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Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, with Daniel K. Williams · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is sponsored by Crossway.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Curated by award-winning hymn writers Keith and Kristen Getty, the Sing Hymnal Personal Edition features timeless hymns without musical notation to help readers meditate on lyrical excellence and biblical truths.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Find it at crossway.org.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I will go further now.
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  SPEAKER_00: There are no real personalities anywhere else.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Until you have given up yourself to Him, you will not have a real self.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sameness is to be found most among the most natural men, not among those who surrender to Christ.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: How gloriously different are the saints.
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  SPEAKER_00: But there must be a real giving up of the self.
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  SPEAKER_00: You must throw it away blindly, so to speak.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Christ will indeed give you a real personality, but you must not go to him for the sake of that.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about, you are not going to him at all.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Your real new self, which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is his, will not come as long as you are looking for it.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: It will come when you are looking for him.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Does that sound strange?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: The principle runs through all life from top to bottom.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Give up yourself and you will find your real self.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Lose your life and you will save it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day, and death of your whole body in the end.
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  SPEAKER_00: Submit with every fiber of your being and you will find eternal life.
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  SPEAKER_00: Keep back nothing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.
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  SPEAKER_00: Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.
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  SPEAKER_00: But look for Christ, and you will find him, and with him, everything else thrown in.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So wrote C.
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  SPEAKER_00: S.
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  SPEAKER_00: Lewis in the concluding pages of Mere Christianity, one of the most famous works of Christian apologetics ever published.
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  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy.
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  SPEAKER_00: And today I am excited to talk about C.
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  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis and the broader history of apologetics with Daniel Williams.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: He is associate professor of history at Ashland University and is a historian of all the things that polite people don't talk about at dinner.
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  SPEAKER_00: You know, politics, religion, apologetics.
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  SPEAKER_00: His most recent book is The Search for a Rational Faith, Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity, published by Oxford University Press in January 2026.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Dan, thank you for being here.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you for inviting me onto your podcast once again.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: So for those who have not connected the dots yet, I should also mention as a disclaimer, Dan is my husband.
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  SPEAKER_00: So we talk about these things also at the dinner table.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: But this summer has been busy.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps our deepest and best conversation about his book will be now.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for joining us.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: But first, before we get to the broader story of apologetics and how C.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis connects to it all, let's start with a more basic question.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: What exactly is a classic of apologetics work and what makes C.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's mere Christianity a classic of this genre of Christian apologetics?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a great question because the vast majority of works of Christian apologetics do not have a very long shelf life.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: So some people have asked me, well, after writing a history of Christian apologetics and reading dozens of books from the 17th century to the present, which one would you recommend?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I find that it's difficult to recommend works published in the 17th, 18th, 19th, or even early 20th centuries because most of those books have not aged particularly well.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: They answered questions that people were asking at the time they were written, but a generation or two later people found that the evidence they were using or even the questions they were asking didn't really resonate with a lot of people.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say that of the great works of apologetics originally published in English, the only ones that that really had enduring power were two from the 18th century: Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion and William Paley's uh evidences of Christianity or his work uh Natural Theology.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: But even those books are not widely read today.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: They were widely read throughout the 19th century, uh, but then their popularity really dropped off.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh we get to the 20th century works of apologetics.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we have books by J.K.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Chesterton that perhaps were not widely recognized as works of apologetics in their in their own time, but have become uh known as such.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, we have C.S.
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  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's Mere Christianity, and and one could argue that this is the most enduring uh work of classical apologetics uh in our own time.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so the question is, well, what makes this an enduring work?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: What what might make any work of apologetics theoretically an enduring work?
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  SPEAKER_01: And somehow the apologist has to ask questions that go beyond the immediacy of of his or her own time.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I think with the with the issue of apologetics, there's a real challenge for an apologist because an apologist is meeting skeptics where they are, addressing doubt.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so often the questions that skeptics are asking are unique to our own time.
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  SPEAKER_01: Or if they were not, then the question is, is a new work of apologetics even necessary?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: So if people ask the same questions uh forever, then we could simply take a work of apologetics that's written in the past and say, okay, there's no real need for a new work of apologetics.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so the fact that we're publishing so many works of apologetics shows that people are are looking at at new issues.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: So some of the works of Christian apologetics that have been written in the last decade address issues of gender.
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  SPEAKER_01: Uh, does the Bible's view of gender reflect uh truth, or does it uh is it outdated?
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  SPEAKER_01: That that's a question that people were not really asking in the same way in the 1940s when C.S.
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  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was giving these talks, but they are asking it today.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's quite likely that 50 years from now or even 20 years from now, the conversation about gender will have moved to a new point.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: And those works that are being written about that today, uh, with cutting-edge books by Rebecca McLaughlin and other apologists, you know, may not age particularly well, but that's okay because most of the time, Christian apologists are are trying to answer the questions that people are asking today, not the questions that they're going to ask 100 years from now.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a very rare book that simultaneously addresses the questions that people are asking right at one particular moment, and also is equally effective at speaking to people in later generations.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe in the conversation today, we'll get into what made this book that really rare work of apologetic that could do both, because hardly any books have.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: When we talk about classics, we are talking about books that have stood the test of time.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when we think back to even bestsellers from a century ago or longer, uh very few books from that number are still being read today.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, in some ways, it's not a surprise that apologetics fit into that same category, that very few apologetics can become classics in the sense that they're still being read 80 or 100 years later or more.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: But they're still, apologetics are still worth considering as a genre of their own.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So let's um, I was wondering if you could take a step back and give us a definition.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: What do we mean when we say works of apologetics?
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  SPEAKER_01: The word apologetics comes from the Greek word uh apologia, and so it's very much a classical word.
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  SPEAKER_01: Uh, that meant defense.
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  SPEAKER_01: Now, today, the most commonly used word that is derived from that is apology, and and we use the term apology uh perhaps in a different sense than it would have been used a few centuries ago.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's usually used today in the context of saying one is sorry for something, uh or making an excuse for something, but uh it its original use was a legal term, a courtroom term.
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  SPEAKER_01: We can think about Socrates' apology, for example, his defense of his actions.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so originally the idea of apologetics had that courtroom connotation that you are giving a defense of the faith in the face of skepticism.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: You were presenting evidence for your cause.
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  SPEAKER_01: And uh the original works of apologetics tended to be uh evidentiary-based.
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  SPEAKER_01: They were they were compiling various forms of evidence that would convince a skeptic.
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  SPEAKER_01: In more recent years, maybe apologetics has taken a different turn.
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  SPEAKER_01: Some of the most popular works of apologetics today are not strictly evidentialist, but in in some way, they're still presenting a defense of Christianity, even if it's a softer defense.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: They are trying to address potential objections to Christianity and saying, actually, when you consider all of the facts, the case for Christianity looks stronger than the case against.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your own intellectual journey because you've enjoyed reading apologetics for a really long time.
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  SPEAKER_00: So I'd love to hear how that those experiences have shaped your uh thinking about the faith.
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  SPEAKER_00: And also when did you first encounter mere Christianity?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think I encountered mere Christianity um before I graduated from high school.
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  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so my interest in apologetics dates back to my childhood.
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  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I remember a workbook study that uh I did on Christian apologetics in middle school.
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  SPEAKER_01: And I had been looking forward to that study because I was even coming into middle school, I was beginning to ask questions about uh the evidence, the historical evidence for Christianity, justice God, different uh questions that skeptics ask and questions that apologists have tried to uh examine.
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  SPEAKER_01: I've always been a very rational sort of person.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so my my journey to the faith, even though I grew up uh in a Christian home surrounded by uh the Bible, surrounded by uh church-going experiences and and surrounded by theological conversations, my my journey always involved this rational element where I wanted to ask and answer the question, how do I know that these things are true?
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  SPEAKER_01: And the because of my temperament, I would say that the the answer to that question was, unlike some Christians, would not be primarily experiential.
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  SPEAKER_01: It would it would have to involve a historical dimension or a scientific dimension.
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  SPEAKER_01: In other words, Christianity would have to correspond in some way to the rest of uh observable reality, as I understood it.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so I I think because of my own temperament and because of my own theological tradition at the time in the Churches of Christ, the form of apologetics that I gravitated to, and really the only one that I I knew at the time as as a distinctly apologetics uh oriented discipline was uh evidentiary.
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  SPEAKER_01: That is looking at historical evidence, looking at uh some of the scientific uh claims that some people made uh as to why the universe required a creator.
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  SPEAKER_01: So I think I read C.
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  SPEAKER_01: S.
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  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's Mere Christianity when I was still in high school because I I started when I was in 10th grade reading a lot of different works of C.
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  SPEAKER_01: S.
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  SPEAKER_01: Lewis and Francis Schaefer.
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  SPEAKER_01: Now, interesting enough, at that time, Mere Christianity didn't really seem to make a strong impression on me compared to other works.
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  SPEAKER_01: So the my favorite Christian apologetic work in high school was Josh McDowell's Evidence that demands a verdict, um, which is just very much grounded in the historical evidences, and that's what appealed to me at the time.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: But years later, as I continued to read and think about things, I I think C.S.
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  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's Mere Christianity became more important in my own thinking.
