, one of the space novels, That Hideous Strength. The whole book ends in a tower of Babel. Everybody is anarchistic when it comes to words, anarchistic when it comes to thought, no longer rooted in reality. This, for Lewis, was essential to any kind of robust thinking and dialogue. So reality, I think, just so I can summarize a piece of that, reality is what's out there, whether that's an actual physical thing or a concept that can be mapped out. And truth. It could be defined. And truth is how we align to that reality. When what I think, when what I think is accurate with the reality, then I have the truth. But again, the reality is complex. This is a mug that's true. But I could then say, but it holds so much volume of liquid. It weighs so much. If Aristotle was here, he'd say it has a formal cause. It has a material cause. It has an efficient cause. It has a final cause. It has a molecular structure. We could go on and on and on. And that's what to us. That means any truth I know is a gateway to greater wonder and awe as I make discoveries in the world made by God. It's fascinating. I've been I've been reading some work. James Gibson, ecological theory of visual perception. And he kind of talks about that. So you look at the mug and we just think of it as a solitary mug. It's the thing I'm holding that I drink out of. Right. But he says within that mug, there's a bigger context and a smaller context. And the way we talk about it depends on the aspect that we're looking at it from. Are we looking at it as mug, as a paradigm for all other mugs? Right. Which is the bigger set. Or are we talking about it as a mug and the molecular makeup of that mug? And so he's got this fascinating way of describing that. He calls it nesting. But it seems to accord with what what Lewis is talking about. Because one of the things he talks about is, look, these things, these properties are there whether we recognize them or not. And so what we're doing as we're starting, we're starting to recognize reality around us. We're making claims about that reality around us and those claims could be either verified or falsified. Yeah. But the key is, though, you can have a sure word. You can have a sure word. Yeah. A hundred percent. But because you can't get to the bottom of it, we realize that our thinking will always need to be dynamic, not static. Yeah. So there will be change. It will be necessary. And I need to think through what kind of change is necessary. Is it a change of kind? Yes. So what I thought before needs to be scrapped and I need to think of something that's more fundamentally sound. Yeah. Or is it a change of degree? Trees are changing all the time by adding rings. It's a change of degree, not a change of kind. Right. We'll chop the tree down, build a table out of it. That's a change of kind and to build it and discern what kind of change are we talking about in any given situation. That's again, to talk about the truth of change, I need to define my terms so I don't get off track. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. Well, Lewis is a fascinating figure. I mean, we could have done a whole we could have done this whole episode on Lewis. We probably could have done the whole episode on English Reformation. But what I hope this gives folks is just a flavor of the sort of conversation they can have when they go on this trip with you two guys. Yeah. I mean, that is true. That is true. There's a reality that supports that. There's a reality to that. That we have officially scoped out. It's a mind blowing reality. You'll leave worshiping every day on that tour. It's true, though. It happens. Yeah, we will go to Lewis's home. We will see Henry VIII palace. We will Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's. Yeah, we'll we'll we'll see it all, man. Well, I think people will definitely have a good time. We'll put a link. I assume you have a link that people can sign up and consider the tour or sign up. And that'll be in the show notes. And I just encourage you to go check this out, everybody. Greg and I are actually going to Germany here in, I don't know, three, four weeks, something like that. I kind of lose count. But we're going to be over in Germany doing a tour. And so it'll be the first one. I'm pretty excited

but that'll be a lot of fun. And I'm sure this one in England, English Reformation, C.S. Lewis, all these different folks. I mean, we didn't even touch. Yeah, we didn't even touch Moody and some of those other characters you talked about. So there's so much richness there. Just encourage people to check out the tour and enjoy hanging out with these two guys. So appreciate you all being here. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for letting us be here. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, we'll call it a day there and we will catch everybody on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. I'm best-selling author John Seidel, and I'm the Christian who became an alcoholic, not the other way around. Through the power of Jesus, I got sober, and now I'm sharing both my story and the stories of others just like me, along with helpful interviews from trauma, faith, and addiction recovery experts. If you're a fan of messy sanctification and powerful stories, join me on the Confessions of a Christian Alcoholic podcast on Life Audio or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Let's get radically vulnerable.