Lecture - Dr Alister McGrath - C.S. Lewis and the Post Modern Generation: His Message 50 Years Later
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- čas přidán 25. 04. 2013
- This lecture by Dr Alister McGrath was sponsored by The Lanier Theological Library in Houston, TX and presented at Champion Forest Baptist Church in Houston, TX, Saturday, March 23, 2012 titled: "C.S. Lewis and the Post Modern Generation: His Message 50 Years Later"
Dr. Alister McGrath is a Professor of Theology, Ministry and Education at Kingʼs College London, and Head of its Center for Theology, Religion, and Culture. He is also
Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, and President of the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics. Until 2008, he was Professor of Historical
Theology at Oxford University.
Dr. McGrath was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1953. He attended Methodist College, Belfast, in 1966 studying pure and applied mathematics, physics and chemistry. McGrath continued his education and eventually earned both a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and a Doctorate of Divinity from Oxford University. The interactions between these two areas of study-Christian theology and the natural sciences-have been a major theme of his research work.
As a former atheist, McGrath is respectful, yet critical of scientific atheism. He has frequently engaged in debate and dialogue with leading atheists, including Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins. McGrath has explored Charles Darwinʼs role in atheist apologetics and other controversial concepts of atheism, such as the "meme" in recent atheist accounts of the origins of belief in God.
McGrath is working on many projects, including his research on the late C. S. Lewis and a major intellectual history of the Swiss Protestant theologian Emil Brunner. His new book to be published in March is entitled C. S. Lewis -- A Life. Reluctant Prophet, Eccentric Genius. This biography will be supplemented by a collection of eight major academic essays on Lewis, to be published in May 2013. Other forthcoming books are the first in a five-volume series entitled "Christian Belief for Everyone" and a new textbook on Christian History.
For more infomation on the Lanier Theological Library: www.laniertheologicallibrary.org/
Can't believe I am just now discovering this video. Love to listen to Alister McGrath. So articulate and easy to understand. Thank you for uploading!
you are very welcome. you may want to watch the other videos I have of him. several lectures and a few seminar panel discussions. Do a channel search with his name while on my channel page. look for the magnifying glass when your mouse passes over it will say channel search. this helps find videos since i have so many to choose from. Also you can search under most viewed videos. I am sure some of his will be found in that group.
the magnifying glass appears right after to the right of the "About" button on my channel page but does not appear unless your mouse passes over that area. I did a search. I have 9 videos going back 7 years there are Lectures, Pannel discussions, a sermon and an interview.
Great. I'll check it out.
Yes...and I'm discovering it 4 years after you did.
I remember reading The Great Divorce, and how it is like walking on impossible surface at first and then getting acclimatised to goodness, we have to want to be good, we have to hunger an thirst for God, like being in a spiritual desert,we have to want God, for He wants us, but we reject Him
Brilliant lecture for the postmodern age
Well, 1929 was when Lewis said that he became a Deist. He didn't at that time believe in having a relationship with that God at all. Therefore, we wouldn't expect Christian conversation in his discourses with his father at that time. Also, his letter from February 1930 is consistent for a Deist who is slowly becoming a Christian, Lewis saying that the spirit is showing an alarming tendency to become personal. Lewis also says in Surprised By Joy that that moment in 1929 didn't change much of his daily life; he simply then believed there was a God.
53:00 Lewis says in an interview with Mr Sherwood E. Wirt of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in May of 1963,
why he wrote the Screwtape Letters: "At the time, I was thinking of objections to the Christian life, and decided to put them into the form, "That's what the devil would say."" Evidently, that is where he came up with diabolical ventriloquism
Really enjoyed Alisters biography of Lewis, it was a great read.
thanks for sharing.
Exceptional
Death makes us think about God. The only way we believe we can transcend.
Jesus shared bread and wine, if w love Him we share his food and we share His suffering, because those who love God will be persecuted, Jesus said that, its sad but its true. We have to bear the burden of the cross as well as the joy of the crown if we truly love the Lord our God, who truly loves us.
Very interesting. Thanks.
Illuminating; but where does it address Post-Modernism? Still, thank you for posting it.
I attended the lecture about 9 tears ago and watched the video several times before uploading it over 8 1/2 years ago. So it has been a while for me. Perhaps someone who has seen it more recently can answer your question. thank you for your interest.
C.S.Lewis wrote about child abuse at school in Surprised by Joy, and abuse begets abuse, he described "house tarts" in public school. I have heard accusations against Tolkien. I am one if the Pindown child abuse victims. I like C.S.Lewis's books as well.
+Barbara Richards You heard accusations but since you have nothing concrete against the man, you drop hints. It's slander nonetheless. J.R.R. Tolkien didn't abuse anybody.
+Barbara Richards. Hi Barbara, I think you may well find there were some accusations made against his SON, which were apparently unfounded.
st r It depends on what one means by abuse. Child beating by school teachers, in loco parentis, and by parents was common in the twentieth century. And sometimes, as we know from public schoolboys, beatings were severe. Some Christian parents still believe in the rod of correction and cite the book of Proverbs in support of such punishment.
+Johlibaptist. HI JB. Therefore one has to draw a distinction between abuse and discerning chastisement? I don't think it is just Christian parents who believe in the "rod of correction", those who believe in physical child correction are from across societies spectrum.
[Indeed in Muslim countries "beating" apparently extends to women].
Johlibaptist Yes, the rod of disipline not the cane.
Very influential literature my mind constructs philosophical views,frame by frame, its foundation was similar to C.S Lewis's his means and placing of virtuous pillars brought me to believe we should live with unanswered questions as much with perpetuity it should be ok to recognize the unknown for god wants us to remain in mere divinity like kings
iuhoiud ewfewe I regret to say that your comment is worthy of Pseuds' Corner.
Concerning the questions about Lewis suspending orthodoxy for the sake of a narrative: Ransom Theory is much closer to biblical orthodoxy and the Church’s historic teaching than something like the grotesque Penal Substitutionary Atonement view.
The Church has never officially adopted one particular theory of Atonement. More a cluster of ideas or theories. See Gustav Aulen.
Alister McGrath faith in a scientific age
Jesus Questioned About Fasting
14 Then John’s disciples came and asked him, “How is it that we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?”
15 Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.
16 “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. 17 Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”
Q&A for this lecture on this link czcams.com/video/gydB0iD599g/video.html
Us Pindowns hae been persecuted, I forgave those who hurt me, it was God who made me do that, I hated them but Jesus said pray for those who persecute you, He set us an example in the Garden of Gethsemene. I can't stop blogging about it though because the paedophile gangsters are still abusing children, I hate blogging but I have to do it because the children are being abused, as I was, in "care"
I find it difficult to believe that C S Lewis had such a low view of marriage as A McGrath attributes to him. He certainly never regarded marriage as merely a "contractual agreement". One only needs to read his chapter on Christian Marriage in Mere Christianity, in which it is quite clear that Lewis regarded marriage as a union between two people of the opposite sex who become "one flesh". That's no mere contractual agreement!
I know Lewis' marriage to Joy the first time was contractual so she could stay in England but when he married her the second time in the eyes of the church, his belief in marriage was becoming one flesh.
@@annchovey2089 Yes. The contractual marriage was only a civil one... When they fell in love and wanted to be "really" married, that was something else and they had it blessed. What a complicated thing that was for him, between her status as a divorcee and her cancer, but it makes his life experience so much richer...she clearly was one od the people who influenced and dramatically improved how he wrote for female characters.
It also gives us the chance to see how he treats two motherless boys left in his care (such an echo of himself and his brother)
I think it's very important that, when one of them wanted to revert to Judaism, he had his kitchen koshered for his stepson.
@@melissasaint3283 Yes. And such a shame that the "The Shadowlands" movie conveyed him as losing his faith. I wish Douglas Gresham had spoken up more on Lewis' behalf.
@@annchovey2089 did it? I've never seen that movie! So, does it show his moment of doubt in the worst period of his grief immediately after she died, but not his recovery in the days and weeks after? I mean, he gives us that in his own words, in his own writing, so it would be pretty disingenuous to omit it!
@@melissasaint3283 Yes. It basically ends with him crying with Douglas in the attic. Anthony Hopkins is a terrible C.S. Lewis. You can tell he didn't do any background study in Lewis although Debra Winger was a great Joy Davidman. She went to Oxford to prepare for the role. If you find the old Shadowlands movie with Josh Ackland (sp?), he is more like the real Lewis although Claire Bloom was not a great Joy. Richard Attenborough produced the latter one and I don't think he nor Anthony Hopkins had any interest in doing any favors for Christianity. I'm sure most people who would go to see a movie about Lewis probably already know of the many great works he wrote after Joy's death and he died with his faith in tact.
