Tag Archives: C. S. Lewis

Religion

What is the Word?

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Picture credit: aaronburden. Unsplash license.

Here’s a quotation that shows up on my Basefook feed from time to time:

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, which is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for curiosity or controversy) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

[From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume III, p. 246.]

Of course the person who posts this snippet feels that they’ve laid down a trump card – look here, you Bible-thumper! Even your hero C. S. Lewis didn’t think the Bible was the Word of God! What do you say to that?

All right, let’s talk about it.

First of all, I already knew Lewis wasn’t an inerrantist. This is not news. As I’ve often said, when a man is ten feet away from you, it makes all the difference in the world whether he’s walking toward you or away from you. Ten feet is almost here for the first, almost gone for the second. I think Lewis was walking toward me (us). That’s my subjective opinion, but a pretty well-informed one.

And of course, in an important sense, Lewis is entirely right. Christ is and always has been the uncreated Word of God, a Person of the Trinity: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1, ESV)

But I don’t think Lewis would have ever claimed that Christ was God’s Word in an exclusionary sense – that God could not also speak words that weren’t the Son. I’m pretty sure Lewis accepted that God had spoken all kinds of words – to the prophets, to visionaries, to the evangelists and apostles. I don’t think he’d have denied that the canon of Scripture is the inspired Word of God, while being distinct from the Person of Christ.

The question I always ask when I read this passage is, “Who is this Christ that you think you can find anywhere else than in the Bible?” If you quote the Lewis passage to argue that you have a Christ of your own who’s a little different than the one the Bible shows us, I think, frankly, that you’re worshiping yourself. And I suspect Lewis would agree.

If you spend time in the Bible, does it bring you closer to Christ, or further away? What better place is there to draw near to Him?

Now, Lewis was a sacramentalist (as I am, being a Lutheran). We believe that Christ is especially present in Holy Communion – that He comes to us in a physical way in and under the bread and wine. So I’ll stipulate to that as a place where we meet Him truly.

And Christ Himself emphasizes that we can also meet him in our neighbor – especially our neighbor who’s poor and sick and suffering. “And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:40)

So that’s most certainly true as well.

But where do I learn these things?

I learn them from Scripture.

It is my experience, and my observation, that any “Christ” that people talk about, who is separate from the Christ of Scripture, does not come from God.

Authors, Religion

C. S. Lewis on Charles Williams

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Here is a portion of a radio talk C. S. Lewis gave on Charles Williams, whose Descent Into Hell I reviewed last night.

I’ve heard the complete talk, which is very short in its own right. I don’t know why they cut it down, except that Lewis starts with an anecdote about the poets Leigh Hunt and Thomas Babington Macauley as an example of bad literary criticism. I suppose nowadays nobody knows who either of them is. (To be honest, I don’t know much about them myself.)

Below, an introduction to Williams by the scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, for whom I recently did some translation work. I did not in fact know she was into such good stuff. Turns out that, counting David Llewellyn Dodds, who comments here from time to time, I know two important Inklings scholars.

Authors, Reviews

Theatrical review: ‘Further Up and Further In’

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I had a great experience Saturday afternoon (before all the shock of the events in Pennsylvania). Max McLean was in town with the Fellowship for the Performing Arts production of “Further Up and Further In.” A friend of a friend had bought a block of tickets, they had a seat free, and my friend arranged for me to get in.

“Further Up and Further In” is a splendid example of a one-man show. The performance time (about an hour and 20 minutes) rushed by.

I’d seen McLean’s work before, having bought the DVD of “The Most Reluctant Convert.” I thought it an impressive low-budget production, though McLean seemed a little rubber-faced in the role of Lewis. I suspected that the stage was his true medium, and was gratified to be proved right.

I read an article years ago that said that if you only know Sir Laurence Olivier from the movies, you have no idea what a genius he was. He was directed to subdue his reactions and his gestures for the more intimate environment of film. But some spark (the author said) was lost.

McLean doesn’t seem to have subdued his performance greatly for the movie, but on stage this approach is highly effective. The dramatic scenario here is that we’re having a conversation with Lewis in his study in the year 1950, but of course it’s not really like that. Lewis would never have gesticulated as McLean does – these exertions are for the audience in the upper decks. (Also, Jack Lewis would have been smoking constantly, which does not happen in this play.) What we actually have here is a long sermon – but it’s a brilliant sermon, cut-and-pasted from Lewis’ articles, books, and letters. It’s all vivid and exciting, and the stage furniture – desk, wing-backed chair and drinks cabinet – sits before a large rear projection screen that displays images illustrating the narrative.

The text deals with problems of faith such as how we can believe in God at all, and how to deal with the problem of pain. It ends with Lewis speculating on ultimate things, on the end of the world (he quotes heavily from the sermon, “The Weight of Glory”) and the wonders of Heaven.

If “Further Up and Further In” comes to your town, I highly recommend going to see it. I had an exhilarating time.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Till We Have Faces,’ by C. S. Lewis

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…the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. We call it the wrath of the gods; as if the great cataract in Phars were angry with every fly it sweeps down in its green thunder.

I wonder what J. R. R. Tolkien thought of Till We Have Faces. I can’t seem to find any information about that online. Tollers and Jack were, of course, somewhat estranged by the time this novel was published; not turned enemies, but their friendship had cooled through the circumstances of life. I have an idea Tolkien thought Lewis had lost interest in their mythopoeic project, their shared endeavor to write new myths foreshadowing the gospel for modern pagans.

But that’s very much what Till We Have Faces is – though the myth isn’t a new one (Tolkien specifically wanted English myths) but a retelling of a classic Greek one, the myth of Cupid and Psyche. The central mythopoeic idea that myths are “good dreams” that anticipate the gospel is here, richly and beautifully realized.

Orual is a princess in a fictional barbarian kingdom, apparently sometime in the early Iron Age. She is the oldest – and ugliest – of three sisters. Redival is pretty and frivolous. Istra, the youngest, is so beautiful and sweet that people treat her like a goddess. “The Fox,” the girls’ Greek slave tutor, calls her Psyche, and Orual dotes on her.

But when famine and pestilence come to the land, the people turn on Psyche, accusing her of blaspheming the gods, causing all this evil. It is determined by the priests that she must be taken to the Mountain and sacrificed to the Beast who dwells there. Orual is injured trying to defend her sister, and so is unconscious when the ceremony is carried out.

Later, Orual travels with the chief of the king’s guard up to the Mountain, to gather her sister’s bones for burial. To her astonishment and joy, she finds Psyche there, alive and well. But the girl tells her a crazy story about being married to the Beast of the Mountain, who is actually a sublime god. Orual, certain that Psyche has gone insane, conceives a plan to bring her to her senses. And great evil will come from this.

I first read Till We Have Faces a lifetime ago, when I was in high school and the book was fairly new. It was the second Lewis book I read, after The Screwtape Letters. Callow as I was, I recognized it for a book full of depths, but I couldn’t see very far into them.

Reading it now, as an old man, I found much more in the story. It moved me deeply. Has any book ever dissected the human heart as this one does, bringing to light all the petty possessiveness, jealousy, and even hatred that we humans often mean by what we call love?

Great book. Read it if you haven’t yet. If you have read it, read it again.

Authors, Uncategorized

Belated R.I.P, Joss Ackland

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Tonight, like your high school teacher when he had a hangover and couldn’t face the prospect of lecturing, and so rolled out the old film projector, I once again fall back on video, bereft of useful ideas. I happened to be watching one of the old Inspector Dalgliesh mysteries with Roy Marsden, and Joss Ackland showed up in the cast. That always reminds me of his tour de force performance as C. S. Lewis in the original 1985 BBC television film of Shadowlands – which in my opinion remains the only watchable version. The travesty Richard Attenborough foisted on the public in 1993 was not actually about C. S. Lewis, but about some imaginary scholar Attenborough made up, who was emotionally stunted until being saved by True Love. (I’ll stipulate that Debra Winger was better as Joy Davidman than Claire Bloom was – purely because she was more abrasive. That is, in my opinion, almost the theatrical film’s only virtue.)

You can view the 1985 version here.

This version, excerpted above, is much closer to the original events, and to Lewis’ personality. Douglas Gresham praised Joss Ackland’s performance as his stepfather. Ackland didn’t much resemble Lewis, except in physical bulk, but he had a similar booming voice, and he seems to have sought out ways to make his performance authentic.

The clip above dramatizes the critical point in the plot where Joy, stricken with cancer and newly married to Jack Lewis, experiences a remission and goes home to the Kilns to live with Jack, his brother, and her two sons (there were, in fact, two boys – one got cut in the transition from small to large screen).

Joss Ackland usually played villains or rather nasty people (one exception was a cameo as D’Artagnan’s father in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers). I would pay considerable money (if I had any) for a voice like his. I looked him up on Wikipedia, and found that he died last November. 95 years old, which is a good run.