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  SPEAKER_01: And especially in my late 20s, after I realized that some of the evidence that popular apologists like uh Josh McDowell, later Lee Strobel cited were maybe not as strong as what I had once thought.
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  SPEAKER_01: I I was looking for something deeper.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so periodically I return to uh Mere Christianity.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I've I've read it several times, and uh it has become an important book for me.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think there are still maybe other books of apologetics that have have resonated with me even more, but I I think there's there's a depth uh in C.
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  SPEAKER_01: S.
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  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's Mere Christianity that uh has made this an enduring work in in my experience.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I've certainly gone through crises of faith.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I wouldn't say that that C.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: S.
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  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's book necessarily pulled me out of those crises of faith, but I would say that that as I was emerging from some of those crises, that that sometimes I would look at C.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's book and and see new enduring insights that that maybe uh sustained me to some degree.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so let's talk about C.
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  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's motivations.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: So what was he thinking as he was writing this book?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like how, why, and when did he write this work of apologetics?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the uh the book actually began not as a book, but as a series of BBC radio talks during World War II.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what had happened is that at the beginning of the 1930s, C.S.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis became a Christian.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: He had grown up in a nominal Christian home.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he had then served uh in World War I.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: He became an atheist uh as a young man, and so for much of the 1920s, he lived uh as a as an atheist, as a skeptic.
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  SPEAKER_01: But he was also engaged in in the late 1920s in conversations with uh his friends who were Christians, the most well-known of whom was J.R.
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  SPEAKER_01: Tolkien.
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  SPEAKER_01: And it was in those uh conversations uh with friends that that he was confronted with perhaps some inconsistencies in what he thought was an airtight case for for atheism, for the absence of God.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he actually details some of those in in Mare Christianity.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: So he became a Christian uh, I think in 1931.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: He was already uh an emerging scholar of medieval literature, and so he began writing works on Christianity during the 1930s.
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  SPEAKER_01: Uh his first major work on Christianity was The Pilgrim's Regress, which came out in the mid-1930s, only about five years or so after his conversion.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then in the late 1930s, he wrote his space trilogy, and starting with Out of the Silent Planet.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then in 1939, he published The Problem of Pain.
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  SPEAKER_01: And that was the probably the most popular work that he had yet produced.
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  SPEAKER_01: Uh in 1942, he would publish what became an even more popular work, the Screw Tape Letters.
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  SPEAKER_01: But it was based on the problem of pain that the BBC reached out to him.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the BBC at the time was trying to come up with wholesome, non-controversial broadcasting to give to the public during World War II.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, this was the radio that British people listened to at the time.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so they wanted to produce programming that that would not necessarily cause a lot of controversy in the general public, but at the same time be uplifting and substantive.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: So they decided to do some religious programming, and the question was who to invite.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: They needed to invite someone who would not be sectarian, religiously sectarian, someone who would uh not be politically controversial.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: There were some uh more liberal uh clerics in the Church of England, for example, who who really viewed Christianity as as tied to uh socialistic social programs, and not everyone agreed.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so they needed someone who would who would talk about Christianity from a uh uh a less politically partisan lens.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so initially the BBC suggested that C.S.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis do a series on Christianity and modern literature or religion in modern literature, and and he was not particularly interested in that, actually.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't really like modern literature very much.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: So uh he suggested that he not talk about modern literature, but instead he suggested doing something that along the lines of what became mere Christianity.
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  SPEAKER_01: He wanted to speak about Christianity to people who perhaps didn't accept Christianity.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time, Britain was officially Christian, but very nominally so.
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  SPEAKER_01: One survey found that of the recruits serving in the British Army, only 23% could explain the Christian meaning of Easter.
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  SPEAKER_01: So clearly there was a lack of substantive Christianity, even though the majority of people had been baptized in into the Anglican church.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: So C.S.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis began his series by talking to just the average person who perhaps didn't think of themselves as really needing religion.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: But imagine if they were thinking about fairness on a train, who took their seat and would they complain?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's where he started.
