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Why did C.S. Lewis think natural law could make us human again?

, · January 24, 2023

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but irrigate deserts.” With these words C.S. Lewis opened The Abolition of Man. Lewis spent his life standing against the modern approach to education, an approach that encouraged cynicism and skepticism, leaving a wasteland in its wake. On the basis of his own university experience Lewis was convinced he was living in an age of men without chests. Men asserted their will to power, deconstructing the morality of classical philosophy, but all the while cowering in the face of society’s destruction.

Michael Ward joins Matthew Barrett to probe the ways C.S. Lewis served as a modern-day prophet. Yet Lewis was also strategic, appealing to natural law to throw into question the subjectivity rampant in his day. His goal was ambitious: the recovery of objective virtue and moral value, all for the sake of humanity’s survival.

Matthew Barrett

Matthew Barrett is the editor-in-chief of Credo Magazine, director of the Center for Classical Theology, and host of the Credo podcast. He is professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the author of several books, including Simply Trinity, which won the Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in Theology/Ethics. His new book is called The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. He is currently writing a Systematic Theology with Baker Academic.

Michael Ward

Michael Ward is a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford and serves as Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. He is the author of several works, including Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford University Press), The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge University Press), and After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis (Word on Fire).

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