released 11/21/2025

Jeffrey Barbeau, author of The Last Romantic: C. S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology (IVP, 2025), explains what made Lewis an effective theologian, though Lewis himself disavowed that title. His extensive engagement with the philosophy, literature, and theology of earlier ages — the Great Tradition — made him an excellent “translator” of theology for non-theologians. Barbeau explores a controversy in the mid-1960s at Wheaton College (when Lewis’s reputation and legacy were still being debated) in which Dr. Clyde Kilby championed Lewis’s view of the importance of developing a Christian imagination. In opposition, Dr. Morris Inch expressed the evangelical stance common at the time — which reflected a modern epistemology — that emphasizing the imagination and aesthetics would lead to theological relativism and subjectivism. Barbeau describes how Inch’s position reflected a late 19th century emphasis on rationalism and a strenuously dogmatic vision of faith that downplayed how the Holy Spirit and Scripture use beauty and emotion to make truth come alive for believers.

21 minutes

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