Transcript
KILBY: The novel we -- there is not -- there is one novel among this particular group of people that I'm trying to describe -- there's only one novel been produced that I consider both thoroughly Christian and a real novel in the full sense of the word. It's called A Holy Masquerade, and it's by
a Swedish writer by the name of Olov Hartman (inaudible). Olov Hartman, A Holy Masquerade. I've just pulled it off my shelf, I loaned it out, so it's getting worn out a bit. I just pulled it off my shelf and went through it again
just before I came up here. It's a powerful novel with a tremendous Christian meaning. But still, it's a novel, utterly readable. The depth with -- the skill -- it's a translation, but you feel the skill in the translation. In the drama with the crowd I'm talking about, and as far as my knowledge goes, has done quite
little. A moving picture, there are some very trained people in a technical way, some who are putting out films -- expensive films that they make for big corporations and whatnot. And they know how to make pictures. But nothing Christian, that I know of. It's --
I don't know who made the -- that movie -- what's that recent movie of...
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: The Hiding Place.
KILBY: Yes, The Hiding Place.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: (inaudible) that was that Billy Graham movie.
KILBY: Was it?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Yes, (inaudible).
KILBY: I was told -- I've never seen this, but I was told -- it came down south when I happened to be there, and I was told that there wasn't a single person in the theatre that wasn't weeping at the end of the film. I just told that, I've not seen it. But, that suggests that it has a lot of power of some kind.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: (inaudible).
KILBY: I think, by the way, that they've done pretty...
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: It's more than just literature.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: It is literature.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: It is literature, but it is -- yeah, it is...
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: It is literature.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: It's literature and it's not literature in the good sense (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I don't know what that means.
KILBY: Well, by the scholarly definition, you mean. By the scholarly definition. I'd like to say just one more thing, now.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: [Good?] literature is not fiction.
KILBY: That's just a word about the crowd that I know best, because I'm one of them. And I've been in writing conferences, and all kinds of conferences. Now there's a -- if you extend this to the word Christian, then I think we have a good deal to proud about. I'm not talking to the point you raised, how we go about getting publishers to publish this, and why they don't and so on, but I think once you extend this to the word Christian --
what we understand there -- you do have, of course, men like Tolkien, and Lewis, and [Macdonald?], and Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers, who is very, very good. And of course, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, and so on, and so on, and so on. You can make a long list -- Graham Greene. How many are there? And they
do have reputable publishers, by the way.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Yeah, but it is still -- you're speaking of a past (inaudible; overlapping dialogue).
KILBY: I still agree with you.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: It's still a past group. Now, for example, today, John Updike is regarded as a religious writer. I don't think he is. But he's regarded as a Christian writer and is actually supposed to write in the [Bartian?] mode.
KILBY: I'll have to tell you something about that.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I'd much rather read Bart than I would read John Updike.
KILBY: I know of a case --
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: They're quite different.
KILBY: -- since we're way off from the place, you won't know who I'm talking about. If you think you know it, it's somebody else anyway. But, I know of a case where a Christian school gave John Updike an award -- a considerable -- money, I don't know what it was, I forget, but anyway, gave him an award, and the powers that be in the school made him take it back.
That's what they thought of (inaudible) non-Christian writer.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: (inaudible).
KILBY: Nothing.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Well, when you think actually, of what Run, Rabbit, Redux, Couples, you name it, and it's a descent into nothing. And yet, actually, he has been classified and written about, I think, in several magazines, as a Christian writer, which probably illustrates the point that I've been trying to make, which is that the level of Christian consciousness is at an all-time low.
(inaudible) how do you see the writing style (inaudible). How do you see the (inaudible)?
KILBY: [Albert Mugrich?] said that Solzhenitsyn was the greatest man alive, and I have a very high opinion of him as a writer, of course we get him in translation. And I -- he -- nothing that I know of that is directly, immediately, Christian, but everything that he -- that I have read of his
that's in that direction, such as his speech on receiving the Nobel Prize, wasn't it?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Yes.
KILBY: Tremendous, just tremendously -- all the implications is thoroughly Christian.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: So, that really his writing is a critique of secular society. When you think of the The Gulag Archipelago, and people find it very boring to read, but this is a very good experience of what it means to live in a truly secular society. Now, I think our society is an extraordinarily boring society, all you have is money and Cadillacs and things like that. It's extraordinarily boring, and if you speak about it, or write about it, you're regarded actually as a community or something else. Whereas he who has grown up in communism is writing about any kind of secular
society, and also his criticism of American society is that it is too like a Russian society, and does not have the vitality, actually, to challenge and to face it. And I think he's probably right. And I think that you can see a Dostoyevsky quality of that Solzhenitsyn. And he is indeed, I think, in the mainstream of great Russian literature, and I think the two greatest forms of literature are English -- and I'm excluding American
here -- are English and Russian. They're magnificent forms of literature, and they are at their best when they're most distinctively Christian. And what I see in Solzhenitsyn is a growing awareness, A of -- a growing response to the [word?] that meets him in the human situation, that means him in the secular situation, to which he responds. And you see a growing response. You see that actually In The First Circle, which obviously comes
from Dante, the involvement, the drawing in actually, the going down the various circles into the depths of hell. Because there are no standards, there are no highlights, just as the same as it is in the Gulag Archipelago. You have nothing but a great mass of grayness. It's one-dimensional existence, and he makes us conscious of another dimension. Yes?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Yes, yes. Well that would be -- I think many people would conceive of him as a Christian -- a great Christian writer. You see, I think at the time he was living that the Christian consciousness was very much alive, and so that Shakespeare, as he writes, is very much involved in it, and he's very much aware of the symbolism, the language, the myth, the great stories, the great legends, which he weaves into his structure. And you're very conscious of right and wrong, it isn't a case
of left and right with him, is it? He's wrong, he's very wrong. He's right, he's very right. There's a sense of judgment. The human conscious, for example, is something that can't be trifled about, because whenever the divine order is broken, then the man finds no rest until he's brought to judgment. The ghosts like Macbeth's ghosts or Hamlet's cry
for judgment. And you can't escape that judgment, because it is part, again, of the divine order. And I'd say that Shakespeare is a very -- I mean, just take his speech on the quality of mercy that does not strain but it falleth like the (inaudible) beneath -- is unquestionably straight out of the Bible. I mean, what else?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: No, well he lived -- before that time, I think that he's the last, as it were -- some people say, and I'm no expert on Shakespeare, but he lives, doesn't he really, as the last of the medieval man, conscious of the changes that are taking place? And these changes had already taken place in the medieval world, and he's very conscious of the breakdown of order, and he's terribly worried and concerned about...
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: (inaudible)
KILBY: There have been a number of books written on both sides of the fence trying to prove, on the one hand, he's a Catholic, and on the other side, a Protestant. This might mean something -- I see what you're talking about. He isn't a Christian writer in the sense of talking directly about Christianity, but then, you see, you can put most anybody -- I've always thought about Voltaire's Candide, where is a thoroughly cynical
from one end to the other. But Voltaire couldn't have been that cynical about the lack of goodness in the world if he hadn't had a terrific yardstick about what goodness meant. So, that in some sense you could even say of Voltaire that he's thinking about Christian things.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: And I've, of course, actually been probably maligning American literature, but I'm doing so because I think it is, essentially, literature of revolt, and it is the revolt against Puritan, it is against and against Calvinism, but the very source of its revolt is borrowed from that which revolts against. Whereas -- and that's why I don't think it's in the same category as the great -- as you find actually in the early English literature, as you
find it in the pre-Shakespeare literature, as you find it in Milton, as you find it in the early English novel, particularly. You don't find that these great affirmations are made -- although they're made in very subtle ways, you don't find that, because I think that we inherit -- because of our times -- inherit very much a literature of protest.
KILBY: There are two interesting books written by Edmund Fuller -- up here in Connecticut, he was headmaster of one of the schools up there, I forget which one. One is called Man in Modern Fiction -- they're not new books -- in which he takes up the bad things, you know, that have been -- there are a number of books on that subject -- the direction of modern fiction and its degenerating direction.
But then another book called Books with Men Behind Them. I like that title, Books with Men Behind Them. And here, he covers not only Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams, but also a good many writers that I'd never heard anything about, and I went and read a number of those writers, and found them very good. You might be interested in that second book in particular,
Books with Men Behind Them. Edmund...
