I am always thankful that the first theology book I ever read was C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I stumbled upon it in the B. Dalton Bookseller at the local mall early in the summer before my senior year in high school, was intrigued, took it home and devoured it in less than a day. From then on I read anything I could get my hands on by Lewis: Miracles, The Great Divorce, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, The Abolition of Man, you name it. Lewis’s clarity, cleverness, creativity, intelligence, and piety all captured my imagination. My love affair with his writings transformed my faith and my life from that of just muddling through, to being thoughtfully engaged in thinking about God, the universe and everything. For that I will be ever thankful.
But I am thankful, too, to have had Lewis early on as a hero because from him I learned that there were far more theological options available to the serious Christian than what is being offered on American Evangelicalism’s theological menu. There are lots of things I could cite: his coziness with evolution, his openness to purgatory, his ambivalence about atonement theories, and so on.
Today I wanted to highlight Lewis’s take on the Bible. Lewis’s view of the Bible draws deeply both from his intimate knowledge of the Church Fathers and the Medieval Doctors of the Church, and his awareness of modern biblical scholarship. That is to say, he creatively draws from the deep resources of the Church’s grand tradition in order to think through the contemporary problems posed by modern historical-critical scholarship. [Read more…] about C.S. Lewis on Scripture. God’s Word in Human Words. Part 1 of 2