PWJ: S4E01 – TSL – Welcome to Season 4!
It is finally time… To celebrate Hobbit Day, today we begin Season 4 of Pints With Jack where we’ll be reading through The Screwtape Letters. In today’s episode we just talk through this season an introduce our new co-host…
To celebrate “Hobbit Day”, today we begin Season 4 of “Pints With Jack”! This season we’ll be reading through C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters”. In this episode we introduce our new co-host and talk about what to expect this season…
S4E01: “Welcome To Season 4!” (Download)
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The roadmap for Season 4 is available here.
Time Stamps
00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:11 – Welcome
01:31 – Introducing our new co-host
07:11 – Quote-of-the-week
08:43 – Drink-of-the-week
12:54 – Toast
14:09 – Chapter Summary
14:56 – Season Structure
24:58 – Screwtape Unscrewed
28:43 – Screwtape Genesis
43:08 – Screwtape Impact
52:20 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Remarks
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
Matt and Andrew sat down for a chat to talk about The Screwtape Letters:
Here is a link to Joel Heck’s website which is mentioned during their discussion.
Show Notes
Opening
- This season we’ll be reading The Screwtape Letters. We have spoken about this book on three previous episodes:
- We have added a new co-host, Andrew Lazo. He’s going to be a busy man this year as he’s just started the charter class at Northwind Seminary, pursing a Doctorate of Theology and Ministry in Romantic Theology, studying the works of the Inklings. Andrew was also just on the Upstream podcast with Shane Morris:
- Since recording the last Pints With Jack episode, I got married!
- Matt told us about The Meaning of Marriage, a book he’s really enjoying by Timothy Keller. “Dr. Love” (Jason Lepojärvi) has already recommend that book. Andrew pointed out that Keller’s wife, Kathy, had even corresponded with Lewis. Andrew also recommended The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason, which describes marriages as looking into a mirror.
- Matt shared the quote-of-the-week, which comes from a movie he hasn’t seen:
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”
The Usual Suspects/Charles Baudelaire
- Andrew is a great fan of scotch and a member of The 1405’s. The drink-of-the-week was The Balvenie (Double Wood, 17 years). Here are the tasting notes:
- Nose: Elegant and complex oak, vanilla, honeyed sweetness and a hint of green apple.
- Taste: Sweet with dried fruits, sherbet spice, toasted almonds and cinnamon, layered with a richness of creamy toffee notes and traces of oak and deep vanilla.
- Finish: Vanilla oak, honey and spicy sweetness.
- Matt toasted Gold Level supporter, Kelly Gross:
Kelly, we raise a glass that every day, through God’s abundant grace, you find the strength to fend off any and all attacks by Screwtape & Wormwood.
Toast to Kelly
- Normally at this point I would share my chapter summary which, this season, I will be restricting to one hundred words.
Discussion
Season and Episode Structure
- Matt then began explaining how we’re going to organize this season. We’re going to be discussing a new Screwtape letter every Tuesday. Our “After Hours” episodes on Thursdays. In addition to having great guests like Dr. Michael Ward and Dr. Holly Ordway, we’re also going to be having an “Owen Barfield Month” and a “Poetry Month” when we’ll be talking about Lewis’ poetry.
- When speaking about our dynamic as a threesome, Andrew quoted from The Four Loves:
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)
- Matt explained that our Skype Sessions this season will most often be recorded by the member of our group who was not on the main podcast episode. We’ll also be having on some more guests.
- We’re also planning on hosting “Watch Parties” where we’ll watch documentaries and the Narnia movies and then all chat together afterwards. This will be available to Patrons. We might even send out popcorn to our upper-level supporters!
- During our discussion of this, I mentioned two movies I had recently watched, Tenet and the live-action Mulan. I thought the former was extremely mind-bending and the latter rather dull.
- Andrew recommended Bill And Ted 3, as well as C.S. Lewis: Dreamer of Narnia from Disc 3 of the DVD version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
- I explained that each episode will have a section at the end when we untwist Screwtape’s logic from convert it from its hellish point-of-view. I brain-stormed a bunch of different names:
- Resisting The Devil (James 4:7)
- Battle Plans, Armour of God, Stratagem (Ephesians 6:10-20)
- Michael’s Memo
- Patient Prognosis
- Untwisting Screwtape
- Unscrewing Screwtape
- Straightening Out Screwtape
Screwtape Genesis
- I then invited Andrew to tell us a little bit about the background to the composition of The Screwtape Letters.
- Books such as Problem of Pain and Out of the Silent Planet have already been published when Lewis began The Screwtpe Letters. Lewis was also writing Perelandra whose story contains a demon-possessed Weston. He was also writing A Preface to Paradise Lost, which was John Milton’s epic poem about the Fall of Man, which no doubt also exerted an influence, particularly because the devilish character was seen as something of an attractive character there.
