Monday, 15 February 2021

Still CS Lewis

The fact that C S Lewis - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/15/quiet-cs-lewis-is-on-why-subject-of-new-film-could-be-right-for-now
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/15/quiet-cs-lewis-is-on-why-subject-of-new-film-could-be-right-for-now> - can still win a sympathetic article in the Guardian in 2021 relating to his role as a Christian apologist and convert from atheism is a testimony to the scale of what God accomplished through him.

The fact that, in 2021, Lewis might still be Western Christianity's foremost public apologist, despite having been dead for over half a century, is less encouraging - and is a telling testimony to the drift of evangelicalism at large during that time into anti-intellectualism or superficiality.

N T Wright could have taken the role, but has sadly with great consistency proved unable to restrict his desire to curry favour with society's gate-keepers by regularly taking any opportunity to sneer disdain at anyone to the right of him, and his silly desire to try to stake out a position as the first person ever to be correct about important topics - desires encouraged him in propagating unnecessary and significant theological errors. This was a great loss, as his combination of intellectual gifts, energy and ability to speak to different audiences were a match to Lewis's. The way he combined top-class scholarship and orthodoxy of "The Resurrection of the Son of God" in particular was thrilling (one of the best-argued and ground-breaking theological books I have ever read - and it stands well alone, so if you don't have a particular desire to plough through reams of "New Perspective" advocacy in the other large tomes in the series, you can easily read it on its own).

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