My task today is to talk about C. S. Lewis as the great prophet of this century that I believe he, along with Francis Schaeffer, indeed was. But before I do, I hope you will indulge me a bit of personal reflection.

Lewis’s personal influence is something of a convergence of history this particular week because twenty-five years ago this very day—in a flood of tears in a friend’s driveway in the toughest days of my life in the midst of the darkest days of Watergate—I surrendered my life to Christ. It is no accident that I am here today on the 100th anniversary of the birth of C. S. Lewis, for it was his writing that convicted me. Would I have been converted without Lewis? Yes. I am enough of a five-point Calvinist of reformed theology to believe that God had His hooks in me and would have gotten me. The Hound of Heaven , as Lewis wrote, would have pursued me, but it was Lewis whom He used to convict me.

I had succeeded in everything that I had done in my life. I was the youngest company commander in the U.S. Marine Corps, the youngest administrative assistant in the U.S. Senate, the youngest this and that, and I had started a big successful law firm. I was the youngest senior aide to the president of the United States. I thought I was so good. I never thought about being a sinner. I always thought I wasn’t any worse than anyone else; I hadn’t done anything the Democrats hadn’t done before me; and God, like any good college professor, would grade on a curve, and I would be fine. Lewis convicted me so deeply with words that I am sure you are so familiar with—words from Mere Christianity: “There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride. . .”

Lewis also wrote that when you walk through life looking up toward God, you come up against something immeasurably greater than yourself. But a proud man who is always walking through life looking down on other people cannot see something, something immeasurably superior, above himself. Lewis, I am sure, did not realize that he was writing for Chuck Colson in the darkest days of Watergate. His words were like a torpedo that hit a ship. Confronted with his words, I could not even get the keys into the ignition of the automobile -- I was crying too hard. There I was, a proud, ex-marine captain, White House hatchet man, calling out to God! I wanted to know Him. I didn’t know the words. I had never known anything about evangelicalism. All I knew was that that night I desperately wanted to know the living God. I desperately wanted my sins lifted from me. I desperately wanted to know what this man was writing about.

That next week I went to the coast of Maine on a holiday with my wife, Patty, to get away from all the agonies of Watergate. I brought Mere Christianity with me and read it cover to cover. I took a yellow pad, which I am want to do as a lawyer, and I made my columns: There is a God/There isn’t a God; Jesus Christ is God/He isn’t God. I went through the book and came against an intellect as formidable as any I had faced in my life of politics or law—the mind of C. S. Lewis. I became convinced of the truth that Jesus Christ is God.

As I said, I’m sure the Hound of Heaven would have gotten hold of me anyway, but C.S. Lewis did two things for me. First, he convicted me of my sin. He made me understand that I had to repent, and that I could be forgiven. And he gave me an intellectual framework to understand what had happened to me in that emotional experience of surrender. I was somebody who distrusted emotion. I relied on reason. I was trained as a lawyer to think analytically. And yet I was able to understand what God had done that evening because in Mere Christianity Lewis laid it out in an intellectually understandable way.

This taught me a lesson that I have used in my ministry ever since. Although apologetics and reason will not lead someone to God, they will at least set the stage whereby that person can understand what is happening in his or her heart when God is moving in that life. Apologetics is necessary to set the framework for us to understand the reality of the Christian experience. This is particularly so in this age when all truths are considered equal, when there is no truth, when there is nothing to base it upon, when the Christian memory is being erased from our culture. It is particularly vital that we be able to defend the faith and give rational and reasonable explanations for it. Because although reason will never bring you to Christianity, Christ and the Christian faith are not unreasonable. They can be understood in an intellectual context.

Not a day goes by without my giving thanks to God for my salvation. I don’t believe I have gotten up in the morning in the last twenty-five years without thanking Him for what He did in that driveway. And I can hardly think of that moment without feeling gratitude for C. S. Lewis at the same time.

