The Wade Center organizes the 10th annual Hansen lecture

On Thursday, January 30th, the Wade Center of Wheaton College organized the first of three lectures in this year's Ken and Jean Hansen series. Aubrey Buster, Associate Professor of Old Testament, presented “CS Lewis and the Apocalyptic imagination”, a discussion about the commitment of CS Lewis with apocalyptic thinking through his stories.

In view of the fact that apocalyptic literature is often created from the crisis, Buster assumed that Lewis' generation would be shaped after two world wars and the atomic bomb by another interest in apocalyptic literature. However, Buster found the opposite.

“Lewis speaks a judgment about his age about the teaching of the last things,” she said. “It is not that they are refused or rejected. It is the case that most simply don't think about these things at all. “

During the age of Lewis, said Buster, the dominant story of the end of the world was the mythology of progress. Lewis called this mythology “the scientific perspective, evolutionism or developmentalism”, in which the world is slowly growing into perfection. Lewis found the mythology of progress to be deformed and tried to reform people's ideas through his stories, said Buster.

In the lecture, Buster describes how saturated Lewis' fiction was with many of the same elements in biblical apocalyptic texts. Instead of refuting the myth of progress through arguments, Lewis uses “the convincing power of vitality” to show the beauty of the biblical apocalyptic narrative and the unattractivity of the alternative through its stories. “What we see,” said Buster, “is a strategy in which Lewis does not primarily try to show that the alternative myth is wrong, but that it is unattractive.”

Danielle Corple, Associate Professor of Communication, was the respondent of the first lecture. Corple said that humility is the right reaction to biblical apocalyptic literature. The reason why the mythology of progress is so seductive is his appeal to the human desire to “predict, explain and control the unknown”.

The purpose of the biblical apocalyptic literature, said Corple, but it was “moving us into a God and being surprised, whose ways, even his more strange communication channels, are higher than our own.”

In addition, Corple also emphasized the dangers of the myth, as the many injustices in the name of progress have shown. “We have to confront the horror of this myth, which is ultimately the horror of the experiment to play God,” she said.

After Corpe's answer and a short Q&A with the audience, Jeffrey Barbeau, professor of theology, had a book in the lobby for his new book “Under contractThe Last Romantic: CS Lewis, English literature and modern theology. “”

In an interview with the recording after the lecture, Buster said that the apocalyptic literature, like in Lewis' time, can be split today when people literally read them and try to predict the future or ignore them as a whole.

Regarding Lewis' stories, Buster said: “I hope it gives us a way to rethink these apocalyptic elements of our own faith as something that does not have to be a hack in order to predict the future or to despise something primitive about Christian faith, but can be realized as the center.”

Buster's second lecture on February 27 dealt with Lewis' construction of the monstrous, and the third lecture on April 10th will deal with the construction of hope. Your research on the lectures will be published in the book format in early 2027 by Intervarsity Press (IVP). Earlier lectures were developed into books and published by IVP Academic.

The lecture is organized annually by the Wade Center, a literary center that emphasizes the continued relevance of seven British Christian authors: CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, GK Chesterton, George Macdonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams. The Wade Center invites the Wheaton Faculty of a variety of disciplines to present one of the seven authors through the lens of their respective discipline. Walter and Darlene Hansen issued the lectures in honor of Walter's parents: Ken Hansen, a former trustee of Wheaton College, and his wife Jean.

Buster's vision for her lecture series matches Walter Hansen's original hope for the lectures. In Hansen's foreword to Barbeaus “”The last romantic,“Hansen writes that the purpose of the lectures is to” explore the great literature of the seven major authors so that we can escape from the prison of our self -centeredness and our close parochial perspective in order to see with different eyes, to feel with other hearts and to be equipped for practical acts in real life. “

Buster's lecture offered the audience the opportunity to see apocalyptic literature with different eyes.

“I hope that this will encourage the Church to think more about the sky than to gain conflicts on earth or to be afraid of hell.”