Special Episode: The forethought of G.K. Chesteron and C.S. Lewis

“What we have to do is look evil squarely in the eye and decide how we are going to resist it.” - Prof. Douglas Farrow

It may come as no surprise that when we gather together to record these episodes we enjoy some good food and drink and rich fellowship with one another. It was during one of our previous recording sessions that conversations around Prof. Douglas Farrow’s work on Chesterton and Dr. Stephen Dunning’s expertise with Lewis were being discussed. It turns out that both Lewis and Chesterton had some foresight into what we have experienced with COVID-19 and government mandates in the last two years.

We are very excited to have two expert fellows on the show this week to discuss their prescient work.

In this episode, Douglas Farrow and Stephen Dunning walk us through some of the writings of C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and lead us in a discussion of how their thoughts and words might offer some wisdom for us grappling with current events in Canada.

“Lewis was also eerily prescient about what we have witnessed from governments during Covid, what I would describe as a form of scientific activism.  Think of all the calls to “follow the science,” as if science spoke univocally in support of whatever the current policy happened to be.  As an aside, this required everyone to consign yesterday’s policies to the memory hole and to ignore (or distort) what was happening in other jurisdictions, such as Florida or Sweden.  That Hideous Strength goes to macabre (and at times comic) lengths to demonstrate that the enemy of these scientific activists--these Controllers as Lewis calls them in The Abolition of Man, or directors of NICE in the novel--is clarity of thought, clarity of speech. The essential problem, according to Lewis in both these works, is as I suggested earlier, that the activists have rejected the only source of real authority through which they could justify the ends they seek to achieve.  And yet they are compelled to act, motivated by ends that they can only vaguely articulate.  And they most certainly do not want to look carefully at the concrete reality experienced by those who fall victim to the means they use to achieve these vague ends.” -Stephen Dunning, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Trinity Western University

Hosts:

Ivan DeSilva, MDiv, ThM, Instructor in Religious Studies, Trinity Western University, Pacific Life Bible College

Jens Zimmermann, PhD, JI Packer Chair of Theology, Regent College

Stephen Dunning, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Trinity Western University

Douglas Farrow, Professor of Theology and Ethics, McGill University

Producers:

Curtis Meliefste, MDiv Student, ACTS Seminaries

Show Links:

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