Over those twenty-five years, a treasured possession has consistently reminded me of C.S. Lewis. When I came to Oxford in 1977, and spent a wonderful day speaking at the Oxford Debating Society, Walter Hooper met me. At the end of the day, he gave me a box. In that box was something wrapped up in paper. He handed it to me as I was leaving, and he said, “I want you to take this back with you and not open it until you get to London.” Well, I couldn’t resist! I opened it on the way back in the car, and in it was a pipe with tobacco in it—and not just any pipe. As Hooper wrote in his letter to me, “I hope you will accept this gift, one of C. S. Lewis’s pipes that is now yours to do with as you like. It will interest you to know that C. S. L. left us before he had a chance to knock it out.” I have it encased in glass, across from my desk. I realized that this was a pipe apparently on Lewis’s desk the day he died. I was so proud of that. Every time I had a friend come to my house, I would say, “Let me show you C. S. Lewis’s pipe.” Mark Hatfield, the former senator, was over at my house one night, and I showed it to him. He looked at it with a sort of scorn, and said, “It may have been the one that killed him!”

There are some great ironies in the way Lewis has impacted this century—great ironies in terms of my own life. Isn’t it amazing that it would be someone from outside of the evangelical subculture who would reach the White House hatchet man? I had been at every evangelical gathering that Richard Nixon had hosted (and evangelicals were flowing in and out of the Nixon White House all the time), yet even though I had listened to all of those messages, nothing ever got to me. Isn’t it ironic?

Isn’t it ironic that Lewis would affect me as he did, and then my book would come out in 1976, the “Year of the Evangelical,” as Newsweek labeled it in its headline? There was Jimmy Carter, born again Christian, and Mere Christianity enjoyed a resurgence of sales in America. Could Lewis have ever imagined that through his writings and his life of reflection he would create one of the evangelical resurgences in our country in the later part of the twentieth century? Could he, this humble professor at Oxford and Cambridge, have imagined the supreme irony that his writings might be used to convert someone who would go on to start a ministry that is in eighty-three countries around the world reaching out to hundreds and thousands of the lost and suffering—the least of these, the people who are marginalized, off in the prisons? The lesson in that, of course, is a profound one for all of us: Whatever God has called you to do, do it with excellence. Don’t jump ahead and try to imagine how you can change the world, because you can’t possibly out-guess God, because He has a better sense of humor than you or I do! Look what He did with C. S. Lewis’s life.

Lewis and Justice
Indeed, my ministry has been profoundly shaped by Lewis’s essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.”

When I got out of prison, I was aware of two things. First of all (and I had to repent for it), I realized that all of those speeches I helped Nixon write on law and order saying, “lock them up and throw away the key,” were wrong. (I did help him write them, at least the more eloquent ones.) I knew they were wrong because I met people who had been in prison seven, eight times, and prison didn’t deter them. I saw people who had been brought into prison on the humanitarian, utopian myth of the twentieth century that we can put people in institutions, and we can somehow rehabilitate them. I saw how false that was.

I couldn’t put it together until I read “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.” In 1954 Lewis argued so brilliantly that punishment should be based on just deserts, an understanding of what justice is—not on some therapeutic notion, not the triumph of psychology and therapy over law and reality. No, a person is punished because he has done something wrong. And only this view of punishment respects that person’s humanity and dignity, because he is given “just deserts” instead of having some Viennese scientists in white coats, as he put it, in a laboratory deciding how we can either cure or deter that person’s behavior.

Lewis profoundly affected my own views of capital punishment. I was opposed to capital punishment most of my life until I really understood the just deserts theory and realized that there are some cases that warrant capital punishment. This realization came when I was visiting on death row in Menard, Illinois, with John Wayne Gacy. He was so totally unrepentant, I realized that there was nothing else that would respect his humanity other than the just deserts of punishment.

Lewis saw where the “humanitarian theory” would lead us to, and that brings me to our topic. Lewis saw this at a time when Eisenhower was in the White House talking about peace, progress, and prosperity; when Ozzie and Harriet had moved into Levittown; when Britain was rebuilding after the war; when everybody was at peace. When everybody was comfortable because life was back to normal. Lewis saw that it wasn’t anywhere near normal. The prophet, the visionary, sees that which others can’t see. What he saw was more than just the flaws in the justice system. He saw the triumph of therapy over responsibility. He saw the utopian’s conquest, the victory of psychology and biology and science over law and reality. He saw how our traditional social consensus was coming unraveled.

When we drop the concept of desert the only two questions we can ask about punishment are whether it deters crime or whether it cures. But these aren’t questions on which any ordinary man has judgment, as Lewis argued; what is likely to deter crime is a question that only an expert penologist can answer; what is likely to cure is a question only the psychotherapists can answer. So take away the notion of the just desert, and the whole morality of punishment disappears. Why, in heaven’s name, he asked, am I—someone charged with a crime—to be sacrificed to the good of society in this way, unless, of course, I deserve it? Here’s what Lewis said—this is when he was beginning to speak so powerfully about what was happening to our culture: “My contention is that good men, not bad men, consistently acting upon the humanitarian theory of punishment would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants of all tyranny. A tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive of all.”

He then goes on to suggest that religion could be considered a neurosis—and just think how people could treat Christians if religion were considered a neurosis. This is precisely, of course, what happened in the Soviet Union. And this is precisely what is happening in totalitarian countries all around the world today--and precisely what could very easily happen if we don’t have the courage in Western society to defend a traditional morally rooted world view. Today it is merely impolite to talk about Christian truth, but in a not-too-distant future it may be considered a sign of mental unbalance.

Why Did Lewis “See”?
Lewis turns out to be the keenest prophet of the twentieth century. But why do you suppose he saw these things? How odd that it would be a professor of medieval literature! One can only speculate why it is so. I have one theory: he saw the signs of the changing times—the vacant stare of the coming postmodernism—written on the faces of young students in the classrooms before him. He heard in his students’ questions the beginnings of deconstructionism, depriving words of their meaning. What counted was not that Coleridge’s waterfall was really sublime, but whether that tourist thought it was sublime. I think Lewis saw the mood on the faces of students, when politicians and other cultural elites could not see it in the generation of leaders.

Maybe it was because Lewis understood the power of the imagination and how our aesthetic senses affect the way we ultimately think. This is why I am so appreciative of all of the artists and poets and authors who have been here this week to remind us of the need to reach out with the truth, not only propositionally to the mind, but to all of the senses as well. I know Lewis understood.

Or maybe it was because, as a scholar, Lewis had a well-formed understanding of the struggle between truth, the “Tao,” as he called it, and the great skepticism of those who believed that they could construct their own conceptions of reality. Lewis saw two great world views in collision!

Maybe it was because Lewis had a supernatural gift of insight. He liked to call himself a “supernaturalist” in opposition to the naturalism of the age.

Whatever it was, one thing is absolutely clear from his writings: C.S. Lewis saw the surging tides of deconstructionalism and skepticism that would soon erode the moral foundations of the Western world.

Lewis clearly saw that naturalism would defeat—for a time—supernaturalism, in the great conflict of the world views of the later half of the twentieth century. (Although I should say that the conflict is nothing new. Those world views were in conflict back in the time of the ancient Greeks. Aristotle dealt with questions of naturalism, and many Greeks believed in or sought a supernatural explanation for reality. I have always thought of Plato as a pagan searching for Christ. So that debate has gone on for a long time, but it has come to a collision at this point once again in the later half of the twentieth century.) He saw that the Western world would throw over the natural moral order. He foresaw the emergence of elite “controllers” who would tell us what was good for us and take away our humanity and dignity, instituting the kind of soft despotism Tocqueville wrote about. And Lewis saw that ultimately this would produce tyranny. He saw it all in the forties and fifties when few others—certainly few Christians—did.

