C.S. Lewis—The Work of Christ Revealed

Brazier

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894384
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

C. S. Lewis--The Work of Christ Revealed focuses on three doctrines or aspects of Lewis's theology and philosophy: his doctrine of Scripture, his famous mad, bad, or God argument, and his doctrine of christological prefigurement. In each area we see Lewis innovating within the tradition. He accorded a high revelatory status to Scripture, but acknowledged its inconsistencies and shrank away from a theology of inerrancy. He took a two-thousand-year-old theological tradition of aut Deus aut malus homo (either God or a bad man) and developed it in his own way. Most innovative of all was his doctrine of christological prefigurement--intimations of the Christ-event in pagan mythology and ritual. This book forms the second in a series of three studies on the theology of C.S Lewis titled C.S. Lewis, Revelation, and the Christ (www.cslewisandthechrist.net). The books are written for academics and students, but also, crucially, for those people, ordinary Christians, without a theology degree who enjoy and gain sustenance from reading Lewis's work.

Part One

Scripture—

Revelation Transposed

“Then comes the real shock.Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if he was God. He claims to forgive sins.He says he has always existed.He says he is coming to judge the world at the end of time.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952), 50–51.

1

Scripture, Revelation, and Reason I: Skepticism and Suspicion

SYNOPSIS:

An assessment of C. S. Lewis on the Bible, his doctrine of Scripture, will tell us much about the basis of his understanding of revelation and the Christ: person, act, event. Importantly Lewis connects revelation with illumination, how the writers of Scripture were inspired; therefore, how do we assess apparently mythological narratives, such as the creation story in Genesis? What is the historicity of the Old Testament, of Scripture generally? Lewis lays great stress on the humanity of Scripture—infinite wisdom, which comes down and is beyond complete human comprehension, presenting Scripture as “an untidy and leaky vehicle.” Lewis’s understanding of Scripture can be gleaned from his multitudinous letters as well as his apologetics: for example, the Clyde S. Kilby letter (1959), and Reflections on the Psalms, (1958), where he identifies certain general propositions: we must distinguish between divine word and human comment; we must note that inconsistencies and historical discrepancies point to different levels of historicity even within the Gospels. The humanity of Scripture in relation to the historicity-unhistoricity (as distinct from falsity) must not be understated—Lewis dismisses the proposition that all statements in Scripture must be seen as historical truth, or that all are unhistorical. For Lewis, Scripture shows that inspiration operates regardless of moral probity (likewise, inspiration is not always of the same mode and to the same degree); we cannot take a passage in isolation, and ignore contradictions, we cannot assume that if one event written in the Bible is true, all events are without flaw. This will lead us to an examination of Lewis on the reliability of the witnesses—the Gospel writers—and the trial of the witnesses (here Lewis’s work “God in the Dock” (1948) is highly pertinent). How reliable is the picture we have of Christ from Scripture?

What value did Lewis accord to Scripture? Lewis was highly critical of modern biblical criticism where it attempted to reduce and explain away, where it sought to demythologize. His acerbic criticisms are set out in “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” (1959). He was particularly critical of this approach in scholars and clerics such as the German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann, and the Anglican clerics Revd. Dr. Alec R. Vidler and Revd. Dr. Walter Lock, especially in their classification of John’s Gospel as myth, their classification of the miracles as metaphorical signs, but pertinently in their use of literary categories: Lewis questioned their expertise in understanding genre and literary types, where this understanding was based on the mistaken notion of historical superiority, a denial of the miraculous, and an attempt to place the text in the context of the life and times in which they were written (Sitz im Leben). Lewis was therefore skeptical of a modernist hermeneutic of suspicion (i.e., an analysis and interpretation of the biblical text where it was grounded in suspicion, doubt, and mistrust). This was, for Lewis, an approach that was rooted in the Enlightenment, and the claim to “know” the texts better than the authors did. For Lewis, we should be “agnostic” towards such modern scholarship, which was to be classified as transitory, relative, and ultimately unprovable in its reductionism.

1. Person, Act, Event

When asked by the eminent logician and mathematician Heinrich Scholz (originally trained in theology), what was the basis on which theology operated as an intellectual discipline in the university, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth is reported to have answered, assertively, that it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Barth was not embarrassed by an act and event that most academics, particularly scientists and philosophers, repudiated; he did not beat about the bush, he did not obfuscate, there was no hedging around religious emotionalism, no putting any notion of a “god” into a box to be analyzed from the safe secure position of the absolute certainty of a seemingly enlightened human intellect. To Barth the resurrection was the only basis on which you could do theology as a distinctive Wissenschaft—that is, a science rooted in reason, objectivity, and knowledge. For Barth, and for C. S. Lewis, all was related to this single event, which had cosmic implications: herein lies the intellectual responsibility that underpinned Lewis’s commission and vocation as a Christian apologist—the person, act, and event of God in Jesus of Nazareth, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lewis knew that some of the worst sins were intellectual—they were ideas. So what we believe, or don’t believe, has a profound effect upon us, and thereby on other people. Doctrines are sets of beliefs or principles held by the church, taught by the church. We do not as individuals make up what we want to believe to suit our individual needs: truth is given. This is what C. S. Lewis had to accept in that momentous conversation with Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien in 1931, which triggered his final acceptance and conversion.

When speaking of a doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity Lewis addresses the distinction between religion and theology; more pertinently he asserts the importance of doctrine. Lewis regarded theology as a science: “Theology means ‘the science of God’, and I think any man who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about him which are available. You are not children why should you be treated like children?”1 Lewis acknowledges that there is for some people a distinction between an experience of God on the one hand and the dry almost clinical statements that are the creeds and the doctrines. For someone who has had a genuine experience of God a consideration of doctrine may seem like, for Lewis, turning from something real to something less real. Lewis uses picture and analogy to explain. He compares a map of the Atlantic Ocean with the real thing: observing the ocean from the coast, then looking at a map of the Atlantic is to turn from the real to the less real:

But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused.2

This is important because through using narrative and pictures (the map and the ocean) Lewis communicates as an apologist just how important theological doctrines are. The creeds are based on, and grew out of, the witness of the apostles. The early Christians did not just come up with ideas about a holy man named Jesus. They had seen with their own eyes, touched and were touched. The witnesses run to hundreds from the start of Jesus’s ministry to the Ascension and the Day of Pentecost. Many of these witnesses were women, and if the early Christians were simply making it all up they would not have used women for key witnesses because, according to the Greek and Roman social traditions of the day, a woman’s testimony counted for nothing in a court of law. Furthermore, by witnessing to the Christ-event they were putting their lives on the line—Stephen was stoned to death for his testimony. The witness of the many men and woman and children who saw what happened, the events recounted in the Gospels, are, for Lewis, to be considered as more reliable than whatever religious experience we may have today—though such intimations must not be dismissed, they are, as Lewis had seen personally, pointers and allusions, suggestions and intimations, of God’s love and expectations for us: “Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to theology that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones—bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which real theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression—like believing the earth is flat.”3 Contrary to the spirit of the age of “modernism,” and contrary to the fashionable watered down Christianity that Lewis identified as his opponent, we can see Lewis’s content-led method here: his appeal to the testimony of the witnesses who wrote and compiled Scripture, and the developing patristic church tradition. He also refers obliquely to the early church heresies about Jesus Christ that resurface now and again, and for Lewis were evident among some of the Anglican clerics of his day. And popular religion? Popular contemporary religion can be seen as in effect a regression into a neo-paganism. But, as Lewis noted, a pagan, history shows, is a one convertible to Christianity. A pagan is, in religious terms, pre-Christian, or sub-Christian. Today’s pagans are post-Christian.4 The difference is essentially that the pagans before Christ were, certainly for Lewis, moving towards Christ, whereas today’s Western neo-pagans are moving away from the Christ-event (arguably to an even greater extent today than in the 1950s, when Lewis commented).

2. C. S. Lewis on Scripture

i. Illumination and Revelation

People have understood the nature of the Bible in subtly different ways down the centuries; likewise any understanding of the authority of the Bible has varied along with its use. The Bible is generally accepted as a mode of special revelation—therefore, if we say the Bible is inspired what exactly do we mean? In these three chapters we will come to see what exactly Lewis believed to be meant by inerrancy, inspiration, and infallibility in relation to revelation and the human faculties of reason and imagination, specifically in two forms of revelation: Scripture, and the Christ-event. When the writers of the New Testament asserted that Scripture was insp...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction C. S. Lewis—The Work of Christ Revealed
• Part One: Scripture—Revelation Transposed
• Part Two: The Revelation of Christ—God, or a Bad Man
• Part Three: Christ Prefigured—Intimations to the Pagans
• Conclusion The Work of Christ—Revealed
• Select Bibliography