Jeffrey Barbeau | C.S. Lewis, The Last Romantic & Faith in a Post-Christian World

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. Before I jump into the episode, I wanted to remind you about all the resources we have available at usefultogod.com. You can check those out at usefultogod.com. I also wanted to alert you to something that I think is pretty special. It's a German Reformation tour that we're running this fall. We'll be walking in the footsteps of Luther and Bonhoeffer and traveling from Berlin to Munich and just reflecting on the enduring witness of faithful believers. The tour runs October 30th to November 9th, and we're hoping that everybody can book by May 31st. Spots are filling up fast, so check that out. The link to that tour is in the show description of today's episode. So if you're interested, check it out. Now, let's dive into this episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I am joined today by Dr. Jeffrey Barbeau. He is a professor of theology at Wheaton College, and he's written a book called The Last Romantic, C.S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology. And we're going to be discussing that today. Jeffrey, thanks for being on the podcast, man. I really appreciate you being here. I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, so in sort of in our little pre-interview conversation, I mentioned I don't really know a whole lot about C.S. Lewis. I remember when I was early on in my Christian faith, people would give me various C.S. Lewis books to read. And so I remember reading C.S. Lewis on the problem of pain. Obviously, as a kid, I read, you know, The Narnia Chronicles and those kind of things. And then recently, my daughter was assigned The Great Divorce as a textbook in school. And so I got to read through that with her and kind of work through some of it. But he definitely has a different way of writing and a different way of presenting theology than I think I'm used to at the very least. Right. It's not academic. It is more imaginative. And so as you're addressing some of his work in your book, The Last Romantic, how do you see that sort of imaginative focus historically being a bane and a blessing? That's a big question. And I think, let me just address the first part of what you said there, because a lot of people encounter Lewis when they're kids. You know, you hear something about the Chronicles of Narnia. Maybe you read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And you're like, oh, this is great. You know, and it sort of has this accessibility that a kid can get it, but so can an adult. And I think that's what makes Lewis so interesting. He has this writing style where you kind of know, even when you're young, I think you kind of know there's something deep going on here, but you don't always put your finger directly on it. And then as you know, you're older, maybe you're reading it, maybe you read it with kids or something like that. And you're like, oh, wow, like this is, this is great. There's a lot taking place here. Right. And, and so I think just even just taking a moment to observe that Lewis has this kind of style. He's so quotable. He, he feels when you're reading him, just like so smooth, you know, it's just like everything does sound easy. And, and I think that makes him really attractive. So I just think, first of all, let me just say that, right. I don't know, is that your experience too with Lewis? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think when I read him as a kid, I didn't really understand what I was reading. I was just enjoying the story. It's a pretty fantastic story. I mean, I think as an adult, when I read it, you know, the only off-putting thing I can remember about, I think it's In the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is when Santa shows up and I'm kind of like, what the heck is going on with Santa? But, you know, you do start to, especially as I got into Christian theology, you start to understand where he's really going, what he's really pointing to and how he's trying to frame out this world to convey an understanding of a Christian worldview, which I think is sort of fascinating. Absolutely. And, you know, I talk about this early in the book. When I was a kid and I read Chronicles of Narnia, I read the first book, right? Yeah. And I was really uncertain about it. I didn't really have anyone kind of reading alongside me. You know, my parents weren't really sitting there saying like, all right, let's talk about this together. And so my experience was one as a fairly new Christian in the sense of being pretty serious about my faith. I was confused. I was like, wow, this Aslan character looks a lot like Jesus. I'm not sure. Is this okay? And I had this kind of inbuilt conscience, like, maybe this is wrong, right? And of course, now as an adult, I see it differently. I recognize that that's exactly the power of literature is to sort of help you enter into the space to understand someone like Jesus, maybe through a new lens. And then maybe this goes back to your original question, which is, I think Lewis is using stories to do just that. I think, first of all, he does want to tell stories that are pleasurable, that are enjoyable, that we read them and we think, wow, that was so fascinating, so interesting. It captured my attention. And that's what we want in our writers. I mean, and actually we need Christian writers who can do that for us, that when we read their work, we don't feel like slammed over the head with the Bible necessarily. We don't feel like we're being preached at, but we just enjoy the world that we have entered into. And I think that's the first point here is that Lewis actually does that so well, that no matter where you're from, no matter your background, you read his stories and you're just like, oh, that's interesting. Or I want to talk about that. I want to think about that some more. Then he does something more with the story, right? And that's maybe what this book in some ways is about, is what is he doing and why is he doing it? And maybe where did he even get those ideas from? Well, talk a little bit about, you know, I understand a little bit, I think of what the romantic aspect of this is, but what, can you help us understand what romanticism was? Like this is not a love story necessarily. So what, what is romanticism in the way you're using it in the book and how does Lewis connect in with that? Absolutely. Now I don't want to dissuade your readers because, you know, we're recording this a little before Valentine's and, you know, if you have someone you love, you should buy the book and, and tell them how romantic it is. But