The Feeling Intellect

Reading the Bible with C. S. Lewis

Newell

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498272117
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christians of all backgrounds agree that the Bible is the unique sourcebook for our understanding and knowledge of God. Yet reading the Bible is often as neglected in believers' homes as amongst the skeptics. Moreover, there is much evidence that the Bible is as often misread in the modern church as we suppose it to have been widely misunderstood in the darkest days of Medieval superstition. It would be an enormous help to sit with a deeply learned scholar--one devoted to the historic Christian faith, who yet taught with the common touch--to help us mature in our reading of Scripture. Such tutorials might rekindle our desire to read the Bible more skillfully with the humble discipline of daily practice.C. S. Lewis has inspired a generation of readers, both skilled and beginner, to deepen their understanding and enjoyment of Scripture. Perhaps Lewis's unique contribution to reading Scripture is his disciplined use of the imagination as the forgotten cognitive tool of our day. This kind of reading attends to the text's emotional tone alongside the conceptual content in order to engender not just more knowledge about Scripture nor mere entertainment for dulled sensibilities, but to enable a knowledge of God: a reading for discipleship. This is the kind of reading I hope to support in these chapters.

Part One

An Experiment in Reading Scripture

Introduction

The Experiment

Indwelling the Text

Have you ever read a book in such a way that you not only took in the main ideas, themes, and plot but something further also happened? It’s as though the text gave you entrance into the emotion embedded within the story. C. S. Lewis tells his friend Arthur Greeves that he will never read Beowulf correctly unless he is willing to “forget your previous ideas of what a book should be and try and put yourself back in the position of the people for whom it was first made. When I was reading it, I tried to imagine myself as an old Saxon thane sitting in my hall of a winter’s night, with the wolves and storm outside and the old fellow singing his story. In this way, you get the atmosphere of terror that runs through it . . .”1

In other words, we can open our minds in both a cognitive and affectional way to what is embedded in the text. The feeling intellect is a phrase used by Lewis (and by Charles Williams and earlier by William Wordsworth) to describe a way of reading in which both reason and imagination are equally alert and at their fullest capacity of insight and creativity.2 This way of reading never imposes a pre-arranged doctrine or order onto the text to reinforce a traditional explanation. Nor does it transplant the text into an emotional mood acquired elsewhere. Instead, the reader receptively indwells the text—that is, allows the intrinsic meaning to form its own imprint.

But can one really distinguish embedded ideas and feelings from those that originate elsewhere? Consider, says Lewis, two Englishman on a tour of the continent. The one carries his Englishness abroad with him and brings it home unchanged. He consorts with English tourists along the way. “By a good hotel, he means one that’s like an English hotel . . . He complains of bad tea when he might have had excellent coffee . . . But there is another sort of traveling and another sort of reading.” One may eat local food, drink local wines, and see a foreign country as it looks to the inhabitants, not the tourists. “You can come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before.”3

This analogy invites us to choose one of two ways to read a book. We may read to find evidence of theories or ideas that we already value and hunt for hints of them in a hidden or primitive state. Alternatively, we may read in a less calculating way—not to confirm previous opinions or experiences but to encounter new realities, perhaps not yet part of our world. Because this latter way pays careful attention to what is within the text, we allow ourselves to be altered by the text we are reading. This launching into a new reality can be described as a baptism, at least while we are in the act of reading. Though a permanent alteration is hardly established, something fresh has been planted within us from the text. At least while we read, we are being changed.

The first time Lewis mentions having his imagination baptized comes, not when reading Scripture, but while reading George MacDonald’s novel, Phantastes.4 Believing God had come personally to space, time, and history in and through Jesus, Mary’s son, MacDonald invited Lewis to see the entire world through this implicit lens. Only later did Lewis choose to live his entire life baptized into the story of Christ. But MacDonald set Lewis’s mind on a new path, baptizing his imagination with a christocentric vision of all earth and sky, parents, children, friends, and lovers.

Lewis understood even this temporary baptism to be a process of death and rebirth. In a memorable description, he sees this process as the crux of what he calls good reading.

Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are. The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandize himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it’.5

The Experiment

My proposal in this book is to make explicit what is implicit in Lewis’s reading strategy and apply it to reading Scripture. Specifically, I will follow Lewis’s way of responding to the text in three ways: First, to historically and imaginatively reconstruct (or at least seek to be aware of) the original context. Second, to indwell the emotional as well as the cognitive content embedded in the text, which will lead, third, to a fresh response of discipleship in our contemporary setting.

Before we look at our first passage, I want to describe this threefold process a little further. If the goal of reading is to be cognitively and emotionally immersed in the text, one can’t bypass a careful scholarly reconstruction of the cultural and historical context. It’s no good trying to imagine ourselves as Saxon thanes while reading Beowulf if we have no clue about the culture, history, and language out of which this ancient tale arises. In Lewis’s own literary critical writings, he spent a good deal of energy seeking to recover as accurately as possible the historical context in order to read the text “in the same spirit as the author writ.”6 His introduction to medieval literature, The Discarded Image, is a good example of a book-length attempt to provide “an outfit” or map to help contemporary readers enter a worldview everywhere assumed in medieval culture but that has become quite foreign to us. He assembles this outfit in order that readers may enter as fully as possible into the world and characters of medieval stories. In this way Lewis rejects the strategy of “the many” who prefer to use ancient literature to see what sort of impression it makes on an unrepentant contemporary mindset. His goal is the very opposite: to read the ancient writings as far as possible from within the worldview inhabited by the ancients. Only thus may a modern reader hope to grasp what these stories meant to those who first told, heard, and recorded them. The better our appreciation of medieval history, philosophy, language, geography, and religion, the better our chance of a cognitive and emotional grasp of the meaning. This logic applies for reading any piece of ancient literature, including the Bible.

Of course, even after we attempt this kind of intellectually rigorous and imaginatively sensitive reading, we still must decide what kind of truth the text possesses. But without grasping the meaning of a text through the disciplined use of both the imagination and the intellect, the question of truth is premature. After all, a meaningless statement or event can be neither true nor false.7

This emphasis on the use of imagination as the means to recover meaning may remind some readers of the Lectio Divina, the tradition of contemplative reading lived out in monastic communities, or even more specifically the Ignatian method, whereby one takes a Bible story and seeks to get inside it by imaginatively identifying with one or more characters as the drama unfolds. By reading the text as if we were that person, we “hear” what God wants to say to us today through this character.8 Perhaps, on the other hand, insisting on the use of the intellect to accurately grasp the historical-cultural context may remind us of early Protestants like Martin Luther or John Calvin who stressed the historical context as the key to the meaning of Scripture. These Reformers were seeking to recover the historical, literal meaning of the text, which they believed had become entangled in allegorical and devotional embellishments that, like weeds, had grown around the text, choking off its intended meaning.9

Lewis’s wisdom is to incorporate the strengths of both approaches while carefully controlling their limitations. Unlike the imaginatively florid allegorical method, much admired from Origen and Augustine through the medieval period, Lewis reigns in an undisciplined imagination that refuses to do rigorous historical/cultural homework, lest it make the text a nose of wax for popular fads or the latest Zeitgeist. Unlike the Ignatian strategy (which clearly has similarity with what Lewis attempts), this way insists that before we try to “hear” what God is saying to us in the story, we must first and firmly set ourselves aside and listen to what the st...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Part One: An Experiment in Reading Scripture
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Response and Responsibility (Luke 1–2)
• Chapter 2: Atonement: Aslan’s How (Rom 3–5)
• Chapter 3: Freedom for a Horse, His Boy, and Western Culture (Or Nurturing Narnians in a Calormen Culture) (Gal 4)
• Chapter 4: Till We Have Christians: A Myth of Christendom Retold (Matt 20)
• Part Two: Reading the Bible as a Double Narrative
• Chapter 5: A Theology of Nature and of Grace for a Silent Planet (Ps 19; Rom 1–2)
• Chapter 6: Of Inner Rings and Rivals: Rehabilitating the Doctrine of Election (Gen 27; Rom 9–11)
• Chapter 7: “Gawd, Ain’t It Lovely?”The Journey from Fear to Awe (Prov 1; Acts 4)
• Chapter 8: Curses for Babylonians and Crumbs for Canaanites: A Hermeneutical Regress for Contemporary Pilgrims (Ps 137; Gen 22; Deut 7; Matt 15)
• Bibliography