Lippy to deliver C.S. Lewis lecture today

Forty-five years ago when Christian apologist C.S. Lewis died, church attendance in Great Britain was falling.

Today, the highest estimate of participation in church in England is 3 percent of the country’s population, according to Dr. Charles Lippy, the LeRoy A. Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at UTC.

“Western Europe, including Great Britain, is a far more secularized culture than the United States,” he said. “It was one of the things (Lewis) was concerned about.”

Today, Dr. Lippy will discuss the topic “Is Christianity Plausible Today? Challenges of the 21st Century” as he presents the 26th annual C.S. Lewis Lecture at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

He replaces Dr. Timothy George, dean of the Beeson School of Theology at Samford University, who could not attend because of illness.

“We had hoped to get him in as a speaker (before he retired),” Dr. Doug Kutz, the Ben Gross Chemistry Professor at UTC and Lewis Lecture committee member, said of Dr. Lippy. “We’re kind of happy we put him in a position to where he can’t say no.”

Dr. Lippy said his intention is to suggest that the world in which Christians try to get their message across has changed significantly since the day of the Christian apologist.

New immigrants, including Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, have made the religious culture in the United States much more diverse than the Judeo-Christian culture that was the norm in Mr. Lewis’s day, he said.

The enemies then were referred to as “godless Communists,” Dr. Lippy said.

“It suggests,” he said, “there are some stunning transformations over the last several years that have challenged how (Christianity) has been seen,” he said.

How worship is viewed, the decline of mainline Protestant denominations and gender and sexuality issues also are among today’s challenges, Dr. Lippy said.

The lecture, he said, will explore “what does (it) have to do with what a Christian finds believable, and how to address (the challenges).”

Dr. Kutz said Dr. Lippy’s topic may touch on some of the same things Dr. George was going to talk about in his lecture, “Theology for an Age of Terror.”

Dr. Lippy, who will retire from UTC at the end of the semester, said he will end the lecture with some personal reflections.

The lecture is sponsored by the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, UTC and Covenant College.