in fact, uh, this is not that kind of romantic. It's not that, um, fairy tale of a love story, but it is a period and a kind of mood. And so to understand romanticism, I have to kind of explain both of those kind of briefly here. I would say it's a period of literature, but actually it's a whole lot of, uh, different types of works. So we have painting that's romantic. We have music that can be romantic. We have literature that can be romantic, but in my focus here, I'm thinking of British romanticism. And usually we say that's from around the late 1780s until the early 1830s. And that seems kind of random, except in Britain at that time, there's a whole lot taking place. It's a really powerful period in terms of the literary works that are being produced, but also politically, there's just a lot happening. You have the French revolution in France. You have the end of the slave trade. You have a lot of reform taking place. So it's a really dynamic period. And right in the middle of that, you have these poets and other types of authors. Think of Frankenstein, but the poets are really a focus and they're doing some new things. There's some new subjects they're wanting to write about and new ways of writing. So romanticism in Britain is really that time period. And it reflects also a mood and the mood gets us to sort of the sense of one's individual feelings of the kind of experiences we have. Some of our most famous romantics, someone like William Wordsworth, he's talking about nature and going out into mountains and, and hillsides and walking. And he's talking about his encounter with nature, kind of seeing things in a fresh way. And in many ways, we're still the heirs of that. If I can just go a little longer here, maybe I'll just say during COVID, a lot of people were feeling, you know, trapped inside. They didn't know what to do. And what were they doing? Sometimes they would go out into some natural setting. They would get out of the house and they would maybe find a park or for me, I live in Illinois, a prairie. And I found myself in the dead of winter, walking through the prairie and enjoying a kind of solitude, honestly. It was very cold. It was just me and the deer

You have a sense of that? Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing, because I'm an academic, I'll say is, these periods are ones we've created, right? And so, if I say, oh, this is the key, someone might go, well, earlier, that was already happening over here. So, you know, these are ways that we kind of organize information. But one of the things we do think about is, like, the Enlightenment, right? You have, after the Reformation, you have this kind of rise of individual reason and the kind of intellectual life. And even science reflects that. And that's a really positive thing, right? They're focusing on the natural world. They're looking at everything around them. They're studying it. And this is when we think of, for example, deism. Now, deism is this idea that the revelation of God, we don't really need the Bible to give us a revelation of God because we can look at nature. And as we study it, we actually see truths about God right there. But then they say, so God made the world this way and then kind of steps away from it, right? We have this idea of the kind of, the world spinning around and the creator has kind of moved away and kind of leaves it on its own. And deists tended to think, well, all right, if I just look at nature, if I look at creation, I can understand all I need to know about who God is, what the world is like, and about the moral life, even. Like, what does it mean to live rightly? So you have these Enlightenment ideas and they're very kind of heady in that way. Well, the romantics are a part of a shift. Now, they still care about the intellect. They still care about reason. They still care about those things. But more and more, they're talking about, well, what about the part that's inside of us? What about our hearts? Is there something about beauty that, sure, you could, like, measure beauty. You could kind of make calculations of proportion and so forth. But isn't there something about, let's just say beauty, that you can't quite calculate? If I said to my wife, oh, I love you, like a formula that works out perfectly, I think she'd find that a little bit dry. Now, she likes math, so maybe she'd be okay with it. But that's not usually how we think of writing a card or a love letter, is it? Far often, we think about, like, you know, do you mean the world to me? I don't even have words to describe how much you mean to me. I'm so in love with you, right? Now, that, that's a different kind of way of thinking of it. And I think the romantics, now, I did go with the kind of Valentine's route there, but the romantics were thinking about those feelings and intuition and an encounter with something that we maybe can't even put in words. That's kind of what they're getting at. Though they themselves are very diverse, so I don't want to, you know, narrow any of them in too much, but that's part of that movement. Now, afterwards, you have the Victorians, and I'm happy to talk about that too, but I've been going for a while. I'm lecturing. Well, no, it's interesting. I mean, I think, so where my mind's going with this and not being a scholar of this period, right? So you have the Enlightenment that's a little bit more detached emotionally, we might say, and it's really heavy on reason on that side of the spectrum, let's say. And then you move into Romanticism, which maybe is a little bit of a corrective to that and an addition in and a supplement to what that reason's been doing. And that's happening in Britain. And what I'm wondering is, does America lag after this? You know, are they basically parallel periods? And I take your point, you know, when we're talking about these periods, we're really talking about, you know, sort of artificial boundaries that we're using to organize broad trends. But I'm sort of interested in, you talk about the trial of C.S. Lewis at Wheaton College, right? And so I'm wondering, that feels to me like it's a, if I were just to frame it in terms of what you just said, and maybe this is inappropriate, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a sense in which it feels like there's an Enlightenment lag that is uncomfortable with the romantic notions of what C.S. Lewis is doing. That there's this struggle of moving from the reason and the analytic and the sort of, we could call it the hard stuff, right? The science of it into a squishier, more imaginative, more storied and experiential sort of mode. Is that sort of, is that a right reading of this? Is