C.S. Lewis Lecture at UTC

If you are in the Chattanooga area today, don't miss the thirty-second annual C.S. Lewis Lecture at UTC. The C.S. Lewis Lectureship was established in Chattanooga in 1983 by Charles Hummel of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to perpetuate the Christian and literary legacy of Clive Staples Lewis.

Tonight at 7:30pm, at the University Center Auditorium, Ken Myers will be speaking on "The Second Friend: Owen Barfield's Influence on C.S. Lewis."

Ken Myers is the host and producer of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, a bimonthly audio magazine that examines issues in contemporary culture from a framework shaped by Christian conviction. He was formerly the editor of This World: A Journal of Religion and Public Life, a quarterly journal whose editor-in-chief was Richard John Neuhaus. Prior to his tenure at This World, he was executive editor of Eternity, the Evangelical monthly magazine. For eight years, he was a producer and editor for National Public Radio, working for much of that time as arts and humanities editor for the two news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Mr. Myers serves as a contributing editor for Christianity Today, and his published writings include All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Crossway Books: 1989), and (as editor) Aspiring to Freedom: Commentaries on John Paul II's Encyclical "The Social Concerns of the Church" (William B. Eerdmans: 1988). He has also written for numerous periodicals, including The Wilson Quarterly, TableTalk, Discipleship Journal, World, Crisis, First Things, The Washington Times, and The World & I. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland, where he studied film theory and criticism, and of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

Movie Premier: 42

Tonight, I will be going to the premier of the movie "42," the story of Jackie Robinson. Part of the movie was filmed in Chattanooga at historic Engle Stadium. I am grateful to my home group leader, who works for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, for inviting my wife and I.

The event starts at 7pm with a reception, followed by the movie premier at 9pm. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as there is a tremendous thunderstorm on its way to Chattanooga and scheduled to hit the city at the time of the reception. It is too bad that rain is on its way. Had the weather forecast been more favorable, the street in front of the movie theater was  going to be blocked off so that the reception could take place outside.

Sadly, I will miss tonight's annual C.S. Lewis lecture by D. Stephen Long on "Why Jesus is Not Ethical."I look forward to hearing about the lecture as well as Q & A afterward.

Ralph Wood on G.K. Chesterton

Ralph Wood, Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University, gave the thirtieth annual C.S. Lewis Lecture at UTC on "Rum, Romanism, and the Sacramental Imagination: G. K. Chesterton as Defender of the Faith." The lecture was held at the Bentwood Auditorium, which seats over three hundred people. There were some empty seats, but not very many.

Wood seems like an interesting guy. In his informal talk, he identified himself as an evangelical Christian, which probably made many of the conservative, church-going folks in attendance happy. However, during the question and answer period, he stirred the pot by claiming that Adam and Eve were not historical figures, by arguing that personal faith in Jesus did not mean that a person was an authentic Christian, and by claiming that Jesus Christ is actually present in the bread and wine at communion.

My favorite moment in the Q &A was when a middle-aged man in the front row raised his hand to ask why Wood thought that it was "silly" that Adam and Eve were not historical figures. Within seconds of returning the microphone, the man asking the question received the following question from Wood: "Tell me why it isn't silly that Adam and Eve were actual human beings." The man hesitated before somehow managing to say that he had no idea where to begin, but the fact that the Bible talks about Adam and Eve as real people is significant. Wood responded by asking another question: "Then, where did the children of Cain and Seth come from?" The man in the audience suggested that they must have married their sisters. "That would be incest! You see, you open up all kinds of problems when you try to interpret the Bible too literally," was Wood's followup remark.

Reading between the lines, it seemed that Wood purposely tried to mimic how he imagined Chesterton would have responded to these kinds of questions. As Wood pointed out in his lecture, Chesterton strongly avoided extremes, such as alcoholism or teetotalism. Alcohol, according to Chesterton, was useful for "convivial" gatherings. Too much of it was clearly a problem, but avoidance of drinking was also not the ideal. With regard to the Christianity, Chesterton saw over-rationalization as problematic while also despising the extreme emotionalism sometimes associated with the evangelical tradition. Rather than a precise journey that can be calculated, the Christian pilgrimage, according to Chesterton, is a wandering road that meanders in several directions before arriving at its destination.

Wood's lecture on Chesterton reminds us that there is a mystery to Christianity. But rather than see this as a problem, we should rejoice that we believe in a God who is dynamic and cannot be contained within our feeble minds.