Historical Background
I know all of you are thoughtful, thinking Christians, so I don’t want to insult your intelligence, but after I spoke at Wheaton College and referred to some of these concepts I was chided by students who said I was using terms like “naturalism” and “positivism” and “materialism” and “relativism” without putting them in context. So let me give a very simplistic snapshot of the course of Western thought against which we have to understand what Lewis saw and predicted. This will be terribly beneath most of you in this crowd. I guess this is a sign of the times. We take philosophy today and reduce it to a bumper sticker, don’t we? So I give you a story of Western culture on a bumper sticker.

From the Greeks onward, Western culture generally embraced the idea of a transcendent, absolute moral order. The Greeks believed in the absolutes of truth, beauty, and justice. They believed that a well-ordered life was a life lived in accord with these things. Then came the rise of Christianity and the belief in Judeo-Christian truth rooted in revelation. The “God who has spoken, who is” spoke to us, and those words shaped our belief system. Science became possible only because of that belief formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition; science is only measuring what is, what is real. If there is no order, no absolute order, what is there to measure? You can’t measure chaos. So science and the whole pursuit of knowledge rested upon these foundations.

Dramatic change in Western thought came about in the seventeenth century. I’ll use as my dividing point when Rene Descartes retreated to the isolation of what might be called his “Dutch oven”—that famous moment—because he couldn’t decide what was real in the world. So he sat in his Dutch oven until he decided what was real. And when he came out, he decided cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” The only thing he was sure was real was the fact that he could think. Although he was a strong believer himself, that phrase had profound and dangerous implications for the West, because it got people thinking of reality not in terms of what is external to us and objective and transcendent, but, rather in terms of how we perceive it. Truth became a subjective matter. Not coincidentally the introduction of subjectivity into knowing reality came the Enlightenment passion for the rights of man. The idea took hold that God was no longer needed to explain the cosmos, and therefore God was no longer needed for moral formulation. Along came Kant, who said that if we can’t perfectly empirically validate something, we can’t really know that it is. And finally we arrived at Nietzsche, who went beyond Kant and said that if you can’t validate something, it isn’t--so, “God is dead.”

Naturalism, the idea that there is a naturalistic explanation for everything, became a predominant theme of the Enlightenment. But it didn’t become part of popular Western consciousness until the twentieth century. John Dewey took naturalistic principles and transformed education from the pursuit of knowledge of an absolute truth and moral truth into a process. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes took these concepts and said that the law is no longer a binding set of transcendent truths--it is merely what sociologists think will work best for the people. Then there was Freud, in the 1920s, with his preoccupation with the therapeutic approach to life. And of course there was Darwin, whose naturalistic theory that we have evolved and are merely the highest form of primates has become so popularized.

Paul Johnson, the great British popular historian, marks the dividing era of modern times with Einstein’s discovery of relativity in 1919. People latched onto the word relativity, confusing relativism in the realm of ideas with relativity in the physical sciences.
Relativism, the idea that all propositions are morally equal and that there is no binding objective transcendent truth, and naturalism or materialism, the idea that there is a naturalistic explanation for everything, have become dominant in today’s culture.

Traditional Western thought fought a valiant fight for a long time -- even into the middle of the twentieth century. When I studied at Brown University in the early fifties, I took a course in sociology. Just to show you how quickly things have changed in the academy, that semester course in sociology was all about the traditional father, mother, the heterosexual family, and how that family worked. Today at Brown you can get your major in gay and lesbian studies. That is all in less than half a century.

An Unfolding Prophetic Vision
But Lewis saw where naturalism and relativism would lead. In his first book, Pilgrim’s Regress, published in 1933, he saw the utter sterility of materialism or naturalism as an idea. His allegorical everyman, John, had to pass on his journey through the deception of materialism. And he mocked it! I love the way Lewis did this! He mocked it, dismissing it as “a philosophy for boys.” Wonderful! For Lewis, Christianity and Hinduism are the only two serious options for the adult mind.

Three works, to which I would like to refer briefly, capture his prophetic vision for what was happening to the later half of the twentieth century: The Abolition of Man, in 1943, (which includes my favorite essay of all time, “Men Without Chests”); “The Poison of Subjectivism,” also written in 1943; and Miracles, an article that first appeared in 1942, and again later in book form in 1947. In these three writings we see his prophetic vision unfold.

First, he exposed the inherent irrationality of materialism. The job of the good apologist is always to start with our presupposition, God is: He has spoken; He has created the universe; He has spoken it into existence. And a good apologist demonstrates that any other proposition is irrational. This is precisely what Lewis did. Materialism gives us a theory which explains everything else in the whole universe, but which makes it impossible to believe that our thinking is valid. That’s because an accident cannot think of itself in any objective sense. Consider Lewis’s words: “In order to think, we must claim for our reasoning a validity which is not credible if our own thought is merely a function of our brain, and our brains are a by-product of irrational, physical processes.” Precisely! Every one of you can handle an argument with materialist, naturalist friends, who say there is a naturalistic explanation for everything. How can they know what they are saying is true? They are making their claim with a brain that supposedly results from a chance collision of atoms that came out of the primordial soup 8 billion years ago.

Then Lewis showed how this irrational materialism would lead to the death of morality. “This thing which I have called for the sake of convenience Tao, and which others may call Natural Law, or Traditional Morality, or the First Principles of Practical Reason, or the First Platitudes, is not one of a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected.” He went on to say, as an illustration of this, “Therefore if I say, ‘I ought,’ that has no greater moral weight than if I were to say, ‘I itch.’ ” Exactly! He saw that relativism was taking the law apart. The whole attempt to jettison traditional values as something subjective and substitute a new scheme of values for them is wrong. It is like trying to lift yourself by your own coat collar. I love that illustration, because if you try to lift yourself by your own coat collar, you will not only fail to lift yourself, you will only succeed at choking and strangling yourself in the process. This is precisely what modern man is doing. Francis Schaeffer said it well: “The modern man has both feet planted firmly in mid air.”

Lewis saw that a world view founded on materialistic principles could allow no room for ethics. I have lectured on ethics (or the lack of them) at several great universities in America, and I never can get any kind of debate going with the students. They have lost the language with which they can even engage in moral discourse, because they have been so enmeshed in this idea that there can be no absolute truth. We can’t even communicate today, because we have deconstructed, i.e., taken apart, the meaning of language. Lewis saw this coming in “Man Without Chests” published in 1943, in which he described the reaction to Coleridge’s example of the waterfall; those who said it was sublime were not saying that it was sublime in reality, but rather that they saw it as sublime. Lewis called this, in another essay, “verbicide,” the killing of words by stripping away and perverting meaning. If there is no objective meaning, I might say, “This is so” (because of x, y, z), and you would perfectly at liberty to respond, “That is all right, you can believe that” because that is only the way you see it. Nothing we say conveys the truth about anything other than the way we feel.

I have often lectured on the death of the rule of law. When I told the students at Yale Law School that their school was responsible for law’s demise because the “school of critical legal studies” (deconstructionism) was born there, I thought I might start a riot. But they didn’t argue with me, because they have rejected the law of noncontradiction. I can believe one thing, and they can believe something absolutely antithetical, and we can both be right! Utterly preposterous! But that is what deconstruction does. And it has affected literature, it has affected education, the law, and every area of life.

But Lewis saw where all of this would lead us. In “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” he said it would give rise to the great utopian pretensions. Deconstructionism opens the door to the great myth of the twentieth century: the goodness of man, that good people, freed of prudish Victorian restraints, can live in perfect bliss. But since it is the “controllers” who deliver us from such restraints, it in fact leads to the smoldering ashes of Auschwitz and the flowing rivers of blood in the Cambodian killing fields. The disaster of the twentieth century was the belief that man is good and can create his own utopia. Lewis saw this ever so clearly, as he wrote in the Abolition of Man: “Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that, not from any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such; having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.”

Subjectivism leads to tyranny. “The very idea of freedom,” Lewis wrote in “The Poison of Subjectivism,” “presupposes some objective moral order which overarches both ruler and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law, but if there is no law of nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators, and conditioners, and every creator stands outside his own creation.”