that kind of how it may have played out? Like, just talk through that. It's, you're on the right track. And it's a little more complicated, which is probably exactly what you would expect me to say. Right. It's not surprising that I didn't get that all the way right. So I'm not. That's okay. Yeah. So one way to think about it, and of course, again, we can always oversimplify, but sometimes we need to see things in kind of big sweeping movements, knowing that there's always going to be differences, even at any given moment, right? So even during the Romantic period, there's plenty of people who you would say that sound just like someone in the Enlightenment, right? So again, that's, that's to be said here. But so what you have is that kind of Enlightenment emphasis on reason. And then we often talk about how, for example, in Britain in the early 19th century, there's this shift towards the sort of natural world and that in the, in the feeling sense though, the encounter, for example, go back to my case of walking in the prairie, you know, before the Romantic movement, people, if they were out walking in the woods or, you know, alongside a mountain or something like that, you might encounter that person. You would think, well, he must be going to work. Maybe he's a laborer and he's on his way to work. But if he's just wandering around, then you might have a different reaction, which is like, oh, he's maybe he's poor. He's a solitary wanderer. And you might think kind of what's wrong with him. This idea that you would actually kind of go out into nature and find it something refreshing and fulfilling was new. Now what happens in America is that same kind of set of concepts. And it has a very strong kind of religious element to it. And it funnels into different types of churches for a while, but it does lag like you describe. And the lag is that in the middle of the 19th century, you start to see this. And that's actually really important. I think listeners will be really interested in this because that's the same time when America, North America and especially the United States is having a sense of its own identity being formed. We're after the revolution now. And it's before the Civil War. This is time when we see the rise of some of our most favorite literature. You think of the New England_transcendentalists. How many people read in high school Emerson or Thoreau? Maybe you read Moby Dick, something like that. Or at least you were supposed to. And that sort of literature is in a time really impacted by the Romantic movement. It's kind of funneled over here in the 19th century. And that sense of self-reliance, of kind of a communion with the world, a sense of our connection to others, but also my own self. All of that's a part of the founding of early America. And that influence then is shaping it. Now, to extend this one step further, how do we get to the 20th century? So what happens then is when we have around the time of the First World War, we start to see a kind of breaking up in Christianity taking place in the United States. Okay. It leads to this kind of fissure where Christians kind of take one of two sides. We think of polarization in our own day. You could say about a hundred years ago, this was taking place as well. And you have some who tended to focus much more on Christianity's social concern. And you had some who tended to focus much more on like piety and traditional doctrine. Now, both were picking up on streams that had been kind of held together previously for a lot of, for example, evangelicals, kind of have a really strong heritage of the social concern and the kind of deep piety together. But these were breaking apart so that by the time you get to the middle of the 20th century, this quick, rapid history I'm telling here, the trial of C.S. Lewis that I talk about in the book, there was a time when at Wheaton College, which is now a center of Lewis studies, Tolkien and others, the inklings, right? There was a time when Wheaton was starting to collect these writings. And then we had Clyde Kilby in particular, really saying like, hey, this, this guy's an important writer. We need to think about this. But there was a certain amount of distrust, even for C.S. Lewis, because of the ways he talked about our inner life, the way he argued about Christianity in terms of his defense of the faith. Some of the moves he was making and the way he presented his arguments left some faculty actually a little uncertain about him. He wasn't yet the great C.S. Lewis. Right. You know, he was on the rise and there was a bit of uncertainty about him. Interesting. Yeah. It's sort of fascinating to

If no between the two, you certainly start to see people focus almost on one rather than the other. And so, it's interesting to hear you talk about that World War II fissure, or World War I fissure, I'm sorry, where you have this interesting divide. That's fascinating. Yeah. We're not only polarized today, we were polarized way back when, right? This is 100% true. And that sort of thing happens throughout the history of Christianity, where people are maybe emphasizing one thing, and then another group will come along and say, no, I think we need to correct this. And we find this kind of back and forth again and again in different ways. It's not a strict kind of only two things, but it happens over and over again. And I think that's part of what the body of Christ really is about in some ways, that oftentimes, we need to listen to our fellow Christians and say, OK, what are you picking up on here? What am I missing? And that doesn't mean we change our position entirely, but that sense of listening and really kind of learning from others, not only in our own day, but in the past, goes a long way to maybe seeing the blind spots in our own lives. So were there, when C.S. Lewis is sort of, when people are becoming uncomfortable with C.S. Lewis and this sort of internal working that he's talking about, are there specific works that they're concerned with more than others? Is it more the fictional literature that he's writing and the discomfort with this sort of imaginative world that he's creating that is trying to convey the gospel in that sort of storied manner? Or are they also concerned with some of his more philosophical and theological writing where they're trying to, where he's trying to do more of, you know, a traditional non-fictional, we could say, approach to Christianity? Is it his, to go back to a term you used, is it the mood that he's sort of conveying, or does it have to do more with the genre of the literature that he's writing? Great question, because I don't remember specific concerns about the story, but it seems to go without saying that there would be some people who would just be unsure about the use of story in general. I think there is that tendency that people have when you hear someone who's trying to express key ideas about faith and they hear story, that they're like, oh, I wish that was a bit more exact, right? If I shot my students, for example, a piece of artwork or, you know, something that's expressing some doctrinal idea, they'll look at it and I have such wonderful students, I should say, but they'll look at it and they'll be like, well, that's not quite right. That's not quite how it happened. Or doesn't the Bible say this, right? And of course, they're so attuned to the scriptures as they ought to be. But then, when the art gets in there, of course, you're going to find things that aren't exactly the same, right? So, it goes almost without saying, but I'm so glad we are talking about it, that anytime a Christian tries to tell a story or perform some form of artwork, right, a drama, let's say, theater, or offers a painting or a piece of music, there will always be these areas where some will react and say, well, you didn't quite get that right. And I think maybe that's a reminder for all of us. And then we'll get back to Lewis here. But a reminder that when artists do their work, things are going to sometimes be a little uncomfortable or a little different. And that should bring about discussion. It should call us to the scriptures, but not just to sort of nitpick, but to really reflect on our faith together. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about Lewis, right? You read the Chronicles, you read the sci-fi. I mean, I remember the first time I was reading his trilogy and, you know, Out of the Silent Planet, for example, and just being like, oh my goodness, I have never even thought about the world in this way. And whether he was actually trying to, like, get us to think about the natural world or not, you can't almost tell, but thinking like, huh, I wonder if there's aliens, you know? That was like my early reaction in college. It's like, huh, well, how would that, how would that work if there were aliens, right? And this is what great literature does, is it allows us to sort of get outside the box for a minute and to imagine possibilities and think about them. But to get to your earlier question, because it's sort of been with me, you know, one of the things that those who were concerned, certainly here at Wheaton College, about was just the way he made his apologetic arguments. He starts talking about like a moral law or a kind of knowing we have within us. And for some, that felt like maybe he wasn't biblical enough. Like he just wasn't saying, well, this is what the Bible says. Instead, look at Mere Christianity. He opens it with this sense of the moral law. He's, you know, he's talking about like, imagine, you know, you have a fight. You know, this is the example I give at least. I've said it so many times. I don't even know if he says it anymore or if it's just one I made up. But we can think of it this way, right? You get in a fight with your brother or your sister over something that happened. You're like, that's not right. You shouldn't do that. And that's the kind of argument that Lewis opens with. He kind of appeals to our sense of fairness, of justice, of right and wrong. Isn't that an interesting way to start talking about faith? And he says pretty early in Mere Christianity, he's like, we're still like a really long ways away from Christianity here, but we just have to start with our sense of like, what is right and what is good, that inward knowing we have about the truth. And if we start going there, then maybe we actually can see one step further, which is, who's the one who has set it up this way? Why is it like that? So that sort of argument is really interesting. I think Lewis was trying to appeal to something that he recognized would resonate with a lot of people, unlike if he just said, the Bible says, and settled it. Because in our culture today, and certainly it was the case in the middle of the 20th century in England where he is giving these radio addresses in a time of war. And if he just said, the Bible says, I don't think that would have been as effective. And he knew that. Yeah. It's kind of interesting, I think, to consider, and I can understand why there would be some discomfort around this, at least as I think through, you know, back on some of the things I've read for Lewis. One of the things I have thought about is, I wonder how much of this really is conditioned by his cultural context. So, and one of the things I've thought about is, do you need a Christian consensus for this, to pull off the sort of storytelling that Lewis is really doing? In other words, as we move into a society that is, you know, often called post-Christian and, you know, you don't see a widespread understanding of the Bible, we just have so much more material that can be dealt with now that the Bible is not the, you know, central text, let's say, of even literacy learning just outside of religious circles or something like that. And so there's less awareness of some of these principles and ideas and stories. And so now you sort of flash forward to a modern day and you say, well, would these arguments still work? Obviously, I think they'd need to be updated and revised a little bit, but it strikes me that they probably still would, I think, where, but I would say, I think I kind of resonate with some of the concerns where it's like, you still have to root these things in more of a biblical and theological context, especially today, because it's easy to go off the rails and say, well, this is justice, but that not actually be justice, or this is moral, but it not actually have anything to do with morals. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. I think for Lewis, let me argue on both sides of this because I think it's kind of necessary to hear the both sides of it. I think for Lewis, he would agree with you, but what he would say is that actually he's, now he still believes something that I think is less and less accepted today, which is, he thinks that there really is one moral law that if we all kind of look at it with clear eyes, that everybody would agree on. He's, he thinks that like, if you look across religions, across cultures, across time, it doesn't really vary. He thinks that like, there's a core that like everybody will get, and he calls us the Tao. And it's interesting. He does this, right? He wants us to see, like, there's something that's not just Christian, right? That kind of, everybody kind of recognized.

Yes. And it's something, and, you know, of course, this is, this is found right there in Romans chapter one, right? There is something that we all know that we're responsible to, and I think Lewis is picking up on that. And he does it so subtly. He doesn't have to say, Romans one tells us, instead he just makes the same argument effectively. He says, we're kind of all responsible to this, and we, we hold others responsible to it. So even though he doesn't point directly to the Bible, I think he's actually making a very biblical argument. And he thinks that everybody has this, that as much as we're different in our cultures and the way we grew up, maybe, our backgrounds, our context, he thinks that we're actually still going to share this. So for him, he's pulling on something that he thinks actually will work really, really well. All the way across. It's interesting. Yeah, y'all go ahead. I was just going to say, I mean, while you're talking there, what came to my mind is DC Schindler. You know, he does a lot with, he's a Catholic philosopher, and he does a lot with reality and authority. And he talks about the claim that reality has on us, that reality isn't something, or he uses the transcendentals, the good, the true, the beautiful. These are not things that we determine. They're things that we recognize. And thus, they have this claim on us. And it's a very similar argument, I think, to what you're suggesting Lewis would make, is that there is a real there. There's something real there that we're all just recognizing. And it's not something we've all gotten together and said, hey, let's decide on this. It's just something about the world. And as we're observant of it, we are going to recognize this aspect that then can be pulled out and said, look, God created all things. He created it like this. There is an underlying order here. We're all going to recognize that to some degree. And that's the common thread across humanity. Well, you know, it's interesting that you bring up that argument because when Lewis's writings were coming over into the North American context, it was actually among Roman Catholics that he had some of his earliest, best reviews. Mark Knoll was one of my predecessors in this lecture series that this book is based on. And Mark Knoll is one of the great historians of American Christianity and a really powerful influence on so many Christians today, I would say, even if they don't know his name, maybe they actually have been impacted by him. And in his work on Lewis, he was like, listen, in the North American context, Catholics were the first to be like, oh yeah, this guy's right. And I think it was really that natural law resonance, that sense of the moral law and natural law that he could communicate so well. And evangelicals, again, were a little bit less, you know, a lot of your mainline Protestants and Protestants kind of more broadly were a little uncertain, right? Why wasn't he making his argument directly from the Bible right off the bat? But over time, they began to see the ways that actually what he was saying was so resonant with everything that evangelicals value and a lot of Protestants value. Yeah, it's interesting. The resonance with the Catholics, and I suppose that's where I would go to, is that idea of natural law would seem more intuitive to them than it might have been to us where we're focused on what's usually referred to as, I suppose, special revelation. They're focused on general revelation, you might say. So that's interesting. You were going to argue the other side of this. What? I don't want to lose that. So what other side of this? Yeah, talk about the other side of it. Yeah, no, I'm so glad you're bringing that up because there is a part of understanding any story or appreciating some of these arguments that does require biblical literacy. And I think that's worth stopping and thinking about for a moment. There was a time when biblical literacy could be more or less assumed of someone who had gone through the educational process more or less the same in different areas. They were going to have a certain amount of biblical knowledge. And I think we see that less and less. And that actually makes not just like getting the argument because you kind of appreciate it, but like appreciating the literary power of a work or the kind of power of an argument a lot more difficult, I think. So, for example, if you're reading Lewis, again, let's take the space trilogy, and you don't have that biblical basis, you'll understand the story, you'll appreciate the story, but you won't quite see all of the ways that he's drawing from Scripture in there along the way. And I think that leads to a diminishment of that full appreciation and the power of it. I was just at a lecture recently where someone was talking about Shakespeare, and to understand Shakespeare, of course, you can go to a theater, you can see the actors, and so many of us, we don't really quite track with the language all the time, but if you see Shakespeare acted, it almost doesn't matter that you get every word. You feel the tragedy, you sense the comedy, but if you really want to go deep with Shakespeare, you have to recognize those influences that are right there in the text. And, of course, the Bible is one of those really powerful ones. So I think having that biblical literacy does become also very important. So you're kind of working on a number of sides here where to appreciate literature today, to appreciate some of the ways that we might talk about faith, requires the inward knowing, it requires the Scriptures and that sense of like what they're doing and some of the ways those references come through in the text. It's been really interesting, and I think as I was reading through your book and now that we're just having this conversation, I spent a lot of time last year dealing with the intersection of faith and politics, Christianity and politics. And one of the things you run into are like issues of civil religion, and you run into, you know, claims about the Christian origins of the United States and the United States as a Christian nation and all those kind of things. And I'm struggling with that because I don't think strictly biblically and theologically it is a Christian nation, but at the same time you have all these influences sort of flowing in. And so what I sort of ended up coming to was, and, you know, borrowing from that sort of transcendentals language, the true, the good, and the beautiful. There's the true, the good, and the beautiful that is recognized that the church, people with this special revelation from God, need to affirm without closing off. Like we