- When talking about society of the time, Andrew quoted Chesterton:
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
G.K. Chesterton, What’s wrong with the world
He also quoted Mere Christianity:
“Do you really mean, at this time of day, to reintroduce our old friend the devil — hoofs and horns and all?” Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is “Yes, I do.” I do not claim to know anything about his personal appearance.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book II, Chapter 2)
He also quoted one of Lewis’ poems:
God in His mercy made
The fixed pains of Hell.
That misery might be stayed,
God in His mercy made
Eternal bounds and bade
Its waves no further swell.
God in his mercy made
The fixed pains of Hell.
C.S. Lewis, Divine Justice
- We know from a letter to Warnie that Lewis got together with Dr. Humphry Havard one night to listen to Hitler on the radio give his speech, “My Last Appeal to Great Britain. A great empire will be destroyed”. I asked if Lewis listened to it in its original German. Andrew said that Walter Hooper says that:
“During Hitler’s speech from the Reichstag in Berlin at 6 p.m. the BBC gave a running translation so that it was possible to hear both the original utterance and an English rendering.”
Walter Hooper, C.S.Lewis : A Companion and Guide
- The next day, Lewis went to the noonday service at church. Rev Arthur William Blanchett, the young curate preached. Lewis, rather bored, started to think about Hitler and Satan. He’s what he wrote to Warnie:
“Humphrey came up to see me last night (not in his medical capacity) and we listened to Hitler’s speech together. I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people: but it is a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little. I should be useless as a schoolmaster or a policeman. Statements which I know to be untrue all but convince me, at any rate for the moment, if only the man says them unflinchingly. The same weakness is why I am a slow examiner: if a candidate with a bold, mature handwriting attributed Paradise Lost to Wordsworth, I shd. feel a tendency to go and look it up for fear he might be right after all.”
Letter to Warnie (July 20-21, 1940)
He went on to describe the idea he had for letters from a demon:
The idea would be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view e.g. “About undermining his faith in prayer, I don’t think you need have any difficulty with his intellect, provided you never say the wrong thing at the wrong moment. After all, the Enemy will either answer his prayers or not. If he does not, then that’s simple – it shows prayers are no good. If He does – I’ve always found that, oddly enough, this can be just as easily utilised. It needs only a word from you to make him believe that the very fact of feeling more patient after he’s prayed for patience will be taken as proof that prayer is a kind of self-hypnosis. Or if it is answered by some external event, then since that even will have causes which you can point to, he can be persuaded that it would have happened anyway. You see the idea? Prayer can always be discredited either because it works or because it doesn’t”
Letter to Warnie (July 20-21, 1940)
What Lewis writes here will appear in the final book in Letter 27.
Screwtape Impact
- The letters appeared in The Guardian Anglican newspaper (May 2nd through November 28th in 1941). This is not the same as the British newspaper available today in England. Lewis was paid 2 GBP per letter. As usual, Lewis gave the money away to widows and orphans, but then got stung with a massive tax bill! This prompted him to setup the Agaponary, The Agape Fund through his friend, Owen Barfield, whereby he gave away two-thirds of all his earnings.
- The Published the letters as a book in England in February, 1942 and appeared in the USA several months later.
- The initial printing of 2,000 copies sold out immediately. It was reprinted eight more times that year.
- It made his name, particularly in the USA, getting him on the cover of Time Magazine (September, 1947) with the subtitle “Oxford’s C. S. Lewis His heresy: Christianity”. It described him as “The most popular lecturer in the University”, saying “With erudition, good humor and skill, Lewis is writing about religion for a generation of religion-hungry readers brought up on a diet of ‘scientific’ jargon and Freudian clichés. … [He] is one of a growing band of heretics among modern intellectuals: an intellectual who believes in God.”
- It brought about a landslide of letters which he answered. Walter Hooper estimates that he answered about 50,000 letters in his lifetime. Walter told Andrew that Lewis’ motto was, “When in doubt, GIVE MORE. Answer the letter.”
- Lewis called himself a “hot-gospeller”, and likely knew that writing Christin books would torpedo his career – which it did.
- According to Warnie’s 1951 Diary entry, someone announced his intention of voting against Jack for Professor of poetry in favour of Cecil Day-Lewis because Jack had written Screwtape a decade earlier.
- Matt quoted an essay about The Screwtape Letters:
The Screwtape Letters are deeply committed to a narrative in which abandonment to the will of God is humankind’s only ultimately worthwhile pursuit and demons are dedicated to thwarting that pursuit.
- We chatted about the conflict between “town” and “gown”, the idea that if something is popular and readable then it can’t be very good. Needless to say, Andrew brought it all back to Till We Have Faces:
“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 4)
I argued that Lewis was simply a “master communicator”, as Dr. Steven Beebe has written in his book, C.S. Lewis and the craft of communication.
PWJ Stuff
- I encouraged listeners to check out our Facebook page, as well as our shop, and Andrew’s eBay account.