How Has C. S. Lewis Influenced You?
00:00:00.000 | In the last episode, in episode 82, we talked about your early impressions of
00:00:09.020 | C.S. Lewis, beginning for you when you read "Mere Christianity" in 1964, and in
00:00:14.300 | light of the upcoming National Conference here in the Twin Cities, what
00:00:16.860 | have been Lewis's most enduring marks on you and your ministry?
00:00:20.500 | Anytime I'm asked the question of influence, I always have to plead I could
00:00:24.740 | be wrong, because I think we're influenced in ways and by people we
00:00:30.620 | don't even understand completely. So here's my best effort to describe some
00:00:34.820 | of the marks that are still on me that come from C.S. Lewis. Number one, Lewis
00:00:42.140 | exposed my adolescent chronological snobbery. He's known for that.
00:00:50.820 | Chronological snobbery says things are better because they're new and they're
00:00:55.500 | worse because they're old. And Lewis comes along and says nothing is better
00:00:59.700 | for being new and nothing is worse for being old. It's like saying an idea you
00:01:07.820 | had on Thursday is better than the idea you had on Tuesday. I think that's the way
00:01:11.980 | Chesterton put it. And centuries don't make truth go away. And then he
00:01:19.420 | supplemented that, after curing me of this pride, he said the old has in fact a
00:01:28.980 | very special value, because when you read an old book, it doesn't have the same
00:01:36.140 | blind spots and prejudices that your new books do, and therefore it has the unique
00:01:41.260 | potential of freeing you from things in your culture and in your life that you
00:01:47.380 | don't even know you are captivated by, which I think is the roots of why I love
00:01:53.020 | the Puritans, why I love Edwards, why when I go out to pasture as a hungry sheep on
00:01:59.140 | Monday after pouring myself out from my flock, I go back a few centuries, almost
00:02:05.740 | always, because there's just something about the air they breathe, those older
00:02:12.500 | Bible-saturated saints that contemporary writers by and large don't have.
00:02:18.580 | So he just blew away my immature, silly objections to what is old and exposed
00:02:27.980 | the superficiality of always trying to be current. I mean, isn't it amazing, Tony,
00:02:32.540 | that so many of us, if I hear Tony Ranke just read so-and-so, I
00:02:37.660 | kind of feel, "Oh shoot, I haven't read that yet," and I don't want to give the
00:02:41.740 | impression that I'm unread, and isn't that awful? I mean, it's just vanity through and
00:02:46.340 | through to have feelings like that, and he's been so helpful. That's number
00:02:50.780 | one. Number two is quiddity, the sheer amazing wonder that things exist. Not
00:03:02.100 | that Jimmy Durante had a huge, knobbly, humped nose, and Richard Nixon had a ski
00:03:08.100 | slope nose, but that everyone you meet on the street has a nose. He just looked at
00:03:16.060 | the world, he said, "Isn't that amazing? Look, they have noses, and the holes in
00:03:21.220 | the noses are at the bottom and not the top, so the rain won't go in, and they're
00:03:25.780 | not on the front like a pig, so the wind won't blow on them and make funny sounds like
00:03:29.780 | a whistle." He saw frogs and bees and whales and stars and planets and clouds
00:03:37.300 | and roses and azaleas and peaches and pecans, red and blue and yellow, the feel
00:03:45.580 | of sandpaper and glass, the smell of bacon,
00:03:49.300 | New Moon grass. Every time I walk over to church, round about April, I hear the
00:03:55.860 | first robin sing. I think I hear the first robin sing because of C.S. Lewis,
00:04:01.300 | because a lot of people don't ever hear the first robin sing. He saw, and then
00:04:07.980 | he said what he saw in the most amazingly concrete ways, and he just
00:04:15.060 | simply looked at the two great books of God, the Bible and the world, and he
00:04:23.380 | taught me the sheer wonder of the thisness, that's what quiddity means, the
00:04:30.220 | thisness of things. So that's number two. Number three is the coming
00:04:36.580 | together of logic and romance, precise thinking and powerful feeling. I fell
00:04:46.380 | in love with reasoning in the 10th grade in a geometry class, and the next year in
00:04:53.900 | the 11th grade I fell in love with literature, reading, poetry, and two years
00:05:00.460 | later I met C.S. Lewis, and he put those two together as I never thought they
00:05:08.340 | could be. Somebody who was as razor-sharp in his thinking and reasoning as
00:05:13.500 | anybody ever heard, and somebody who was as explosively, vividly, powerfully,
00:05:21.340 | imaginative as anybody I've ever heard. And those two things have marked my
00:05:27.520 | ministry probably as much as anything. The juxtaposition of logic and
00:05:35.260 | imagination, or romance, or feeling, or poetry, and Lewis is the one who
00:05:40.980 | wakened that sense of they're together, they're not separate.
00:05:45.980 | Maybe one more thing. In my preaching over the years I've tried to follow
00:05:51.300 | this, but Lewis taught me the power of concreteness and the weakness of
00:06:00.380 | abstraction in the way we communicate. For example, don't say, "It's like a tree."
00:06:09.660 | Say, rather, "It's like an oak tree." No, no, no. Say, rather, "It's like the oak tree on
00:06:19.300 | the green hill in front of the house where I grew up." No, no, no. Don't say that.
00:06:25.980 | Say, "It's like the oak tree on the green hill in front of the house where I grew
00:06:32.900 | up that had a perpendicular branch about 18 inches thick, so strong a wooden swing
00:06:39.060 | hung from it for two people to swing on on a warm summer evening just beside the
00:06:43.940 | trunk where Noelle and I carved our initials in the summer of 1968." Say that.
00:06:49.100 | You see the difference? Abstractions are boring summaries and generalities, and so
00:06:57.860 | much of what we think and do today, it teaches students to think in
00:07:02.180 | generalities, think in abstractions. And Lewis said, "You will be a powerless
00:07:06.820 | communicator if you don't get specific, particular, touchable, seeable, smellable."
00:07:12.500 | So the impact of Lewis, not just on the way I see the past or the way I
00:07:19.180 | think about logic and feeling, but just the way I think about communication has
00:07:24.900 | has been huge to this day. Thank you, Pastor John. We will be studying the
00:07:29.700 | enduring influence of C.S. Lewis later this fall on September 27, 28, and 29 here
00:07:34.260 | in Minneapolis at the Desiring God National Conference. The conference is
00:07:37.700 | titled "The Romantic Rationalist--God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C.S.
00:07:42.540 | Lewis." More details and registration will be available soon at DesiringGod.org
00:07:45.860 | on the blog and under the Events tab. I'm your host Tony Ranke. Thanks for
00:07:50.380 | listening.
00:07:52.780 | [BLANK_AUDIO]