Trent and David continue their discussion of C.S. Lewis’s works including parts you may have never heard before like “the argument from desire” for the existence of God and the role of imagination in defending the Faith.
Intro: Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: And hello. Thank you for joining us for a very jolly episode of the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Joining me today is David Bates, host of the podcast Pints with Jack and we’re talking about CS Lewis. In our previous episode we talked about the secret life of CS Lewis, everything about the man you didn’t know. You’ve probably heard about him, but many things you didn’t know. One of the most important evangelists and apologists for the Christian faith of the modern era and it’s a reputation well deserved. We’re going to be talking more about that today, getting into the wisdom of some of his arguments and ways of presenting the faith that I think all of us should model in our various interactions and dialogues. So David, welcome back to the Counsel of Trent.
David Bates: It’s lovely to be back here again.
Trent Horn: Well, I want to, though, pick up on just a few things on Lewis’ biography we did not have time to get to in the previous episode, because they also do weigh in on some of his apologetics and his theology. So, misconceptions people have, they think he’s an Englishman, he was actually born in Ireland, and some people think that he was a bachelor, and he was a bachelor for a while, but he ended up getting married later in his life.
David Bates: Yes.
Trent Horn: Tell us about that.
David Bates: Yes, he spent nearly all of his life as a bachelor, but with his celebrity came many, many fan letters and it was something that he took very seriously. He spent several hours each day replying to them and he had one letter from an American poet and writer by the name of Joy Gresham. And the two quickly developed a firm friendship. She visited England and then eventually moved there with her two sons. Unfortunately the British government was then starting to threaten to kick her out of the country.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: So Lewis offered her a civil marriage. He said, “It’s not going to be a real marriage before God, just a piece of paper so you and the boys can stay in England.”.
Trent Horn: So he committed green card fraud, basically.
David Bates: He did. He did.
Trent Horn: But I mean he’s still, it was a marriage, it’s following the laws of England, you know, so, okay.
David Bates: Exactly. Unfortunately, not too long after this happened, Joy was diagnosed with cancer. If you remember in the previous episode, his mother had also died of cancer.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: And she wasn’t expected to live long. And suddenly faced with the possibility of losing her, Lewis starts to realize the depth of his feelings for his friend.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: And so the two were then actually married by an Anglican priest at her hospital bed.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: And that clergyman, he laid his hands on Joy and prayed for her because he had had some success in healing before. And Joy went into remission for about four years. Some of the happiest years of their lives.
Trent Horn: Wow.
David Bates: But then the cancer did eventually return, and you can read probably the best book to ever give anybody after the death of somebody close to them is A Grief Observed. It’s raw, it’s real. You get to see a real difference between the Lewis who wrote The Problem of Pain,-
Trent Horn: The academic.
David Bates: Yes. And the firsthand, A Grief Observed.
Trent Horn: Which is so interesting because one thing that drove Lewis’ atheism was the death of his mother. And so it seems like that same pain has now come back to hit the stronger Christian Lewis and he doesn’t pull any punches.
David Bates: No.
Trent Horn: It’s almost as if he takes the view “I can’t be an atheist, but I can still be mad at God.”.
David Bates: Absolutely. He follows in the tradition of the Psalms. You don’t deny the existence of God, but you can certainly rail at him.
Trent Horn: And so that’s how he feels after the death of his wife and then his children, I guess they would be his adopted stepchildren?
David Bates: Yeah, his stepsons.
Trent Horn: Okay.
David Bates: Douglas and Davy.
Trent Horn: And then at this point would they still have been young children or older?
David Bates: Yes. They were still pretty young.
Trent Horn: Oh wow.
David Bates: They were still at boarding school. He continued to look after them.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: And Douglas in particularly is somebody who champions Jack’s work-
Trent Horn: Oh, okay.
David Bates: … around the country, and actually ran the globe.
Trent Horn: Oh, okay. But through A Grief Observed, his faith takes a hit and something to understand and meditate upon, but he still retains his faith even until his death in 1963?
David Bates: Absolutely. If you watch the movies, The Shadow Lands, it portrays it bleaker than I think it really was. This wasn’t somebody who was just about to return to being an atheist.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: But he was certainly somebody who was deeply grieving.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And I think that’s acceptable. Sometimes we think in the Christian life that because we’re Christians, our grief can’t be something that endures, but to lose the relationships we have in this life is to experience a real kind of loss and that’s healthy to be able to grieve that.
David Bates: We follow a Lord who wept at Jerusalem, we follow a Lord who wept at the tomb of his friend.
Trent Horn: Lazarus, yes.
David Bates: And Lewis says himself in The Four Loves “to love at all is to be vulnerable.” It’s actually one of my favorite parts of Lewis because he actually takes on Saint Augustine, because Saint Augustine in his confessions speaks about the loss for friend and he draws the moral of the story “don’t love something that you might lose” and he therefore says, “Well, therefore love God because you’ll never lose God.” And Lewis, he loved Augustine, but he said he was going to respectfully push back. He said “That kind of a mindset really appeals to me. I’m a safety first creature.”.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: But he says, “But to love at all is to be vulnerable.”.
Trent Horn: Right. To have a real love we have for anyone, whether it’s a friend or a spouse, we have to be vulnerable. If we never let our guard down with other people, then we’re always putting on a show for them. We’re not engaged. We’re not having these real, fulfilling kind of relationships, and the same with God. If we don’t let ourselves be vulnerable to God, then he’s really just our boss. He’s not really our father or our Lord, he’s just kind of an employer we’re behaving under.
Trent Horn: You also say that his death was overshadowed. He died on November 22nd, 1963.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: A famous day in history anyone might remember, but what happened then?
David Bates: Well, there were two other people who died that day. One was Aldous Huxley and the other one was president John F. Kennedy. That was the day he was assassinated.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: And as a consequence, as you can imagine, that is what filled the news. And so Lewis’ death was a very quiet affair. There were actually only a handful of people at his funeral. His brother Warnie had always struggled with alcoholism, and after Jack died, he just went to the bottom of a bottle of whiskey and never came back up.
Trent Horn: Oh wow.
David Bates: So he wasn’t even there.
Trent Horn: Now what’s interesting is that Peter Kreeft, who I’m willing to give the mantle of the modern CS Lewis, has really kind of inherited the mantle here. He’s written a series of dialogues, and CS Lewis appears in them, Socrates appears in many, but Lewis appears in some of them. One of them is the dialogue between heaven and hell. I think it was written back in late 1981, 82.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: And it’s a dialogue imagining, in heaven, that moment when John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and CS Lewis all arrived there at the same time.
David Bates: Yeah.
Trent Horn: And what their conversation would be like from a Christian, a more liberal Christian, and then someone who’s more an atheistic materialist like Huxley.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: And so I think it portrays it well there.
David Bates: And Peter Kreeft has released a new book with a very similar kind of set up-
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: … Symbol and Substance where it’s a conversation between Billy Graham, JRR Tolkien, and CS Lewis with a very similar kind of idea. I actually heard one person, when they were speaking about Peter Kreeft, they went, “Oh Americans,”… They said of Lewis, “Oh he’s like the English Peter Kreeft.”
Trent Horn: Well that’s always nice to hear. So all right, well Peter Kreeft gets his due then. So it’s always like whenever I hear people say that Ben Shapiro is a Jewish Trent Horn. I always appreciate like, “Oh well that’s always nice to hear,” as opposed to me being the Catholic Ben Shapiro, but you know, I…
David Bates: I think you need to get a cup that rather than “leftist tears,” it needs to say “sinners’ tears” or something like that.
Trent Horn: Right. Let’s talk then about the genius of Lewis’ works. We’ve talked about his life and what’s come from that. Let’s talk about the genius of how he articulates the Christian faith and makes it understandable to people. So one point you bring up here in our, what we’ve been going over to talk about in this dialogue is the idea of a common Christianity. Now, what’s funny is some Catholics and Protestants are critical of Lewis.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: Because he stops at what is called Mere Christianity. It’s like, “Well, that’s not good enough. Why are you stopping there?” But Lewis saw merit in doing that.
David Bates: Absolutely. A lot of people have very odd ideas about this and I always just send them back, “Go and read the preface again.” He explains what this is and why he’s doing it. So in Mere Christianity, he is defending Mere Christianity. He’s not trying to water down the faith, that was one thing that Lewis really couldn’t stand. What he was trying to do was defend the basic Christian beliefs.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: And he said that he was doing this because he didn’t feel that anybody else around him was really doing that. And he said, “Better scholars will be spending their time on the denominational disputes.”
Trent Horn: Yeah, they’re talking about the finer points of disagreement between Catholics and Protestants or Anglicans and other denominations.
David Bates: But he said he wanted to defend Mere Christianity, and he said, “This isn’t a lowest common denominator, watered down kind of Christianity.” He regarded it as a highest common factor that we find across all of the historic Christian denominations. And he said “That was where the line seemed thinnest, so to it I went.”.
Trent Horn: And that honestly, that’s how I feel when I choose the subjects of my own books to write, because you’ll have Catholic authors, there’s all different kinds of subjects Catholic authors approach. Like I’m never going to write a book on Mary-
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: … because there’s a gazillion books on Mary and probably one of the best books was written by my boss, Tim Staples, Behold Your Mother. I don’t need to write in that area because it’s been done.
Trent Horn: I don’t need to write a book on the Deuterocanonical books of scripture, Gary Michuta has a good book on that. But for me, like the reason I wrote Why We’re Catholic is because I racked my brain and thought, “Well wait a minute. There’s a lot of books about Catholic subjects, but where’s that one book just on why you should be Catholic, you can give to anyone.” And I was not aware… The only book I knew that I had given to others that had affected me and my conversion was Rome Sweet Home by Scott Hahn. And that book is helpful, especially for people who are Protestant, but it’s not even as helpful for atheists because Hahn was a Protestant pastor before he became Catholic.
David Bates: Yeah.
Trent Horn: So to have something, and I think this might be something Lewis was dealing with, like, “Okay, you’ve got great books for Protestants to become Catholic or Catholics to become Protestants” or these different… caring about God more and living out your faith. But what about just the average man in the RAF, the British Royal Air Force, who thinks that’s all a bunch of hooey, what do we have to reach him? And so he stepped forward to fill that void.
David Bates: Exactly. And for the longest time, my standard books that I would give people would be Mere Christianity to get them that far, and then something like Rome Sweet Home or Crossing the Tiber or something like that to finish them off. So I was very happy when your book came out because now I only have to give people one.
Trent Horn: Instead of having to… And that’s what I used to do. I cobbled together multiple books, like “Read this book, then this book, and this book.” It’s always easy, “Here’s just one.” So let’s talk… I’d like to… Well, did you do have a thought on that?
David Bates: I was just going to say against these charges that he was just watering down the faith. I’d actually say that he was saying something that you hear very clearly out of the Catholic church and particularly JPIIs in cyclical ut Unum sint.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: Where he quotes John the 23rd where he says that what unites us is much greater than what divides us.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: Those other discussions are very, very important, but we do need to sit back for a moment to recognize the fact that we all worship the same God. We believe that Jesus walked out of his tomb.
Trent Horn: Right. And I think this is important because some people have this idea that, well, if you want get someone convert, you should just get them to be Catholic. And I really feel like that’s true, I want them to become Catholic. But I really feel like, especially dealing with an atheist or a nonreligious person, there really is a chain of becoming Christian first and then seeing which denomination is correct.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: I think most people go to Mere Christianity first. I know I did in my conversion experience. And then I look to see what church made the most sense of just this basic Christian belief in God and the divinity of Christ. But let’s talk about that basic belief in God, because I want to talk about some of their arguments Lewis puts forward people may not be as familiar with. I had a friend request from the other day a resource for a relative of hers on the subject of knowing that heaven is real, but not one that’s religious one that’s more philosophical.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: And I said, “Well, it’s kind of hard to prove heaven just from philosophy,” but then I thought “I’ll give you one argument. The argument from Desire-“.
David Bates: Yeah.
Trent Horn: “… by CS Lewis, and that might be helpful if you want more than just a biblical defense of heaven, but a philosophical one.” Tell us about Lewis’ argument from Desire.
David Bates: Honestly, this is my favorite argument for the existence of God. It’s not the most rigorous of philosophical defenses that you will ever find and it certainly isn’t in Mere Christianity where Lewis doesn’t present it as a syllogism and qualify all of his terms.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: But he communicates something that I always feel just resonates very deeply within me. And he starts off by saying, “The world around us disappoints us. It’s just inevitably going to let us down.” And he also says, “Well, how are we going to respond to this?” And he says that there are three main ways. The first is the hedonist way. If your car disappoints you, if your job disappointments you, if your wife disappoints you, just get new versions of all of them. If you don’t have enough money, go get more.
Trent Horn: Just get what makes you feel good.
David Bates: Exactly.
Trent Horn: Find whatever will make you feel good.
David Bates: And the belief that there is something out there that is going to plug that gap in your heart. The other way he says is you can just be a stoic and just accept the fact that life is going to let you down. But he says that the Christian draws a different lesson from this experience. He says that creatures aren’t born with a desire unless a satisfaction for that desire exists.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: He says a baby feels hunger, well, there’s such thing as food. A duckling wants to swim, well there’s such thing as water. Men feel sexual desire, well, there’s such a thing as sex. And here’s the line that just resonates with my soul. He says, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”.
Trent Horn: Hmm. Because we have this desire for God or perfect happiness, it cannot be satisfied in this life. Our desires are not in vain, they do have a corresponding object. Therefore this desire must be satisfied in the next life, heaven or eternal life with God.
David Bates: Yeah. And Peter Kreeft, he tidies up Lewis’ argument and offers some slightly more rigorous philosophical categories to show that this desire is real and it has an object.
Trent Horn: You know what’s funny is I’m sympathetic to this argument. I agree. Like if I was in a debate, I wouldn’t put this argument out there, because to me it’s more of a non rational argument, not an irrational one. But I also call it intuitive or you either see it or you don’t.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: For example in Why We’re Catholic I offer a similar intuitive argument about Jesus that the very name of Jesus causes a discomfort in people that other names do not and I believe that’s evidenced the unique power and identity of the person of Jesus. Now that’s been criticized by other people who I think take my argument too literally. It’s not like I’m saying this is the best evidence for Jesus.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: But just that for some people will see that and say, “Oh. Yeah.” And other people won’t. If you don’t see it, that’s fine. And I think it’s the same with the argument for desire.
David Bates: My other favorite one is “There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, therefore there is a God.”.
Trent Horn: Yes, that’s Kreeft’s, I think it is 20 Arguments for God. I think that’s number 18.
David Bates: And he says, “You either get this one or you don’t.”.
Trent Horn: Right. And I think that’s the case and it’s okay to present that. Now I’ve thought about the argument for desire and I’ve always put on my philosopher’s hat and I always try to debunk my own arguments I use. What was hard for me is I can think of a few desires that I don’t believe have a natural corresponding object, but perhaps they don’t. My silver bull I used to go to, before talking to you right in this very moment, was most people have a natural corresponding desire to change the past, to not have made certain mistakes. It’s universal, but it’s impossible. It can’t be done even for God. But perhaps that just means, not that we have a desire to change the past, but we have a desire to live a perfect moral and upright life.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: And that’s really more the desire that we have and that is one that will be satisfied in the next life. Because there’s other desires, I have a desire to fly. No, not really. There are desires that are passing, but most, you’re right, most desires we have… Now, of course, someone could be hungry and there’s no food, but there is such a thing as food.
David Bates: Exactly.
Trent Horn: That’s the point.
David Bates: It doesn’t have to necessarily be filled for everybody, always.
Trent Horn: But the kind of thing must exist for the desire to make sense.
David Bates: Exactly. I think it also helps to go to the transcendentals, to look at truth, goodness and beauty.
David Bates: These are things that we want without limit.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: You know, we’re never satisfied with just one new fact, we want another. We’re not just satisfied with a little bit of beauty, we want more beauty. And even the most beautiful things, there still comes a point when you reach [inaudible 00:16:47], say, “Well, is that it? I want more.”
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: More, more.
Trent Horn: Every toddler does a little sign language “more, more.”.
David Bates: I thought you’d go with Oliver, “Please, sir…”.
Trent Horn: Please, sir, can I have some more? You want more? Then there’s that Family Guy where Stewie’s there and he pulls out a gun and says, “All right, drop the girl. Put her in the bag, please.” Let’s move onto another typical Lewisian trait, that’s his use of analogies.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: And I myself in doing my apologetic work, I try very hard to use analogies, because I think that’s how most people understand things. If you just explain it, it just goes over people’s heads. The key, I believe, to being a good teacher is to make a good analogy so someone can see, “Oh, X is weird, I don’t get X.” Well X is like Y. “Oh I get Y. Oh, now I get X.” That’s the idea. And Lewis does that very well.
David Bates: And it creates that indelible memory around which you can then reason. That’s one of the wonderful things about parables. When you remember the story, you can now start thinking through some important moral and philosophical ideas because you have the story on which to hang it.
Trent Horn: Right. Because you might say “You should forgive other people because God forgave you.” I’m like, “Oh, you know, okay.” “There was a story once about a King of forgave a servant’s debt and the servant was a crummy person and didn’t forgive the other guy’s debt.” Oh, wow, what happens in the… So analogies also can kind of have a little bit of a story element to them, and you know Lewis is the artful storyteller.
David Bates: Absolutely. And he does it all the time, particularly in Mere Christianity, because, as you say, it puts an image in your mind and it’s something that you remember. And it also touches you in more than just simply your intellect.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: Lewis called the imagination as the organ of meaning, and reason being the organ of truth.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: And you really have to have both. And he just does it throughout Mere Christianity, but one of my favorites is when he’s talking about morality.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: He talks about the different parts of morality, but he does it by asking his readers to imagine a flotilla of boats.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: Number of boats going across the the Atlantic Ocean. Again, given World War II, this was something that was regularly happening.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: And he said “For this flotilla to successfully arrive at their destination, three things have to be true.” One is that they have to stay in formation, they can’t just be crashing into one another, otherwise they’re not going to make the destination.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: They also have to be working well internally, because if all of the gears and everything are jammed and they need to divert, they’re not going to be able to, and then they’ll start bashing into one another. And lastly is this, like a teleological idea, they need to be going in the right direction, they need to be going to the right port. And then he then draws that back into the realm of morality, because people are very quick to say, “Oh, we should treat other people well.”.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: There’s very little argument there. But as soon as you get to the idea that there is an internal morality, people start getting a little bit more antsy about that. But with Lewis’ example, you can see why it’s so important. Because if my internal gears aren’t working, if I’m not in control of my machine, inevitably I’m going to start bumping into other people. This is why the catechism talks about chastity, in particular abstinence and fasting. It’s so that we can control our body rather than our body controlling us.
Trent Horn: Right. So I say, “Oh, well just treat other people kindly.” Right, but if I don’t treat myself kindly, and if I dwell on angry or hurtful thoughts, if the machinery inside’s not working, I’m going to crash into somebody else, just like… And the flotilla reminds us that the ship has to work on the inside, the ships can’t crash into each other, and all the ships have to reach the right destination together.
David Bates: Exactly.
Trent Horn: That’s all of us in the moral life. We have to be able to regulate our internal moral processes, treat each other well, and we all should be ordered towards kind of the same end. I agree the analogies. I remember reading Mere Christianity, gosh, probably nearly 20 years ago, and it still sticks out to me, the moral law, the analogy he used, he talks about the man sitting on the bus and he’s like, “Well, it’s my seat.” Not like “Give it to me,” like it’s a rule, it’s my seat, you took my seat, like there’s this rule, you broke. Not just give it to me, I want it. Or it’s my orange, I gave you a bite, you ought to give me some too.
Trent Horn: They’re very simple examples, but they still stick with you after a while. And that’s what we have to do in our presentation of the faith is to come up with these simple examples for things to get people to understand the more complex things.
David Bates: As well as think about them afterwards.
Trent Horn: Right. And so that they stick, because for me there’s a book, I’m going to have to look it up here now. I think it’s called Make It Stick. What was the, yeah, here it is. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown. And so he talks about that, the idea that great ideas aren’t just the idea itself, but that you’ve incorporated mechanisms into it that people, they won’t forget them. Let’s talk about a few other areas where, especially areas that people don’t know as well, because obviously Lewis is well known for the trilemma, Lord, liar, and lunatic.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: And to me, I think some people are unfair with Lewis on this.
David Bates: I completely agree.
Trent Horn: Because they think “Well, CS Lewis, Jesus might’ve been a legend. You never think about that? How do you know?” Maybe he wasn’t a liar or a lunatic, he’s just a legend. But obviously Lewis knew what legend was. He wasn’t ignorant of this. He was making a different kind of argument when he comes to the identity of Christ and using that trilemma.
David Bates: Yes, and he even sets up what he’s assuming. It’s somebody that is reading the New Testament and giving us, “Okay, these are Jesus’s words.”.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: Therefore, who is he? And it’s he’s attacking the person who says, “Oh, well, he’s just a a wise preacher.”.
Trent Horn: Yeah. He’s talking about just the general British guy who hears the sermons, hears the homilies. “Oh, he’s just a nice man.” And just assumes that from the Bible and he’s basically just correcting people’s misreading of the Bible.
David Bates: Exactly. It’s sort of like when some atheists complain about the Kalam cosmological argument and say “But it doesn’t even mention God.” It’s like, it’s not trying, it’s setting something up for a further argument.
Trent Horn: Right. Lewis is knocking out that Jesus is not a lunatic or liar, he’s Lord. And then if you disagree with that, we’ll go back to the reliability of the Bible, whether it’s a myth, other things like that.
David Bates: And somebody steeped in literary criticism, like Lewis, would have been fine going to that.
Trent Horn: Yeah.
David Bates: Actually even before he converted, I think even to theism, one of his colleagues who he described as the most hard-boiled atheist he knew, he commented on the New Testament about its integrity and historicity and he said “It’s quite incredible that dying and rising God almost looks like it happened once.”
Trent Horn: Almost. So you can’t quite bring yourself there, but even others who understand literature and myth can see this is not a simple fabricated story. Let’s talk a little bit about Lewis’ defense of Christianity and the idea of the purpose of Christianity. Because at first this may seem intuitively obvious. We say, “Well what do you mean the the purpose of Christianity?” Like what’s it for? He has some profound insights here.
David Bates: And this was the biggest thing I took away from reading Mere Christianity week by week over the course of the podcast, because you couldn’t rush through. And it’s a really interesting question just to ask Christians that you know, “What is the purpose of Christianity?” Because they can come up with lots and lots of different purposes.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: To gather together on Sunday, to be good people, to serve the poor. And Lewis just kind of cuts all the way through that, and he says that the purpose of Christianity is to become another Christ, to put on Christ. And he even says that Christianity offers nothing else, but this is the purpose of everything that gathering together. Even the greatest and most holiest of things, it is still for that end.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: And in Eastern Christianity, I go to a Byzantine Catholic church, we call this theosis, the idea of transformation.
Trent Horn: We go to a Byzantine Catholic church.
David Bates: I didn’t…
Trent Horn: You’ve been there longer. I’ll give you that much.
David Bates: I didn’t want to call you out.
Trent Horn: No, I have come out. I have come out of the doors, not the closet, but the sanctuary with the doors to say that, yeah, we haven’t switched rights or anything but we do frequently attend a Byzantine Catholic church. Same one that you attend at which the concept of theosis we really boil down here.
David Bates: Exactly. It’s to participate in the divine life. Lewis says that we receive our natural life, he calls it bios, our natural life and our parents, but what we really need is zoe, a supernatural life from God and he says that we receive that principally through faith, through baptism and Holy communion, says these aren’t the only ways, but these are the principle ways through which we received this life. And this has meant to transform us. And he comes to another one of his wonderful analogies. He compares it to tin soldiers coming to life.
Trent Horn: I remember tin soldiers. Yes, in Mere Christianity, when I was reading through, that really struck me. The very, I was in the civic center library, and it’s always funny when you read something profound and like a song it like takes you back to that very moment. This happens to me a lot with audio books.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: When you hear-
David Bates: I remember which junction I was at in my car.
Trent Horn: Where you were driving your car, where you were riding your bike. And I remember, because the civic center library and Scottsdale has this large atrium area that you can just sit in. And I remember reading just being struck by the tin soldiers, which Lewis proceeds with the analogy in this way.
David Bates: And in the same way that the trilemma makes an appearance in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, this idea also makes an appearance in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When Aslan goes to the witch’s house and breathes on the stone statues and they come back to life, echoing both Pentecost and the harrowing of Hades.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, then for our listeners, obviously who aren’t as familiar, how does then does he take the tin soldier to apply to our spiritual lives? Like that’s what God does to us.
David Bates: That’s what God does to us, the indwelling of his spirit. This all comes out of Peter’s epistle where he talks about that we have become partakers of the divine nature.
Trent Horn: Now, what’s interesting here is that this is one of those things that a Catholic reader reading through this, will just see Catholicism screaming through.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: But it’s not that off-putting to Protestants because many Protestant writers will talk more about that the purpose of Christianity is just to have our sins forgiven and then to be right with God.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: And they’ll talk about sanctification, of course we’re sanctified, we grow in holiness, but not necessarily as it’s an after effect, not the primary purpose, but Lewis wouldn’t necessarily the the division there.
David Bates: No, and I think the more you’re exposed to Lewis’ thought, the more you see this everywhere. He preached this wonderful sermon called The Weight of Glory and he effectively made the point that we forget who we deal with day to day. The person who rings up our groceries at the grocery store, the people that we work with and that we walk past, he says every single one of those is going to live forever. He says, you’ve never known any mortals. We are all going to live forever and we’re going to live in one of two ways. We’re either going to be a heavenly creature or we’re going to be a hellish creature.
Trent Horn: Hmm.
David Bates: And so again, he brings these images which do you want to be?
Trent Horn: Which do you want to be? A question that we all need to answer and help other people answer as well. What are some resources that you would recommend for others who would like to learn more about CS Lewis? Let’s say someone’s listening to us that’s “Aw, CS Lewis is great.” They see the corpus, like there’s so many books he’s written and books people have written about him.
David Bates: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn: So where do you recommend people go first? Like which CS Lewis books to read or resources and then resources about CS Lewis do you think would be helpful?
David Bates: Well obviously they need to go to PintsWithJack.com and follow us.
Trent Horn: Obviously.
David Bates: Listen, watch our videos, listen to our podcasts, because we’re going to be breaking this stuff down. We are not experts, we’re just amateurs who just love Lewis and want more people to read him. So get stuck into some of his books.
Trent Horn: See British people can make anything sound great. If I say I’m an amateur, people are like, “Oh, you know who’s going to listen to Trent?” “Don’t worry about us. I’m an amateur.” Like, aw, that’s wonderful. You make anything sound great. But although, when I travel other countries, my American accent is actually prized. I was in, oh gosh, I think I was in in Germany, but I met some women from England, or it was from the British Isles I think. And they said, “Oh, say that again. I love how you say that.” I’m like, and I was saying, “You mean a tomato?” Like “Oh, love, he says tomato.”.
David Bates: Tomato.
Trent Horn: It’s a tomato, it’s a tomato Bates. So PintsWithJack.Com.
David Bates: And then get stuck into his books. You’ve got a choice of genres as to what you think you might prefer. If you like apologetics, go read Mere Christianity. If you like stories, go read the Chronicles of Narnia. They are wonderful. Lewis said that a children’s book that isn’t worth reading as an adult wasn’t worth reading as a child. And the Chronicles of Narnia are gold and they’ve actually just been picked up by Netflix, so they’re going to be remaking all of them again soon.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: I would also recommend, two of my other favorite books are The Screwtape Letters, which is an another one of these imaginative supposals. It takes the form of a series of letters written by a senior devil to a junior devil, his nephew, and he’s giving him instruction on how to tempt his patient, his Christian, to get him to turn his soul towards hell.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: And it’s wonderfully creative and a wonderful work of human psychology as well. To realize that the ways in which we start thinking and get steered away from the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Trent Horn: Right.
David Bates: And one of the real lessons in that book is Screwtape, he doesn’t really care what the patient chooses, just how are we going to twist it to send him to hell.
Trent Horn: To even take something good and make it bad.
David Bates: Exactly. It’s a very Augustinian idea that evil isn’t a privation, I’m sorry, evil is a privation. It’s not the thing in itself, it’s too much or at the wrong time or in the wrong way.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: And that’s the lesson that you really get from The Screwtape Letters. And then my personal favorite is The Great Divorce.
Trent Horn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates: Which is another one of these imaginative supposals. Lewis asked, “What would it be like if souls from hell could go and visit heaven? Would they even want to stay?” And it takes a case study approach. So pretty much in each chapter you meet a new ghost, a soul from hell who is visiting heaven, and you get to see why they turn back, what souvenir of hell are they unwilling to let go of in order to enter into heaven and joy.
Trent Horn: Hmm. Yeah, I remember that one actually. I was driving with some friends during my pro-life missionary work. That was back in probably 2010 and we used to drive across the country to our different campuses to set up exhibits. We were driving through, I think Arkansas heading our way to Georgia, the University of Georgia, and we played it as an audio book. And actually many of Lewis’s works are available as audio book. I think that’s one of the best ways, honestly, not just to read Lewis, listen to a highly produced audio book.
David Bates: Yeah.
Trent Horn: I think that’s probably the way he would want them to be heard. I don’t know what you think.
David Bates: Oh no, I agree. And there’s a, it’s a theater group that has gone around the country producing The Most Reluctant Convert, which is a theater production of Surprised By Joy. They’ve done The Great Divorce, they’ve done The Screwtape Letters. It really definitely lends itself to that medium, because again, we’re getting back to this idea of imagination being the organ of meaning.
Trent Horn: And I have been meaning to remind people to go and check out your podcast, which is…
David Bates: Pints with Jack.
Trent Horn: So check out PintsWithJack.com and thank you all for supporting TrentHornPodcast.com so we can have a lot more interviews like this to help build you up, to share the faith in homage to someone great like CS Lewis, to go out there and present our faith with imaginative wonder to help people encounter the real Jesus. So David, thanks so much for being with us for these two episodes.
David Bates: I’ve very much enjoyed it.
Trent Horn: And thank you all for being with us and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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