Category: Book review

Lewis and the Bible

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.

History Repeats Itself

I am one who believes history has something to teach us. But as Steve Turner said, “History repeats itself. Has to. No-one listens.”

The Iran Revolution of 1978 that brought down the Shah and elevated Khomeini was, as the subtitle of Scott Anderson’s King of Kings says so accurately, “A story of hubris, delusion, and catastrophic miscalculation.” Almost every player in this sad tale was either malicious or incompetent, and sometimes both.

Anderson interviewed many of the primary figures who are still alive, including Farah Palavi, the Shah’s queen. But he also looks back at the series of events over the last hundred years (and even 2500 years) which came to a head in 1977-79.

Delusion came from both sides. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor, was so fixated on the Soviet Union that he couldn’t see the revolution had nothing to do with the Cold War.

Ebrahim Yazdi, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, was convinced Khomeini would be a savior for Iran, and ultimately became Khomeini’s first foreign minister. He so wanted to believe Khomeini would be an enlightened leader, that he refused to see or could not see the harsh figure who would slaughter thousands of Iranians. Yazdi died regretting everything.

The Shah was both autocratic and indecisive. The CIA and State Department (while giving conflicting advice to the Shah) both refused to take seriously the few people who actually knew what was going on, that the Shah was in deep trouble.

I remember the nightly reports on television, counting each day the embassy hostages were held prisoner in 1979-80. So this whole episode was not easy to relive. But it was important to do so.

Boys and Men Are in Trouble

It’s easy to slap shallow Left or Right political explanations and solutions on the struggles men are facing today. If we really want to help men and women, we have to leave the politics behind. In Of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves explains why.

  • In education: Boys underperform in school and women now earn 60% of bachelor’s degrees, a near reversal from fifty years ago.
  • In mental health: Men are three to four times more likely to die by suicide than women.
  • In the workplace: “Male jobs have been hit by a one-2 punch, of automation and free trade. Machines pose a greater threat to working men than to women for two reasons. First, the occupation’s most susceptible to automation are just more likely to employ men…. By contrast, women make up most of the workforce in relatively automation-safe occupations, such as healthcare, personal services, and education.” (21)
  • In the family: “In 2020, one in five children (21%) were living with a mother only, almost twice as many as in 1968 (11%).” (41)

While Reeves affirms the progress women have made in many areas, he contends we can and should do two things at once—help women and help men.

In fact with more and more women carrying the burden of being both primary breadwinners and primary childcare providers, often the best thing we can do for women is to help the men in their lives get decent jobs and affirm their role in the family.

One problem is that both Left and Right have gone to extremes and politicized the issue, while neither does much about it. “Far away from the front lines of the culture war, the real-world problems of boys and men go largely unaddressed” (129).

Many on both sides, for example, are science deniers. “Many conservatives deny the environmental science of climate change. But many progressives deny the neuroscience of sex differences…. For many progressives, it is now axiomatic that sex differences in any outcomes or behaviors are wholly the result of socialization. . . . But this is simply false. Men do not have a higher sex drive just because society valorizes male sexuality, even if it does. They have more testosterone. Likewise aggression… To be fair, there are some reasonable concerns about how this science will be used…. Natural differences between men and women have often been used to justify sexism. This is mostly an outdated fear. In recent years, most of the scientists identifying natural differences have, if anything, tend to do stress the superiority of women.” (111)

The solution is not, says Reeves, to turn back the clock. That ship has sailed, that train left the station, that rocket blasted off. Our economy has been restructured so dramatically in the last half century that, with few exceptions, families cannot thrive on a single income.

Reeves proposes a variety of concrete, workable changes. Here are just a few of his ideas:

  • In education: Since boys take longer than girls to develop mentally and socially, gradually shift so that boys start kindergarten a year after girls. Many parents already do this so their children will be more athletically developed (and so have a bigger chance of success) in high school and college.
  • In the workplace: With traditionally male jobs continuing to fade away, and with jobs on the rise in health, education and administrative, let’s give more emphasis to recruiting and hiring men. And all of us need to stop thinking male nurses are failed doctors or somehow effeminate.
  • In the family: We need to affirm that dads still matter especially in their roles as protectors and teachers. Research shows that fathers really come into their own when kids hit adolescence–helping them evaluate risks, navigate what it means to stand on their own feet, and give them confidence as they make their way in the world. Reforming the child support system and paid leave policies can also be key.