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  SPEAKER_01: He was trying to explain Christianity to people who were already living in a post-Christian culture.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the United States was far more religious than Britain was uh at the time.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe today we are at a state that's not that dissimilar to Britain's in some way.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: There there are some substantial differences.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: But in terms of uh a culture that that was historically Christian, but but has a significant number of people who are maybe only nominally churched or or nominally Christian or who perhaps would find it difficult to explain even the most basic aspects of Christian doctrine.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: There are some similarities between the environment that C.S.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was confronting and and uh our own time.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so he gave this series of broadcasts, and and initially it was supposed to just be eight broadcasts, and then it it became extended and it extended over the course of about two years.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but then afterwards he published this as a a book.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, first a series of of uh short booklets, uh, about four short booklets, and then that they were compiled in 1952 into uh Mere Christianity, which is, of course, is how we we know the book today and how most people have encountered C.S.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's thought uh in this work.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: But the reason the chapters are so short, uh so poignant, so readable, is that they were designed to be either 10 or 15 minute broadcasts, just very short radio broadcasts.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they would have to speak to a general audience in a conversational tone, given on weekday evenings during the war.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, how were these received?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: The radio broadcasts were very popular.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, after they were published, C.S.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis did get did encounter some criticism.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so the the criticism came uh from some people who were who were secular.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, one of his most one of the his critics who perhaps would be most well known.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: To people today for other reasons, was George Orwell, who was not a Christian, who was a socialist, and who complained that this was marketed as nonpartisan, but it was really too conservative.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was moving people away from concern about the things that he thought they should be concerned about that would lead to a socialist program.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: More liberal members of the Church of England, some of the scholars and theologians in the Church of England, even some of the bishops, criticized Lewis for not taking into account more uh recent findings in critical scholarship from the late 19th century and on that would have questioned the historicity of the gospels.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: They said he was he was too ready to accept the the uh the historicity of the gospels without sufficient question.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that has continued to be a criticism from people who who do line up with uh uh a critical approach to the to the biblical record.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: But oh on the whole, this has been this was very popular.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was well received among Catholics uh who found it to be a very fair statement of the essentials of Christianity.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was reasonably well received among evangelicals, or uh even at the time, groups that would have been called fundamentalist people associated with Moody Bible Institute, for example.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: They did quibble with some things.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: They found that that not everything that Lewis said here could could be lined up with an evangelical version of Christianity.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: But for the most part, they were positive.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the initial reception from American mainline Protestants was overwhelmingly positive.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: They really appreciated what C.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was doing.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: And by the time Mere Christianity was published in book form, the screw tape letters had already been published and they had made uh C.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis an international sensation.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: After the book was published, it became over the next few decades even more popular than it was at the time.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so in the year 2000, Christianity Today named it based on a vote from a panel of uh Christian writers and theologians and others associated with Christianity today, uh, the best uh Christian book of the century.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it has led, it has been instrumental in leading a number of high-profile evangelicals to Christ, most notably, I guess, uh Charles Colson, the Watergate uh aide who went to prison for his, or the Nixon aide who went to prison for his role in in Watergate, but then became a Christian.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: And he said it was reading Mere Christianity that convinced him that Christianity was intellectually true.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that that's been true for a number of people.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh today, I think the C.S.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis book that is by far the most popular will be the first book in the Chronicles of Narnia series.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so Mere Christianity perhaps has been eclipsed by C.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's larger fame as the writer of the of the Chronicles of Narnia.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: But that's a relatively recent term.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: And even today, uh Mere Christianity is second only to the Chronicles of Narnia in terms of best-selling C.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis books.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: It still resonates with a lot of people.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: There are there have been millions of copies sold.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, we're talking about this on a podcast for Mere Orthodoxy, whose title is a combination from Chesterton and C.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis.
• 25:42
  unknown: Yes.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Orthodoxy and Mere Christianity.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, can you walk us now through Lewis's argument?
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we hear that this was this resonated with people at the time when he delivered the talks and at the time that the book was published, and then it kept resonating even more so afterwards.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are his arguments for the faith?
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: He begins with an argument for the moral law.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is something that he also developed in the lesser-known book, though still widely read book, uh The Abolition of Man, which would come out during this period in the early 1940s.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: But according to this argument, all of us intuitively sense the existence of right and wrong, even if we don't admit it.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: We the the evidence for that is that when someone does something to us that we consider unjust, we say things like, that's not fair, or even that's wrong.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: And if pressed on it, it becomes very obvious that we're not simply talking about a matter of personal preference.
