A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
incomparable cherry cheesecake: that the best learning is apt to happen not in a classroom but in a home, helped along by food and drink. The hospitality we began to learn from the Kilbys has enriched our own teaching for more than fifty years.
I have lingered on my own experience of Kilby’s teaching because I think it illustrates in one particular instance (the one I know best) the sort of door-opening that Kilby accomplished—directly, for generations of students at Wheaton, and indirectly, for the wider public of his work on behalf of Lewis, Tolkien, and the others of the “seven” that formed the focus of the Wade Collection (now known as the Marion E. Wade Center). Clyde Kilby was fundamentally a teacher, but what he had to teach was not a collection of facts; rather, he taught an awed, thankful, and joyful stance toward creation and Creator. From the time he first came to Wheaton—as assistant dean of men and professor of English, in 1935—he was able to embrace the bigness of vision that the Christian liberal arts college embodied, and that is well expressed in words from Jonathan Blanchard, Wheaton’s first president and the subject of a biography by Kilby, Minority of One: “Every truth is religious because all truth belongs to God.”
But Blanchard wrote those words early in the nineteenth century, when evangelical Christianity was still in a place of power, and the perfectibility of society still seemed a possible end to the great American Christian experiment. But—as many have documented—by the early decades of the twentieth century this robust Christianity had been marginalized, and Christian faith became defensive. All intensities of feeling were suspect, except the intensity of need to turn people back from the wrath to come. Though Wheaton College never completely gave in to that withdrawal from engagement with the world and the life of the mind, the culture that supported it had increasingly withdrawn to a small, closed room, characterized by a premillennial eschatology that tended to devalue both creation and culture, a gospel that preached the good news of salvation from, but with no sense of salvation for, and personal piety that stressed relationship between the soul and God—but not how to appreciate the sanctity of the world around. So Mark Noll, long a history professor at Wheaton—and a former student of Dr. Kilby—was able to write with some lament of “the scandal of the evangelical mind,” the scandal being that it doesn’t have much of a mind.
But it was not just the life of the mind to which we had closed the door: we were also walled up in a Christianity that had little room for intensities of feeling, especially toward the created world. It was that door—the door opening on beauty, and what it implied about ourselves and our God—that Kilby opened for many of us. And he didn’t just open the doors. He put us in the hands of a whole set of wise, holy, and imaginative guides. Kilby knew a great deal already of the country he helped us to explore, and one of the marks of his own saintliness is the eagerness with which he stepped aside and let these guides lead us on out through the door he had opened.
Here Luci Shaw’s other metaphor is apt. Kilby didn’t just open a door; he opened a floodgate, and what poured out was a stream of truth that was gloriously refreshing because it flowed not from “evangelical” or “Protestant” or even “Christian” sources, but from a wonder at creation itself, which is the source of all true myth. The writers for whom Kilby became a channel were certainly Christian, but what they gave us enlarged our understanding of what “Christian” meant: they helped us understand what water meant, along with the whole torrent of created reality that flows everywhere. Lewis’s great mentor, George MacDonald, put it beautifully: “There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen; it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier.”2 Water must be understood as water before it can be understood as “the water of life,” and these great mythmakers enabled us to understand both. I recall a chapel talk Kilby delivered based on Jesus’s words from the cross, in which he spoke of the immense and gracious irony that caused the maker of water to cry, “I thirst.” Such a recognition helped make Kilby such an effective conduit for the work of these writers whose imaginations has deepened our understanding of both Christianity and creation. The essays that follow, taken from lectures, reviews, interviews, and scholarly articles, provide a good, deep drink from Kilby’s “well of wonder.”
1G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1936), 60.
2George MacDonald: An Anthology, ed. C. S. Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 81.
SECTION 1
C. S. LEWIS ON THEOLOGY AND THE WITNESS OF LITERATURE
Chapter 1
LOGIC AND FANTASY: THE WORLD OF C. S. LEWIS
Here, in an article first published in Christian Action, January 1969, Kilby presents a brief survey of Lewis’s life and work, chronicling the beloved writer’s life from childhood to his death in 1963. He stresses the importance of his early education, particularly in the discipline of logic, received under the tutelage of the formidable W. T. Kirkpatrick. Kilby’s insistence on the powerful combination of logic and imagination in Lewis is echoed by another British Christian, the theologian J. I. Packer, who has often remarked that Lewis’s strength lies in the fact that “all his arguments are pictures, and all his pictures are arguments.”
If you continue to love Jesus, nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope you may always do so.” That remark may sound like a fond old grandmother’s, but it was written to a little girl by one of the most brilliant men of our time. The man was Clive Staples Lewis, distinguished professor at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and author of more than forty books. It was written less than a month before his death on November 22, 1963, the same afternoon President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
C. S. Lewis did not easily come to so simple and straightforward a faith. Born in Ireland, he learned simple goodness from his first nursemaid; but afterward, through the influence of a well-meaning but wrongheaded school matron, he turned atheist. His father was a successful but eccentric Irish solicitor, and his mother was a cheerful and wise woman who early started her son off in the study of French and Latin. But neither parent was noteworthy for the sort of deep faith that eventually was to characterize their son.
Nor had the parents two other deep strains that came to mark their son’s outlook. The first was a romantic strain of longing for an indefinable but intense thing called joy. The second was just the opposite—a mind trained razor-sharp in logic. In the course of time the British Guardian said that following the train of an argument by Lewis was “like watching a master chess player who makes a seemingly trivial and unimportant move which ten minutes later turns out to be a stroke of genius.” The New York Times spoke of one of his books as possessing “a brevity comparable to St. Paul’s” and an argument “distilled to the unanswerable.”
The romantic strain in Lewis was associated with the green Castlereagh Hills, which Lewis and his brother Warren could see from their nursery window, and with a toy garden of moss, twigs, and arid flowers made by Warren on the lid of a can. Later this tendency came to include a profound love of Norse legend, the “Ring” cycle of Richard Wagner’s operas, and the entire world of Norse mythology. The logician strain is best seen in Lewis the lecturer and biblical apologist. For instance, at the beginning of his book The Problem of Pain he makes out a better, or at least a more succinct, case for atheism than Bertrand Russell ever did, and then he proceeds to demolish that case. But it should be said that nearly always the romantic and the logical are combined both in his books and in his whole way of thought.
The big house to which his family moved when he was seven years old helped to shape Lewis’s love of solitude. It was a place of “long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair