Putting Lewis in his place

I used to think C.S. Lewis was never awarded a professorship at Oxford—despite his stellar achievements in teaching and publishing—because he was open about his faith. But I’ve become convinced that was not the primary cause. Lewis was punished because he dared to write popular books, and give popular broadcasts, outside his field of specialization. Lewis broke the rules, “poaching” from other disciplines and critiquing those in his silo, and other silos, that were out of touch with the real world and with the needs and convictions of the man on the street. Lewis dared to be a generalist in an age that esteems specialization.

Some things don’t change in academia, as evidenced by Between Interpretation and Imagination: C.S. Lewis and the Bible (Eerdmans, 350 pp.) by Leslie Baynes, a professor of New Testament and Second Temple Judaism at Missouri State University. Despite its prodigious research, its skillful marshaling of Lewis’ multitudinous letters and personal marginalia, its balanced assessment of the books that influenced Lewis’ interpretation of Scripture, and its original, at times brilliant, linking of the Bible to the Chronicles of Narnia, this book is filled with the same academic arrogance and scholarly condescension that blocked Lewis from receiving his much-deserved Oxford professorship.

Baynes obviously respects Lewis and loves his Chronicles of Narnia, but when it comes to assessing his nonfiction writings on the Bible and its claims, she, if I may mix two metaphors and one cliché, withdraws into her specialized shell, defends her turf with sarcasm and willful misunderstanding, and, as a result, misses the forest for the trees. Like so many academics before her, Baynes has been so fully socialized into the rigors and nonnegotiable “facts,” actual or supposed, of her specialized club that she takes them for granted as proven and normative. I think she believes that if Lewis had taken all the classes and read all the books that she has he would modify his position on Biblical matters.

At the core of what makes her book an essential addition to Lewis studies is the detective work she has done to show what books influenced Lewis in the early years of his conversion and continued to the end of his life to color his reading and interpretation of Scripture. Chief among these are James Moffatt’s The Theology of the Gospels and Charles Gore’s Jesus of Nazareth and Lux Mundi, particularly its chapter on “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration.”

Of the former, Baynes writes that though Moffat acknowledges “differences among the four Gospels,” he “insists on their continuity, not only across the three Synoptics—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—but even between the Synoptics and John.” She explains further that Moffat grounded that continuity in “Jesus’s knowledge that he is the Son of God.” She then makes some strong claims that Lewis both misread Moffatt and persisted in believing an aspect of Moffatt that her tribe rejects: “Moffatt’s argument for harmonizing the Gospels through the ‘filial consciousness’ of Jesus seems to have vanished without a trace—except insofar as it affected C.S. Lewis. ... Furthermore, inspired perhaps by Moffatt’s argument on the unified theology of John and the Synoptics, Lewis will ignore most of the places where Moffatt contrasted them, and he will harmonize the Gospels’ different Christologies, a practice that culminates in his claim that Jesus went about calling himself divine just as much in the Synoptics as he did in John—a claim Moffatt explicitly denies.”

Of the latter, Baynes writes that Lewis absorbed four cardinal points from Gore that he stayed firm on for the rest of his life: (1) “the centrality of the incarnation, the Son of God made flesh”; (2) “that the entire Bible is not ‘divine’ in the same way”; (3) “that the Old Testament records ‘how God prepared the way for Christ’”; (4) “that Jesus, not Scripture, is the word of God.” It was because of his agreement with Gore on these points, Baynes argues, that Lewis could reject a fundamentalist view of plenary inspiration/inerrancy while accepting the authenticity of Biblical accounts that include miracles. This view “led him to believe that there were different sorts of Biblical inspiration without denying that the canon as a whole was inspired.” It allowed him, further, to accept “errors of fact regarding history and science” in the Bible, as well as the possibility of Jesus being wrong “about ‘religious’ things, because the dogma of the incarnation requires his kenosis, which makes the human Jesus fallible.”

Thus far, Baynes’ assessment of Lewis’ view and use of Scripture is balanced. Backing up her claims with copious quotations from Lewis’ letters and passages from Moffatt, Gore, and others that Lewis underlined in his personal copies, Baynes earns the right to conclude that for Lewis “every part of the Bible is not inspired in the same way, and requiring ancient writers to conform to modern conceptions of truth and history is misguided.” Sadly, she descends briefly into fashionable virtue signaling when she unfairly accuses Lewis of harboring anti-Jewish prejudice in his Reflections on the Psalms and of being a supersessionist who too blithely equated the Pharisees with self-righteousness. She stands on firmer ground when she quotes passages from Lewis’ wife Joy that reveal her to be anti-Semitic, despite, or because of, her Jewish heritage—but Baynes does so without taking into account how common it is for people from minority ethnic groups to be highly critical of others in their group who they feel make them look bad.

It is, however, in her two chapters on Lewis’ lesser-known “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” (anthologized in Christian Reflections) and his well-known and highly influential Liar-Lunatic-Lord apologetic from Mere Christianity that she pulls out her specialist card and accuses Lewis of meddling in fields where he does not belong. To be fair to Baynes, she uncovers many small errors in Lewis’ essay that lack nuance and that expose him as misreading slightly the liberal theologians he critiques. Baynes is right that Lewis often shoots from the hip and that when he read the Bible, “he was always more interested in content than context, and he could be rather harsh toward those who weren’t, mixing legitimate criticism with polemic.”

Lewis often paints with a wide brush, but that is because one of his great skills, and ministries, was his ability to cut through the academese to reveal the anti-supernaturalist biases that underlie so much of modern Biblical studies. “Once the layman was anxious to hide the fact that he believed so much less than the Vicar,” explains Lewis in the closing lines of his essay, “he now tends to hide the fact that he believes so much more. Missionary to the priests of one’s own church is an embarrassing role; though I have a horrid feeling that if such mission work is not soon undertaken the future history of the Church of England is likely to be short.”

It was an embarrassing role, but Lewis bravely took it up, calling on his fellow parishioners to adopt a position that was not credulous or obscurantist, but truly critical: “I do not wish to reduce the sceptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else.”

Baynes shines a light on every little chink she can in Lewis’ polemical armor, while blithely ignoring the fact that Lewis, as he explains clearly in his first paragraph, is writing his essay precisely to convict academics like herself. After admitting that he may, as a nonspecialist layman, be misunderstanding some of the pronouncements coming down from modern higher critics, he warns that specialists like Baynes who read his essay “ought to know that such misunderstandings exist. That sort of thing is easy to overlook inside one’s own circle. The minds you daily meet have been conditioned by the same studies and prevalent opinions as your own. That may mislead you.”

Baynes is quick to present Lewis as unable to think outside of Moffatt and Gore, but never once imagines she might be unable to think outside of her own historicist-driven education. She takes numerous potshots at Lewis, claiming that if he read higher critics like Bultmann, Vidler, and others more carefully, he would have seen his errors. She never allows that Lewis, who read everything and remembered everything he read, did understand the fullness of Bultmann, Vidler, Moffatt, and Gore but didn’t agree with parts of them because of his ability to see through faulty methodologies and presuppositions. Lewis had the much-needed skill of garnering truths from liberal theologians and higher critics without falling prey to the academic zeitgeist.

I apologize for being so polemical, but Baynes, despite the brilliance of her book, threatens to set a dangerous precedent for Lewis studies, one that will drag us back to the very academic myopia Lewis fought so hard against. Although this review has already gotten longer than intended, I must press on a little further to discuss Baynes’ supposed demolition of Lewis’ argument that the one thing we cannot say about Jesus is that He was a good man and a prophet but not the Son of God. “That is the one thing,” Lewis argues,

we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Baynes, ensconced within her narrow tribe of historicists, is scandalized that Lewis should be so naïve as to think that Jesus claims to be the Son of God in all the Gospels, John as well as the three Synoptics. To her polemic, I offer three answers, two short and one long.

First, Lewis’ apologetic does not rely upon a belief in inerrancy or even that the Gospels were supernaturally inspired. As long as we read them as reliable historical documents that record Jesus’ sayings with basic accuracy—as serious scholars from F.F. Bruce to Craig Blomberg have shown that we can—Lewis’ logic remains sound. Second, although Lewis argues that Jesus claims to be the Son of God, the force of his argument rests not on a precise Christological definition, but on the need to prevent people from domesticating Jesus and dismissing Him as a charismatic rabbi but nothing more. Jesus made radical claims that force us to choose one of three options: to dismiss, excoriate, or worship Him.

Third, despite what I just wrote, I agree with Lewis’ assessment that Jesus did make claims to being equal with God in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Baynes thinks she can defang the healing of the paralytic recorded in the Synoptics when Jesus infuriates the teachers of the law by claiming to have the authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:1–12). Although the teachers of the law immediately assume Jesus is blaspheming, Baynes reminds us that “John the Baptist and Jesus’ disciples” also “acted as human conduits of God’s forgiveness.” But Baynes ignores the fact that no one accused John the Baptist or the disciples of blasphemy. Jesus’ claims remain unique.

She concedes that Jesus, in all three Synoptics, answers yes to the high priest’s direct question as to whether He is the Son of God (Matthew 26:63–64; Mark 14:61–62; Luke 22:67–70), though she plays silly games with her readers by writing that only “in Mark does Jesus affirm that he is Christ and Son of God, with a simple ‘I am’” (192)—as if anyone who has taken Bible 101 does not know that the “You say so” of Matthew and the “You say that I am” of Luke are equivalent to a “yes.” In any case, I was taught that Biblical critics like Baynes believed Mark to be the most authentic Gospel!

But Jesus’ affirmative answer to Caiaphas is dwarfed by His unambiguous identification of Himself with the Son of Man described in Daniel 7:13–14, who will come on the clouds, sit at the right hand of God, and be worshipped by all peoples and nations. If such a claim does not equate Him with God, I do not know what does. It certainly provoked a charge of blasphemy from Caiaphas. I grant Baynes’ point that Jesus is not defining a precise Christology, but that does not take away from the enormity of His claims—just as the fact that Jesus keeps a messianic secret does not take away from the enormity of the secret that He is keeping. But there are other claims in Mark that are equally ridiculous, or blasphemous, in the mouth of anyone who was not the equal of God: 8:35; 8:38; 9:37. No one in all of Scripture makes claims like Jesus’. And among no other ancient people than the monotheistic Jews, Lewis reminds us, would these claims be so shocking. Indeed, if Jesus were not equal with God, then the Pharisees were right to condemn Him for blasphemy and turn Him over to the Romans to be crucified.

Baynes is a fine scholar, and her section on the Bible in the Chronicles of Narnia is first-rate. She has uncovered passages from Lewis’ letters and marginalia that paint a fuller picture of Lewis, and she is to be commended for doing so. But she needs to listen to Lewis more carefully when he calls out clergymen, seminarians, and academics who are out of touch with the believer in the pew and claim to treat the Scriptures with respect while dealing them the death by a thousand cuts.

Baynes trusts too much to modern techniques of Biblical criticism that continue to be based on faulty biases that would never hold muster if they were applied to other ancient books. No, argues Lewis with his signature wit, the “‘assured results of modern scholarship,’ as to the way in which an old book was written, are ‘assured,’ we may conclude, only because the men who knew the facts are dead and can’t blow the gaff.”