• 26:48
  unknown: C.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was dealing with the with the claim that morality was simply cultural, and he he deals with that very directly.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in the late 19th century, the discipline of anthropology emerged around the idea of cultural relativism when it came to customs, including morality.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: And C.S.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis said it's obvious, actually, that there are certain moral ideas that that all or nearly all cultures share.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: They may differ on who is subject to those rules.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, uh, are you not are you simply not allowed to kill people in your own ken group, or is it something of broader application to the nation, or even is it something that's global?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: But nevertheless, you don't find cultures that say that uh that dishonesty is inherently good, or that that uh you simply have the right to kill everybody at will.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there are certain moral rules that people sense within them.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: And while that that argument from conscience had been developed before, I think it had not been popularly expounded in such depth and uh with such skill as what C.S.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was doing here in Mare Christianity.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: So then once we have a sense of that moral law, we know that there has to be a moral law giver, that this is not something that could originate from simply uh natural forces, according to C.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: There has to be uh something beyond us.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then the question is, what is that?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: And and what we know about God from nature, therefore, is that God does care about uh morality and also that we have not consistently followed that.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that should lead us then to want some sort of divine reconciliation, some to want God's grace.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: C.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis began in this unexpected place that was not necessarily where uh the BBC expected him to begin.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: But as he argued, you cannot really introduce people to Christ until they have the sense of a moral law.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: And in making that claim, although C.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis resisted very much uh Calvinism and the Puritans, what he said there is actually very similar to what uh classic Reformed theology emphasized.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: That is, the idea that we we have to understand our state of being lost before we can appreciate uh the reality of salvation, before we can understand God's grace.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's that's where he he began with with readers.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then in that first section, he leaves people with uh the reality of God's forgiveness in Christ, of Jesus uh fulfilling the moral law for us.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh from there, he goes into what seems like a very different direction.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Really, he he assumes this point that his his readers have been convinced that maybe there is a case to be made for Christianity.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so he spends much of the rest of the book sketching out what that Christianity consists of.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: What are the Christian virtues?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: What does it mean to live as a Christian?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, toward the end, how do we understand unique Christian doctrines like the Trinity and the Incarnation?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a very intellectual and ideas-driven defense of the faith, uh, which is quite different from evidentiary apologetics that you mentioned earlier.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: Can you explain a little bit more about the difference?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like what exactly, what kind of things would we find in evidentiary apologetics?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I I would view much of mere Christianity as part of classical apologetics.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Classical apologetics, which um has had a lot of practitioners.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: So some of the more recent names in that field have been um R.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: C.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: Stroll and William Lane Craig.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, classical apologetics tends to be philosophical.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now, C.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's Mere Christianity avoids all philosophical jargon.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's very much jargon-free.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's a much more accessible work than a lot of works of classical apologetics.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: But but classical apologetics can trace its roots back to Thomas Aquinas uh in terms of the proofs for God, uh, which C.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis does not give here.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's giving more of a common sense reasoning, conversational reasoning with people, but he's working through philosophical concepts.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, he does draw a little bit on evidentiary apologetics in the sense that when he gives his Lord, liar, or lunatic argument, he is looking at historical claims about Jesus.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that argument actually is not original to C.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis at all.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's something that that had been in circulation for a long time.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: And C.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis didn't necessarily claim that he was making any any sort of new apologetic arguments.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: Quite the contrary, he was he was simply synthesizing uh and repackaging a lot of uh arguments that had been in circulation for a while.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: But uh a work that's maybe a little bit more of an evidentiary-based uh work would be one that looks at historical evidence, that looks at scientific evidence, and says, okay, what is what is the evidence telling us about whether these things really happened?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: So on the popular level, probably the most famous works of evidentiary apologetics over the last 50 years would be Josh McDowell's Evidence, the demands of verdict, and Lee Strobel's case for Christ.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: Both of those, I think, um are somewhat problematic in terms of their historical claims.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: There are works that do evidentiary apologetics, I would say, a lot better than either McDowell or Strobel did, but uh most of those works have not become uh nearly as well known.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: So if you wanted to look at works that are are works of of evidentiary apologetics on a more uh sophisticated or technical level, you could uh look at N.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: T.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Wright's uh books on the resurrection, like the resurrection of the Son of God.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's very much a work that that looks at historical evidence and then says, okay, what can we what can we know about from the historical evidence that might have a bearing on this question of whether uh the resurrection really happened or whether it is something that that could have simply been a uh product of people's cultural imagination at the time.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: So speaking of the cultural imagination, a new-ish and really popular um approach to apologetics now is cultural apologetics.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: So how is that different from classical apologetics and evidentiary apologetics?
