Surfing on God: Peter Kreeft on Surfing, Science, Sanctification, and C.S. Lewis

The Table Audio w/ Evan Rosa

“We must re-mythologize. We must see myth not as the flight from reality, but as the flight to reality. And if we thus love and value myth, we will make them because we are creators made in the image of the Creator. And that’s what Lewis did. That’s what Tolkien did.” Peter Kreeft is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and has written upwards upwards of 75 books of philosophy, theology, apologetics, essays, reflections, and more, not to mention his frequent public lectures and articles, though he considers his own approach to philosophy as no more than a shell full of water in the shoreless sea of God's infinity. In this episode, Dr. Kreeft’s reflections each felt like their own short and yet quite expansive essays, spanning from surfing and sanctification to C.S. Lewis and mythology. Rather than presenting it conversationally, we’ve queued up each topic to let Peter Kreeft be Peter Kreeft.

Show Notes

• 3:30—Peter Kreeft on Peter Kreeft
• 3:46—On surfing, the ocean, and heavenly life.
• 4:06—“Surfing, I think, is preparation for heaven. Because if you’re a soul surfer, instead of a hot-dogger, you just follow the wave and you become part of the greater being and in heaven we’ll surf on God.”
• 5:38—“In Perelandra, the wave is a symbol of God’s will… so you simply follow the wave of God’s will, that’s the secret of sanctity.”
• 6:04—On sanctification, perfection, and the summum bonum.
• 6:59—“That process looks different for everybody because everybody is different. The road, the story of everybody is different. That’s why God created billions of different people, not just one. And that’s why heaven is going to be endlessly interesting because we’ll share each other’s stories and enter into each other’s stories.”
• 7:17—On Gabriel Marcel, being, goodness, and personhood.
• 8:44—On becoming a saint.
• 9:53—“I personally believe that when we get to heaven we're going to be very surprised at who's there. How did you get there? Your theology was all askew. Well, yeah, but God saw deeper than that. He saw a heart that sought Him, and He Himself said, “All who seek me will find me."”
• 10:28—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief.
• 12:24—On psychology and modernity.
• 13:43—On the soul, Henri Bergson and mathematical bees, science, and what human persons are.
• 17:32—“The soul is not physical, but it is the soul of a physical body, and the body is not spiritual, but it's a body of the spiritual soul. Whenever you touch one, you touch the other. Just as you can't change the meaning of a book without changing its words, or change the words without changing the meaning. Anything that affects the body as a whole affects the soul too, and anything that affects the soul also affects the body.”
• 18:39—On intellectual virtue and civil discourse. “I think the two most important virtues of the mind are also moral virtues, honesty and prudence, or the fanatical search for truth on the one hand and practical wisdom on the other hand.”
• 19:53—On love.
• 20:44—“Only if you love somebody do you really know them. This is why God is so wise because He loves. Love opens the eye, the eye of the heart, the deepest eye.”
• 20:57—On suffering, Victor Frankl, and the necessity of meaning.
• 21:54—“It's not just the will to live. It's a belief, a faith, a trust that all of life, including suffering, has a meaning, has an outcome.”
• 23:22—Ad break: “Seeking Christian Wisdom for Life’s Biggest Questions” via Biola LEARN (15% off your next course).
• 24:56—On Clive Staples Lewis and his legacy.
• 26:13— “Lewis has done more for welding Christians together and helping them to understand each other, especially by that book Mere Christianity, than anybody else has done. He has shown us what's important and what's less important. He's given us a sense of perspective. 50 years later, he remains utterly up to date, utterly relevant. He's not dated because he deals with the perennial things.”
• 27:25—On Lewis, literature, and telling the truth through fiction.
• 29:02—“Lewis tells it like it is. A lot of people hate him for that. He offended people in his own day. He continues to do so. In fact, if you're not offending anybody, you're not saying anything very important.”
• 29:15—On Peter Kreeft's favorite works of C.S. Lewis.
• 29:45—On Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, Christianity, and mythology.
• 30:41—“Lewis, like the medievals, was fascinated with allegory and symbolism and thought of this not merely as a literary device but as something in the structure of the universe because things are also symbols. God writes with things as we write with words, and therefore the dispute between let's say the modernists and the fundamentalists about whether the Bible is symbolic or literal is a silly one. It's both. The one does not exclude the other.”
• 32:06—On why dark places are holy places, and how C.S. Lewis embodied that truth. “The holy places must be dark places for two reasons. One, because the darkness is in our own souls, and we project that on to the God that we try to find. The second reason is that there has to be faith. There has to be trust. God can't reveal Himself totally to us and still elicit from us the loving trust that He wants, above all.”
• 33:29—On what we find when we remove our armor and let down our defenses.
• 34:25—On sharks and vending machines: linking the darkness of the ocean with holiness, faith, and the risk that life is.
• 35:14—“Faith is a risk. Love is a risk. Life is a risk. It's a very dangerous thing, being born, but it's an adventure.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu