This episode dives deep into the fascinating world of the Inklings, featuring the dynamic duo of Dr. David C. Downing and Dr. Crystal Downing, who take listeners on a vibrant journey through the lives and works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The conversation unfolds from a live lecture at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Chapel Hill, NC, where they discuss the essence of the Inklings—an eclectic group of writers who gathered in pubs to share their ideas and inspire one another. The Downings highlight how Tolkien and Lewis not only influenced each other’s literary paths but also played pivotal roles in shaping modern Christianity through their imaginative storytelling. As they navigate through the complexities of faith, creativity, and friendship, listeners are invited to reflect on the Reformation of Redemption and its relevance today. So, grab a pint (or your favorite beverage) and prepare to geek out over some of the most influential literary minds of the 20th century!

Gather around, folks! The latest episode of Systematic Geekology brings the magic of the Inklings to life with a special lecture from Dr. David C. Downing and Dr. Crystal Downing, recorded live at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Chapel Hill, NC. This special event, titled "The Reformation of Redemption," dives deep into the world of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, two literary titans who not only shaped fantasy literature but also influenced Christian thought through their imaginative storytelling. The Downings, seasoned scholars of Lewis and Tolkien, explore the camaraderie and creative sparks ignited among the Inklings—a group of writers who met regularly to share their works, critique each other, and inspire one another over pints and good cheer. They delve into how Tolkien reframed the dying god myth for Lewis, leading to his eventual conversion, and discuss the unique friendship that blossomed in the aftermath of their shared experiences during World War I. All of this unfolds in a cozy, pub-like atmosphere, inviting listeners to reflect on the impact of these authors on modern faith and literature, with anecdotes that resonate even today. So if you're a fan of Lewis, Tolkien, or just love a good story, this episode is a treasure trove of insights that you won't want to miss!

Takeaways:

• The Inklings, including Tolkien and Lewis, created a unique space for collaboration and inspiration through their shared love for storytelling and literature.
• Dr. David and Dr. Crystal Downing emphasized how the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien significantly impacted their views on faith and creativity.
• Dorothy Sayers' approach to writing about Christianity in a relatable way has resonated with modern audiences, highlighting the importance of inclusivity in faith discussions.
• The podcast reflects on the timeless relevance of the Inklings, showing how their community dynamics can still inspire today's creatives and thinkers.
• Discussion of the 'dying God' myth illustrates how Tolkien's reframing of this concept played a crucial role in Lewis's conversion to Christianity.
• The event at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church served as a celebration of the literary friendship among the Inklings, showcasing their lasting influence on contemporary faith narratives.

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Your friendly neighborhood geek will Rose here and we are really excited to share this episode with you. What you're about to hear is a live lecture and podcast that hosted at my church here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

We set up our fellowship hall as Inklings Pub and we eeked out on CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien 4. We recorded this on Reformation Sunday. So we entitled this lecture the Reformation of Redemption.

The lecture was given by Crystal and David Downing, who are huge Lewis, Tolkien and Sayers Ecology. David and Crystal are co directors of the Marion E. Lead center at Wheaton College and they're retired professors at Sciatic University.

And our whole point of this was to really lift up what Lewis and Tolkien and Sayers did in their time and focused on their book group, the Inklings, where they gather in a pub, share their writings and to build off each other and to inspire each other and to challenge each other. And we really had a good time with this. And really what we do here at Systemicology is what they were doing with the Inklings.

They were gathering with friends to share what they were kicking out about and then to workshop some of their projects and ideas and thoughts.

And so we hope that we can with this for a long time here at Systemic Theology and so gather around the pub and listen to us geek out about the Inklings and some of our favorite creators and authors all time.

I do also want to mention that we had a podcast and a YouTube video not that long ago where we talked with John Hendricks about his book the Myth Makers. It really went really deep with the friendship of C.S. lewis and Tolkien, and that was a lot of fun too.

So if you're really into CS Lewis and Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers, you'll have a blast with this episode. But we've also talked about this on other podcasts and YouTube videos as well. So we hope you can get go deep dive if you haven't checked that out.

All right, friends, have fun. And yeah, the geek of me honors the geek in you.

Lewis said of Martin Luther that he quoted Martin Luther saying the church is like a drunk on the back of a donkey. He's worried about falling off on the left side and ends up falling off on the right side. So he quotes Martin Luther in his letters.

That's my latest book coming out.

It's called Letters on Living the Faith and it's excerpts from Lewis's letters to many different people, some who whom he knew and many who he did not know. They would write him questions about their marriage, about the Bible, about theology, and he would give very thoughtful answers.

So I thought most people don't want to plow through 3, 500 pages letters, but if you do, you'll find a lot of great nuggets. One of them, a woman wrote to Lewis and said, are you handsome? And Lewis said, not that I know of. I think that was a good answer to that question.

Let's talk about Lewis and Tolkien. I didn't know they were friends. I read Tolkien in junior high and then I read Lewis in college.

It was only later I found out they were best friends there in Oxford. I asked my mother, why didn't you give me the Narnia Chronicles when I was growing up? It would have been great for the Christian imagination.

And my mother said, well, Lewis drank and smoked and he was an Anglican, so I thought he might be a bad influence on young people. So she gave me a book called Keep Penny, Play, Pray, which did not turn out to be a class. People are not reading that.

Okay, so let's talk about these two gentlemen. Good friends they both were born in outside of England.

Often it's the outsiders, Jonathan Swift and Edmund Spencer and others that become mainstream in a country's literature. The Lewis was born in Belfast in Northern Ireland, the Protestant part of Ireland.

And Coking was born in South Africa, father bank manager in South Africa. So they both started out very far away from England.

They both loved fantasy stories, they loved Nordic myth, they loved can't quite read that Beatrice Potter. And so even before they met each other, they had a lot of common interest.

Lewis said, one of the great bonding forces of friendship is a lot of common interest. You have a lot to talk about. His first friend, he barely knew Arthur Greaves in Northern Ireland. And they both found out they love Nordic myth.

It's definitely a geekology moment. They got together and they said, oh, what do you think? They both have the same book.

Even flipped through page by page, they both were exposed to the idea of the dying God myth. There was a famous anthropologist named James Fraser who said that the dying God is really not that unique. The idea that Christ died for our sins.

We have Osiris in Egyptian myth, we have Balder, we have Christ on the cross, Dionysus. And so he thought this is a very common motif.

He tied it into the cycles of the year that the, the grass and the growth dies in the winter and then comes back in the spring. Called them Corn God myths. So Lewis considered this to be a very powerful argument against Christianity.

So they were at Victorian childhoods. They both had the trauma of losing their mother.

When Lewis was nine years old, his mother died of cancer and within two weeks his father sent him off to an English boarding school. And most child psychologists would say that's not the way to handle having your mother pass away. Send him off to boarding school.

For Lewis this became a step away from faith.

There's a good book called Mother Loss by Judith Wolf and says that when a child loses his or her mother, three common reactions are loss of faith in a benevolent God, how could a loving God take away my mother? The second is friction with the remaining parent.

It's very hard for a father to try to be both parents and Lewis's father was especially inept in that role. And the third thing is search for a mother substitute. And all three of these fit Lewis perfectly. Didn't get along with his father.

When he went to Oxford, he met the mother of one of his fellow World War I friends. They trained together at Oxford and his friend Patty Moore was killed. And Lewis developed a real adoptive relationship with the mother.

It's very much like a father son relationship to was the opposite.

When his mother died, rather than straying away from his childhood faith, he felt it was a matter of principle to maintain and propagate his mother's faith. He became even more devout. He associated his face faith with a kind of mother loyalty.

So they both heard about the, the childhood myths, the dying God myth. And then they both were accepted to Oxford. Lewis's examiner, they had like blue book exams.

The examiner said, these are the best examinations I've ever seen. The whole time I've been at Oxford.

But then Lewis couldn't pass the math exam in a math exam called the Responsions, which was not much more than high school arithmetic. And Lewis had this strange blind spot when it came to numbers.

Even his friends said when they would go to lunch with him and try to figure out the bill, he would, you know, was this. Finally he would just take a handful of paper and coins and say, can you tell me how much I owe you? You know, he just couldn't figure it out.

So they both went to Oxford, achieved great things as an undergraduate and then they both were called away to the war in France. And these are teenagers. Lewis arrived on the trenches at the age of 19.

I've had some 19 year olds in my College classes that I wouldn't trust with a paper route. So the idea that you're a, you're a lieutenant in charge of a hundred privates and corporals in, in wartime. And Lewis was wounded in World War I.

He was an English shell fell short. And so he got out of the war by being injured. Tolkien got trench fever and couldn't shake it. So he spent most of the war.

They both spent most of the war in hospitals.

One thing you notice about Lord of the Rings is you have a big battle and then you have a whole chapter on recovering in a hospital and people are visiting you in bed and people are. And Tolkien was very aware that, you know, recovery time was a big part of the cycle of being a warrior.

He's one of the first people to really deal with the fact that after the battle there's a lot of people spending a lot of time in, in hospitals. Louis said in Surprised by Joy, his memoir, that there were places you couldn't see a single blade of green grass.

Everything had been shown shot up by artillery and machine guns, that everything was just mud and water and blood. And he said you'd catch your rubber boot on a piece of barbed wire and all this cold water would come into your boot and then everybody had lice.

And sometimes when you're trying to sleep in the trench, you feel a little nibbling feeling and some rats trying to decide if you're dead or not. So they both had extremely traumatic experience experiences in World War I, both of which got into their later books in the Narnia Chronicles.

In the last Battle, the unicorns are coming to help the good Narnians and they come over a ridge trying to join the battle and the, the Black Dwarves, the evil dwarves, mow them all down with bows and arrows and not a single unicorn makes it to the battlefield.

And Lewis's stepson said that Loose remembered, in trench warfare, you're all in the trench, the lieutenant blows a whistle, you all climb a ladder and you try to cross no man's land.

But the Germans were so ready for them, they had their guns pre sighted and so every single person would be shot down within three feet of the trench. They didn't even get a chance to run toward the Germans. Tolkien admitted that the scene in the. The death. Death marches. Not the death marches, the.

When they're crossing over and they see all these heads and bodies in the swamp, that was his own experience. He was a message runner and he often had to cross no man's land and step over bodies.

The first time he met Lewis wasn't that impressed with Tolkien. He was worried about Catholics and he was worried about linguist and, and Tolkien was both.

And the first time he met him, he said he's a nice enough fellow as long as he gets slapped in the head every hour or so. Not the best report to start a friendship.

But the two of them discovered that they both loved Norse myth, they loved Beatrice Potter, a lot of other fan, anything with fantasy and fiction and getting away from the world. They both became distinguished dons and professors after their undergraduate efforts. They got graduate degrees.

Folking was at Merton College and Lewis was at Magdalen College.

And they really the breakthrough for the two of them was when they were talking about their own fiction product projects and talking said, would you looking at something I wrote. And Lewis read it and he loved it. And he was the first time Tolkien had gotten major encouragement for his creative writing.

So from the two of them meeting and sharing writings, they added some other friends, Hugo, Dyson. They ended up being anywhere from 10 to 15 members that were sharing each other's writing projects. And that's the basis of the Inklings.

The Eagle and Child is the pub there in Oxford which is closed right now. They're renovating it and putting in hotel rooms, but they promise they will put back the Rabbit Room, as they called it.

There's a back room where they would sit around and share their stories. The Eagle and Child, they called it the Bird and Baby. The. As you see from Insignia. Where'd that. Oh, there it is. Okay.

Well, they called it the Bird and Baby because the bird is carrying off the baby. Part of a fad among modern Lewis scholars is you have to come up with your own name for the Eagle and Child.

So Michael Ward calls it the Flyer and the Crier and mine is the Swooper and the Pooper. So if you go to Oxford and go to that pub, you have to come up with your own name for the Eagle and Child.

Even though they were great friends at this point. Well, as I said, Lewis was a skeptic.

He had childhood faith, but when his mother died, his faith started fading and all through his teens and twenties he was a skeptic. One of his friends from boarding school said he was a foul mouthed atheist. And when this person ran across a book by C.S.

lewis and realized it was Jack Lewis, he was shocked because the Jack that he knew was a very vitriolic non believer. As they talked about myth and fantasy, Lewis said, well, the dying God myth, you know, that's made the rounds.

Jesus of Nazareth, not really that unique. And Tolkien said, well, let me reframe that idea for you.

Yes, there are a lot of dying God myths, but Jesus of Nazareth is the only time that the myth became history. Nobody looks for the grave of Osiris or the grave of Dionysus. It was just a motif.

And he said, but in Christianity, the myth became fact, mythology became history.

And so the fact that there are so many of these dying God myths suggests that we all have an intuition of the need for redemption, the need for salvation from above. And this was very crucial for Lewis, he and Tolkien and another friend named Hugo Dyson.

I talked until three in the morning about dying God myth, Christianity, and Lewis became a Christian soon afterwards. Now, at this point, Tolkien was writing parts of the Hobbit, starting on the Lord of the Rings. He had a lot of brilliant drafts.

He called it my mad hobby. And he liked doing it for its own sake. He wasn't trying to publish. And Lewis said, you know, this is wonderful fiction.

You need to, you know, get this ready and send it out to some publishers. And he actually had to harangue Lewis into submitting the Hobbit first and then Lord of the Rings later. Harangue Tolkien. What? I say thank you.

Yeah, Lewis harangued himself. There was a. There was a split personality that most people don't know about. Harangue tolking.

So I was doing a radio interview once and I said, you know, if it wasn't for Tolkien, we might never have heard of Lewis. He would become this great Christian writer. And if it wasn't for Lewis, we might never have heard of Tolkien. He might not have submitted his work.

And the interviewer said, yeah, and if it wasn't for Lewis and Tolkien, we would have never heard of you. And, wow, that's kind of uncalled for here. But it was a pivotal moment in their relationship and especially in Lewis's faith.

Now, even though they were both friends and they both wrote fantasy, they actually had different views of what they were trying to accomplish. In Tolkien's view, the Christian artist is a sub creation.

God created us, put us on earth, but he made us creators and he encourages us to create our own imaginary worlds. The Tolkien called this sub creation. So the greatest tribute you can pay to God is to become yourself a creator.

And Crystal is going to talk about how Dorothy Sayers had a similar paradigm. And so this was a. It wasn't very evangelistic.

People always say, well, if Tolkien was such a devout Christian, why didn't he get in more material about, you know, the Christian creed and try to encourage people? But Lewis's view, I mean, Tolkien's view was not evangelistic.

He said, if I've made this beautiful story in which the good characters are really good, I've given people a look at what a good character looks like. I don't need to evangelize. And he and Lewis had some tension over that because Lewis wanted his stories to reflect Christian creeds much more.

We had some second graders come to the Wade center, and I said, you know, this book could be worth 10,000 if you've got one in good condition. And I said, if you go to your grandmother's house and you find this book, bring it to me and I'll buy you a milkshake.

And most of the students laughed. This one little girl came up afterwards and says, I can't have milkshakes because I'm lactose intolerant. So that was very cute.

So anyway, Tolkien's view is we are sub creators. God created us, and when we make things, we are embodying his nature or reflecting his nature. Tolkien wrote a famous essay called On Fairy Stories.

Too much emphasis has been placed on representation or symbolic interpretation of the beauties and terrors of this world. Fantasy is, at heart the making or glimpsing of other worlds. Fantasy is, I think, not a lower but a higher form indeed.

The object, nearly pure form, and when achieved, the most potent. So he was very into world making. His languages, he has five different languages in the Lord of the Rings. They actually are not made up languages.

You can conjugate the verbs. You could see the singular versus the plural. He was a linguist first, and he actually started creating languages.

And then he said, what kind of world would people use these languages? So he was amazingly thorough. Even his geography. He and Lewis both marched all over France in there.

And so when you're reading about the Nine Walkers leaving Rivendell and it takes two weeks to get to their next destination, he said, I really tried to figure out how far can nine people on foot travel in a day. And he built that into the Lord of the Ring. Amazing attention to detail. So loose is Tolkien's view is more being a sub creator.

He liked the story of the sculptor who was making a gargoyle on the top of a way up high on a cathedral. And somebody said, why are you working so hard at that? You know, nobody's going to see it from the ground. And the sculptor said, well, God sees it.

And Lewis felt the same way. I'm going to make gargoyles, even if only God is there to appreciate it. Lewis's emphasis was a little different.

He always had a bit of a evangelistic streak. He liked Billy Graham. He said, I got a bit of the Bible thumper in me. He said.

So Lewis said creation as applied to human authorship seems to be entirely misleading term. We rearrange elements he has provided. There's not a vestige of real creativity de novo in us. Totally new.

Try to imagine a new primary color, a third sex, a fourth dimension, or even a monster which does not consist of bits and parts from existing animals stuck together. Nothing happens. So he had more of a view that we take the creation we find and we transform it in our fiction.

We don't try to be sub creators necessarily, but Tolkien said fantasy is made out of the primary world, the world we live in. But a good craftsman loves the material and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood when only the art of making can give.

So he saw the fantasy writer as a kind of a sub creator, literally creating his world brick by brick. Even though Louis. Even though Tolkien stressed that he wanted to be a sub creator, quite a bit of things from the primary world got into his fiction.

Gandalf means magic elf and that shows up in the older Eddas. And so he liked that name and added that the figures. He got a postcard from Germany and they had the Bergeist, the.

The mountain spirit of German lore. He actually got this, this postcard on the back of it, it says Gandalf.

So he showed that, that, that image of the wizard with a big cloak and the wide brimmed hat was a basis for Gandalf. Tom Bombadil was a Dutch doll that the children had.

And one time one of the brothers, there were three sons and a daughter put the doll in the toilet and it was all dripping. And Vulcan said, oh, well, I see he's been on his adventure. Tom Bombadil was got too close to the brook and the.

The water nymph pulled him into the water, so that's why he's drenched. So he Turned a. A childhood tragedy into a charming story.

And then he would make up more and more adventures about Tom Bombadil and he becomes a character in the Lord of the Rings. Borrowings from the primary world Edith Tolkien, Lewis met in. They were both orphans. They were in an orphanage and she loved to dance.

One time they were taking a walk around the orphanage and she went to a meadow and just started dancing in the sunlight. And Lewis always. Spokane, always remembered that. And you see that in a number of his stories, especially the.

The story of Aragorn and what's her name. Oh, Arwen is one thing up. Well, both Lucien and Arwen dance. As I say, Tolkien did a lot of revising.

His first name for Arwen was going to be something like Blood Orson. I can't remember it. And then he came up with Arvin. Arwen. No, it was Fenullius.

I'm sorry, but Dorthen was his first name for Gandalf and Arwen was called Fanulius. I would love to be at his elbow while he's revising.

You see the word Fanulius for this beautiful young woman who dances and then he crosses it out and puts in Arwen Evenstar. You've got to go. Yes, Good revision. He was amazing that way.

J.K. rowling took a big piece of shelf paper and she outlined all seven books and all the character arcs of key characters, whereas Tolkien would just wing it. He loved the idea of Strider.

Was originally a hobbit ranger named Trotter, and he was wise and been around all around the world, but he's hard not to laugh at him. And when they got in the snow of Mount Cardis, Hoking says, I can't have this wise leader being carried by humans. And so he changed.

He decided to make him into a human ranger named Schreider. I'm glad, Will, that you stressed that these are humans. You said a couple times, these are human. They were not talking.

Said I'm a hobbit and everything, but size. He said, I love Bright west kits. I like beer and smoking and I like adventures. So he identified quite a bit with his hobbit characters.

Lewis's stories nearly all always began with images. Tolkien's story started with words. He was grading blue books and he came across a blank page, and it was such a relief.

As a professor, I totally identify with this. You think you've got like six more pages of handwritten blue book and you turn a page and they stuck together.

And he said, all students should do this. So the paper is very Rare. So he just wrote, in a hole in the ground, there lived. And then he said, what is a hobbit? What do they look like?

You know, what are their habits? And so he started with the word hobbit before he invented the characters. I did.

After I read this anecdote, I was grading student papers, and sure enough, there was a blank page in the Blue Book, and I wrote, in a part of the bay, there lived the halibut. And I waited for the magic to continue. And it did not continue. So I'm not talking. So for Lewis, it wasn't words, it was images.

He said before he wrote Narnia, he saw a fawn with an umbrella on a snowy day, and he was dreaming of lions, and he saw a picture of this beautiful but cold queen. And his story had to do with connecting those images into a coherent narrative. Tolkien. I mentioned this.

Tolkien stories often began with an evocative word. Ha. Arendelle. Brightest of angels of the Middle Earth sent unto men. He read that phrase and he said, who is Earendel?

He created a character in his mythology who's a sky sailor named Earendel. I mentioned the part about, in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Lewis tended, as I say, to be more evangelical.

He was thinking about, what's the effect on the reader going to be? He wrote that the whole subject of religion was associated with lowered voices, as if it were something medical.

But supposing by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Good, good one not thus steal past watchful dragons. I thought they could.

And Pastor Wilt mentioned translating Christianity into the vernacular, and that's one of Lewis's great passions. How do we take Christianity that is often too theological, too academic, and turn it into something that people can understand?

It doesn't always work. I had a student when I was at Elizabethtown who said, I read the Lion, Witch in the Wardrobe, and people say it's Christian, but I like the story.

But why do people say it's Christian? And I said, well, Aslan dies for someone else's fault, and then they're heartbroken because he's gone, but then he returns and they're jubilant.

Does that remind you of anything? And my students said, oh, like Gandalf. So it's not a surefire method for evangelizing young people.

But in any case, I just want to emphasize they were great friends, but they really had different views of Christian fantasy. Lewis stressed the interdependence of the factual world and one's fictional world.

In the Narnia Chronicles, he'll say it reminded you, have you ever seen workers by the railway line drinking tea out of tin cups? Well, that's. And I've been to England a dozen times. I've never seen workers drinking tea out of tin cups.

But he would make references to our world, which Louis Tolkien wouldn't do, and all of Lord of the Rings. There's no mention of Jesus or Napoleon or Hitler or anything of that sort. He made one mistake and he was unhappy about it.

In the opening scene where Gandalf is putting on these great fireworks, it says one of the fireworks went blazing in front of their faces like a freight train. And later on he said, I'm mentioning freight trains in Middle Earth they didn't have freight trains.

So that was his one lapse and he was sorry for it. He didn't catch that. The. So Tolkien stresses the independence of secondary world fantasy is an act of sub creation.

In terms of their collaboration, Lewis brought out the best in Tolkien's work partly by just helping get published and then critiquing some of the passages. And Tolkien helped Lewis get a precise sense of writing for a popular audience. A better spelling.

Lewis was a terrible speller and a better ending to the story and also helped him find a publisher. So the two of them had a wonderful collaboration.

It's one of those Lennon McCartney type moments where the two of them just had a synergy that kept them both stimulated each other and challenged each other and ended up being two of the greatest writers of the 20th century. People say, well, who do you think's method was more successful?

The interdependence model, where it makes references to our world or the independence model. And I say, they Both have sold 150 million copies of their books. So I'd go, go one way or the other.

It's okay, you know, it's not really a yes, no answer. Tolkien, Lewis was talking his biggest fan, promoter, encourager and haranguer, you know, get these things ready for publication.

To was a nightmare for publishers. He would work over something, 20 drafts into the publisher and they would send back the galleys, which is just for typos and punctuation errors.

And he would start going, you know, I think Aragorn should be a human. And he would start writing in the margins. And the publishers go, please, no. You know, whereas the Tolkien was. I mean, Luce was the opposite.

He wrote one of The Narnia Chronicles. He just hand wrote it. His handwriting was so neat. He submitted it to the publisher handwritten, and there were virtually no changes.

So once again, you can have very different creative models and they can be both be successful. Okay, so that's my quick take on those two. And Crystal, you want to come up and talk about Dorothy Sayers. Thank you. Thank you.

Go ahead and sit down again. So could you clap again just for me? Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Okay, now let me introduce. Okay, so you know what you're doing now.

You know how to.

Okay.

Basically, David has talked about how Lewis talking were essential to the reformation of each other's views that have changed the way thousands of people have thought about Christianity. I want to bring us into our era.

But to do that, I'm going to talk about Dorothy Sayers, who is someone that Lewis identified as near the end of his life as one of the four most important influences on his spiritual life. And we'll see why.

But to get us to relate it to our own times, I want you to think about an advertisement in Our Own times that I pulled out of a magazine. Spirituality meets artistry. For only $59, you can be spiritual. You can buy the sign of spirituality itself.

It reminds me of an incident that my nephew told us when he was at seminary in Los Angeles. A friend of his got a job dog sitting while a couple in Beverly Hills were off in Europe. And as this student was babysitting the dog, the dog died.

And so she called the people in Europe and said, oh, I'm sorry. The dog said. And they said, it's okay. Dog was very old. We knew he was not long to live.

But we do want you to take him to our vet in Los Angeles who will know what to do with the body. And she says, well, how do I take him? And they said, well, just go up into the attic. There's some old suitcases there.

Just put him in a suitcase and then take him to this address.

Well, this woman, she was struggling student financially, so she had to take buses from Beverly Hills to downtown Los Angeles and then switch buses to get to the vets. And as she was getting out of the bus, well, she found the suitcase.

She put the dead dog in the suitcase, and then she's taking the bus and she's climbing down the steps of the bus. And as she gets down the steps, some guy runs by, grabs a suitcase out of her hands, goes down this alley.

Don't you want to be there when he opened the suitcase? That is A great metaphor for how a lot of people regard the signs of Christianity.

You know, if you have the sign itself, like the external suitcase, you don't realize that maybe something is dead inside from that sign. And isn't this exactly the point that Martin Luther was making when he nailed his 95 theses to Wittenberg church door?

When I was teaching Shakespeare at ucla, I taught Hamlet. You know, gotta read Hamlet if you're in a Shakespeare course.

And I pointed out to my students that in the second scene of Hamlet, Shakespeare mentions Wittenberg four times. And that is a good insight as to how to interpret Hamlet.

Do you keep following the word of the father, or is there another way to interpret? So I explained to my students, and a lot of them hadn't heard of Martin Luther before.

And when they were taking their Blue Book exams, I gave them a choice of what they could write about. And one of the options was explain the significance of Wittenberg in Hamlet.

And I showed my students how it's really the most spiritually sensitive of Shakespeare's plays.

And in one of the answers from my UCLA students, he said, well, there was this guy named Martin Luther, and he was really angry, angry at the Roman Catholic Church, and he nailed his feces to the door of the church. And at the time I go, I'm a horrible teacher. It never occurred to me to try to explain that. But luckily, you know about this incident.

This is the day we celebrate it. And of course, the reference he makes reference to the famous Tetzel who was selling indulgences.

And Luther makes up this jingle, attributing it to Tetzel. As soon as the gold in the casket rings, the rescued soul to heaven springs. You know, it's similar.

You could say, as soon as you buy our cross, Satan will be at a loss. You know, you just buy this certificate, you buy this sign itself, and you don't care that there's a dead dog inside.

What contributed, as I'm sure you're all aware of, is the technology of the era. Part of the reason Tetzel and others were able to sell so many indulgent certificates is because of the printing press.

And at the time, Rome was trying to build St. Peter's Cathedral, and they just wanted more and more money. So once Again, you just buy the sign of salvation.

Tetzel actually proclaimed that his indulgence papers were so strong that even someone who had raped the Virgin Mary could get out of hell if they bought his papers. Yeah, ought to just have the sign itself. Well, Martin Luther used that technology, that technology that was perpetuating this problem for the good.

And we all know this, translating the Bible into the vernacular and the printing press made it available. His sermons were printed up, he produced many pamphlets so that people theology was no longer just in Latin.

Well, this is very similar to this woman who influenced C.S. lewis, Dorothy Sayers. She was invited to write a series of radio plays about the life of, of Jesus. And radio was a new technology of her day.

She was much more famous than Agatha Christie in the golden age of detective fiction. And so here they just wanted this famous writer to write plays that people would listen to on the radio. New technology.

The name of her plays are the Man Born to Be King. Sayers spent a whole year reading the gospels in the original Greek so that she could have a real sense of what's going on.

And she read a bit from one of her plays and people were appalled because she did not use King James English. Now I assume you know what the King James. I've spoken to some like high school groups and they haven't heard of King James English.

But that's the authorized version written when commissioned, when Shakespeare was still alive. Some people have been speculate, oh, maybe Shakespeare had a part in it just because it sounds like Shakespeare.

But that's the way people talked back then. Sayers got hate mail from Christians. Christians tried to censor these plays.

It was discussed in the House of Lords as to what they should do about this, this horrible defiance of tradition. Tradition, okay. But it gets even worse. Not only did Sayers not use King James English for Christ and the disciples, he.

She actually had some of them speaking slang. Okay, gets even worse. Some of it was American slang. This was actually headlined papers in London plays about Jesus and American slang.

And you know, a lot of the disciples were working class. Of course they spoke slang. They definitely didn't speak King James English.

But there's something about, you know, just like the indulgence paper people want the sign of Christianity. King James English was the sign of traditional faith. You've got to hold on to that sign. And Sayers didn't.

The third play came out, it was about the wedding at Cana, the day that the Japanese attacked Singapore. And then Singapore proceeded to be lost to the Japanese.

So newspapers actually announced, proclaimed that Singapore was lost due to Dorothy Sayers plays about Jesus. She is quite an amazing woman.

The irony, as many of you already know, is about 90% of the king James Bible is based on William Tyndale's translation a little less than a century earlier. And he was doing things that got the church really mad, you know, so he would take the Greek, a Greek word that formerly meant to do penance.

And once again, part of your penance might be going and saying a certain number of prayers, buying indulgent papers. Even in Martin Luther's own church, as you probably know, there were 15,000 relics that the Elector of Saxony had so that you could go.

And for every relic that you reverence would get a certain number of 100 days off of purgatory. And one of the relics was four drops of breast milk from the Virgin Mary.

I mean.

Yeah, well, so Luther had problems with that too. Okay, I don't know. Well, what Tyndale did then is translate this word, do penance, where it makes it very clear cut.

You just go through these steps and you get salvation by this cross. You get salvation again. Tyndale reformed. The sign changed, the sign of redemption.

And of course he was killed first strangled and then burned at the stake.

So the King James Bible that in Sarah's day everybody is trying to protect is based on a translation centuries earlier that Tyndale was burned at the stake for. And this, this obsession with, with traditional signs.

Well, despite all this hate material she got, Sayers actually got threatening phone calls from Christians. I mean, Christians were just brutal towards her. But she kept discussing she was not going to back down.

The guy in the center in this picture voiced Jesus. And so he. And then the producer is on the right. And they just kept going despite the controversy. One of the. Another example, it wasn't just language.

She was also changing the way she was reforming the way we think about the Bible, as did Luther. And I bet you can guess just from the look of this, which disciple this is. Yeah, Judas. You go online, say, okay, I want an image of Judas.

You cannot find a neutral image of Jesus of Judas. Sayers did something really fascinating.

She turned Judas into the most intelligent disciple, the disciple who recognized that the Messiah wasn't going to be this political leader who comes in and overthrows the Romans, that the Messiah had to sacrifice his life to save others. I mean, he was brilliant. And you go, well, how can she get away with that?

Well, how she got away with it is then, Yeah, so then Sayers has the incident of the triumphal entry. And Judas didn't realize that in her plays that she had arranged to come in on this donkey.

And Judas thought that Jesus had sold out to the political cause because, you know, people are waving palm branches, they're putting their cloaks and they, they are. This isn't what a suffering servant does.

So what she shows is that Judas trusted his own certitude about what Jesus should be doing more than he trusted Jesus. And so she's making this point how people have an idea this is authentic Christianity.

And as some of you know, one of the Crusades, the Western church went and was killing people in the Eastern Church because they didn't use unleavened bread. You know, there's certitude that you have to use the unleavened bread that is the sign of Christ's body. This is nothing new.

There's this famous incident, pre Raphaelite painting Christ in the house of his parents. This caused. This was way before Sayers, but it caused an incredible controversy. One of the people who denounced it was Charles Dickens.

He said, you know, this the mother of Jesus, she looks like a whore for a jail shop. And people just weren't used to. And look how the boy Jesus, there's all this sawdust on the floor and he's holding up his hand.

Obviously a nail has already pierced his. His palm. I mean, it's quite profound.

And this is probably more like the way it was in Jesus's time than what we're used, what the people back in the Victorian era were used to. Like this where this is the boy Jesus teaching in the temple when he's 12 years old and he's all in silk close and surrounded by Corinthian columns.

I mean, people want to hold on to these traditional signs, whether they are indulgences or King James English.

Sayers commented on this, saying that when she published the collection of plays about Jesus, that her era manifests that docetic and totally heretical Christology which denies the full humanity of our Lord. I mean, this is essential to Christianity. And yet people wanted to hold on to the kind of their clean visions.

No, the boy Jesus can't stand on sawdust. No, the Jesus can't speak slang. If you're Unfamiliar with it. The docetic heresy around 200 AD comes from the Greek to seem.

And it was basically earnest followers of Christ. But the idea that God would take on flesh, I mean we get so used to it going to church. Yeah, Jesus was God incarnate. This is a shocking idea.

There was a bishop named Demarcion who said, who denied the full that God was fully flesh in Christ because how could God create excrement? And yeah, we get so used to more sanitary signs, we forget about the radical nature of our faith.

And so what we need to remember is and this is what Sayers was very committed to both and thinking just as the word of God, Jesus was and is both fully human and fully divine. Maybe that's a model for us, how we think about controversies in our own time as Christians.

Well, Sayers reformed the way people thought about Christianity. As she told her friend C.S.

lewis, she received thousands of letters from people saying for the first time in my life, I understand what Jesus has to do with me. Me a slang, slinging person, working class person. And part of. And God works in mysterious ways.

Part of the reason that so many thousands of people listen to these radio plays and their lives were changed, they were redeemed is because of the controversy caused by other Christians. Because all these Christians are rising up and protesting and trying to censor these, these plays.

And so all other individuals who would normally not turn on radio to listen to, you know, the life of Jesus, they switched on their radios thinking that oh, this must. Christians are so upset. It must be a demythologizing of the story. But what they heard was all the miracles were there.

The death and resurrection was there, the post resurrection appearances of Jesus were there. They were just in reformed signs. The truth of salvation through Christ, the truth of redemption doesn't change.

But because of that, our signs need to change because culture changes and they're going to understand differently.

When Sayers sent a copy of the Man Born to Be King and this is what the copy would have looked like that Lewis received from her, he was just blown away. He was not someone who listened to the radio that much.

But these, when he read the plays, he actually said that Sayers, man born to be King has edified us in this country more than anything for a long time. It is a mouthwash for the imagination. And notice the years apart, he was still reading it. In fact, C.S.

lewis read the man the plays that Sayers wrote for the radio Man Born to Be King every year for his Easter devotions until the year he died. That means 20 years.

So when he's writing the Narnia Chronicles, he is being mentored and spiritually uplifted by these plays that Christians tried to suppress. I would then like to just make a little digression. And my student Will here, Elena, would appreciate that. You notice C.S. lewis smoking his pipe.

Here's another one smoking his pipe. Jacques Derrida, who is the father. You've probably heard of deconstruction. He analyzed how signs worked.

The sign of a cross, the sign of an indulgence paper, the sign of King James English. And he noted that every sign operates by what he called an economy of exchange. You have a signifier and then the signified meaning.

But the trouble is, people get so caught up with the signifier, like King James English, like Rolex, they just lose sense of what they're supposed to signify and they start idolizing the signifier. Well, Derrida then went on to say that, and here's the visual image of that.

Because language operates by an economy of exchange between signifier and signified. That explains why so many religions operate by an economy of exchange. That's what indulgences were. Literally.

You'd buy an indulgence and you got an exchange time out of purgatory. But rituals, rites, works of penance, works of charity, and I add here, works of language.

Because I grew up in kind of a fundagelical background where, oh yes, we're not Catholics, they're so works oriented. But I had no sense of how much I had the sense of that it was a work of language I was doing. You have to say the right words.

I asked Jesus into my heart when I was 8 years old and I was born again. Case closed, I don't have to worry about anything. And I said the right words. But notice the assumption there is.

I saved myself by saying the right words, I used the right signs. And religions tend to, since language operates by an economy of exchange, you know.

And by that you mean I say the word dog, you get in exchange for that, an image of a dog in your mind. I do a work of penance.

I get salvation and heaven, even the word atonement, that Tyndale, once again, he invented this word for the Hebrew that you hear in Yom Kippur. But he invented it because what God wants is at one meant with us.

But think of how people have turned even the idea of atonement into an economy of exchange. They'll say, well, he's going to have to atone for his sins. He's going to have to do something to get forgiveness.

And Tyndale's whole point is God wants to be in relationship with us. Okay, what's interesting about this is Derrida defined deconstruction as openness to the other.

And I think it is a more modern term for the term Reformation. Now, Derrida himself was an atheist. He acknowledged he was an atheist. He said pure gifts are impossible.

All religions operate by an economy of exchange. But he realized if deconstruction is openness to the other, then I have to be open to other ways of thinking of religion.

And he started, he went from a pure gift is impossible to substituting the word God for impossible.

And then he started reading the Bible and he said, I've discovered that the only religion that doesn't operate by an economy of exchange is Christianity. It is predicated upon a gift. This is amazing because he was willing to reform his own views of redemption. He was willing to be open to the other.

I'm going to skip, I was going to talk about political issues, the peasants war, but I want us now immediately to think of today. What is the technology we're struggling with today? Not Gutenberg's printing press, not the radio anymore, but how do we think about new technologies?

How can we as Christians not just think of the problems they create, but how can we see both sides of the issue? How can we be both and thinkers, even when, especially when it comes to AI, which is so controversial right now.

And I think Luther gives us an answer, as do Tolkien and Lewis, because Luther had a community at Wittenberg University and he had amazing support from his students, from other faculty.

And we need to think about the importance of community as we face the challenges of our own time, a time in which there is such incredible polarization, just you can't even know whether you can trust what comes out of the mouths of politicians. And this is what the Inklings had. They had community, even though they didn't all agree with each other.

Community doesn't mean just surrounding yourself with people who think exactly the way you do. Tolkien was Roman Catholic, C.S. lewis Anglican. The person in between them, Owen Barfield, he was an anthroposophist.

And Lewis, and he didn't agree about things, but they still talked about them.

So for us, how can we develop communities that were willing to grapple with some of the problematic issues in our own time rather than just despairing about them? And I'm. This is a self directed sermon because I'm in despair over our times.

So what we need to do is to consider the possibility of the impossible getting away from the exchanges that so often corrupts Christianity to endorsing the impossible gift.

And let me just add, that doesn't mean belief isn't involved, because if you're offered a gift, you have to believe it's been offered to you before you accept it. Right, but that's different than an exchange. Okay. If you believe the right thing, you're going to heaven. No, let's reform that view of redemption.

God has offered the gift of salvation through Christ, and all we have to do is reach out and take it. Thank you.

Awesome. Awesome. Is this Mike? Hello, Coming at you. Boom, boom, boom. Maybe, maybe. Hello, hello. Coming at you on. On.

Good, good. All right.

Hey, great job. That was amazing.

I love it.

I let. So I do want to enter a little time of. Of Q and A and you guys bantering. I love this idea of doing this in community.

And how are you doing this?

And here we are, the same kind of toxic message boards that comes around geek stuff, and people mad that Star wars was done this way and not that way. And how would you say, like, the comparison of, like, the Inklings and their community compares 100 years later? Have we learned anything?

Are we doing the same kind of things?

What.

What does that look like in terms of the controversies around her? Like, why aren't you using this kind of language or this kind of translation, but yet put it in the vernacular to people.

And here we are today trying. And I loved your bringing Derrida.

In terms of deconstruction, That's a big buzzword in progressive Christianity in terms of deconstruction, reconstruction. When, when? In terms of Reformation Sunday. And think about reforming, always reforming. Here we are 100 years later. The same kind of stuff.

Yes.

Just throwing it out there.

Thoughts.

What do you think?

Well, a model that I like to say, book by Daniel McAdams called the Stories We Live by. And he talks about how we all create a storyline for our lives.

And the four main plots are the legacy script, a happy past which leads to a happy present. And that's a healthy script. You know, I had a great foundation. My Parents loved me, I went off to college or whatever, and now I'm.

I feel like I'm in a good place. That's the Legacy script. There's also a positive script called the Self Absolving.

Excuse me, the Overcoming script, which is I had a difficult past, but I've worked my way toward a positive present. Both Lewis and Tolkien had a Overcoming script.

It was very aware of their, their difficult childhoods, but they both felt like through friendship and faith, they came back to a very good place. The two, the two less healthy ones. One is the nostalgic script, which is my good past led to a bad present and so I had difficulties.

I didn't get into college, my parents divorced, but I've worked things through and now I'm glad where I am. Excuse me. Nostalgia script is I started out well, but now my parents divorced, something bad happened and here I am as an adult and I'm not happy.

The other one is the self absolving script, which is my bad past leads to a bad present. I didn't get a break as a kid. My parents didn't support me. I didn't get into the school I want. No wonder I'm so unhappy in my, in my middle age.

So this is Daniel McAdams on Life Scripts. What interests me, he says the two drivers of human behavior. What is agency? You want to accomplish something. You want to be in control of your life.

You want to be recognized for your gifts. The other one is community or communion, where you want to connect with people, you want to be part of a group.

So he's actually saying if you sit down and think of flashbulb memories in your life, like they're going to be either positive. Because my agency was affirmed. I applied to a good school and I got in. I won this award in high school.

And the negative would be I applied and I didn't get in. Or somehow, rather I not as successful as I wanted to be. The community or Continuity.

