On Thursday, Jan. 30, Wheaton College’s Wade Center hosted the first of three lectures in this year’s Ken and Jean Hansen Lectureship series. Aubrey Buster, associate professor of Old Testament, presented “C.S. Lewis and the Apocalyptic Imagination,” a discussion of C.S. Lewis’ engagement with apocalyptic thought through his stories.
Given that apocalyptic literature often arises out of crisis, Buster guessed that Lewis’ generation would be marked by a renewed interest in apocalyptic literature in the wake of two world wars and the atomic bomb. However, Buster found the opposite.
“Lewis pronounces a verdict on his age concerning the doctrine of the last things,” she said. “It’s not that they are denied or opposed. It is that most simply do not think of these things at all.”
During Lewis’ age, Buster said, the dominant narrative of the end of the world was the mythology of progress. Lewis called this mythology “the scientific outlook, evolutionism or developmentalism,” in which the world grows slowly toward perfection. Lewis perceived the mythology of progress as malformed, and sought to reform people’s imaginations through his stories, Buster explained.
In the lecture, Buster describes how saturated Lewis’ fiction was with many of the same elements present in Biblical apocalyptic texts. Lewis, rather than seeking to disprove the myth of progress through argument, uses “the persuasive power of vividness” to show the beauty of the biblical apocalyptic narrative and the unattractiveness of the alternative through his stories. “What we see,” said Buster, “is a strategy in which Lewis does not primarily seek to show that the alternative myth is wrong, but that it is unattractive.”
Danielle Corple, associate professor of communications, was the respondent for the first lecture. Corple said that humility is the proper response to biblical apocalyptic literature. The reason why the mythology of progress is so alluring, she said, is its appeal to the human desire to “predict, explain and control the unknown.”
However, the purpose of biblical apocalyptic literature, said Corple, is to “move us toward awe and wonder at a God whose ways, even his weirder ways of communicating, are higher than our own.”
Moreover, Corple also emphasized the dangers of the myth, as evidenced by the many injustices done in the name of progress. “We must confront the horror of this myth, which ultimately is the horror of attempting to play God,” she said.
Following Corple’s response and a brief Q&A with the audience, Jeffrey Barbeau, professor of theology, had a book signing in the lobby for his new book “The Last Romantic: C.S. Lewis, English Literature and Modern Theology.”
In an interview with the Record after the lecture, Buster explained that apocalyptic literature, today as in Lewis’ time, can be divisive, with people reading it literally and trying to predict the future, or ignoring it altogether.
Referring to Lewis’s stories, Buster said, “I hope it gives us a way to rethink those apocalyptic elements of our own faith as something that neither needs to be a hack to predict the future or despised as something primitive about the Christian faith, but can be realized as a center.”
Buster’s second lecture on February 27 addressed Lewis’ construction of the monstrous, and the third lecture on April 10 will address his construction of hope. Her research for the lectureship will be published by InterVarsity Press (IVP) in book format in early 2027. Previous lectures have been developed into books and published by IVP Academic.
The lectureship is hosted annually by the Wade Center, a literary center that emphasizes the ongoing relevance of seven British Christian authors: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams. The Wade Center invites Wheaton faculty from a variety of disciplines to present on one of the seven authors through the lens of their particular discipline. Walter and Darlene Hansen endowed the lectureship in honor of Walter’s parents: Ken Hansen, a former Wheaton College trustee, and his wife Jean.
Buster’s vision for her lecture series aligns well with Walter Hansen’s original hope for the lectureship. In Hansen’s preface to Barbeau’s “The Last Romantic,” Hansen writes that the purpose of the lectureship is “to explore the great literature of the seven great authors so that we can escape from the prison of our self-centeredness and narrow parochial perspective in order to see with other eyes, feel with other hearts, and be equipped for practical deeds in real life.”
Buster’s lecture offered listeners the opportunity to see apocalyptic literature with other eyes.
“I hope this encourages the church to think more about heaven than winning conflicts on earth or being afraid of hell.”