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, C.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis himself, I would argue, was an early practitioner of cultural apologetics.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: Not so much in this book in Mere Christianity, although there are hints of it, but much more so in his works of fiction.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, after write, after writing Mere Christianity uh and his book on miracles, which is very much a work of classical apologetics, C.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis then turned toward works of the imagination, most famously, of course, the Chronicles of Narnia series.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: What cultural apologetics tries to do is to appeal to people's sense of imagination from within the culture to present a case for Christianity that fulfills people's cultural longings better than the current cultural situation does.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it it's in dialogue with the culture.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: And most of the time, rather than simply uh arguing against the culture, saying culture is wrong in its understanding of gender, or culture is wrong and it's understanding of moral relativism.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Rather, what it what cultural apologists do at their best, I would say, is to appeal to people's sense of moral imagination and say, actually, you should want Christianity to be true.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: Tim Keller was famous for this.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: His every Easter, he would preach a sermon that was designed for skeptics.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it was designed not to necessarily present historical evidences for the resurrection, of which, of course, there had been many examples of sermons doing that before.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: But rather, he said he wanted skeptics to leave the church that morning saying, even if I can't quite bring myself to believe that someone rose from the dead on Easter morning, I kind of want it to be true because of the implications.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's cultural apologetics.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: And Tim Keller did a lot of that in his own life.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I think now that uh he has passed on, there are others, particularly associated with the Keller Center, who are very overtly trying to do that.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: But much of Tim Keller's inspiration for cultural apologetics came from his thorough reading of C.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Tim Keller had memorized large sections of C.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis to the point that uh some of one of his parishioners once joked in an anecdote that Tim Keller liked to tell, uh, that he could always tell when Tim Keller hadn't prepared sufficiently for a sermon.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because on the weeks when he was well prepared, he quoted widely from a lot of different sources.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: On the weeks when he hadn't spent as much time on his sermon, uh, he simply quoted from C.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis because he could he could do that uh from memory without much effort.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh a lot of what you get uh in Tim Keller's apologetics is is a channeling of C.S.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: And even though mere Christianity is probably more in the classical apologetics realm than in the cultural apologetics realm, even there, C.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis is appealing to people's longings, appealing to people's imagination and saying, uh, isn't this actually something substantive that that you would want?
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think someone will finish Mere Christianity not just with the sense that Christianity is intellectually true, but also they'll, I hope if C.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis has accomplished what he wanted to accomplish here, they'll they'll have a sense that maybe this is actually a superior life to anything that they could imagine.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's why I find it so um so appealing, just in general, reading C.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, not just mere Christianity, but in general, he's inviting us into a vision of the world as it could be, which um which is beautiful.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the invitation to the gospel, not the world as it is right now that we sense is broken, but um what Christ has in mind.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that will be true at some point in the future.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one question I want us to get to now is how this all fits into the history of apologetics in America, which is the subject of your recent book.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: So what sorts of arguments have appealed to people from, well, I guess the age of the Puritans to the present?
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: How has it changed?
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think uh the in the 17th century we really see the beginning of uh evidentiary apologetics.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the in the early 17th century the arguments that were given uh in Puritan sermons for the existence of God commonly cited arguments from design as well as classical proofs for God.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: But uh over the course of the of the 17th century, those arguments for design expanded to include larger arguments for uh the historical veracity of uh the Christian story.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: By the late 17th century, evidentiary apologetics was pretty well established based on uh an appeal to biblical prophecy and an appeal to biblical miracles.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the the most common way to try to defend the faith in the late 17th century among evidentiary apologists was to say we know that the prophecies of Christ were given before uh Jesus was born.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: And we know from the historical record that Jesus fulfilled these prophecies in a way that that goes far beyond uh chance or or what any what any human could could uh do on their own.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we also know that that there is a lot of testimony of Jesus's miracles, and that testimony was given by people who were uh eyewitnesses, and uh these two could not have been given by it uh these miracles as well could not have been the product of an ordinary man.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: And and the person who was performing those miracles was someone who was claiming uh to be divine, to be uh the son of God, to be God in the flesh.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so, therefore, uh both the prophecies and the miracles support that.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: And in particular, uh in the early 18th century, people started to focus especially on the resurrection and the historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of that supports the idea that Jesus was who he claims to be, and that the Bible uh therefore is a uh a divine product as well, because Jesus uh relied uh on the Bible and and uh the eyewitness testimony of Jesus is a historically accurate record that became part of the Bible.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that that held a lot of uh weight with people for a long time.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in the early 18th century, some Christians began to confront deistic skeptics who did argue against the historicity of the Bible, uh, drawing on ideas from uh Spinoza, for example, from this 17th century uh skeptic in in Europe.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: But most people, I think, did find the historical evidences convincing uh in the United States, certainly in American colleges, those historical evidences were taught for a long time, well into the 19th century, even into the late 19th century in many places.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: However, there were new books that also appeared that were designed to deal with deistic arguments in particular.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the most well-known of those was Joseph Butler's The Analogy of Religion, which was a British work that came out in the early 17th century.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so, in the American context, a lot of the books that people assigned in their classes on Christian apologetics in the in the early 19th century were those classic British books, uh, The Analogy of Religion by Joseph Butler, and then a work of historical evidences from the late 18th century that had synthesized some of this earlier work, William Paley's evidences of Christianity.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so whether you were going to Harvard or Yale or or uh Princeton or Brown or uh Williams or Amherst or other places uh that were leading centers of education in the early 19th century, you would be required to take courses in Christian evidences, as they were called, and as well as natural theology, and you would be exposed to these arguments.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in the late 19th century, as people became influenced by German uh criticism of the Bible, German higher criticism, they they started to have to deal with that more directly.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh I I think Christian apologetics began to split off into a number of different directions in the United States.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: On the part of liberal Protestants, there were people who continued to defend the faith, but argued that it did not have to be historically grounded.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: And they they rooted that argument in William James's pragmatism.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: They they argued that actually the truth of Christianity should be tested not by the historical evidence for it, but by its effect on people's lives.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: And if you can make a case that Christianity works, then uh that's that's sufficient.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: And C.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's Mere Christianity does try to deal with that argument.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: He does argue that Christianity works, though he also, in keeping with what all uh evangelicals or people who would come to be known as evangelical Christians would argue, it has to be historically grounded as well.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: You can't have a Christianity that's simply ethical, that is, that's divorced from Jesus and Jesus' resurrection.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: So the arguments that, the apologetic arguments that people made to defend the historicity of the Bible, uh started to include arguments as to why historical criticism was not the last word on the gospel story, that there were reasons to believe that this is this was a historical, a historically trustworthy account.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: And most recently, I think, uh scholars like uh Richard Baucom have done a very good job of trying to argue.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: You why the Gospels are grounded in eyewitness testimony, why they're not products of a of a later age.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: You can find that were those arguments earlier in the 19th century.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: Books like Andrews Norton's uh multi-volume work on the historical evidences for the gospels or George Park Fisher's evidences of Christianity in the late 19th century.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: Those those works by uh New Testament scholars or or church historians of the 19th century are doing what I think people works like N.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: T.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: Wrights or Richard Balcombs are doing today, although because the scholarship moves, I think most people would find it far more useful to read N.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: T.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: Wright or Richard Balcombe than to read those early 19th century works.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: But uh the point is the the conversation began to move toward uh an examination of the historical criticism, asking the question, is this historical criticism uh justifiable?
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: C.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis really didn't get into that.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I think his critics who argue that he was he was blind to those, to that historical criticism, which by the way is a criticism that has resurfaced uh in very recent years with the this recent work on C.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis, how C.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis read the Bible, it brings up those criticisms that people were making in the 1940s.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I think those criticisms are somewhat misguided because C.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was familiar with higher criticism, and he was also familiar with arguments against it.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he considered higher criticism so untrustworthy for reasons that he briefly dealt with in other books that he just didn't feel the need to deal with it.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: He argued that literary critics routinely were completely wrong in estimating what, in trying to guess what he was thinking when he wrote things or in what order he was he was writing his works.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that if they couldn't even get it right for someone that was alive in their own time and someone who's case he obviously knew well, then why did they think they were making uh historically trustworthy judgments when looking back 2,000 years to uh the gospel writers or even beyond that to uh the Old Testament?
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: He really did not believe that that literary criticism or or historical criticism of the Bible uh was based on anything more than speculative guesswork, and and he just therefore didn't take it very seriously.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: But uh in recent years, uh in the last 50 years or so, I think Christian apologetics has moved into a number of new directions, including, as you mentioned, uh the cultural apologetics.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: There are still works of evidentiary apologetics being uh written, but a lot of people also have found that many people who are skeptics are not necessarily people who who disbelieve because of historical evidence or or who would be convinced to believe because of historical evidence.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: Rather, they're they're people who need to have their imaginations sparked uh and to realize that Christianity is telling a better story.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's definitely room for a lot of different forms of apologetics because the best works of apologetics from any individual's perspective are going to be the works of apologetics that speak to their particular questions and their particular doubts.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: And those doubts and questions are not universal.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: There are certain ones that are fairly common, but there are a lot of different uh questions that people have.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think it's it's useful when thinking about works of apologetics, not to think of a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather to think of uh the question well, what what assumptions does this particular person have in in looking at the Christian faith?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: And what uh works would or what sort of reasoning would speak to those particular questions?
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I wonder if this means that for apologetics in particular, it's just harder to have classics of the genre.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: That may be.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I think that uh Tim Keller's book, Reason for God, is as close as anything we have today to what could be a classic of apologetics that that is broadly based.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: But even Tim Keller, uh, shortly after he wrote that, felt that maybe it wasn't fully addressing the questions that people were beginning to ask in the 2010s, which is why he continued to write and uh wrote some works that tried to take a step back.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: So making sense of God, for example, which uh Tim Keller published, I think about seven or eight years after he wrote Reason for God is another work of apologetics that's trying to take a somewhat different approach, not undermining in any way the reason for God, but trying to address people who were perhaps at a different point in their thinking.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: And some people around Tim Keller, and I think Tim Keller himself, but certainly those around Tim Keller, uh, believed that that had Reason for God been written later, it would have had to address a lot of other questions, particularly questions about uh the about gender and about whether Christianity was harmful uh to the world, uh, that that really didn't uh come to the fore, or and in some cases were not mentioned at all at all in Reason for God.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I I do think it is hard to have a classic work of apologetics.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: To a certain extent, that was true in the 20th century as well.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: The vast majority of works of Christian apologetics are that were published in the 20th century are out of print today.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, C.S.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis did not expect mere Christianity to endure.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: He was somewhat surprised that it was.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think he would have been even more surprised had he lived longer to see that it uh that it continued to sell well and and become even more widely respected after his death than it was before.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so the real puzzle is not so much, you know, why did earlier works of apologetics uh fade away, but you know, why have certain works of apologetics had enduring power?