The Connectivity script, you remember I asked her to marry me and she said yes, I got elected to student council. Or the negative is she said no. I wanted to connect with these people and they rejected me. And the reason I bring that up is because the Inklings had.

He says often agency and connectivity are in opposition. You're a middle aged manager and you get a chance for a big promotion if you're willing to move to Detroit.

But do you take your children out of school? Do you make your spouse leave her job?

I mean, how much is your personal sense of agency going to overcome the community and connectivity you have with your family.

And the reason I love the Inklings is they had that unusual formula where their sense of agency reinforced community and their sense of community reinforced their sense of agency. They sit around and read a manuscript. They had very frank discussions about what was good, what was bad, and that was bonding.

To talk about each other's writing projects was a great bonding approach, but it also spurred them to accomplish even more. You talked about Lewis and Hokey making an agreement. I'm going to write a space story, and you write the time story. So I.

It's kind of a long winded answer to your question, but I think we still can take this dynamic of the Inklings, in which our sense of agency reinforces community and our sense of community actually encourages agency and individuals. So that's my rather long winded answer to your brief question.

Yeah, I'm really fascinated by, like, we don't do this alone, right? Like Luther, even Luther, we see him as this great reformer and he did his thing.

He had his team, he had his friends, he had the people that supported him in his journey.

And the same way the Inklings, I love that, like, some of these, the, some of the greatest literary works of, of, of all time were because of some friendships that they were encouraging each other to do these things.

And so this group that huddled together and we huddled together on Sunday mornings or in small groups or with families and friends or book groups, systematic ecology, whatever, we gather together and we encourage one another and push one another and challenge each other.

And Dorothy Sayers, this, this whole idea of her doing this thing and then, I don't know, there's something about this, the angry letters that were sent to her for doing this thing and pushing things, I don't know, encourages me in some way because we live in this age of like, you know, rage bait or Twitter controversies or whatever you want to talk about. People talks as much as boards. But she still stood firm in what she believed of how to articulate the faith of folks out in the world.

And it resonated with people.

So. Right.

I, I and Dorothy Sayers was really committed to community.

Just so much for connectivity.

So I think even, you know, the church can build. And of course, we have First Corinthians 12, Romans 12 about we all have different gifts. Sinus came up once again getting us to think in new ways.

Like CS Lewis creating a lion who makes us think about Jesus in new ways. Sayers compared the church. She said the church should be like a theater troupe. She loved Theater.

And her experience was that in theater, everyone, when you're putting on a dramatic production, you all have the same goal. And so everybody putting on the production realizes it's not just about the director. It's not just about the superstar actor that we got.

Because no matter how good the actor is, if your sound technician isn't doing his or her job, nobody will hear the actor. If the lighting technician isn't doing his or her job, you won't even see them on the stage.

And she said, we have to think more like that rather than, you know, well, the church. You know, it's. You look for a good pastor. But no, we all have the same project to reform the way people think of redemption.

And we all have important roles today. And so we have to be identifying each other's gifts in community and reinforcing those gifts.

Because there's certain gifts that, you know, some people would probably like more than others, like the person who just moves the props on a stage production. But if the prop is in the wrong place and causes the, you know, the main actor to fall and break his leg, no pun intended. I mean, that.

We're like math.

I don't like, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, literally, liturgy means work of the people. And then Luther talked about the priesthood of all believers.

It's not just the priest up front, but as everyone. We're all baptized. We all have gifts. We're all a part of this team together. And I think that's important in terms of how we do faith together.

Are there questions out there? Oh, yes. Will.

Thank you very much for the talks.

I have a question about why Lewis.

Became interested in writing children's fiction. I've heard one story about this, and I wanted to ask you whether it was true. The story I've heard is that he was writing apologetics and theology.

He had a public debate with philosopher.

Elizabeth Anscombe, and this was an overwhelmingly.

Negative experience for him and made an impact on his friend.

It seems like they were under the.

Impression that he found it, like, humiliating or unpleasant in something. And some people think that that's why.

He became interested in fiction. But I'm sort of, like, suspicious of.

This story, but I don't have any evidence one way or the other.

So is that.

Does that story seem true to you?

Does it seem, like, justified?

I think it is overstated. He did have a debate with Elizabeth Ancam, who was a Wittgenstinian Catholic philosopher. I would have loved to known her. She was extremely smart.

And Lewis was Used to winning debates. This was in the late 40s, I think. 48. And she really got him on equivocating on a word.

He has an argument in Miracles that says if our brains evolved from irrational causes, how can we trust our brains to be a rational guide to reality? And he was kind of fudging on irrational, meaning they just happen in nature, versus irrational meaning. That's a bad argument logically.

So he actually went back and revised some sections of Miracles after that debate, but he already had children's literature in mind long before that debate. They had children in their home during World War I, during the London Blitz. Two million children. No, I'm going to stick.

I'm going to stay with World War I. No, you're right. So anyway, during World War II, the children were sent out to less dangerous areas.

Both the Tolkiens and the Lewis has took in children. And Lewis said, oh, they're such charming children. They have trouble entertaining themselves, but they love the adventures of living out.

He was reading Edith Nesbit, he really liked in her stories, a group of children will have an adventure. It won't just be a solo like Alice in Wonderland or wizard of Oz type characters. So I would say that story has been much overrated.

He did believe that you can appeal to the imagination more easily than to the intellect.

If somebody gives you three arguments for the existence of God, you tend to get your defenses up and you already have rebuttals even before you finish hearing the argument.

But if somebody says there was a great lion and he came from the over the sea and somehow he called it sneaking past those watchful dragons of Sunday school lessons and flannel graph and all that kind of thing. So my answer would be, I think he did get more interested in literature, in imagination, but the process was already happening.

I don't think the debate. The debate was very subjective. Some people thought that Lewis did fine, but Louis himself felt that he'd fallen flat.

But my short answer would be, that's been overemphasized. The debate leading to his writing fiction rather than apologetics.

Well, if we had a little bit of humble pie that created Narnia, I'm all for it. But wasn't it like Tolkien Was a little. Was kind of a harsh critic towards the Narnia books as well.

He was.

And that created a little icy towards the end of their relationship. Didn't end on great terms just because Lewis built up Tolkien's like, I love your stuff. You should do it. And he's like, what do you think about this?

He's like too metaphorical, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah. He didn't like the allegory. He says in the preface to Lord of the Rings. I dislike allegory in all its forms. I prefer history, even feigned history.

Now, he did give a copy of the Narnia Chronicles to his own granddaughter. So once again that could be overstated. He didn't like the fact that Narnia was such a mishmash.

The Lord of the Rings, it's all Nordic Germanic motifs or mythology. The trolls, the wizards, all the characters except for hobbits you can find in Norse literature like the Elder Eddas and the Poetic Eddas.

And whereas Lewis, oh, let's bring in Bacchus and let's bring in a lion. He thought it was too much of an amalgam or a mishmash.

Father.

Father Christmas. Right. I think the reason Father Christmas shows up in one line which the wardrobe.

There's a picture of Lewis as a 4 year old and he's pulling this little Father Christmas on a donkey. And in many ways Narnia is. Lewis is writing it for the child in himself. The setting is Lewis's own childhood.

