Summary
Alister McGrath argues for the importance of the imagination in truth-telling and truth-seeking.
Transcript
I think one of the things that C.S. Lewis did was to recover this sense of the importance of the imagination. And one of the things that Lewis realised was that if you limited yourself to reason alone, and you had this glib and shallow rationalism, that just didn’t deliver an adequate basis for life. And Lewis discovered that the imagination opened up new realms which in effect could be shown to be rationally defensible.
And I think one of the great outcomes of this is the rediscovery of the importance of story. Stories are not simply things to entertain us, they are things that are there to convey meaning, to open up newer imaginative possibilities. Here is a new way of seeing things, and if you enter into this way of seeing things the world is a very different place. Think of The Chronicles of Narnia; J.R.R. Tolkien did the same for Lord of the Rings.
I think this rediscovery of the imagination in human truth-seeking and truth-telling is really very important. I think Lewis played a very important role in doing that.
