What Christians Believe? Peter Kreeft - 1

What Christians Believe? Peter Kreeft – 1
cinops be gone Tuesday, April 2, 2008
Notes from a talk given at the C.S. Lewis Summer Conference 2003: A tape from St. Joseph Radio – P.O. Box 2983 – Orange, Ca. 92859 (714) 744-1998 – www.stjosephradio.com This is classic on Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity.

Introduction: One of the great things about C.S. Lewis is that he combines two things that are rarely combined – Logic and Imagination. Now the Narnia Story is the Space Trilogy and Until We have Faces which is my favorite book…. I loved his Socrates books which are published by University Press. The Unaborted Socrates and I understand that Peter is planning a new series of Socrates books in which Socrates examines some of the great philosophical figures of the past. Peter has written I think 40 odd books and has plans for a dozen more…

The Talk: Part II of Mere Christianity could be seen in context of the whole and then an overview of the contents of each of the five chapters of Part II. After that comes something a little more …. (Taping problem) almost all lectures I find are dull, almost all questions and answer sessions are interesting.

Mere Christianity is almost certainly Lewis’s most powerful book. It is also his least original and the two are connected. If you know the last page of Mere Christianity where he speaks about originality and says that the person who is the least original in all the history of the world is Our Lord himself. He says I come not to do my will but the will of my Father. When people ask me what book to read about Christianity after the New Testament, I say this is it.

There are two ways to explain the division of Mere Christianity into 4 parts. – one is from above and the other is from below. Divine Providence certainly organized it. They were written on four different occasions, four different years so they fit together not by Lewis’s planning but by God’s.

But from a human point of view … There are two ways to explain the division into four parts … On the other hand we can divide it systematically, logically and objectively, on the other hand we can divide it psychologically and subjectively.

First the logical or objective division; I shall use two standards of division corresponding to the two halves of religion, theology and morality, and the two halves of all human knowledge, theory and practice. And I shall combine this with another standard of division which could be called epistemology or how we know things and what do we know by human reason and what do we know by faith in divine revelation.

Thus the first part of Mere Christianity is morality known by reason which leads to the second part which is theology known by reason. The third part is morality known by Faith, distinctively Christian morality and the fourth part is theology known by Faith distinctively Christian theology focusing on the doctrine of the Trinity. (To be continued)

George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish and Vietnamese.