He says it was the time of the Bastables and Sherlock Holmes. And so the setting of the early stories is the first decade of the 20th century. It's not Lewis's own decade. Yeah. So I forgot what I'm talking about.

But I do think they had their falling out. Had several stages. It has been exaggerated. Lewis's talking Sunset.

And Tolkien wanted to be the best friend, not the second best friend. And then writing Narnia didn't help. And then thirdly, when Joy Davidman came along in the.

In the 50s, they had an unwritten rule that women didn't participate in the Inklings meetings because their wives were very traditional wives of cooks and what is the German phrase? Kirche kuka kenter. The domain of the wife is the church and the kitchen and the children. But When Joy Davidman showed up, she was so different.

Lewis says, hey, you should come to our meeting. And all the other inkling. Wait a minute. For 30 years we haven't had women attending and now you're bringing your wife here? Yeah, so those.

But he did, they did stay in touch and he would go visit Lewis once a week. When Lewis died, Tolkien said, you know, the loss of other friends has been like the falling of autumn leaves.

But when Lewis died, I felt like somebody had chopped down the trunk of the tree at the base. So he had a very profound reaction to Lewis's passing. Thank you both.

This is such a gift after I graduate from college.

The Nicene Creed, I think this year. And David, you mentioned that Lewis was.

More committed to sort of narratives. And Crystal noted that this tension that.

Many generations of Christians wrestled with and how can God be human still like.

Figured that one out that to the satisfaction of all professing Christians.

So I'm wondering what you see in Lewis and Tolkien and Sayers and their struggle with these questions that might inform us today as we, we continue to wrestle with how we live in community, how we think about God is in our world in a very unique political. Both Lewis and Sayers said that the essence of Christian doctrine was established in the first four ecumenical councils. They both agreed on that.

And since then, there are different definitions of how that becomes manifest, but they were comfortable with that. You know, the whole idea of denominationalism that.

And that also kind of has an anti docetic element because docetism just implies it's just all an intellectual ascent. But we're all flesh. We're all embedded in a certain cultural moment. And that is going to make a difference to how we talk about our faith.

But also, and that's why I wanted to bring in technology, you know, how can we just as Sayers use the radio, just as Martin Luther used the printing press and didn't defy it, even though both were being used for. They had negative consequences as well.

But when I talk about community, the hard part is to join together quite self consciously in community, even with people we disagree with. And the polarization we're feeling now is just like, you know, we're right, they're wrong.

And I put it in one of my books on Sayers that rather than for me to live as Christ, too many evangelicals today, it's for me to live is my party's political platform. And I use Christ as a prop to hold it up.

Amen.

And but we need to be in conversation, uncomfortable conversations with other Christians. And none of us likes, you know, to be uncomfortable. But I think it's important.

I would add the idea of inclusiveness. Luth, you can tell in the Narnia Chronicles, a lot of different preachers become followers of Aslan. He liked the phrase mere Christianity because he.

He grew up in Northern Ireland, and Catholics and Protestants were literally killing each other. Not just debating, but killing each other. So he lost his faith for most of his teens and twenties.

When he came back to faith, his best friend was J.R. tolkien, and he went to orthodox services. He had friends that were orthodox. He really stressed that the unity of the body as opposed to denominations. Tolkien didn't totally buy it. She.

He thought that Tolkien, Lewis still had a bit of that Northern Irish Protestantism in him. And he. Tolkien said, every once in a while, when I listened to Lewis, I. I feel a certain ulterior motive is the way he put it.

But in general, I would stress the unity of all Christian faith. And the second thing was the power of appealing to imagination. If you go back to Jesus, somebody says, who is my neighbor?

Jesus could have said, well, he's somebody who lives close to you or somebody who's in need that you could help. And none of us would remember Jesus's answer. But Jesus go, there was a man traveling and he was beset by Robert.

And that story sinks in so much more deeply than just a prose answer would have done.

So in many ways, Lewis and Tolkien are taking up the mantle from Jesus of telling stories, which really sink in as opposed to just propositional truth.

I love that when you share that the token started with, you know, there was a hole in the ground, there.

Was a hobbit hole in ground, there lived a hobbit.

And there was a hole in ground, there lived a hobbit. And then, then, then the story goes. So that becomes a parable, that grand story that we dive into and derive meaning from and help frame lives.

All right, so we're going to wrap up here in a minute. We do have a little book here, book table here with some books here that are free, free books.

We remember Frank Makowski, who would be sitting here, front row for this thing. Some of the books on that table is from his own library, Dorothy Sayers and others.

So if you want to grab one and take it home with you, you can, you can do that. So I'm going to ask one more question. And you, and you. It's going to be challenging, but if you had to pick like Just one.

You're on an island and you had one book to take from, like, Dorothy sayers or Tolkien, C.S. lewis. Just one what? Which book would you take? You could only take one.

You could only take one book, and that's going to be with you on the island for the duration.

Do I have to take my husband?

No, just. Just a book.

So which one of the books from all three of those, which book are you taking with you to that island to be with you for, to keep you company for the tour?

Well, they asked that question to G.K. chesterton, who was also one of the authors we collected at the Wade Center.

Yeah.

They said, if you're on a desert island, what one book would you want to have with you? And Chesterton said, I would like a book called A Practical Guide to Shipbuilding.

I love it. All right, now I'm going to keep pushing you, CS Lewis, talking to our Sayers. You have one book. What's your favorite one? Not necessarily favorite.

What one are you going to carry with you on to?

Well, I would be like C.S. lewis. I could reread over and over the Man Born to Be King.

And the first time I read it, I'm so used to the biblical accounts, I wasn't reading carefully enough, like what she does with Judas. And she does some brilliant things with the two thieves on the cross, giving them speeches.

And one of the thieves, justice, is totally mocking this Jesus and saying, oh, you. You think you're the king of the Jews. And dismiss responses as, oh, come on, hold back. You know, he's just a little loony that.

Just don't criticize him so much. And then Jesus says, verily, verily or true? Sears writes, truly, truly, you will be with me in paradise.

And all of a sudden, Dismas, who was just kind of thinking of Jesus as this looney tune on the cross, he suddenly realizes, oh, oh, you are who you say you are. Oh, I don't deserve this. And notice what. Well, what I notice so has done there is she's undermined an economy of exchange.

We think the thief says, you know, makes a statement, and then, oh, you said the right thing. You're getting heaven. But instead she has him say it kind of to accommodate his looniness.

And it's only after Jesus offers him the gift that Dismas realizes what it really is. Wow. But see, the first time I read it, I was just going, yeah, there's two thieves on the cross.

And so every time I go through it, kind of like every time I go through the Bible I see different things. Different things speak to me at that moment in my life. So that man. Born to king.

It's a good Reformation sermon. Good Reformation sermon right there. All right, Dave, what are you picking? That's right. What. What. What's your book? Weight of Glory.

And the Weight of Glory is just spun gold. I know people have actually memorized it way you memorize scripture.

So that would probably be my choice, would be these four great sermons, the best of which is the way to.

I don't even know if I've read this. I'm going to look that up. That's great. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Fantastic job. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you. Coming.

Thank you.

Sa.