wanna avoid allowing the people who are recognizing this sort of incomplete picture of the true, the good, and the beautiful from closing that off and saying that it's complete. But we shouldn't, we shouldn't, we should affirm, I guess, is the best way to say it. We should affirm that yes, you're seeing the true, the good, and the beautiful. This is a good thing that you're noticing these things, that you're recognizing the actual structure of the world. And I think Lewis seems to me to have done that. This is what he's trying to do and pointed to some of these things that this is not something we need to shove away and say, well, they're feeling that and they're, you know, they've closed their eyes and threw a dart at the dartboard and accidentally got a bullseye, but that's not real skill. Like let's not view it like that. Let's view it more as something like, no, this is an innate observation that is a right observation that we need to nurture into something that moves them toward faith. This isn't something that we need to degrade. It's something that we need to highlight, but push beyond. And so, yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, I think that Lewis does just that late in Mere Christianity. There's this wonderful part, it's one of my favorite parts of the book, actually. It's in part four and near the beginning of that section. And he's giving a lecture on theology and this, he's sort of, I always envision him as a kind of old, grizzled looking fellow, kind of tough. He's been in the military, he's been in the Royal Air Force. And he says, you know, sort of like, oh, that's great that you're telling us all about theology, but I really don't need all that, right? I've encountered God. I've had an experience of God out in the desert at night. And he's describing this way in which he's had a very powerful, impactful moment of an encounter with the transcendent, an encounter with a living God. And he says, all the talk you're giving me about doctrines and what the church wants us to do and all of these kind of very technical sounding things, it's so dry. I've had the real thing. Why are you giving me that? And, you know, you might expect Lewis, if he's the way I sometimes imagine him, right? The caricature of Lewis being like, well, I've got a pretty good argument about why you should care about these things. But he doesn't do that. Instead, Lewis says, you know, I think he really did have an encounter with God and it was powerful. But of course, it's a limited thing. And as long as you're content to be there in the desert and have that kind of encounter, that seems like it's well and good. You could be on the beach and you could be looking at the ocean. You could say, this ocean is far more real than any map you would give me. But of course, Lewis says, we need maps. Maps help us to go places. They take us beyond that one moment on the beach or in the desert. So as a matter of practice, I think Lewis

really catches us by surprise. There's a way in which we would expect that he, this Oxford don, that he is going to make an argument and try to wrestle the guy into belief. And he's like, yeah, I get you. I think that you probably did have an encounter with God. But that's not enough. It's not the end of the story. Do you see this, you know, as you teach students, you teach undergraduate students there at Wheaton, so you're dealing with the younger generation more frequently than I think probably most. How do you see this sort of playing into their experience? I think there's probably a narrative and a perception out there that younger generations are more prone to experience. They're more prone to these moments and the participation in the world than they are maybe about strict, heady, theological thought. And are we really in a space where Lewis is going to, I think, is going to resonate with that younger generation to a great deal and that we're going to need to counterbalance in one way or another? Like, what are your thoughts on how this sort of plays itself out in contemporary church world? Well, I do think that Lewis resonates with people and of all ages, but certainly the emphasis on story is really big. I mean, young people today, just like in generations and generations past, they love stories. We all love stories. We're little kids. You know, you can you can pull out a picture book. You can play an audiobook. You can you can read someone a story and and they're going to resonate with it. And I think Lewis does continue to resonate. That's why we still see the film franchise coming out because people want to hear these stories and and think of music and videos. I mean, how many people are scrolling just video after video? They want to see a story, even if it's a short snippet of, you know, someone skiing down a hill and they fall over. There's a sense of story there. And it's something personal where even if you've never skied before, you're like, oh, no, I would never want to be in that situation. Right. So I think there are story people. We are looking for imagination. We're looking for encounters and we put ourselves in those shoes. 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. 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Instead, they tell me, there was a time in my life when I thought I was beyond reach. There was a time when I thought everything was falling apart and I sensed God's presence. I sensed that I was forgiven. I sensed that I was loved or I felt the hand of my community. They came around me. They supported me. Right. What are those reactions? Those reactions are not to say that the learning doesn't matter, but oftentimes what really catches us is the personal. It is that sense of the encounter. And I think that's where Lewis is actually on a really interesting track because just like that guy from the Royal Air Force out in the desert, he says, that was real. That's important, but we need to keep going. If you want to be content with just the feeling, eventually that will grow dull and tiresome. But actually what you need now is something more because what Christianity does is it actually asks something of us. There are responsibilities that emerge. We have that encounter and then we have responsibilities that we act out. And there's a discipline and a calling to something more. And in a lot of ways, I think this makes perfect sense to us. Again, think of loving relationships, right? When I first fell in love with my wife, I had that sense of just, you know, all the feelings, right? And oh, everything's over the moon. But then in a relationship, relationships involve a kind of responsibility, a kind of care for another