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: (inaudible) when we hear the phrase Christian writer, to me the thinking (inaudible) when Christian doctrine was implicit, and (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Well, I think so many -- what has been called Christian books -- have been awfully bad literature.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: (inaudible) your teaching to me (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Well, [you're?] to take, I think this is true. And yet you find -- at least I find -- say, Graham Greene, and always deals with a burned-out case, writes in a very Christian mode. I think his -- The Power and the Glory is probably one of the most -- is a very devout -- very deeply Christians -- are you familiar with -- I'm sure most of you are -- is a far better presentation of the man in the secular
state than anything that was ever written by the death of God theologians, or any of these so-called secular theologians, because it shows, actually, the whiskey priest, although he isn't much of anything, he's outside his culture, he's outside his own kind of religious limitations, he has a bastard, he's a whiskey priest, and yet actually, he is the Christian man in the world, and through his tattered humanity shines the power and the glory.
And one of the great things, I think, about Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory is that the whiskey priest doesn't point to himself and his own qualities of excellence, as so much so-called Christian -- contemporary Christian literature does. It's a very moralistic, it's very legalistic, it's very gnostic, I think. And I think it's, in the end, anti-Christian. But I think that, in a book like that, you do have, I think, a very clear presentation
of the Christian man in the world that would suit any good Calvinist. And I would regard myself as a Calvinist -- not a good Calvinist -- but a bad Calvinist would (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: (inaudible) Christian (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I can see, I can read this case now, and he's got a good case, I think. But, can any of you have any suggestions to make about books that you think are -- because a lot of good books, you see, are completely hidden because they don't get onto the best-seller list, because they -- book-sellers aren't going to sell. It's a very short list.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 4: It has one book on it, doesn't it? You mentioned that one. Kilby mentioned that one book about Swedish author, and that was the end of the list as far as...
KILBY: Well, I was talking about a sort of circle within a circle there, I don't want to say an inner circle, because that's misleading. But, I mentioned him. There are a very great many -- well, as a matter of fact, The New York Times, I think it was the October 1st New York Times -- you saw this -- somebody sent me a copy of it. They had an article on evangelical literature. Evangelical -- I can't imagine The New York Times using that word in
its correct meaning. No sneering, a perfectly acceptable article, written of course by some staff writer, some feature writer. And they just accepted it all and published it. But saying that evangelical books are the books that are in now. That doesn't mean, of course, there are good books necessarily, but they -- well, you know -- the Jesus people type of folks.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: But this, I think, has been one of the problems, in a way. Because this is people writing for themselves, in terms actually of the market as a whole, in terms actually of literature that will appeal, such as Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, this seems to be the problem. And so, as I say, you have a division that has taken place, and how can we bridge the gap between the two? Because if you're just writing for Christian folk, that's all, you're just reinforcing
their convictions, which may be a very good thing, but how are you going to reach out and attract people? For example, when you think of the old days, when people read Pilgrim's Progress, for example, or who read Tom Jones. I was speaking at a group one time of very good people, very pious people, and I said, "Tom Jones is a great Christian novel," and they nearly ran me out of the town. And it is, its model
is, of course, the Pilgrim's Progress, and it is devoutly Christian novel. But it's interesting that a very devout group wouldn't think it was a Christian, because Tom Jones seems to be too much of a sinner. Now, it seems to me that I read about sinners in the Bible. My own book, [Souling?], by the way, was thrown out of the book rooms of the southern Baptists because it had
a seduction scene in it. And I presumed that the man in the world is involved in the sins of the world, and that if you're going to be converted, you're going to be converted from a sinful life to a righteous life. You're going to be converted from that which makes for darkness, to that which makes for like. And yet the
southern Baptists in the book rooms felt this was much too sinful a book, that if you're going to write a Christian book you have to write about a man who is goody goody all the way through. Now, the people I know have never been very good, and some of the worst people I know have been the most pious.
KILBY: I think we should talk about the thing you suggested here, a bit. Namely, publishers. I know a man
and wife who are publishers, they've just started in the last five or six years, and they've published about 40 books so far. They want to publish good books, but they have to stay in business. If you publish -- if they don't publish -- let's put it that way -- a certain kind of book, they will go out of business. They've talked to me about this seriously. What will they do?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: (inaudible) survival?
KILBY: Pardon me?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: What kind of books do they publish for their (inaudible).
KILBY: Well, they're substantial books, but they -- they're not literature in the strictest sense. They're small-sized books -- maybe that's a way to say it. They're not bad books at all, they are sort of self-help books --
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: They're how-to books.
KILBY: -- how to raise a family, kind of thing -- a Christian family, you know, this sort of thing, which is all right in its way, and lots of anecdotes, illustrations, a feature, and lots of preaching, of course, lots of excitation and -- clever, in as clever ways as possible, which I don't object to if it's done -- you can do anything --
anything's all right if you do it well enough. But they acknowledge that the books they would like to publish aren't being written, or at least -- on the one hand, you see, they turn -- it's an old story -- you go round and around like the hen and the egg. They say, "We would publish better books if we could sell better books." So, they blame the public. And who knows which one is to blame. I think both are to blame. I think that a lot of publishers --
I think that television is a perfect example of something that I think is more -- I more and more think it is a vicious, deadly thing that is going to destroy us. That's my opinion.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Reduce us to the one-dimensional existence.
KILBY: And, you see, they keep saying the same thing. "We go by popularity, we get the figures, and that's what we go by." Well, I don't believe that's what they should do. I believe they ought to do better than what people are asking for, not just what they're asking for.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: And so, this comes back, really doesn't it, to the responsibility of the Christian in a world, because his responsibility isn't simply an individual responsibility, it's a communal responsibility. His responsibility is not only for himself, but for the body of Christ as a whole. Not only is it a responsibility for the body of Christ as a whole, but it is a responsibility within the body of Christ, actually, to bring something of
Christ's healing power through art and literature to a dying world. And we can write about the dying world, but unless we write about the redeeming and risen savior, we aren't going to help them very much. It's interesting, by the way -- how many of you have read Dostoyevsky's The Idiot? You know, Prince Myshkin...and you remember, actually, that has been slated actually, by the Dostoyevsky
scholars as being one of his least successful books, because they say it has too much propaganda. I'm not sure that it is -- I rather like it, because there's a lot of very good things in it, and he is certainly portraying the Christian as a fool for Christ's sake. But there again, actually, the model, and maybe that many Christians have in their mind is not of that -- of the fool for Christ's sake, but it's that of the president -- maybe it's somebody like Jimmy Carter, or it's somebody like Eisenhower,
or it's somebody like the head of Reader's Digest -- what's his name now? DeWitt Wallace. These are the models. Hmm?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: (inaudible).
KILBY: I didn't hear that.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 4: Colonel Sanders, he said.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Colonel Sanders, yes. Well, these are the models, unfortunately, that we try to use within a Christian sort of milieu, and they don't work, because they're not true to the Bible. We try to make successful Christians, when really they're not all that successful. And anyway, it isn't their success that we're supposed to write about.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: Would it be fair to ask you how you (inaudible) C.S. Lewis and Tolkien (inaudible).
KILBY: To get to...
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: (inaudible) level.
KILBY: To see Lewis, you mean?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I think you could see him -- wasn't it every Thursday afternoon -- you could see him in a certain pub. And [cover down?] with theological conversation with him. I mean, I think there was that openness about him, and there were opportunities of meeting him, and Dr. Kilby can probably tell you about those.
KILBY: Well, I met him by appointment. I was going to be -- my wife and I were going down to Palestine as amateur archeologists, and we decided to blow all our money at one time, and come back up through Europe, and spend a summer in England I was teaching English literature. And I wrote him before we left, and then I wrote him after we got to English, at his suggestion, and we agreed on a time. And I went to see him.
In Tolkien's case, I pulled a sort of stunt that I'm not too happy about, except by the fact that I imposed myself upon, Dr. [Havard?] Lewis's physician -- Lewis and Tolkien's physician has now become my good friend year's later -- but I found out that Dr. Havard lived up the street a little distance from Tolkien,
and I actually somehow persuaded him to come out and have tea with me in his garden while his patients waited for him up in the front of the house. We had tea for one hour and talked about everything. But, what I hoped he would do would be to telephone Tolkien, and tell him to let me in the house, because I knew it was very difficult to get in Tolkien's house. When
I said to him, "Now, I want to go down and see Professor Tolkien, and how do I go about it?" He said, "Well, just go on down there, he's not doing anything." So, I went down, and I rang the bell with fear and trembling. But nobody came, to my utter disappointment. And I was ready to leave when Tolkien opened the door and let me in.
