C.S. Lewis—An Annotated Bibliography and Resource

Brazier

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894469
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This bibliography and resource consists of a chronological introduction to the development of Lewis's works, a copious bibliography and a guide to the study of Lewis, an introductory essay on Christology in Lewis, and a glossary for those unfamiliar with some of the background and terms to Lewis's understanding of revelation and the Christ. It will be an invaluable resource for all scholars of C. S. Lewis. The bibliography stands alone but it also serves to complement the three volumes of the series C. S. Lewis, Revelation, and the Christ.

1 / Lewis . . . and the Christ

In order to better understand the thinking of C. S. Lewis on Christology it is important to have a basic appreciation of the development of orthodox Christian thinking in this area. This chapter is intended to serve as just such an introduction.

Essentially this christological survey is for readers who have not undertaken a theology degree (though having said that, many Western university theology departments no longer run patristic—i.e. the church between, c.200–750 AD—courses generally, or specific courses on the development of orthodox Christology). General readers of C. S. Lewis’s works—often graduates in their own specialism—may not have the background knowledge, often historical, to appreciate many of the terms and concepts, ideas and words cited in the three main volumes in this series. This chapter may be of use to them. This survey may give them the picture and context in which Lewis wrote: that is, the patristic basis of Lewis’s theology generally, his Christology specifically. These ideas may seem ancient, and to some irrelevant, yet when a “modern/“liberal” American professor—W. Norman Pittenger—accused Lewis publically of christological heresy in 1958 (criticisms that were published in the leading American weekly, The Christian Century,1 Lewis likewise publishing a reply.2) Pittenger drew on many of these patristic concepts about the nature of Jesus (Docetism, Gnosticism, Apollinarianism and Eutychianism) in his attack. Lewis, however, refuted the accusation and then proceeded to demolish Pittenger’s Christology as dangerously “modern” and “liberal,” and essentially heterodox.3 Lewis and Pittenger’s differences come down to two propositional questions: first, is Jesus Christ defined by the very nature of his being in and before God, or is he who he is because of humanely conferred status? Second, is what was established by the early and patristic church about the Christ as true today as it was then? These questions about Jesus may be ancient but are as pertinent today as fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago.

1. Who or What is the Christ?

i. The Messiah

Like many ancient names that had cultural or religious meanings, the name Jesus—in Hebrew, Yeshua, given to Mary by Gabriel, the angel at the annunciation—was known to those who heard it as signifying “God is savior,” or “Jehovah is savior;” Christ means “anointed one,” Messiah. The word Messiah was commonly used in the era between the two testaments, Old and New (i.e., the intertestamental period), the concept of messiahship having developed in later Judaism (from the early Hebrew Mashiach, the anointed one, derived from the ancient Hebrew tradition of anointing the king with oil). Messiah was not necessarily a name, but a label, an attribution, an office, a role, essentially a title. By the time of Jesus of Nazareth the title “Messiah” was often attributed to someone the people liked, whom they believed could fulfill, they hoped, a role for them. However, the Messiah was to be the one anointed at the end of days. Jesus is therefore taken by those around him to be the Messiah; hence the early attribution that he is the Christ. The word Christ is simply a translation from the Greek (Christos) and the Latin (Christus) for Messiah. Therefore, Jesus Christ, in name and title, was God’s salvation, the anointed one. This did not necessarily imply that he was the second person of the Trinity. The trinitarian perception is part of the dawning realization in the early church, with ample pointers and examples of Jesus’s trinitarian nature in the books that became the New Testament (texts produced by the earliest church in the years after the resurrection and ascension).

ii. Expectations

Around the time of Jesus’s birth messiahship carried expectations. Some saw the coming Messiah as a political leader who would expel the Romans; others expected a Messiah who would be a partisan revolutionary whose aims were unclear; to yet more the Messiah would return the Temple religion back to a happier time, he would oversee the restoration of Israel. To an extent these can be seen as purely human offices. During the intertestamental period there were many false Messiahs, men raised up to realize a revolutionary, political, or religious role supported by a group or sect to save Israel in some way or other. However, false Messiahs lapsed, disappeared, or were killed by the Romans or the Jewish religious authorities. The Jews were left still hoping.

The idea of redemption, salvation, was part of these multitudinous expectations of a Messiah figure during the intertestamental period—but saved from what, redeemed to what? The answers to those questions were as varied as the messianic expectations of these false Messiahs. As a redeemer figure, expected and foretold, Jesus does not necessarily live up to the expectations of his fellow Jews. However, on reflection, the clues were there all along in Jesus’s life and ministry, and crucially in the Old Testament. The ancient Hebrews priests and kings were anointed, they were Messiahs (Exod 30:22–25); later, this messiahship entitled one anointed by God as a leader, a king from the line of David. Therefore, Jesus of Nazareth was perceived by many who saw and heard him to be the long awaited Messiah, with different and often subjective expectations as to his role. What is important is that a posteriori, after the event, the proto early church interpreted this messiahship in the context of Jesus’s role as God descended to earth to judge and forgive humanity, hence the use of the Greek word Christos, Christ, by the writers of the New Testament. Jesus is then the final Messiah of Messiahs.

iii. Trinitarian

Messiah, Christ, is then revealed to be trinitarian: God anoints God to descend to save his chosen people: the Father gives the Son in the Holy Spirit. Salvation is in potential: along with humanity, Christ reascends into the divine life. Only in the fullness of the incarnation-cross-resurrection and the ascension is messiahship finally defined by Jesus. Then his life and ministry, his sayings and actions, take on new meaning, a significance and understanding veiled to many during his lifetime. Whatever the expectations of messiahship, Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah (therefore, the Christ), not a Messiah, political or otherwise. It is fair to say that some of the Hebrew expectations were blown away by God’s revelation; whatever people expected, it fell short of what was given by God in this Jesus. People couldn’t see or fully understand what Messiah was to be, even though the evidence was there in the Old Testament.

iv. Witness

The witness of the apostles, disciples, and the early church is then a form of revelation equal to Scripture (indeed their witness forms much of the New Testament). The early church tradition replaces the old Hebrew categories of messiahship; the expectations of Jesus’s contemporaries were fulfilled by God’s revelation, but not necessarily in accordance with what they desired or expected. This divergence also extended to the interpretation of messiahship that the Jewish religious authorities held to in Jerusalem. For many years the Western church concentrated only on the early church tradition and the conclusions of the church councils in the fourth and fifth centuries, often, in effect, ignoring the Hebrew tradition that Jesus of Nazareth was born into. In recent years many theologians and Bible scholars, for example the orthodox Christian N. T. Wright, derive most of their conclusions about Jesus of Nazareth from an understanding of the New Testament’s Jewish background, a setting in the life of the times in some ways. Perhaps the answer is to hold in balance the Hebrew tradition and categories, the perceptions of the earliest church, and also the conclusions of the later church councils, about the person and nature of Jesus. This is how to see and understand the term Messiah, the Christ.

2. A Developing Christological Tradition

C. S. Lewis: Revelation and the Christ is a work, in many ways, of Christology; that is, a study of the work and person of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. Christology is thinking about Christ, explaining using the faculty of reason, mostly in written form, so as to explicate who and what Jesus Christ was and is. Lewis’s work was very much in the context of the developed understanding of who and what Christ was; an understanding that took shape in the first seven centuries of the Christian era. As with the Bible, this understanding became something of a compass, a guide, or lodestone, as to what counts as sound doctrine about Christ and what does not. It is this body of knowledge and understanding about the Christ that judges Lewis’s theology and apologetics, as it does also those of his critics. This body of knowledge of what is a traditional and orthodox understanding of Jesus Christ developed gradually during the early church, and then through the following centuries, and was complete by around the year 750 AD. Christology is therefore seen to be the study of the person and work of Christ, fully human and fully divine, historical and universal, and his significance for humanity: this systematic study is therefore the doctrine of Christ, but it must always understand the Hebrew roots into which Jesus of Nazareth was born and lived.

3. The Study of The Christ

If Christology is the study of the person and work of Christ, asserting who he was and is, and what he did and continues to do, then the first books of the New Testament to be written down (Paul’s epistles, specifically 1 and 2 Thessalonians, written around 50 AD to the fledgling church) give us a picture at the very beginning of this christological tradition. They are in many ways about who Jesus of Nazareth, Mary’s son, was:

For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.

1 Thess 4:14–17

For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.

1 Thess 5:9–10

These documents asserted that the Jewish carpenter Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, who had come to save us; so straight away Paul was making strong assertions, doctrinal assertions about Jesus Christ. Those hearing Paul’s words, his assertions, could only really understand what he was saying if they were familiar with the Jewish Scriptures. What Paul was saying would have struck a chord with them if they knew the book of Isaiah, Hosea, the Psalms, and the writings of the prophets; if they knew about the fall into original sin recorded and presented in Genesis 3 then what he said would have made sense to them, it would have resonated with their religious background. Without the Jewish Scriptures as shared background between Paul and his audience (for instance, when writing to converted pagans in, say, Rome, or the sea ports of Corinth and Ephesus around twenty-five years after the resurrection) it became more and more necessary for Paul to explain what had happened on Calvary in its historical context. This historical context is not Roman or Greek history, or Persian or Celtic history: this is Jewish salvation history. In a related vein the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews placed emphasis on the nature of Jesus as Messiah and high priest when writing to Jews who believed that Jesus was the Son of God, the Christ. Given that they were very familiar with the Jewish background the Letter to the Hebrews demonstrated to them how their Jewish heritage came together, culminated in Jesus of Nazareth. The Letter to the Hebrews presents a very high, very strong Christology; it presents an understanding of Jesus of Nazareth, as the great high priest rooted in Jewish salvation history, whose blood is the one atoning sacrificial offering for our sins, through which we are reconciled to God the Father. And in case any were in doubt as to this interpretation in the years to come, the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews asserts that, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8; cf. Mal 3:6a).

This is the early church developing a way of establishing who and what this Christ was from the beginning, which in turn is the beginning of church tradition. When writing to non-Jews Paul’s letters become more and more elaborate as to who this person Jesus of Nazareth is, what he did for us on the cross, what he continues to do for us, and how we should respond. Paul assumed that those hearing his letters read out in the fledgling churches believed that this Jesus was the Christ, the long-expected Messiah, the Anointed One, the Son of the Living God, the Most High descended to earth, he was crucified and rose from the dead for our salvation. The earliest Christians, many of whom had known this Jesus of Nazareth, followed him, saw him heal people, saw...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Series Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: C. S. Lewis—An Annotated Bibliography and Resource
• Chapter 1: Lewis . . . and the Christ
• Chapter 2: C. S. Lewis: An Annotated Historical Bibliography of Primary Sources
• Chapter 3: C. S. Lewis: Correspondent
• Chapter 4: Helen Joy Davidman: An Annotated Historical Bibliography
• Chapter 5: C. S. Lewis: Revelation And The Christ: Secondary Sources—Books
• Chapter 6: C. S. Lewis: Revelation and the Christ: Secondary Sources—Articles and Essays
• Chapter 7: Secondary Sources—Related to Lewis’s Development
• Chapter 8: Web Resources
• Chapter 9: Glossary