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, in writing your book, was there something you discovered about the history of apologetics that really surprised you?
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think the biggest surprise was that the vast majority of Christian apologetics came from what we would call mainline Protestantism rather than from uh evangelicalism.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that even after the split between fundamentalists and modernists uh in the early 20th century, the more liberal wing of Protestantism continued to probably produce the lion's share of Christian apologetics well into the 1950s.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: It was not really until the late 1960s that that mainline Protestant Christian apologetics really dropped off.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: We could even say that C.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis's Mare Christianity was a product in some ways of what we might call mainline Protestantism.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: C.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was a theologically conservative Anglican, but he was part of the established Church of England, which had a significant liberal element.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: He was definitely not a fundamentalist.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: If by fundamentalist we mean someone who tries to separate themselves from modernism or directly fight against modernism, he makes some snide remarks uh in Mere Christianity and even more in some of his other works about uh clergy who are who are abandoning the faith or losing the faith.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he definitely believes uh very strongly uh in the Nicene Creed and in the essentials of the Christian faith.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: He had a high view of biblical authority, but he did not believe in biblical inerrancy.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: He was not a confrontationalist when it came to theological liberals.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: He was not a dissenter.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: About 15% of the British population belonged to what were called dissenting churches, mainly Methodist and Baptist.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: And 7% uh were Catholics, of whom large numbers were generally very theologically conservative at that point.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not where C.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and so he was an uneasy fit for American fundamentalists, or as they later became uh known as conservative, uh theologically conservative evangelicals.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, in the end, I think they uh evangelicals concluded that if C.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was not one of their own, he was as close to one of their own as as one could possibly be, uh, and still be a British Anglican.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I I think you know, C.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis has now been viewed as an evangelical apologist, at least by many evangelicals.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: But his work actually is much more representative of what was a pretty widespread phenomenon in the 20th century, for most of the 20th century, or at least the first half of the 20th century, of mainline Protestant denominations that included a significant number of theological liberals still producing defenses of the faith.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, my final question to you is a version of the question I always ask to conclude this podcast, but what work, what classic work of apologetics do you wish you had written and why?
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I am amazed at the skill of C.S.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis in producing Mere Christianity.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm also um very impressed with the skill of Tim Keller in producing Reason for God.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think that I would have been very felt very gratified to have written either of those books or or even a work that was not nearly as well known as those, but that dealt with skeptical questions in such a a compelling and creative way.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: Realistically, knowing the way that I think and and the what I uh think I you know I might be capable of, and we'll see you know how God might use me in that.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I the work of apologetics that I probably would be more likely to write if it if if I were to do anything would be probably much more similar to some of the historical works of evidentiary apologetics that maybe are out of print today, but that I think did really good work in their own time.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: So um George Park Fisher's work on evidence of Christianity would uh he was uh a um a church historian at Yale Divinity School uh in the very late 19th century in the 1890s.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think wrote did some very compelling work uh arguing why historical criticism of the gospel record was misguided and and producing some very compelling historically grounded defenses of the faith.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: It would probably be something like that, which would mean that it would not necessarily be a work that stands for all time.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the work, the works that tend to stand for multiple generations like Mare Christianity are works that appeal less to the specifics of historical evidence and more to the universality of the human experience, right?
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think C.S.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was so successful because he was able to talk about human emotions, human longings, and human beliefs in ways that transcended his own generation.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: He was able to step out of time.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's obviously a lot in here that that relates to his own immediate historical context of World War II and and uh mid-20th century Britain.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: But there's also even more here that I speak I think speaks to all of us, uh including those of us who are born long after uh that historical context had passed away.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so I really admire people that can do that.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and if I you know happened to do that, obviously that would be that that that would be something to be thankful for, uh something to to be viewed as maybe a life's crowning achievement.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: But uh but realistically, if I were to contribute to Christian apologetics, it would probably be in a more time bound, specific, but still hopefully very useful way.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, even works that are not classics can do so much good for the kingdom of God.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Dan, thank you so much.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.