John Lennox on Attending C.S. Lewis' Final Lectures

Listen to the full interview here!

Would you have enjoyed a live lecture by C.S. Lewis? Our guest this week experienced just such a lecture and went on to become a professor himself at Oxford University. Meet Dr. John Lennox, an extraordinary scholar and defender of the faith on this week’s edition of The Public Square®. Please don’t miss this exclusive interview and please tell a friend.

[jacquedegatineau]

as i understand it, no video / film footage of C.S. Lewis is known and only a small bit of audio recording. what a shame. so glad to hear people who saw him in person share their stories.

[kathleengillespie]

I started reading C S. Lewis as a girl of 14, trying to make sense of my big brothers' drug addiction, suffering, and good v. evil. Now at 66, as I teach middleschool kiddos, I find John Lennox! What a delight. What a lacuna! Gods ways are not ours. I KNOW I can trust God the father of Jesus with suffering and pray for grace, mercy, and whatever good I can do for children through Him.

[NVRAMboi]

I feel a bit ashamed and cheated that I've only recently "discovered" Dr. Lennox. He's a remarkable mixture of brilliance, faith and hope for all of us.

[martm]

Lovely. Could have listened to more of that.

[BrianJuntunen]

It takes more than intellect to love God, in fact the apologists are much needed but holy men are much more needed.

[vincentho]

How I wished we have video recordings of CS Lewis' lectures like the videos we have of Lennox and others. 😢

[jonathanbrewer]

I'm putting together a paper on his Narnia books and the children's stories of Edith Nesbit. Extensive, striking, and significant correlation.

[samlancaster]

Thank you for always speaking The Truth John.
Amen

[ReformedTradesman]

What a cool tune to go along with this. Above all, Praise God for these men.

[dolorespurdue]

paulcooper534, I understand your unique message. Greetings from Galway.😊

[paulcooper]

I so look forward to meeting both of the men/brothers in heaven one fine day. That is after I sit at the feet of Jesus for a great long time, ( I know, time will not exist there).

Charles Spurgeon: This is a loose paraphrase. Lord help me to not be so hungry for the fruit of the tree of knowledge that I miss the fruit of the Tree of Life...that is Jesus.

John14:6

[mis-tur-tay-bur]

I love you John Lennox. You have always been a powerful force for Christianity. However, I need to question the reverence a few very good Christian apologists I listen to have for Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien because of their powerful, hidden "Christian" messages.

My spiritual crap detector has always been set off by such claims.

When Christ created allegories to explain God's message, or His kingdom, these stories at least had verisimilitude - that is, they resembled real life, and the moral of the story was absolutely applicable to the men and women listening. When he told the story of the good Samaritan, for example, he didn't need to say, "Once upon a time there was a Fnarp from the planet Zod".

Compare this to the stories of Tolkien and Lewis: Lions and witches, Hobbits and Golems. Basically these writers have begun with a certain moral premise, or outcome, and created a series of fantastical episodes and that lead to that outcome - at least for the anthropomorphic beasts that populate their fiction.

Once we finish reading about magicians and spells and rings and mystical castles and quests for the source of good, we're supposed to have some epiphany: "Ah, this was a Christian message! That's it! I'm converting to Christianity!" Yet there are Tolkien and Lewis geeks out there who are members of their university Tolkien or Lewis Societies, wear all the costumes, recite entire chapters by rote, and have no intention of replacing their idols with God. In fact, they simply don't know God. So much for those powerful hidden messages in these books! It might as well be Monty Python.

The same claim of "powerful Christian allegory" can be, and has been, made for The Shack, in which God is an old black woman, or even Star Wars. I was once told by some Christian that, despite all the blasphemous ridicule of God in The Simpsons, it was all worth watching because one episode portrayed the nerdy, embarrassing "Christian" Ned Flanders in a good light, and therefore it was worth wading through all the rest and tolerating its message.

Those Christians who accept anything on face value just because it's labelled "Christian" need to wake up. Both Lewis and Tolkien wrote many wise words in favour of their beliefs, and we might say they were very clever because they covered those beliefs with a Christian cloak. But what were those beliefs really? I myself have read Lewis's stuff that comes across as Christian apologetics. It turned out my suspicions were correct: he believed in a mysticism that is anything but Christian, and was a member of the same society as Tolkien - a society that counted the evil Alister Crowley as member and founder. That's how they became friends in the first place.

People actually think they're spiritually evolved because they "understand" the message of this literature, but intellectual apprehension of the meaning shouldn't be mistaken for spiritual insight. If people had spiritual insight, something would be stirred in them to make them question the origins and intentions of the literature they read, the shows they watch, the preachers they listen to, the doctrines they hold, and the traditions they follow because millions (billions!) of others do, or because it's part of their culture.

We need to listen to Christ's warnings about being watchful, about deception, about our vulnerability once we stray outside Scripture. He told us that many would preach a false Christ. He told us that they would be very deceptive. He told us to beware of counterfeits.

Satan is much cleverer than you and me, and that's why God wants us to cling to Him and His Word with faith that He, and He alone, can show us the Truth, through Christ.

This is no criticism of John Lennox. If I was an atheist, I'd be more likely to convert to Christianity after listening to Lennox speak than I would after reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or the Chronicles of Narnia.

[denvan]

Obviously, CS Lewis’ lecturing style precluded a question and answer period.

[jeffreyluciana]

Dr. John Lennox is an amazing Christian genius. He should win a Nobel

[tedgrant]

Richard Dawkins makes a lot of money from C R Darwin.
John Lennox makes a lot of money from C S Lewis.
J H Christ made the Romans a bit upset.

[pubguc]

There's peoples not hunderastating related general scientific energy power technology digital ecosystem research of general scientific

[AtamMardes]

♦"Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool."
♦"Only fools believe & revere the supernatural myths just bc a book claims itself to be the holy truth."
♦"The delusional religious fools are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt."
♦"The religious believe by the millions what only lunatics could believe on their own."
♦"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."
♦"It's difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."

[BeachsideHank]

Believing, in a religious sense, is about not taking responsibility.

[nikokapanen]

I wonder was L.S Lewis saved or not. As i understood he was a smoker, that does not look good, so he might have been an intellectual christian but never a true believer.

[MattSingh]

*It's always great to watch Christopher Hitchens cut-down the babbling nonsense of Lewis. Same goes for Lennox's dreadful, incompetent arguments for Christianity.*