Emerging Scholars Blog

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Reflections on the Psalms

C.S. Lewis on Scripture. God’s Word in Human Words. Part 2 of 2

C.S. Lewis' desk and chair
“C.S. Lewis’ desk and chair.” Taken by Thomas B. Grosh IV at the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL.

In my last post I highlighted C.S. Lewis’s take on what it means to approach the Bible humbly: namely, we should first ask honestly and with an open mind, What sort of book has God actually given us and how has He given it? When we do that, we find that God has given us a Book not at all like what we might have expected if we had formulated a doctrine of Scripture a priori. Instead He has given us something else entirely, something far more extraordinary:

The same divine humility which decreed that God should become a baby at a peasant-woman’s breast, and later an arrested field-preacher in the hands of the Roman police, decreed also that He should be preached in a vulgar, prosaic and unliterary language. If you can stomach the one, you can stomach the other. The Incarnation is in that sense an irreverent doctrine: Christianity, in that sense, an incurably irreverent religion. When we expect that it should have come before the World in all the beauty that we now feel in the Authorised Version we are as wide of the mark as the Jews were in expecting that the Messiah would come as a great earthly King. The real sanctity, the real beauty and sublimity of the New Testament (as of Christ’s life) are of a different sort: miles deeper or further in.

[Read more…] about C.S. Lewis on Scripture. God’s Word in Human Words. Part 2 of 2

C.S. Lewis on Scripture. God’s Word in Human Words. Part 1 of 2

Mere Christianity Book Cover
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

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

C.S. Lewis’ humility in reflecting upon the Psalms

“Reflections on the Psalms” cover

This is not a work of scholarship. I am no Hebraist, no higher critic, no ancient historian, no archaeologist. I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself. If an excuse is needed (and perhaps it is) for writing such a book, my excuse would be something like this. It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. When you took the problem to a master, as we all remember, he was very likely to explain what you understood already, to add a great deal of information which you didn’t want, and say nothing at all about the thing that was puzzling you. I have watched this from both sides of the net; for when, as a teacher myself, I have tried to answer questions brought me by pupils, I have sometimes, after a minute, seen that expression settle down on their faces which assured me that they were suffering exactly the same frustration which I had suffered from my own teachers. The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. [Read more…] about C.S. Lewis’ humility in reflecting upon the Psalms