and a sort of steadfastness, even when things don't feel great. And I really think that there's a parallel there for us in Christian faith that, yeah, there are these powerful moments. But Lewis would remind us, if you want to get anywhere, you're going to need a map. And that means putting together a lot more pieces. And theology is what we call a kind of faith seeking understanding. You've had that encounter. Now you need to understand it. You need to grow in a deeper knowledge, just like you would with someone you cared about, a friend, a relative, someone that you are in a romantic relationship with. There's a growing in knowledge as well as experience. It's been really interesting to start reading into some of the cognitive psychology literature that's coming out right now and the notions of embodied cognition and this sort of emergence of scholarship that's saying you can't really separate the mind from the body, that the way we embody the world influences so much of what we know and how we know it. Not all of it, but a lot of it. And I think when you're talking through the way Lewis is sort of doing this, he's really ahead of his time on that. He's understanding that there's a difference between knowing the doctrine of omniscience and experiencing God's presence in your daily life. There's a difference between, you know, maybe reading a Lord's Prayer in Scripture and actually understanding how to pray. Like these are different types of knowing that he's acknowledging and sort of teasing out in his work. It isn't that he's prioritizing one over another necessarily, but in recognizing the distinctions, now he's able to play with all of these different ways of knowing and sort of poke and prod people in these directions and toward different ways of knowing depending on what he's writing. Because that's one of the things I found fascinating about him is I don't think I could sit down and write a fiction book. I just don't have that skill set, right? An essay, you know, maybe a little calm or something like that. Sure. The nonfiction world, you know, I can do that. But the fiction stuff, I mean, I'm just fascinated when you read, like you mentioned his trilogy. You compare his trilogy to something like Jacques Ellul's work on technology or, you know, even a Neil Postman that's a little bit more accessible. Lewis is able to paint a picture and really convey concepts in a compelling and interesting way that isn't overly dense. It's just got, it's got some, it leaves room for you to think and reflect versus like a Jacques Ellul where it's, you know, one of those books where you might read a paragraph and you got to sit there and marinate in that one paragraph because it's so dense for an hour, right? Just trying to figure out what the heck is he saying here, you know? But I find it fascinating that he is, like I said, ahead of his time in what I'm at least seeing in some of that cognitive psych research of understanding that there are different ways of knowing and experiencing and that all of these are in some ways very valid and necessary, but different. Yeah. Yeah. What comes to mind for me is, as you were describing that, is think of our practices of baptism in the Lord's Supper. I could tell you, you know, you are washed, you're clean, or I could actually put water on you or even immerse you into water. And that now becomes not just notional, right, an idea, it becomes something that has been experienced and that what we call a kind of symbol of the water is a very powerful one. It's not just a flimsy symbol now. That that water becomes symbolic of a mystery in our lives. And that's what, in many traditions, they call a sacrament. A sacrament is this material sign, an outward sign of an inward something, right? Something spiritual. And I think actually stories have that capacity as well. Now, of course, stories do reside oftentimes in that kind of notional space. But I think many of us have had an experience where you have a favorite book. I have books in front of me right now. I'm in my office.

And here's a collection of poetry. Well, when you see this book, you see marked up pages. You've got the I've got all these sticky notes. Why? Because it's not just that I know this book has poems in it. It's because they actually have a kind of place in the book, and it has a smell. It has a feel. And actually, as I return to those stories, I will have a sense of the materiality of this thing. So I think in Lewis, there's even a way that stories can be associated with kind of symbols, and the physicality of a book can be very special to us. A great example of this for many people is a treasured Bible. You know, maybe it's been passed on from family members, or maybe you received it at a certain time. For many years, I always had right by my bedside a Bible I received, I don't know, it was in third grade or something like that. And long since, I knew the people, maybe the pastor would, you know, inscribed in it for me, but it still represented something. And I think we are a kind of embodied—well, we are embodied, of course, but we are embodied in such a way that these material things, they're connected to the ideas. And I think that's what comes to mind for me when you describe all that. Well, I think it's sort of fascinating. You know, you mentioned your time out in the prairie during COVID. You know, when you were talking about the early Romantics, my mind went to On Walden Pond, you know, I think it was Thoreau, if I'm remembering that correctly. And you just sort of sit back and think, like, when we're surrounding ourselves with the digital and the technology, and, you know, you were talking about, you know, this materiality of the books that you're reading. When we're scrolling on a Kindle or something like that, we're not getting that difference in feel. We're not getting the different smell from the pages. We're not getting the different texture of the paper. We're not getting that materiality. It's all the same. It's very uniform. And there's a necessity for us, I think, to be out and experiencing the world in ways that maybe COVID drove you to, right? And in the way that, you know, early on when there wasn't technology about, you know, the nature seemed more accessible to us in many ways. And so I think that, you know, aside from the biblical literacy aspect, which we've talked about, the necessity of understanding that biblical literacy and being in that sort of context and matrix to really deeply understand what Lewis is talking about and grasp the fullness of his work, not that you can't understand it without that, but there's that fullness there. I think that there's something