This Week’s Conference on C.S. Lewis

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - The Desiring God National Conference begins on Friday.

00:00:06.900 | It's a conference dedicated to C.S. Lewis,

00:00:08.700 | and we're titling the conference,

00:00:10.180 | The Romantic Rationalist, God, Life, and Imagination

00:00:13.220 | in the Work of C.S. Lewis.

00:00:15.060 | The fun starts on Friday

00:00:16.180 | at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

00:00:18.220 | Pastor John, what do you look forward to from the speakers,

00:00:20.460 | and maybe give us a sense of what you'll be sharing

00:00:22.140 | at the conference yourself?

00:00:23.620 | - Tony, the more I read and think

00:00:27.140 | in preparation for this conference on C.S. Lewis,

00:00:31.380 | the more excited I get.

00:00:33.140 | And I know that Lewis had his flaws.

00:00:36.540 | The more I read, the more I know.

00:00:38.420 | Personal flaws, moral flaws, relational flaws,

00:00:40.940 | doctrinal flaws, we won't celebrate those,

00:00:44.340 | and we won't ignore those.

00:00:46.420 | But here's why we turn to him, frankly,

00:00:51.060 | with deep-felt thankfulness,

00:00:54.740 | and a desire to honor him 50 years after his death.

00:00:59.740 | Let me put it in a quote from Peter Crift

00:01:02.660 | in an essay that he wrote 30-some years ago.

00:01:06.740 | I just love this quote,

00:01:08.340 | and it'll give the people a sense of what we're in for.

00:01:12.260 | "Once upon a dreary era,

00:01:15.460 | "when the world of specialization

00:01:17.520 | "had nearly made obsolete all universal geniuses,

00:01:21.560 | "romantic poets, Platonic idealists,

00:01:24.680 | "rhetorical craftsmen, even Orthodox Christians,

00:01:28.180 | "there appeared a man, almost as if from another world,

00:01:33.180 | "one of the worlds of his own fiction.

00:01:36.420 | "Was he a man, or something more like elf or angel,

00:01:41.260 | "who was all these things as an amateur,

00:01:45.600 | "as well as probably the world's foremost authority

00:01:48.540 | "in his professional province

00:01:49.940 | "of medieval and Renaissance English literature?

00:01:53.180 | "Before his death in 1963,

00:01:55.100 | "he found time to produce first-quality works

00:01:58.680 | "of literary history, literary criticism,

00:02:01.980 | "theology, philosophy, autobiography,

00:02:05.660 | "biblical studies, historical philology,

00:02:08.640 | "fantasy, science fiction, letters, poems, sermons,

00:02:13.640 | "formal and informal essays, a historical novel,

00:02:18.000 | "a spiritual diary, religious allegory,

00:02:21.100 | "short stories, and children's novels.

00:02:24.200 | "Clive Staples Lewis was not a man.

00:02:27.700 | "He was a world," end quote.

00:02:31.140 | That's remarkable.

00:02:33.460 | And you read that kind of accolade

00:02:37.300 | over and over again for the last 50 years.

00:02:41.760 | What kind of man was this?

00:02:44.140 | What was it that caused people

00:02:47.260 | to write things like that about him?

00:02:49.340 | Well, I'm really excited that Philip Reichan,

00:02:52.720 | president of Wheaton, is gonna come

00:02:54.460 | and tackle the issue of Lewis's view of scripture

00:02:58.220 | and errancy, and Lewis, as the patron saint

00:03:01.640 | of evangelicalism, I'm excited that Doug Wilson

00:03:03.960 | is gonna tackle the issue of what did he really believe

00:03:07.180 | about salvation?

00:03:08.140 | Was he a reformed person in his soteriology

00:03:14.100 | or wasn't he?

00:03:15.980 | Kevin Van Hooser from Trinity's gonna talk

00:03:18.380 | about the role of imagination in theology and discipleship.

00:03:23.380 | And Randy Alcorn's gonna tackle heaven

00:03:26.420 | and the new earth with Lewis as his help.

00:03:29.740 | And then we don't even have a second string in this.

00:03:34.420 | The seminars that you saw, well, here's the second,

00:03:36.860 | they're not second string.

00:03:38.900 | Indy Wilson with the Myth Wars, C.S. Lewis and Scientism,

00:03:42.540 | and Colin Duryez, the friendship of Lewis with Tolkien

00:03:46.460 | and the Lord of the Rings, and Lyle Dorsett,

00:03:48.860 | who's written and lectured extensively on Lewis

00:03:52.260 | in his Care of Souls, and Joe Rigney,

00:03:54.540 | who's read as much and thought as much about this

00:03:57.060 | as any young person I know on Live Like a Narnian.

00:04:02.060 | So the lineup here is simply stunning.

00:04:05.580 | It's one of the conferences that I expect

00:04:08.300 | to learn heaps from.

00:04:11.220 | And as far as my own messages go,

00:04:15.420 | I've been working really hard on these in the last weeks,

00:04:19.140 | and I am so amazed at what I'm seeing.

00:04:22.340 | My first job on the first night is to say,

00:04:24.820 | why did we title this thing Romantic Rationalist?

00:04:28.420 | And the deeper I've gone into,

00:04:30.780 | what do we mean by romantic?

00:04:32.060 | What do we mean by rationalist?

00:04:34.220 | And how did that work itself out in bringing him to Christ

00:04:38.140 | and in the way he did all of his ministry

00:04:42.820 | of teaching and writing, speaking,

00:04:46.420 | in the use of metaphor and poetry and story?

00:04:49.820 | I think it's getting more profound the more I look at it.

00:04:53.620 | And then the last thing I'll do on Sunday morning

00:04:56.500 | in the setting of our worship service

00:04:58.060 | is to do an exposition of 1 Timothy 4, 1 to 5,

00:05:03.060 | which has this phrase in it,

00:05:04.460 | "Everything created by God is good,

00:05:06.700 | and nothing is to be rejected

00:05:08.580 | if it is received with thanksgiving,

00:05:10.740 | for it is made holy by the word of God in prayer."

00:05:15.740 | And with Lewis's help, I wanna try to unpack

00:05:19.020 | how is creation, sex and food, particularly in this text,

00:05:24.020 | made holy by the word of God in prayer?

00:05:28.140 | So yeah, I'm really excited.

00:05:30.540 | If people haven't signed up to come, I hope they will.

00:05:34.860 | - Yes, me too.

00:05:35.820 | And there's still time to register for the conference,

00:05:38.100 | which you can do through the desiringgod.org website

00:05:40.500 | until September 25th.

00:05:42.140 | You can register on-site at the conference

00:05:44.260 | at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

00:05:45.980 | And if you can't make it to Minneapolis this weekend,

00:05:48.420 | the conference will be live-streamed

00:05:49.940 | at desiringgod.org/live.

00:05:53.620 | Of course, all the messages will be archived on the website

00:05:55.720 | for future viewing and listening as well.

00:05:58.100 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:05:59.100 | I hope to see you in Minneapolis.

00:06:00.900 | (upbeat music)

00:06:03.480 | (upbeat music)

00:06:06.060 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

This Week’s Conference on C.S. Lewis

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