In the last episode, in episode 82, we talked about your early impressions of C.S. Lewis, beginning for you when you read "Mere Christianity" in 1964, and in light of the upcoming National Conference here in the Twin Cities, what have been Lewis's most enduring marks on you and your ministry?

Anytime I'm asked the question of influence, I always have to plead I could be wrong, because I think we're influenced in ways and by people we don't even understand completely. So here's my best effort to describe some of the marks that are still on me that come from C.S.

Lewis. Number one, Lewis exposed my adolescent chronological snobbery. He's known for that. Chronological snobbery says things are better because they're new and they're worse because they're old. And Lewis comes along and says nothing is better for being new and nothing is worse for being old. It's like saying an idea you had on Thursday is better than the idea you had on Tuesday.

I think that's the way Chesterton put it. And centuries don't make truth go away. And then he supplemented that, after curing me of this pride, he said the old has in fact a very special value, because when you read an old book, it doesn't have the same blind spots and prejudices that your new books do, and therefore it has the unique potential of freeing you from things in your culture and in your life that you don't even know you are captivated by, which I think is the roots of why I love the Puritans, why I love Edwards, why when I go out to pasture as a hungry sheep on Monday after pouring myself out from my flock, I go back a few centuries, almost always, because there's just something about the air they breathe, those older Bible-saturated saints that contemporary writers by and large don't have.

So he just blew away my immature, silly objections to what is old and exposed the superficiality of always trying to be current. I mean, isn't it amazing, Tony, that so many of us, if I hear Tony Ranke just read so-and-so, I kind of feel, "Oh shoot, I haven't read that yet," and I don't want to give the impression that I'm unread, and isn't that awful?

I mean, it's just vanity through and through to have feelings like that, and he's been so helpful. That's number one. Number two is quiddity, the sheer amazing wonder that things exist. Not that Jimmy Durante had a huge, knobbly, humped nose, and Richard Nixon had a ski slope nose, but that everyone you meet on the street has a nose.

He just looked at the world, he said, "Isn't that amazing? Look, they have noses, and the holes in the noses are at the bottom and not the top, so the rain won't go in, and they're not on the front like a pig, so the wind won't blow on them and make funny sounds like a whistle." He saw frogs and bees and whales and stars and planets and clouds and roses and azaleas and peaches and pecans, red and blue and yellow, the feel of sandpaper and glass, the smell of bacon, New Moon grass.

Every time I walk over to church, round about April, I hear the first robin sing. I think I hear the first robin sing because of C.S. Lewis, because a lot of people don't ever hear the first robin sing. He saw, and then he said what he saw in the most amazingly concrete ways, and he just simply looked at the two great books of God, the Bible and the world, and he taught me the sheer wonder of the thisness, that's what quiddity means, the thisness of things.

So that's number two. Number three is the coming together of logic and romance, precise thinking and powerful feeling. I fell in love with reasoning in the 10th grade in a geometry class, and the next year in the 11th grade I fell in love with literature, reading, poetry, and two years later I met C.S.

Lewis, and he put those two together as I never thought they could be. Somebody who was as razor-sharp in his thinking and reasoning as anybody ever heard, and somebody who was as explosively, vividly, powerfully, imaginative as anybody I've ever heard. And those two things have marked my ministry probably as much as anything.

The juxtaposition of logic and imagination, or romance, or feeling, or poetry, and Lewis is the one who wakened that sense of they're together, they're not separate. Maybe one more thing. In my preaching over the years I've tried to follow this, but Lewis taught me the power of concreteness and the weakness of abstraction in the way we communicate.

For example, don't say, "It's like a tree." Say, rather, "It's like an oak tree." No, no, no. Say, rather, "It's like the oak tree on the green hill in front of the house where I grew up." No, no, no. Don't say that. Say, "It's like the oak tree on the green hill in front of the house where I grew up that had a perpendicular branch about 18 inches thick, so strong a wooden swing hung from it for two people to swing on on a warm summer evening just beside the trunk where Noelle and I carved our initials in the summer of 1968." Say that.

You see the difference? Abstractions are boring summaries and generalities, and so much of what we think and do today, it teaches students to think in generalities, think in abstractions. And Lewis said, "You will be a powerless communicator if you don't get specific, particular, touchable, seeable, smellable." So the impact of Lewis, not just on the way I see the past or the way I think about logic and feeling, but just the way I think about communication has has been huge to this day.

Thank you, Pastor John. We will be studying the enduring influence of C.S. Lewis later this fall on September 27, 28, and 29 here in Minneapolis at the Desiring God National Conference. The conference is titled "The Romantic Rationalist--God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis." More details and registration will be available soon at DesiringGod.org on the blog and under the Events tab.

I'm your host Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening.