While C. S. Lewis was perhaps the preeminent Christian apologist of the twentieth-century, he was not, as he often reminded readers, a biblical scholar. Leslie Baynes thinks that shows.
As Baynes notes in her book, Between Interpretation & Imagination, he was an Oxford don specializing in Medieval literature whose fiction and nonfiction for general audiences became wildly popular. His seventeen-jeweled mind and storytelling talents gave him the tools he needed to make difficult topics understandable and appealing to ordinary readers.
Conservative Christians may have been cautious about embracing Lewis because he didn’t set his sights on defending the Bible the way they did. He thought the doctrine of inerrancy was misguided (pointing to the conflicting genealogies of Matthew and Luke, and differing stories of Judas’s death in Matthew and Acts). But because Lewis didn’t make much of those discrepancies either, Evangelicals could turn a blind eye.
He did, however, respond robustly to Bultmann. Though both thought the Bible was a mix of fact and myth, Bultmann wanted to jettison the myth while Lewis wanted to retain it (recasting it as true myth). That was a key reason Lewis had a wider, more long-lasting impact than Bultmann. Lewis thought that “myth may be the only thing that speaks to moderns about God. . . . How does myth give life? By mediating between the abstract and the concrete. Human thought is abstract, but human experience is concrete” (p. 105).
Yet Lewis’s reliance on his prodigious mind could get him in trouble. Baynes gives examples from his writings of misquoting Medieval, biblical and other ancient texts because he didn’t check his memory against the texts.
In addition, as Baynes details, he hadn’t studied the intricacies of biblical scholarship of the day in order to interact with them adequately. As a result, he sometimes misinterpreted the work of others and built straw men when it came to higher criticism.
Baynes’s most pointed comments are saved for Lewis’s “liar, lunatic, or Lord” argument, one of his most famous. The problem, biblical scholar Baynes points out, arises from Lewis’s contention that Jesus went around saying he was God. (Anyone who does that, says Lewis, must be lying or crazy, unless it’s true.)
While the New Testament writers clearly thought that Jesus somehow embodied the God of the Old Testament, Jesus himself says little of the sort. If Jesus had been clear, says Baynes, we might not have had all the very contentious Christological controversies of the church’s first centuries.
Baynes details the New Testament complications of preexistence, being begotten, and the titles “Son of God” and “Son of Man”—none of which clearly and fully signal divine identity in the first-century Jewish mind, as much as we might want them too. She acknowledges the evidence of Jesus’ own words in the Gospels (e.g., Matthew 26:63-64; Mark 14:61-62; Luke 23:67-70; John 8:58; 8:19-21) but thinks those don’t make the case (and Lewis didn’t use them).
Overall, however, I think she undersells the cumulative case for these and other statements by Jesus. (e.g., Mark 6:50 where “It is I” = “I am” in Greek; and the other “I am” statements in John). Nonetheless, her point is taken. Though the evidence is there that Jesus expressed his own divine self-identity, it’s not as obvious as Lewis makes it out to be.
Baynes ends with a thorough study of and appreciation for Lewis’s use of Scripture in the Chronicles of Narnia. As great a mind as Lewis was, he may have been an even better storyteller.
