C.S. Lewis on inspiration

[Didaskomenos]

Beg your pardon if this is a common subject (I'm fairly new to this forum), but...

C.S. Lewis, the great people's theologian and apologist of the 20th century, champion of thinking evangelicals, held some pretty non-fundamentalist views on Scripture. Thus, a great number of Christians who applaud Mere Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, etc. would be shocked to hear his thoughts. I think it's a good example of how even a thinking mind does not require an inerrant Bible to accept the God of Christianity and his son Jesus and to develop a relationship with him. Please allow me to quote this excellent summary:

A Liberal-Evangelical View of Inspiration: C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) ​

Clive Staples Lewis held a view of inspiration that technically speaking is neither orthodox nor neo-orthodox. Since it is not a typical liberal view or an evangelical position, it is dubbed by the paradoxical term liberal-evangelical.​

According to Lewis, “the voice of God [is heard] in the cursing Psalms through all the horrible distortions of the human medium.” Lewis believed “the human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not ‘the Word of God’ in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history.” In fact, he believed some sections of the Bible to be even anti-religious. He wrote, “Nor would I (now) willingly spare from my Bible something in itself so anti-religious as the nihilism of Ecclesiastes. We get there a clear, cold picture of man’s life without God.”63 Many Old Testament events—including Adam, Job, Esther, and Jonah are mythological; their truth only becomes fully historical in the New Testament. For “the Hebrews, like other people, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology—the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical.”64​

Lewis rejected the orthodox view of inspiration: “One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalist’s view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic’s view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this.”65 He therefore rejected the position “that inspiration is a single thing in the sense that, if present at all, it is always present in the same mode and the same degree.” However, “the overall operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs his inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe.”66 Nevertheless, Lewis believed that in one sense all inspiring writings are inspired. For “If every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of lights then all true and edifying writings, whether in Scripture or not, must be in some sense inspired.” The process of “inspiration may operate in a wicked man without his knowing it, and he can then utter the untruth he intends ... as well as truth he does not intend.”67​

Conceiving of inspiration as a process of literary elevation that has been providentially guided by God, Lewis asserted: “When a series of such retelling turns a creation story of almost no religious significance into a story which achieves the idea of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.” For in that way, he writes, “something originally merely natural ... will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served.”68 Like much of the liberal position, the view of inspiration held by Lewis operated on a model similar to that of theistic evolution.​

For long centuries God perfected the animal form [by natural processes] which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say ‘I’ and ‘me,’ which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God.69​

In like manner, Lewis believed that when the natural development of a pagan and Hebrew myth has been perfected it is taken over into the service of God and elevated to its edifying and sacred heights in New Testament truth. In that way, wrote Lewis, “I have therefore no difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical.” But eventually the mythology of the Old Testament becomes history in the New Testament. Thus the resurrection of Christ is a historical and very important event, “but the value of others (e.g. the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones, whose historicity matters, are, as God’s will, those where it is plain.”70 Thus Lewis strongly attacked​

a theology which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia—which, either denies the miraculous altogether or, more strangely, after swallowing the camel of the Resurrection strains at such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes.71​

In summation, Lewis believed in a fallible Bible that manifests varying degrees of inspiration. He saw a process of development whereby myth becomes history. God providentially guided the natural and errant literary productions of the past. Then, at the appropriate moment, God adopted that natural myth and elevated it into the service of the Word of God. He now speaks through it to the edification of believers.​

63 63. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, pp.111-12, 114-15. In this volume there are extensive quotations of Herman Bavinck. Also see Geisler, Decide for Yourself, pp. 91-102.

64 64. C. S. Lewis, Miracles, p. 139 n. 1.

65 65. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, p. 112.

66 66. Cited in M. J. Christensen, C. S. Lewis on Scripture, p. 199.

67 67. Ibid., pp. 98-99.

68 68. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, p. 110.

69 69. Ibid., pp. 65, 110.

70 70. Cited by Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis, p. 153.

71 71. C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, p. 153.


Geisler, Norman L., and William E. Nix. A General Introduction to the Bible. Includes a short-title checklist of English translations of the Bible (chronologically arranged). electronic ed. of the revised and expanded ed. Logos Libary System. Chicago: Moody Press, 1996, c1989.