"For a few minutes," he said, but then to my great delight, after a while a bell rang -- I think it was a bell -- I think it was a button in the kitchen that Mrs. Tolkien could ring the front doorbell with to get rid of visitors. Any rate, he said, "I'd like to have you come back and see me." Which of course, I did, and then he met me
like a long-lost friend, and that was my first meeting with him. If you're talking about how you get to fooling with people like this, I think it's the same thing as falling in love. Who knows? Who knows how it all began. Who knows? I'm going to say something -- no, not here, I guess -- about myth. I'm going to go down to Hillsdale College next week, and talk
about myth and such things, but I was going to quote -- no, I'm going to do that here in a little bit -- I was going to quote Carl Gustav Jung, who said, at the beginning of his autobiography, "At the age of 83, I have decided to sit down and write the myth of my life." And this is what I have
come to feel about my own life as, in my old age -- who knows how the events have been ordered? I myself have been a Christian for over 50 years, and I am perfectly sure, as time goes on that the...
things that have happened to you. Sometimes they turn on the least little pivot, nearly nothing. Remember Browning's poem? What does he call it? I wrote a little paper on it once, years ago. But it's about some lovers who just looked at each other once across a crowded room. This is it. I don't think he ever married here, but they were -- he was sure
they were in love forever. Well, this does really happen, you know. And they get together sometimes. Who knows? Who knows what little -- I wrote a book once, I remember, a biography, because of the rather silly question that was asked of me by an alumnae [sic] at homecoming at Wheaton College. He said, "Have you written that biography of Jonathan Blanchard yet?" Well, I had never thought about writing a biography of Jonathan Blanchard, the first president of Wheaton.
I had written a little brief 10-page history of Wheaton, just for preface to a study we were doing. Well, I immediately got the idea of writing a biography, and I spent more than -- a spent about a year and a half doing the work, and writing this little book, all from an ignorant question, a question rising totally out of a man's ignorance. And so on,
I could go back through my life and identify many points like that, where almost nothing comes to something. And sometimes a lot of something that I think comes to nothing.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Remember what we talking about this afternoon? And that is, the contribution probably that has been made by Tolkien, and particularly by C.S. Lewis, is the fact that so many of our young people in -- on campuses today have had the advantage of reading -- of having read them in their young, before they came to college. And as a consequence actually, are much more open to the gospel than, say, youngsters several years ago. So, that they've already -- these two writers have done
a splendid job, and isn't this one of the goals that they were striving for, particularly C.S. Lewis when he writes in his three lectures on -- what was the name of that chest? And one of the tragedies of contemporary education is that it completely ignores the heart, and it ignores the source of the emotions, which is also the source of wisdom, understanding, intuition, and the receptor, as it were, of revelation.
KILBY: By the way, that book, which is called The Abolition of Man -- it's one of the chapters you mentioned -- has been admitted -- some years ago was admitted to the great books of the world, by the way, by the Encyclopedia Britannica -- you remember those -- that set of books? It was put in there along with the shorter poems of William Wordsworth, who is quite somebody in the world, and an eighteenth-century political
philosopher -- I forget his name now. But I think that book deserves to be among the great books of the world, and my edition of it is 50 pages, but it is worth any -- most ten other volumes on the same subject. The Abolition of Man, a nice title isn't it?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: There are three lectures, actually, on the philosophy of education.
KILBY: And he -- this was published, I think, in 1948, and it is far more, or nearly true now than it was then.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: More noticeably now.
KILBY: Headed straight down the road. And 1984, I think, is going to hit it right on the nail head. What have we got to go?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: Could it be the case -- maybe because of (inaudible) that's also because of tremendously rising college enrollments over the last decade, and what we're witnessing now is the era of past giants, such as Lewis and Tolkien and Sayer and Chesterton (inaudible) right now (inaudible)
mere mortals walking around and trying to (inaudible) great shoes. And it takes time for this truly epic and Christian writers to become recognized.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: To be noticed, yes. The times actually create the man, sort of thing.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: In some sense, it seems now that in the last decade, there has been a tremendous growth on (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Well, there's been a general fragmentation of education generally, I think, hasn't there? And it's lost that unity which comes out of the unity of our corporate body, with one -- the corporate mind. Not -- I'm not identifying that with collective consciousness, but people who have a core of truth to which they can relate their experiences, and of course the great thing about Chesterton, now that you've mentioned him, was that his Everlasting Man, you see, was one of the kingpins
of the 1920s and the 1930s. So, many agnostics who are now very vocal Christians -- I think Mugrich, by the way, was greatly influenced, wasn't he? By the Everlasting Man.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: Lewis.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Lewis was influenced by the Everlasting Man. But I know so many English intellectuals have been very much influenced by the Everlasting Man, and that was the kind of turning point in their life, reading that story, because it was a story about themselves. It was a story about man as he always is.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: (inaudible) we're about to get about from this writers (inaudible). I think, to a certain extent, (inaudible) perhaps (inaudible) years ago, but now it's (inaudible) certain amount of time has lapsed to (inaudible) composers want to see. And I think, depending on their -- want to see now.
Second thing is (inaudible) highly regarded work by (inaudible). Stravinskey was one of the few (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Well, Stravinsky, I think, had a very Russian quality. You had the [Bagdragg?] Russian Orthodox Church there, and you could notice that dramatic nineteenth-century quality there. But in his work he could hear -- well, some of his work is just like a repetitive of the vespers of the great mass. But there is -- so, there is hope, I think. I certainly am not despairing, and I think the hope lies -- I don't think it lies in my generation,
I think we're almost dead now -- but I think it does lie with the rising generation, and maybe people like ourselves can prod them along a bit, something good will happen. But another thing is that the church has to come alive. I think it has to come alive intellectually, I think it has to come alive in literary and artistic terms. And I think we have to get -- and I think maybe that's happening now, we're breaking the [view of civic?] religions which had a dead hand in everything.
And I think we'll be -- and I think that what Dr. Kilby was referring to, the kind of new evangelical slant, which I think is simply a return to an older form -- the evangelical quality that I experienced when I came to this country at all, didn't seem to me to be like evangelical at all, it seemed to me an introduction to literalism, to legalism, and to moralism. And I think there's been a big
break-through, and I think one of the leaders in this break-through, a man I admire enormously, has been Mark Hatfield. And I could date the change simply --I think maybe eight years ago, maybe nine years ago. And I say in that time -- I think I'm seeing a significant change taking place, and a new form which is simply an old form, a truer form of evangelical expression. And I think in that, there's a great deal of hope.
KILBY: Well, I hope you've read Born Again by Charles Colson, it's a tremendous book. And he says -- he tells about his tremendous surprise, he was a big man around Washington, as you remember, but he tells of his great surprise to find out how many prayer meetings -- dead serious prayer meetings were going on in the houses of Congress.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 4: Well, they sure need it.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: (inaudible)
KILBY: Yes, there has been at least one other. I think that Born Again is confirmation of the whole New Testament. You don't think that God does business today, read that book.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: No, I think this is the kind of recovery that we're talking about, the action of God. I think we've suffered from a Greek and Oriental view of God, in which God has been sort of separated from his creation, we have to see that God is active in the world, and he never left the world. And that certainly, surely -- the assurance that we have from Jesus, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age, and the end of time, and the end of the world,"
it's certainly an assurance that we have to bear in mind, and the thing is that it's -- our literature hopefully would express something of the realism of this kind of (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: One of the things that (inaudible) evangelical church is (inaudible). I think that -- you talked about a new [birth?] (inaudible) kingdom of God, and the ability to see Christ (inaudible) we can see, the redeem from (inaudible).
And I think that, as far as going on, and it's (inaudible) what to is get someone (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: And Paul reminds us, doesn't he, that our hope is in the endurance in 5 Romans.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: So, the (inaudible) man in audience comes from that (inaudible)
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: (inaudible) their bodies...
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: It wasn't salvation at all. (inaudible) difference between saying, "This is a corrupt generation, let's preach (inaudible)." As far as the world system and (inaudible). And a present (inaudible). He actually still Lord of the whole earth (inaudible)
And I think that we can point to this (inaudible) in reality (inaudible).
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Well, C.S. Lewis achieved something of that kind of picture, doesn't he?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: (inaudible)
KILBY: Well, I think it's hard to generalize about any of these things. I'm an evangelical, and I've known for years exactly what you're talking about. I've had complete freedom in my mind, complete freedom in every way, and I -- somebody was asking me today about Wheaton College -- my college -- and I was saying -- I think we were talking in the
dean's office, I believe -- every college in this country up until the time of the land grant colleges, and a great many colleges since then, even including our time, were started by Christian people. Princeton was started by Christian people, Harvard, Yale, all the rest of them, by Christian people. Now, your own dean has told you tonight what the problem is at Princeton.