That expresses precisely the dilemma of the postmodern age. And remember who the barbarians are. The barbarians come, Lewis told us, not over the parapet, not carrying their clubs and wielding their weapons, but they come with polished fingernails and blue pin-striped suits, gathering in well-lighted conference rooms. They are the good people who say that they know how to make life better for all of us.

Before I tell you what I think we should do with all of this, I must point out one other irony. It’s rather overwhelming, as a matter of fact. During World War II, when the entire world was mobilized in the great confrontation between the Allies and the Axis, when Roosevelt and Churchill lifted the world to heroic exertions in protection and defense of liberty and freedom, when the world was seen as polar (good versus evil), when that war was seen as the war to end all wars and the war to make the world safe for democracy, when blood was being shed horrifically, when the whole world believed it was confronting the greatest evil, it wasn’t confronting the greatest evil. All the while, a quiet professor, sipping a pint, reading his beloved books, saw the true struggle differently. He saw the titanic struggle of good and evil not so much between the armies of the Axis and the Allies; he saw it in the workings of the human heart and the mind.

Solzhenitsyn in prison, put it so wonderfully: “The line between good and evil passes not between principalities and powers, but through every human heart, and it oscillates back and forth.” Lewis understood that. Lewis saw that the virus that gave rise to a Hitler was an alien idea, the embodiment of what Nietzsche had predicted would happen in his “will to power”—the superman. That same virus was infecting the good people here in Cambridge and Oxford and in Washington and in Boston. The battle lines were not necessarily drawn at Normandy and Omaha Beach and Dunkirk and Anzio, but in the world of ideas, in answering the question: “How now shall we live?” He understood that in the war over truth, the battle being fought was naturalism versus supernaturalism. And that is the battle we fight today. How now shall we deal with that issue? How now shall we live?

How Shall We Live?
I have four thoughts to leave with you this day as to how to answer that question.

The first is that despair is sin. There is never, never, never an excuse for a Christian to despair. We know how the final battle between good and evil has been fought and won—at Golgotha, with victory assured. We await the final culmination of history. This truth that Lewis grasped allowed him to be positively sanguine about the state of affairs. Not a pacifist—he always believed in doing one’s duty—but at peace. He said, in effect, “What are we worrying about? The world’s coming to an end anyway! History has been written already by our Creator. If it goes up in a puff of smoke it goes up in a puff of smoke, or it goes up when you simply keel over and that’s the end of things, what is the difference?” He would have laughed at all of the apocalyptic predictions and movies like Armageddon. They would amuse him if he saw them today.

The twenty-first century can be the great Christian century, if we understand that every other single way of perceiving reality, every other single possible world view, every explanation of what is, has been proven false and fraudulent and bankrupt and lies in the rubble of the Berlin Wall on the dust-bin of history. If only Christians have the sense to grab this moment and offer hope to the world, to say, “Yes, Christianity is the only rational explanation, the only way people can live their lives.” Then this can be a moment not of despair, even as postmodernity seems to swallow us up. This is a not a moment of despair. It is a moment of opportunity.

Second, I will say something that is controversial. I know it is controversial because I have said it in small groups this week and already had people taking exception to it. There is nothing more important than that we be “mere Christians”—it is the first line of defense, as we enter the new millennium. What Lewis meant by this phrase is that while there are many differences among us, Catholic, Orthodox, fifty-seven varieties of Protestantism, we live in the same house. We discuss our differences, when we have them, as we emerge from our rooms. We do live in separate rooms, because we understand our faith in different ways, but basically we agree on the fundamentals of the Christian faith. But it is inside the house that we ought to have those disagreements among ourselves.

The problem today is supernaturalism versus naturalism. True Christians—those who believe in the substitutionary atonement of the Cross, who believe that Jesus Christ is, indeed, Lord, that He died for our sins, that He calls us to come before Him in repentance and to give our lives to Him and follow Him as Lord—must lock arms and stand together against the forces of naturalism. We must do this not only to defeat those forces, but also to share in the glorious witness to the risen Christ. And we do it by standing together as Christians, not by being divided among ourselves. If we remain divided, it will be a sin before our Lord who prayed for the church: “Father, may they be one with one another, as I am One with You in order that the world will know that You have sent Me” (see John 17:23). How can the world know that Jesus was sent by the Father when the world sees nothing but Christians fighting among themselves?

We will never achieve unity in my lifetime, but I intend to devote my lifetime to working toward it—not in disregard of truth but in service of truth, realizing that it is the condition that God has created while division is the condition that man has created. And no one understood this better than the one who called us to be “mere Christians.”

Third, if we see one thing from the life and writings of C.S. Lewis, we see the necessity for Christians to have a well-formed world view. I think Lewis saw these things because he came from the intellectual world. He understood the intellectual history of Western civilization. He was able to put Christianity in context. Christianity is more than John 3:16. It is more than, “I have come before the Father, and I am now saved—hallelujah. Now I will go back to my church and study my Bible.” Christianity is more than that; it is the truth that God created this universe, and everything is under His sovereign judgment. And Christians are to bring to bear this truth in every single area of life from arts and science and literature and music, to politics and anthropology, right across the entire board; and that means understanding Christian truth that is lived out and made incarnate in every aspect of life. Lewis understood this. This is what enables us to be good apologists.

Why do we care about world view? We care about world view because we can’t live rationally without one. It would be like somebody going into a dark room filled with furniture and not turning the lights on. My friend Cornelius Plantinga at Calvin College says sin is nothing but folly; it is stupidity. It is not looking at and ordering your lives according to the moral order the way God has created the moral order. And so you are constantly “cutting against the grain of the universe” or, as he puts it so graphically, “spitting into the wind.” And that is what so many of us do. We truncate Christianity. We cut it short. We don’t see it as a world-view system in conflict with other world-view systems. And we don’t live it out, because we don’t understand that it is more than simply “I am saved. You are saved. We are O.K.” It is much more; it is the way we apprehend reality.

A Christian world view gives us the ability not only to order our lives rationally; it gives us the ability to evangelize. As I said earlier, I believe I would have been converted had I not read Mere Christianity, but Mere Christianity put it all in an intellectual context.

Remember, we are to advance Christian truth in two ways: to defend it as apologists and to be instruments of common grace. Every one of us should be an instrument of common grace. God in His saving grace reaches down and He converts and He transforms the heart. But He also reaches down and holds back the flood of sin that would otherwise engulf us. He uses us as His instruments, and He uses nonbelievers as His instruments of common grace to sustain His creation. Remember, defend and live the truth, and save us from tyranny.

And finally, I would urge that we realize that, in the final analysis, the battle is not ours. The battle is the Lord’s. I have listened to talks this week that have moved me so deeply. Every single one of us has an agenda. I do, of course. Everybody who has spoken from this pulpit has an agenda. But I think the time comes when we set aside man’s agenda and man’s programs, when we decrease that He might increase, when we realize that it is God, a holy God, whom we serve. We put ourselves aside. We fall prostrate before Him, and we say “You are the King of kings. Use us where you will. Use us in any way You choose.”

Because in the final analysis only one thing matters, that is, as Lewis put it so wonderfully: “When the Lord returns, it matters not whether we are in a great crusade to free the slaves or whether we are tending the pigs. The important thing,” he said, “is that we would be found at our posts.” What did Lewis expect of Christians when Christ returns? Simply that we be at our posts, doing our duty.

Why do we do our duty? Out of gratitude to God. G.K. Chesterton said, “The mother of all virtues is gratitude.” We do it out of gratitude to God for what He has done in our lives. So putting aside our own desires, putting aside our petty and partisan differences, putting aside our prejudices, deciding that we are going to stand together, loving one another, arms locked, let us go out of here from this magnificent, marvelous, rich, fulfilling conference with our minds renewed, our hearts on fire, and with our wills determined at whatever cost, with courage, to stand at our posts and to do our duty in what may be the greatest season of Christian evangelism and the greatest harvest of all times as we approach the new millennium.

God bless you.