How CS Lewis taught us to be better readers.

There was a time in the early 20^th Century when Liberal Theology was popular, and by that I don't mean Liberal as Left Wing, I mean Liberal as not exactly orthodox. People were asking questions and challenging conventions, and not least of these was how do we read the Bible. From people like Von Harnack onwards, many seminaries focussed on higher criticism of the Bible; to read and dissect it as we would any other book, to look at narrative motifs and themes, to try an understand miracles in light of other classical world phenomena, and of course to discuss genre.

This is where Lewis wades in. He delivered a talk in Cambridge in 1951 on how so many illustrious Bible scholars just don't understand literature enough to really pass comment, and a lot of it comes down to one work discussing the genre of the Gospel of John.

Now the Gospels are interesting from a higher criticism view, because the first three (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) seem to define their own genre. When we read them in light of other First Century writings they don't quite fit into Bios, Memoir, or Teachings, they in instead their own genre which we now call Gospel. They share similarities with the others, but we still can't quite classify them.

But the fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, now that is a weird book, and that is why Lewis needed to clarify something regarding genre.

You see, there was a train of thought that says the Gospel of John is romance.

That's right folks, some authors believed that John was the Mills and Boone of his day. Now Lewis took umbrage at this, and he took a shot at the whole of Biblical higher criticism with it. In his now famous talk (since published as Fern Seeds and Elephants) Lewis questions whether these scholars have read enough romance to call John a romantic. To put this in perspective, and to keep this a pop-theology blog, here is the professor of literature at Cambridge dropping the mic on over a hundred years of theological studies saying that they haven't read enough to form an opinion. He isn't questioning their ability to theologise, rather that they were talking out of their rear ends when it comes to literature. Also his dad was Welsh so he is already half perfect. Boom, headshot.

And to give him his credit, Lewis does have his academic chops when it comes to this stuff, the guy is practically a genius, and between him and Tolkien they were probably the worlds leading experts in this next field: Mythology.

Lewis studied a whole boat load of classical Greek texts, and he taught a hella lot of this stuff at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. This guy has chops when it comes to mythology, and that is kind of what he says the Bible is. Of course, he goes into far more depth than I am here, he is a genius and I do pop-theology, go read more since I am only going to skim the surface.

Now Lewis means something different when he talks myth than when we do. We tend to think of myths as something which just upright isn't true, but that's not what it means at all. Myth is how people make sense of the world around them, and they make that into stories. Maybe everything doesn't happen exactly as it plays out in those stories, but that doesn't make them any less true.

To really simplify this (and I know that I am doing Lewis a disservice here), think to the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, fact or fiction? Actually I am asking the wrong question there, a better one would be true of false? You see, something doesn't have to be 'fact' to be 'true', and if we were to dismiss the Boy Who Cried Wolf because we cannot place the exact village and the exact breed of wolf, then we lose a most valuable lesson.

And Lewis was fighting poor higher criticism on two fronts. Firstly there were the people who robbed the Bible of it's mythology, its truthiness. And then there were those who straight up took it too far the other way and tried to make it all too facty (If I make up enough words does that make me as clever as Tolkien?). They were getting hung up on author intention, so when Peter wrote something, what exactly was happening in his world to influence him, what exactly did he mean?

I love the anecdote Lewis gives to this. Apparently one day he read a review of his own work where the critic discusses Lewis' motivation and themes, and all that stuff we were taught in English class. And Lewis noted that he didn't recognise any of it. People had read him and reflected themselves in his writings, and that had completely changed the message he was trying to get across.

And I am so guilty of this, contextualising Bible stuff is what I do more than anything else, and it is really important folks. We cannot pretend that Paul or James or John would understand our world, any more than we fully understand theirs. And I don't think that Lewis is fully signed up to La Mort D'Author philosophy either. I think he just saw some people going too far in not giving the mythology of the Bible enough respect to speak for itself. Of course this is somewhat easier for him since he taught a lot of classical philosophy, so he probably didn't have to think about context as much as we do.

People were getting so hung up on finding the authentic intention of the Bible authors that Lewis gave them this great rebuttal: Mark is dead, and when we meet St Peter we will have more pressing matters to discuss.

And myth is so important to the Christianity of Lewis. There is a great story where Lewis, a die hard atheist at this point, is considering Christianity. The story goes that he and Tolkien are discussing the Bible and mythology and they come to this conclusion: The Bible is myth, and Jesus is myth made real.

Lewis was famously not an Evangelical, he wasn't hung up on issues like six day creation or fish swallowing people whole and spitting them out, he did try to see the truth in the stories of the Bible however, and even told his own explaining what Jesus meant to him. What exactly he and Tolkien meant by 'myth made real' I will leave to you to decide, after all, they are both dead now so we can't ask them.

I hope you have enjoyed this, and had something to think about. Please remember that this is a pop-theology blog, I am not your university lecturer and this is not an academic work, it's just a short piece to make you think about how you read the Bible. God Bless.