too, you know, the way we interact with the world and starting to pay attention to more than just the stories in our head, but also the way we live those stories out in our everyday lives. And so, yeah, fascinating stuff. I will say I hadn't ever thought about C.S. Lewis from this direction. The romantic mood aspect of C.S. Lewis I thought was really fascinating. Yeah, well, thanks so much. I think these are ideas that really resonate with us. They are still how we think of the world today. We, in many ways, are still living in a romantic age or at least the inheritance of it. And, you know, even as you were just describing there, when you have that encounter in nature, it's not even just that moment. It's that it stays with you, right? And Wordsworth describes this. He calls those spots of time. They're these memories that have this kind of unique something about them. It's not always that they were revolutionary, but there's these moments. And then when you are on your own later on and you're thinking about life, you're thinking about your past, those memories come up and they, he describes them as having a kind of nourishing influence on us. And for me, you know, the walks in the prairie during COVID are one of those examples. It's a spot of time in my life when I was feeling isolated. I was feeling kind of frustrated and cramped, and yet I was out. And that remains with me as something that's uplifting to my heart. And it's not the same as the powerful thing that happens when I'm in church, but it also has a profound effect on me. And I think we have these spots of times in our lives. And actually what we need to do is probably do a better job mining them. That is reflecting, collecting them. And these help in our relationships. They help in our workplace. They help in our spiritual lives. When we, you know, have the ups and downs of daily life, but we can look back to these moments and say, ah, but that was a powerful thing and allow that to continue to shape and inform us, even though maybe in that moment, we don't really feel it, but they continue to exert a positive impact on us. And I think actually that's sort of how God's built us. I tend to agree. And I think, you know, the challenge is having taught Bible theology for a long time as well. I don't do it full time, but I've taught adjunct a number of times is trying to help students understand how to go about cultivating those experiences, keeping them in your mind and integrating them within a, maybe we could say in the geek way to say it, I suppose, is a theological methodology, right? Where these fit within the way that we begin to reflect on scripture, on God, on ourselves, on the world. How do those spots, how do they really inform that? But I think it's a super compelling idea. And yeah, I just really appreciate you bringing some of these things out. I don't know that your book, I think did really help me understand Lewis from that different angle. And it did help me to understand why people maybe would have had a bigger problem with him than we do today, because we are living as at least at the very least, I would say, I think you're right as inheritors of that romantic tradition. And so, Hey, we're getting close to the end of time here. And I usually ask my guests one final question. And so it's a, it's kind of a pop quiz, I suppose. So answer it however you'd like. But one of the things I usually want to know is, you know, from your angle, what do you see that the church needs to be thinking about that? Maybe it's not thinking about right now that would help God's people be and make disciples more faithfully. Wow. What a great question that is. Well, there's two things that come to mind for me immediately. One, I think we need in the churches to really encourage those embodied practices. We need to encourage people to recognize what's happening when we go about certain sorts of behaviors and actions. If it's something as simple as just say, as the Lord's supper, what's taking place when you maybe let's say, go up to the front and you receive some bread and wine or fruit of the vine. And what's taking place there and allow people to recognize that sense of the mind body, the, the kind of spiritual thing taking place when we live this out, that it's not enough to just say it, but there's something about the doing. And I think we need to keep encouraging that. And I think relatedly, I come from a Wesleyan background and for the Wesleys, one of the ways we live out embodied practices was not just something like communion, which is so important, but also meeting together with other Christians, small groups, having relationships. And I think that's another example of that kind of embodied life. What we really need to keep leaning into are the ways that we can connect with one another. And when we do those things, I think lives will be transformed. We'll feel that sense of support. We need, and it will build up a greater sense of hope in a time when I think a lot of people can oftentimes feel very helpless and hopeless. So I think those are great ideas and certainly worthy of pursuing. So thanks, Jeffrey, for being on here. Really appreciate having you on the podcast and appreciate your work in the last romantic. And so, yeah, just thanks for being on the show. Thank you. It's my pleasure. Everyone who's listening, I just highly recommend this book. C.S. Lewis, The Last Romantic. I have, I'll put a link to this in the show description. And IVP has generously given us a 20% discount code. So if you don't buy it on Amazon, you buy it on IVP, you'll get a 20% discount there. So just follow the link in the show description as well as the discount code will be embedded in the show description also. And yeah, I just encourage you to go out and get this book. I know C.S. Lewis is somebody who many people find interesting. And I think this book will give you a different angle and perspective to understand some of C.S. Lewis's writings. And it'll just make your understanding and experience of his writing that much richer. So thanks, everybody, for being here. Thanks for listening. And we will catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everyone. I 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. The Historical Jesus podcast is the sweeping saga of the life and times of Galilean Jesus of Nazareth, as well as the faith, religion, and church founded to honor and disseminate his acts and teachings. Join me, Mark Vinette, on this fascinating journey.

Journey through time, exploring the many great works of Christian theology, literature, architecture, music, and art inspired by the words and deeds of Jesus Christ.