And this is the problem in almost every college in this country. They were started by Christians, and now they're not Christian. They're heathen, in essence. I think you've got to fight to preserve this, and you've got to fight hard. My college has had a terrific fight. Before you know it, and this -- I'm talking now about a college, but you know this is true of yourselves -- before you know it -- 00:45:29] -- let me keep talking about college -- before you know it, a college can be down the drain. I've seen this in my own lifetime in various colleges. You get the wrong dean in, you get the wrong president in, and it's amazing how a little group will be formed, and pretty soon you're -- I could tell you the details of how it works, I've seen it work -- pretty soon
you're slipping and you can't recover -- you cannot recover this. I'd like to know an instance -- I know of one very minor instance -- but I don't know of a major instance in the history of this country in my time -- the last 40 years, let's say -- when a college that has slipped away from its Christian morays has come back. And it's true in personal life the same way. You've got to fight, you've got to be holy,
you've got to try to be holy if you're going to be halfway decent. Your aim has to be tremendously high just to keep moving. That's my -- that's what I have had to -- that's my personal life as it has worked out. I'll give you an example of something that's happening to me at this moment. I have a niece down in Tennessee, she's about 50 years old. She lived with
a man that was impossible for 25 years. She finally divorced him. Now, she is having troubles with an adopted child of hers who is living with a man, apparently, that she's not married to, they're going to get married in the spring, but they're living together now. And she has various other problems, and she's down in East
Tennessee, where I grew up, and I'm at the point where she has asked me for advice. She's tried some churches there, they have not met her need, I regret to say. Perhaps she hasn't gone far enough. But she's told me about a group of tongues people down there, and I wrote her a letter in the last three or four days telling her that I
recommend that she join them, go their meetings. And she is in need, she is in desperate need, almost to the point of suicide. What do you do? When you -- you don't tell them to go down to the First Methodist Church unhappily, or even the First Baptist Church, unhappily, I must say.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I'd hardly advise a black man to go down to Jimmy Carter's church. Yep?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: (inaudible) one of my (inaudible) who believes in the future, he or she (inaudible) and (inaudible) be it fictional or non-fictional, (inaudible) some words of wisdom that you shared (inaudible)?
KILBY: For one thing, Lewis did write out, on one or two occasions, a one, two, three list to a couple of young people in this country, by the way, and I don't remember them all now. One thing was, he says, turn off the radio, which would mean turn off the television now. But it's the usual kind of advice, that you stick to it,
my advice to many young people -- I've taught writing for many years -- used to -- I taught creative writing for a number of years, and I warned them the first day in class that if they expected me to turn them out a creative writer, they might as well drop the class and save their money. You can't create a writer, you can't make a writer,
you can tell a writer a lot of things to do, and the main thing, what I told my kids, "I'll guarantee you one thing, you're going to have to do a lot of writing in here, and that's what may show you whether or not you're a creative writer." You do it -- this is what they don't do. They don't do it. I used to ask them sometimes -- they'd come in and want to be a poet, or something. "Did you write any poetry this week?" No. "Well, any this month?"
No. "Any in the last six months?" No. Well, you're not going to be a poet, just forget it. Now, if you're going to be a writer, you write. You've written something in the last week, or in preparing definitely, getting ready and written some of it. The way you become a successful writer of Christian writing or anything else is to write, to work at it,
to struggle with all your soul, to say what Hemingway did on one occasion, I understand. One of his teachers -- was it at Harvard? -- said, "What do you want to do?" And he said, "Be a writer." And he said, "You'll starve." And Hemingway said, "I don't care." And he said, "You'll be a writer." That kind of thing makes writers, not having a fine inspiration some Wednesday evening after dinner,
this sort of thing. This is what Lewis himself practiced. You keep at it, and of course you follow some rules. Lewis himself -- I've thought a great deal about how he
got to be a writer. A great word in Lewis's case is clarity. I was asked by -- what was it? -- the New York Lewis Circle -- they sent out a questionnaire, and one of the questions was well, should we have an emblem of some kind? And I -- in a hurry, I was trying to answer the question there a bit, and I said, try to put the word clarity -- get clarity into it somewhere. That's great praise. He learned how to be clear. Most of us are very unclear.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I think that adds another thing, actually, to the points that Dr. Kilby is making. You know, keep writing. You have to have something to write about, however. You can write all your life, and if you don't have something to write about, it ain't going to happen. But you also have to struggle in order -- and that includes facing the reality of the day to day experiences -- but I also think you have to do this very thing that was so characteristic of C.S. Lewis, and that's be honest, which is perhaps the most difficult thing of all. I think it was honesty
that gave clarity, don't you, to C.S. Lewis's work?
KILBY: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: A lot of his -- for example, a lot of people don't like his Surprised by Joy, because his conversion wasn't in the sort of Billy Graham way. You know, after all what were the three little pointers that led to his conversion, but you remember the little miniature garden, the little bunny rabbit, and the Norse saga. So, that these were completely unexpected moments, which nevertheless were moments of grace.
And I think that's one of the things we have to realize, that people aren't necessarily converted in our terms, or in our way. But that God has a Word for each one of us, and I think that in writing as we are faithful to the Word as it comes to us. After all, it is the Word who is Christ, who is Creator, and who is Articulator, Initiator. All things are summed up in Him,
[philosians?] all things are summed up and hanged together in Him. And so, I think it is in that sense, when we are faithful to the Word that comes to us and say, "Well, this is my Word, and I'm going to write faithfully, but how it's come to me." But if we start to write in terms of the word that we think has come to Dr. Kilby, I think we're going to be phoney, and I think so much about Christian literature is phoney literature, in the sense that it's about the second-hand Word
rather than first-hand Word. And the great literature is always that first-hand word.
KILBY: One of the...
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: And I think in Born Again, that there is a great quality of honesty about that, and he just tells the story as he comes to it. And it's God's grace, it's God's Word that's come to him, and he responds to it.
KILBY: One of the few questions I asked Lewis -- I was teaching aesthetics in a Christian college -- the question comes up about the Christian novel. Can you write a Christian story which is at once really Christian, and at once a novel in the fullest sense of the term? And Mr. Lewis's answer was very immediate. And it was, how about a Christian
carpenter? And that's the real answer to it, you see? You have a carpenter who is a Christian. Another thing Lewis believed was -- and this is the most extreme statement I've heard -- I've had -- I've been in round tables innumerable on this -- but this is the most extreme, and perhaps the correct statement, if you can take it all in at once,
if you don't take half of it. He said, "If you sit down to write a story -- if you're a Christian and you sit down to write a story, you must, above all other things for that time, forget that you're a Christian. Don't even remember that you're a Christian." Which is as far away as you can get from the sermon that is chocolate coated by fictional methods. But he also says
that if you're a Christian -- see, this is the second half of it -- if you're a Christian, your Christianity will get into the story whether or not. And he says that when he first wrote The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, there's no lion. But that Aslan eventually came bounding into the story, and there's the example, you see.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: That is a good example.
KILBY: It's like his Christianity -- it's like his story of his conversion. He says he was the most disconsolate man in England, he though -- convert in England. It was that kind of thing, and this makes it very powerful, of course, to you. And the same thing happens with your writing of Christian writing. You don't try to -- and the least, you try not to write a Christian story, you try to write a story. That's the point. Just a good story. And of course,
all his Christian fiction is a good story first. You can read the Narnia books, or the space trilogy, or anything he wrote, even the Screwtape Letters, you can read just for fun.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Well, I think the Screwtape Letters have probably been the most successful -- have been the most widely read.
KILBY: Yes, they have.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Where in England, I don't know about here, it's very interesting that the end -- shortly after the war -- this I think, was the best seller, wasn't it?
KILBY: Yes, it was. Yes, and I might say...
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: And it was read by all kinds of very sophisticated people -- who thought they were very sophisticated, anyway.
KILBY: Yes, and lots of them were deeply moved by it. Lewis's books are selling at least three times today as during his lifetime. Lewis is having a real spiritual effect on this country.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: There's no question.
KILBY: All over this country.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Which is very encouraging.
KILBY: You ought to see my mail.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I think we'd better pack up now, because some of you have work to do tomorrow. You have, and I have.