One year later, over 300 posts,
over 200,000 words added to this blog, today we are finishing up our journey through the C. S.
Lewis Bible.
I know I did not share much
about the whole book of Revelation but chose instead to focus on a couple of
passages. Therefore, let me highly recommend Michael Wilcock’s book, The Message of Revelation. After many
years of studying and reading about this difficult book, I have found Wilcock’s
work to be the most helpful.
So what of C. S. Lewis and the
Bible? I really like the Afterword to the book. It is a snippet of Lewis’
perspective on the Bible taken from Reflections
on the Psalms. I can think of no more fitting way to close out our yearlong
journey of reading and thinking on Scripture….
For us these
writings are “holy,” or “inspired,” or, as St. Paul says, “the Oracles of God.”
But this has been understood in more than one way, and I must try to explain
how I understand it, at least so far as the Old Testament is concerned. I have
been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I
never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it
includes the miraculous. Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe
that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior
belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific
truth. But this I do not hold, any more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation “after the manner of a popular poet” (as we should
say, mythically) or than Calvin did when he doubted whether the story of Job
were history or fiction. The real reason why I can accept as historical a story
in which a miracle occurs is that I have never found any philosophical grounds
for the universal negative proposition that miracles do not happen. I have to
decide on quite other grounds (if I
decide at all) whether a given narrative is historical or not. The Book of Job appears to me unhistorical
because it begins about a man quite unconnected with all history or even
legend, with no genealogy, living in a country of which the Bible elsewhere has
hardly anything to say; because, in fact, the author quite obviously writes as
a story-teller not as a chronicler.
I have therefore no
difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the
account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which
were Pagan and mythical. We must of course be quite clear what “derived from”
means. Stories do not reproduce their species like mice. They are told by men.
Each re-teller either repeats exactly what his predecessor had told him or else
changes it. He may change it unknowingly or deliberately. If he changes it deliberately,
his invention, his sense of form, his ethics, his ideas of what is fit, or
edifying, or merely interesting, all come in. If unknowingly, then his
unconscious (which is so largely responsible for our forgettings) has been at
work. Thus at every step in what is called—a little misleadingly—the
“evolution” of a story, a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved.
And no good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. When a
series of such re-tellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no
religious or metaphysical significance into a story which achieves the idea of
true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing
will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not
been guided by God.
Thus something
originally merely natural—the kind of myth that is found among most
nations—will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and
compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served.
Generalising this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same
sort of material as any other literature—chronicle (some of it obviously pretty
accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but
all taken into the service of God’s word. Not all, I suppose, in the same way.
There are prophets who write with the clearest awareness that Divine compulsion
is upon them. There are chroniclers whose intention may have been merely to
record. There are poets like those in the Song of Songs who probably never
dreamed of any but a secular and natural purpose in what they compose. There is
(and it is not less important) the work first of the Jewish and then of the
Christian Church in preserving and canonizing just these books. There is the
work of redactors and editors in modifying them. On all of these I suppose a
Divine pressure; of which not by any means all need have been conscious.
The human qualities
of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in
the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not “the
Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable
science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we under grace, with
attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the
use of such intelligence and learning as we may have, receive that word from it
not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves
in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message.
I like that image of "steeping" because I am one who likes to leave the tea bag in my tea cup or mug while drinking. You can never make a cup of tea to strong for me.
Hopefully, that is what we have been doing this year with our journey through the C. S. Lewis Bible. Hopefully, we have been steeping ourselves in Scripture, and we will continue to do so throughout the new year in various ways.
I welcome your thoughts, not
only on this post, but on what you have gleaned from our journey through the C.
S. Lewis Bible this year….
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