It’s time to quit fighting battles that no longer exist, to quit exploiting issues to score political points, and start working together to help everyone.

Planet Narnia

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the rest of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series are widely read and enjoyed. Yet some have criticized them. Tolkien didn’t like the books and found including Father Christmas to be haphazard, an odd mixing of mythologies. Others have wondered why Aslan appears more in the background of several books rather than being central as he is in the first. And what about all that violence? Is it really appropriate for children’s books?

While many have suggested unifying keys for the series that answer these critics, Michael Ward’s proposal in Planet Narnia has become widely accepted. Each of the seven books corresponds to one of the seven planets and their character, as largely understood in the medieval mind. Thus the first book emphasizes the qualities of Jupiter—joviality, kingship, generosity, restoration, and so forth.

The Last Battle, on the other hand, is keyed to Saturn (in Greek mythology, Chronos), a complex figure who Lewis mostly associated with misfortune, sternness, judgment, and sorrow. In this light it is less surprising that Lewis “kills off every single character with whom the story opens” (198). Yet Lewis uses this as an opportunity to meditate on the “divine presence in human loneliness and suffering” (203) and that all the adventures the children had gone through were only “Chapter One of the Great Story . . . in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Ward builds his thesis about the planets not just from the Narnia books themselves but from Lewis’s comments on the planets in his scholarly work, his poetry, and his other fiction (most notably, of course, his Space Trilogy).

I give Ward’s book five stars because of its groundbreaking insights, as well as the thorough and convincing way in which he supports his ideas. For those who are not academics or Lewis nerds, however, the book may seem a bit tedious. You would be excused, then, if you just read Ward’s comments on the Space Trilogy and Narnia in each chapter. The introductory and concluding chapters would also be quite worthwhile. (While I have not read Ward’s The Narnia Code, it is intended to be a shorter, less technical version of his original book.)

For all who enjoy reading and re-reading the Narnia books, Ward’s fresh observations will give greater appreciation for the depth, craftsmanship, and meaning that Lewis built into this beloved series.

Am I Overdoing It?

I belong to four book clubs. Am I overdoing it?

I’ve been part of our neighborhood book club the longest. For almost twenty years about ten of us have met five times a year. So, yes, we are nearing a hundred books. Once a year each of the five households picks a book, hosts the meeting, and leads the discussion. A fun dimension is that often book-themed food is served by the host.

For next month I have chosen Hamnet to discuss. Maggie O’Farrell was courageous to write a novel about the great playwright William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway. But she skillfully, imaginatively, and movingly carries it off.

Recently I started joining three other friends who meet monthly. This second group doesn’t meet in person. We gather on Zoom since we are spread around the country. The format hasn’t hindered our lively discussions at all. And we often keep the ideas (and banter) flowing between sessions with group emails.

The book for our next Zoom meeting is Jeff Crosby’s World of Wonders: A Spirituality of Reading. Though I’ve known Jeff for over twenty-five years, another member of the group was the first to suggest we read it. I was delighted to dig into the reflections of someone who has lived with and loved books his whole career as bookstore owner, book distributor, publisher, and now president of a Christian publishers’ trade association.

My third book club consists of a group of men from my church. Instead of talking about a whole book in one session, we meet every other week, usually discussing a chapter at a time. Right now we are in the middle of Francis Collins’s latest volume The Road to Wisdom. The subtitle is On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust. But Collins also considers another key dimension: Humility. He freely shares where he made mistakes and how he learned from those who disagreed with him. That also is wisdom.

The fourth book club started a few years ago when my oldest grandson, then in high school, called to say he wanted me to be part of his book club. “Who will be in it?” I asked.

“You and me,” he said. He wanted to read Camus and Dante and Kierkegaard . . . and so we did!

We paused as he began college, but he called a month ago to say he wanted to start up again and dig into whatever has been on my to-read list. Richard Reeves’s Of Boys and Men has been on my mind for several months.

I’ve been hearing that while much good has happened for women in the last fifty years, the trends for males have not been good. Reeves says we don’t have to choose between helping men and helping women. We can do both. I’m a few chapters in and he is making a thought-provoking case. Since my grandson is in the center of the demographic Reeves focuses on, I’ll be interested to hear what has to say.

Overdoing it with book clubs? I don’t think so. I’d say it’s just right.

The Christian Revolution

Rather than a history of Christianity, Tom Holland’s six-hundred-page Dominion is more a series of historical essays. His purpose is not to provide “objective,” even coverage of the key events, people, and trends of the last two thousand years but to make a point.

And the point? The ideas that “human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution”—all these, whether proclaimed by atheists or believers, derive historically from the Bible’s claim that humans are made in the image of God, that Christ died for everyone, and that in him there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (540). We are all heirs of the Christian revolution.

He tells his impressionistic history through the use of vivid, selective stories from the past which are sometimes obscure (e.g., Quaker Benjamin Lay) but which he sees as representative of an era, epitomizing the theme he wants to emphasize.

Though he makes a positive case for the influence of Christianity in the world, he does not stint on bloodshed. Over and over he tells how Christians perpetrated violence and death against others and each other in likely every period since Constantine. The book is no whitewash.

Along the way he seems to make some odd choices, however. Though the book emphasizes the critical importance of the place of natural law, Holland barely spends two pages on Thomas Aquinas, likely the most influential theologian in all of church history who lifted natural theology to a place of near supremacy. Yet Holland finds time to spend six pages on Spinoza.

And then there is the peculiar claim that Irenaeus invented the canon when much consensus in the early church already existed on which books should be in the New Testament. Such swashbuckling analysis about something I know makes me wonder about his other judgments regarding things I know less well.

He is a lively storyteller who makes the pages fly by. Yet while I appreciate his efforts at artistry, his poetic prose too often lapses into obscurity. Or to put it more plainly (as I wish he did more often): his ornate sentences are sometimes so convoluted that it can be hard to understand what he means.

So, yes, while I see merit in the book’s overall thesis, a three-star rating accurately reflecs my ambivalence.

No One Wants to Be Fooled

While some conspiracy theories are blatantly ludicrous (such as, the U.S. government has dug a secret railroad tunnel from Nevada to Ohio), they often have appeal.

We don’t want to believe the world is full of chance events that have monumental consequences. Could a lone, random shooter really have killed President Kennedy in 1963? There had to be more of a reason than that, we think.  

Another reason we might be drawn to conspiracy theories is that we don’t want to look like fools. We want to think we won’t fall for a fabrication, a lie, a deception. We want to believe that we are smart enough to recognize when someone is trying to trick us. 

Of course this impulse can go both ways. We could be deceived the government, or we could be deceived by a theory that the government is lying. 

All this brings us to Area 51, the top-secret region in Nevada owned by the U.S. government. Annie Jacobsen’s book by that name details the spy planes and other weapons testing that has gone on there and nearby over the last eighty years.

Much is now known due to many documents which have recently been declassified. We learn, for example, that the use of drones is not a new phenomenon. The Air Force has been deploying them since World War II. Little has been declassified about nuclear testing, however. And there are some documents which despite repeated efforts, both by citizens and government officials, have never been declassified. 

One of the questions I have is, Why? Technology from eighty years ago is completely out of date. Why hide it? Some conspiracy theorists believe the government is covering up how it faked the moon landings at Area 51 fifty-five years ago despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Others think it is hiding evidence of alien landings beginning with Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. 

The author’s explanation for what the government called a weather balloon that crashed at Roswell is certainly more believable than aliens. What crashed, says Jacobsen, was a Soviet spy plane built with the help of Nazi scientists taken after the war. But many questions remain. Why have we never seen equivalent technology from the Russians since then? Why keep it secret even decades later?

Perhaps government agencies find an advantage in allowing conspiracy theories about UFOs and thousand-mile tunnels to run rampant. It keeps attention off what they actually have done and are doing.

At the end of the book the author presents (admittedly, with the least documentation of anything in the book), perhaps the most disturbing speculation as to why some government activities have never come to light—and it has nothing to do with secret technology. According to the author, the government has been engaged in what would be universally condemned by Americans and by the international community—human experimentation.

No one wants to be made a fool. Jacobsen reminds us several times that one of the best strategies to follow is Occam’s razor—the simplest explanation tends to be the best. A good reminder when we’re not sure what to believe.

Concerns about The Unseen Realm

Part 5

Michael Heiser’s largely academic book, The Unseen Realm, has had a wide influence well beyond the scholarly world. I was sent a photo recently when the book was spotted for sale in the gift shop of a high-end resort in Mexico.

The fascination is not new. For millennia humans have sought to understand (and often sought to control) whatever powers may lie behind the physical world. This was not just a matter of curiosity but of survival in a wild and dangerous world.

C. S. Lewis saw two opposite errors in today’s “civilized” world–one is to not believe in the devil and the other is to have an excessive interest in the demonic. While I have given much praise to Heiser’s book over the course of this series of posts, in the spirit of balancing belief with caution, I offer a few concerns.

First, Heiser often seems too confident about his viewpoints. While I think he is largely on track, he would have been better to recognize the strengths of other perspectives and acknowledge that he may not be absolutely right at each point.

One particular example comes in chapter nine regarding predestination and free will. Though his distinction between what God foreknows and foreordains is helpful, I don’t think this solves these contentious issues as much as he thinks they do. Nor does he resolve the related topic of the problem of evil, an issue which probably can’t be answered this side of glory.

Second, Heiser says little or nothing about possible implications of rebellious spiritual beings influencing nations in our day. Might this lead us to categorically condemning all people from certain national or ethnic groups as evil and irredeemable, thus justifying violent, inhuman treatment of them?

The world is complex. Even the one nation in the Bible that was God’s inheritance (Israel) rebelled and did many evil things. At the same time, other nations besides Israel can turn to God (Ninevah). Likewise today, no nation is entirely pure nor purely evil.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said in The Gulag Archipelago:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”

Finally, it is important to remember that while Heiser highlights an important biblical theme, a neglected one, and a misunderstood one, this is not the only theme nor necessarily the main one in the Bible. It is one piece of a multifaceted story.

We can, for example, view the whole Bible through the lens of the Temple. Though it is often said the Bible begins in a garden (Genesis) and ends in a city (Revelation), both images are ways of understanding all of creation as a Temple—a place where God dwells, a place where heaven meets earth.

The Exodus event is another theme threaded through the whole Bible. It is foreshadowed in Genesis, takes center stage in the book of Exodus, and then makes major reappearances in the Psalms, in Isaiah, in Mark, and elsewhere. We can easily think of others such as: creation, de-creation, re-creation; or mercy and justice; or freedom and slavery; or faith, hope, and love.

The conflicts of the earthly and the unseen realms are, as Heiser says, found from Genesis to Revelation. This and the wealth of other such themes are worth a lifetime of meditation so that we may be more fully shaped by God and his Word.

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Image credit: Susan DeCostanza

Letting the Bible Have Its Way

Part 4

The Bible is viewed in many different ways.

Some see it as a how-to book for life or an “owner’s manual” for the soul, if you will. Some see it as a collection of myths and tales from an unenlightened past. Some see it as a sacred object for use in the holiest of settings. Some see it as a foundation of Western culture.

One of the things I appreciate about Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm is the overall approach he uses with the Bible. Primarily, he tries to take the Bible on its own terms, in its own context.

He tries not to impose his own ideas, preconceptions, or needs on the text. He begins by wondering what the original writers thought, what kind of culture they lived in, what kind of assumptions they had about the world. As he puts it, “The realization that I needed to read the Bible like a pre-modern person who embraced the supernatural, unseen world has illumined its content more than anything else in my academic life” (385).

We are fortunate to live in a day of widely available access to ancient documents and archaeological research that have emerged in the last two hundred years. They give us greater understanding of the worldview and the mind of the original biblical writers. We are also more alert to how our own Enlightenment, scientific, or postmodern mindsets can lead both believers and skeptics to impose ideas on the Bible that just aren’t there.

One example: The biblical writers simply didn’t have a category for a how-to manual that allows one to take individual verses out of context for instant answers. They did however have a category for wisdom literature that requires slow, lifelong meditation on texts that may at times seem to be at odds with each other.

Another example: The biblical writers did not employ modern historical methods or criteria. They couldn’t. They employed their own customs and used genres common to their day to tell stories for their own purposes. To label these as “inaccurate” or “in error” by today’s standards is an exercise in missing the point.

In particular Heiser takes aim at the misguided assumption that a literal reading is the truest approach to Scripture, that such a method is the primary way God intends us to read the Bible. When we do, we fail to understand how much scientific and materialistic ways of thinking (which are foreign to the Bible) have come to dominate our own perspective. As he writes:

Metaphorical meaning isn’t “less real” than literal meaning (however, that’s defined). Whether we like it or not, the biblical writers weren’t obsessed with literalism the way we seem to be…. Biblical writers regularly employ conceptual metaphor in their writing and thinking. That’s because they were human. Conceptual metaphor refers to the way we use a concrete term or idea to communicate abstract ideas. If we marry ourselves to the concrete (“literal”) we’re going to miss the point the writer was angling for in many cases.

He gives this example, “If I use the word ‘Vegas’ and all you think of is latitude and longitude, you’re not following my meaning. Biblical words can carry a lot of freight that transcends their concrete sense. Inspiration didn’t immunize language from doing what it does.” (387)

We can’t completely get out of our own skin and crawl into the framework of those who lived two or three thousand years ago in a very different culture. But the journey into the world of the Bible and then back into our world is so worth it.

Note: If you would like a video summary of the book, The Unseen Realm documentary can be found here on YouTube. At just over an hour, this presentation features Michael Heiser and several other respected biblical scholars who offer a clear, succinct overview of the key points from the influential book.

Next Installment: Concerns about the Unseen Realm (Part 5)

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

The Surprising Difference the Unseen Realm Makes

Part 3

So what if the biblical worldview is permeated with ongoing warfare waged by rebellious spiritual beings against God’s followers? How should that affect me?

That’s the question I left us with after my two previous posts here and here on Michael Heiser’s thorough biblical study, The Unseen Realm. Surprisingly, perhaps, Heiser doesn’t highlight exorcism. What he does address is far more amazing and profound.

It starts by appreciating the different but related ways “son of God” or “sons of God” is used in the Bible. “The sons of God” can refer to spiritual members of the divine council (see previous posts) who God appointed to work with him in ordering creation (Job 38:7; Ps 82:6). The phrase can also mean the king of Israel (Ps 2:7) or Israel as a whole (Ex 4:2; Hos 11:1). It can also refer to all believers (John 1:13; Rom 8:14; Gal 3:26; 4:5), and of course to Jesus’ unique sonship (Matt 14:33).

What they all have in common, whether natural or supernatural, is the special status God assigns to them to work with him in bringing about his will, on earth as it is in heaven. When the Bible says we are sons and daughters of God, this is more than just a warm, sweet way of talking about how we are a cozy part of God’s family. It means we have a role in ruling. As God first commanded the man and woman: “Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule . . .” (Gen 1:28).

Our destiny is not just one of salvation in God’s presence eternally, as astounding as that is. We, his people, play a more profound, more mind-boggling role than we may have ever imagined. As Heiser puts it, “We are the children of God, destined to displace the defeated, disloyal sons of God who now rule the nations. Believing followers of Jesus Christ are the fulfillment of God’s plan to have humanity join the divine family-council and restore Eden” (p. 314). This is the context for Paul’s comment that we will one day rule angels (1 Cor 6:3).

In our everyday lives, Paul reminds us that we live this out as temples where heaven and earth meet in our bodies (1 Cor 3:16). Even the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as Heiser explains, are reminders to those in the unseen realm of our ultimate loyalty. We are not theirs. We are his (1 Cor 10:14-17).

When we seek to live out God’s will to unite all in Christ, we have a profound effect on the rebellious unseen realm. As N. T. Wright says regarding Ephesians 3:6, 10:

It is when the Christian community comes together across barriers which divide us from one another that the principalities and powers know that Jesus Christ is Lord. And that as long as we are divided whether black and white, male and female, rich and poor or whatever, the principalities and powers smile and say, “We are still in charge here!”*

How do we get through a day? Both the hundreds of petty annoyances, and the deep doubts, losses, and hardships of life can weigh us down, confuse us, and strike hard blows. By the Spirit, however, we can also remember who we are and who we will be.

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*N. T. Wright, in a question-and-answer session after a joint lecture with Paul Barnett, “Fresh Perspectives on Paul,” MacQuarie University (Sydney, Australia), March 16, 2006 (Vancouver: Regent Bookstore/Regent Audio).

Image by Deborah Hudson from Pixabay.