N.T. Wright also contradicts Lewis, and much of the traditional church, in the sense of the existing tradition most of us grew up in which itself is not that old a tradition, on cosmology, eschatology and afterlife, by re-examining Jesus in his theological historical context, and thus insisting on a _resurrection-centric_ understanding of the Christian universe, future hope and afterlife. Whereas Lewis argues for the post-enlightenment concept of heaven as afterlife paradise, a version of the pagan Elysium or the Happy Hunting Ground, Wright re-affirms resurrection and the transfigured physically resurrected life of the world to come as the Christian afterlife, and restores heaven to its role in the Jewish cosmology, as that dimension or aspect of the universe from which God rules and within which his glory is nakedly visible and undeniable, and locates that afterlife not in a seperate or replacement universe, but in the future of this world in the completed, victorious kingdom of God on earth, which is then also the corrected eschatology, not that depicted in the Last Battle in which this universe and the earth is physically destroyed and the believers removed from it amid the final victory of evil, in contradiction of God's promise to Noah that He will never again destroy the world because of sin. Some of this criticism of Lewis's and much of conservative Christianity's worldview (conservative politically and socio-economically more than theologically) I have always held, although it took me a number of decades, and pointers from Tom Wright in his many appearances on TV, to understand the eschatology and cosmology which was never otherwise explained to me at church, and which never really made sense, because the view that salvation means going to heaven always begged the question "then why do we look for the resurrection of the dead, if the Christian dead have already gone to heaven and that's the final destination - what would be the point of the saints being resurrected at all?" And similarly, "if the Christian hope is paradise, and God's promises are fulfilled only there and after death, then what's the point of the prophets, the Jubilee, the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of the kingdom, and the life of the first church in the Acts of the Apostles, if the only way the kingdom comes is in heaven, not on earth?" It makes all those prophesies lies, and Jesus himself a liar, if the truth is the kingdom never comes on earth, and we aren't actually expected to obey the commandments in the sermon on the mount and elsewhere concerning redistribution of property and eliminating poverty and class difference. And yet Lewis consistently portrayed afterlife, cosmology and eschatology that way. So there are a few things, rather large things actually, about which Lewis was in error and sowing that same confusion I struggled with for so many years. And I know I am very far from alone in that dissatisfaction with the traditional confusion, because it is a major cause of evangelistic failure in the world, because we talk about having good news but deliver little to none, especially to the poor, and it is a major cause for young people leaving the church and losing their faith, that they see the vision of Jesus for radical transformation, and then are confronted by the fact their churches do not try to achieve that and indeed judge and ostracise them for wanting to be anti-capitalist and pacifist according to Jesus' example, and for wanting and expecting that giving their lives to Jesus should mean being given concrete things to do by way of building a new kind of society, the kingdom of God on earth, rather than just showing up on Sunday mornings and in the rest of the week and the rest of their lives living in the kingdom of this world, according to its rules, and working for it instead.
I learned rather late CS Lewis was not a theologian. he was a former atheist like the speaker. Lewis' gift was as a writer like Tolkien. I never got interested in him in undergraduate school where many taking theology were great fans of him. I found him not theologically accurate on many of the same things you bring up. I remember thinking when Alsun dies and the tables of stone on which he was slain crumble into pieces. in reality the law that was in pieces because of man's disobedience came together and were fulfilled by the death of Christ. they are restored not broken up. So after I saw inaccuracies in how i understood proper theology i did not become a big fan of his. however now i do see the literary genius and give him grace on his theological infractions since he admitted when alive he was not a theologian.
The second law of thermodynamics renders NT Wrights views on the afterlife impossible. We need something compatible with eternity. I find Wright’s views on this matter woefully inadequate.
After all, “ heaven and earth will pass away”
@@paulbracken6216 The expansion of the universe would lead to heat death eventually without Creatorial intervention anyway (which may or may not be happening if what I hear about possible addition of dark matter is true). The combining of heaven and earth implies transformation of the cosmos as well as human society, as does the transfiguration. I feel like there's a risk of Deism in assuming physics can so easily trump eschatology. The purpose of that form of words seems to be a rhetorical "never" as to whether God's Laws and Jesus commandments can be forgotten or indefinitely delayed rather than a literal statement about the universe. Since the only part of the Law not being enforced by the Temple was the Jubilee decrees, and since the church ignores so much of the Law of Moses, the emphasis seems to me to be on the fulfillment of the kingdom of God as revolutionary transformation that will never cease to be mandatory.
Whew. A lot of misunderstanding here.
Anybody who follows CS Lewis’s writings religiously will end up in Hell.
Total horse sh!t for people unequiped to deal with reality
What a sheer waste of time. There is no intellectual depth here.
I doubt you even watched....
Albertanator How come?
Azzy , please let me know what you have written or produced that has much more intellectual depth than Dr McGrath , or CS Lewis.
No intellectual depth ? My God. What an asinine statement !