Peter Kreeft Essays on Apologetics Part 2

Interview on C.S. Lewis with Peter Kreeft

Source: Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission, October 2003A Conversation with Peter Kreeft by Jedd MedifindPeter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis scholar, spoke at the C.S. Lewis Summer Institute at theUniversity of San Diego in June of 2003. Jedd Medifind corresponded by mail withKreeft after the conference.Four full decades after his passing, the legacy and influence of C.S. Lewis burn bright asever. If anything, the vintage of stories and ideas produced by the Oxford and Cambridgedon has only come to be more valued, more read, quoted, and discussed by pastors, priests, scholars, laypersons, and skeptics alike. Although Lewis was an Anglican, hiswork stirs the hearts and minds of individuals across the span of Christian traditions.From the Chronicles of Narnia to The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, Lewis'writings continue to find wide welcome among stodgy Mainliners, ebullientCharismatics, devout Catholics, and tradition-loving Orthodox alike.Dr. Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston University, a writer in his own right, and a notedscholar on C.S. Lewis, recently shared his thoughts on the persistent relevance of Lewis'life and thought.What first piqued your interest in C.S. Lewis?What first piqued your interest in Chopin? In sunsets? In astronomy? In AudreyHepburn? The question does not need to be asked by anyone who has answered it. Thething itself, the object, Lewis's mind and spirit, the truths and goodnesses and beauties inhis writings, rather than any psychological, individual, "felt need" on my part or anysociological relevance or fashionableness on the part of the society or culture I came outof.My college roommate credited Lewis, especially Mere Christianity, with saving his faith.When I tried it, it was like Augustine's first reading of the Bible: "Oh, I know all that;that's too easy for me." Like the Bible, and like a human face, the book is deceptivelysimple on its surface but inexhaustible in its depths. Once we have grown some depths of maturity and overcome superficiality and superciliousness and adolescent arrogance, welove it. It's the second book I mention, after the Gospels, when people ask me what toread to understand Christianity.The Problem of Pain was actually the first Lewis book I read, as a college freshman. Ididn't understand it all the first time, but I did understand that the reason I didn'tunderstand had nothing to do with Lewis, but only with me. Here was the clearest, mostdirect, honest, intelligent, reasonable answer I had ever seen (and almost 50 years later itremains that!) to the most difficult problem in the world.

What gives Lewis' writings their remarkable staying power? Is there something Lewisoffers that modern Christian thinkers lack?The question has two parts: what does Lewis have and what do most modern Christianwriters lack?My answer is that my own question gets it wrong. It's what Lewis lacks and modernwriters have that makes the difference. Most Christian writers today want to be up todate, relevant, speaking to their generation, useful, etc. They want to be creative andoriginal. And they end up saying the same things and going out of date very quickly.Lewis just tells the truth as he sees it, and ends up being original. He is totallyuninterested in "marketing," in intellectual economics. He does what Thoreau advises:"Read not the Times, read the eternities." Chesterton says if you marry the spirit of thetimes you will soon become a widower. If you seek and find and communicate "the permanent things," you are permanently relevant.There are also personal qualities in Lewis that make him one of the greatest Christianwriters: his intelligence, of course, and his imagination; but also his utter honesty andopenness and objectivity and love of being. He doesn't have ingrown eyeballs.What allows Lewis' work to transcend many of the traditional Protestant-Catholic barriers?Two things: one a fault, the other a virtue. The fault is that that is the only subject Lewisdidn't want to talk about, even with his friends, much less in public -- the differences between the churches, especially the differences between the Church of England and theChurch of Rome. He addressed issues within his own church and demolished Modernism,which infected (and still infects) all the churches. But he refused to deal with 1517 (or 1054, for that matter.)Why? Both Christopher Derrick, Lewis's student, and JosephPearce, Lewis's biographer, give the same answer: he was born in Belfast and knew his prejudicessat deep.But he [generally avoided this question] for two good reasons. This is true evenif theabove constitutes a bad reason. For we must take him at his word in Mere Christianitywhen he says that the reason why he does not address the issues between the churches arethese: first, he is not a professional theologian but an amateur whose "expertise" is in the"basics."Second, that he thought God wanted him to address the "basics" because most Christianwriters were not doing so; they were fighting on the flanks while the center was goingundefended.He also made very clear, in the preface to Mere Christianity, that "mereChristianity" is not an alternative to any church, nor itself a church. It is like a hall, fromwhich different specific doors lead out, and only beyond those doors, only in the concretechurches, is there food and fire and bed.

Yet, he says, "mere Christianity" is no mere abstraction, no lowest common denominator (or "highest common factor," as they say in England), but a person: Christ Himself. Andthat is why in each church there is a fundamental controversy between those who affirmand obey and believe that Person totally and those who want to revise, update, nuance,relativize, psychologize, or otherwise water down His strong meat. And this controversyis far more important than the admittedly important controversies between the churches.Whether Jesus really rose from the dead and is literally alive and active now has got to bemore important than sola scriptura or the Immaculate Conception. Whether there is onesavior or 260 million is more important than whether there are two sacraments or seven.Do you think Lewis was on to something other Protestants often miss?What Lewis was onto was the fullness of the faith. He wanted it all. Mere Christianity ledto more Christianity. This is a vague thing, a "tendency" rather than a doctrine; but Lewisthought of Christianity as something like art rather than something like science in thissense: science tries to purify its hypotheses and is minimalistic. [The method of science]assumes that any idea is guilty (false) until proven innocent (true). Art, on the other hand,glories in fullness and diversity and richness and universality ("catholic" with a small"c").If the churches ever did reunite, it would have to be into something that was assacramental and liturgical and authoritative as the Roman Catholic Church and as protesting against abuses and as much focused on the individual in his direct relationshipwith Christ as the Evangelicals, as charismatic as the Pentecostals, as missionary-mindedas the old line mainline denominations, as focused on holiness as the Methodists or theQuakers, as committed to the social aspects of the Gospel as the social activists, asBiblical as the fundamentalists, as mystical as the Eastern Orthodox, etc. Some peoplehave a nose for scandal, or garbage, or baloney; he had a nose for "Christianity-and-water."Does Lewis have something Catholics need to hear as well?Yes, he was onto something Catholics need to hear too: the parts of their tradition, i.e. theunbroken tradition of the single church which for a millennium was a single visiblechurch and then for another half millennium was still a single church in every way exceptthe papacy and the filioque. And that tradition contained every one of the ingredientslisted above. I think he thought (and I certainly do) that God was not allowing the desiredreunion of the churches until all of them had learned what they had forgotten. He did notlive to see Vatican II, but he would have been immensely pleased by it, because its geniuswas to return to the sources, to interpret the Catholic Church's rich 2000 year history inlight of Scripture and the early Church Fathers. If all the limbs of the tree began again bya return to the trunk, they would be united since there is only one trunk.Which means, by definition, that insofar as Luther was right, Catholics have to learn, or relearn, from him. And insofar as the Pope is right, Protestants have to accept him. Of