S5½E1 – Bonus – “Chesterton and Lewis”

David was invited onto the Uncommon Sense podcast to talk about Chesterton and Lewis.

S5½E1: “Chesterton and Lewis” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere…

C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy

Opening Comments

Season 6 will start the first week of January – we had to delay to finish setting up our new audio equipment.

This episode originally appeared on the Uncommon Sense podcast

Discussion

1. “Introduction”

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2. “Welcome”

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3. “Who are you and why do you sound like that?”

• Pints With Chesterton
• BBC Narnia

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

• Andrew Lazo

4. “What captivates you about CSL?”

• David’s address to the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society will be posted next week.
• Aslan childhood toy

5. “How do we find you?”

• Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
• Lewis’ Essays
• Lesser Known Lewis

6. “Why ‘Pints With Jack’?”

• The co-hosts with the Inklings

7. “How did GCK impact CSL?”

I had never heard of [Chesterton] and had no idea of what he stood for; nor can I quite understand why he made such an immediate conquest of me… Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love… His humour was of the kind which I like best… Moreover, strange as it may seem, I liked him for his goodness… In reading Chesterton, as in reading [George] MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere…

C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy

• According to Joel Heck, the collection of essays read by Lewis was most likely one of the following:
  • The Defendant (1901)
  • Twelve Types (1902)
  • All Things Considered (1908)
  • Varied Types (1908),
  • Tremendous Trifles (1909)
  • Alarms and Discursions (1910)
  • A Miscellany of Men (1912)
  • The Appetite of Tyranny (1915)
  • Divorce and Democracy (1916)
  • Utopia of Usurers (1917)

George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy

• Joseph Pearce
• The Christian Century (1962)

…[In The Everlasting Man] for the first time [I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy

Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity”. Now, I veritably believe, I thought–I didn’t of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense–that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity”.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy

8. “How has GCK impact you?”

This impossibility of letting in daylight on a delusion does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity. It can be found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument becomes in tensely interesting; because the argument proves too much. For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person. No modem critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad idea like a Cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of all. – The Everlasting Man

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

9. “Why so much Christianity in Lewis’ writings?”

Finally, I got the impression that far more, and more talented, authors were already engaged in such controversial matters than in the defence of what Baxter calls “mere” Christianity. That part of the line where I thought I could serve best was also the part that seemed to be thinnest. And to it I naturally went.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Preface)

A passage from some theological work for translation into the vernacular ought to be a compulsory paper in every ordination examination.

C.S. Lewis, Christian Apologetics

The popular English language, then, simply has to be learned by him who would preach to the English: just as a missionary learns Bantu before preaching to the Bantus. This is the more necessary because once the lecture or discussion has begun, digressions on the meaning of words tend to bore uneducated audiences and even to awaken distrust. There is no subject in which they are less interested than philology. Our problem is often simply one of translation. Every examination for ordi-nands ought to include a passage from some standard theological work for translation into the vernacular. The work is laborious but it is immediately rewarded. By trying to translate our doctrines into vulgar speech we discover how much we understand them ourselves. Our failure to translate may sometimes be due to our ignorance of the vernacular; much more often it exposes the fact that we do not exactly know what we mean.

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

When I began, Christianity came before the great mass of my unbelieving fellow-countrymen either in the highly emotional form offered by revivalists or in the unintelligible language of highly cultured clergymen. Most men were reached by neither. My task was therefore simply that of a translator — one turning Christian doctrine, or what he believed to be such, into the vernacular, into language that unscholarly people would attend to and could understand.

C.S. Lewis, Rejoinder To Dr. Pittenger

• R.A.F. (Royal Air Force)
• Myth Made Fact – Dr. Louis Markos

10. “Single CSL recommendation?”

• The Screwtape Letters

Wrap-Up

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