Pastor John, how did the influence of C.S. Lewis prepare you to discover the theology

of Jonathan Edwards?

Here's the connection.

At least the best I've been able to figure out what God was doing.

Not just between 64 and 68, the Wheaton years, but 68 to 71, the fuller years.

I see the Lewis Clyde Kilby, my lit professor, Wheaton connection, that cluster of influences

as putting the intellectual and aesthetic kindling in place, and it was a very big pile.

I mean, these were dry and unbelievably flammable sticks that were being put in place.

The sticks of logic and the sticks of aesthetic awareness, the sticks of longing and aching

and yearning, the sticks of awareness of beauty and the desire to see it know it.

All those sticks were being put in place.

So that, when the fire of reformed theology, namely Dan Fuller, the Puritans, fell in the

years 68 to 71, they had sticks ready to burn.

That's the way I understand what God was doing.

I didn't get the content so much of my theology at Wheaton as I did the categories of thinking

and the categories of feeling and the intensification of a soul engagement with the world so that

when I began to read God's book, the Bible, having schooled myself on God's book, the

world, everything in it just exploded.

All the ways that Lewis had spoken about seeing things for what they really are, feeling

them for what they really are, speaking them in words that awakened the true value of

them.

All of that came to bear on my reading of the end for which God created the world by

...