[This is a draft from my current writing on C. S. Lewis. Let me know what you think.]
Two
realities lie at the center of Christian faith: Jesus Christ and the Bible.
These are also two of the most problematic teachings for contemporary readers
of Lewis and for Lewis himself. The second, believing that the Bible in some
way is the Word of God, flies in the face of progress. What writing can still
give insight today? Moreover, in a culture of video and Internet, why trust a book of all things? I will take that up that
topic in the another post.
The
first, Jesus as “mere Christianity” presents him—that is, unique among other
religious figures—offends our pluralistic sensibilities. Contrast this claim
with the core Christian virtue of love—a virtue that few would argue against.
“I’m not a Christian, but I agree with many of its teaching. Isn’t the core of
Christianity Jesus’s call to love?” But quote John 14:6 that “No one comes to
the Father except through me” and you will receive heaps of scorn. “How can you
be so judgmental?” The common phrase “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious” can
mean, among other things, “I accept a lot of what Jesus says, but not his
unique place as the Son
of God.”
Lest
this seems something unique to the twenty-first century, I quickly realized
there is nothing about pluralism as context for Christian faith. It came along
with the emergence of the message of Christ. The New Testaments is written in a
stunning array of religious pluralism. I think of the altar to the Unknown God
in the Areopagus that Paul addressed in Acts 17 and the worship of the great
Artemis in Ephesus in Acts 19, or the adoration of Aphrodite in Corinth that
stands behind his letters to the Corinthians. And that’s just a start. New
Testament Christians had a variety of religious options.
C.
S Lewis did not enjoy the thought of becoming a Christian, or even a theist. He
knew he would be scorned by the Oxford intellectuals that surrounded him.
Actually, at the time that this conversion to theism in 1929 and then to
Christian faith in 1931, he didn’t realize the extent: his Christian faith
would prevent him from receiving a professorship at Oxford. (It was Cambridge
that finally offered him a chair in 1954.) He certainly knew that orthodox
Christian belief was not (as we would say) “politically correct.” Moreover, he
carried his own doubts. As he phrased it in his 1955 autobiography, Surprised
by Joy, accepting the
existence of God made him “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all
England.”[1] As a lover of myths and their panoply of
gods and goddesses, affirming the uniqueness of Christ seemed silly. How then
did he resolve this crisis of Christian faith? And how do we believe in the
uniqueness of Christ when there are so many religions? Put another way—the way
Lewis so often encountered this crisis—since the myths of dying and rising gods
share common characteristics with the story of Jesus, aren’t they are all the
same and therefore there’s nothing unique about Jesus?[2]
Lewis’s
story: walk with Tolkien and Dyson
I
can imagine the thirty-two year old Lewis walking that memorable Saturday night
in September 1931 with his Oxford colleagues, Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien.
They were pondering the truth of myths and engaging in dialectic—we would say
“arguing”—with one another. In a letter to his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves,
he admitted that his struggle was between pagan “myths”—which, as a lover of
classical literature, he cherished—and the uniqueness of the story of Jesus:
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed was this: again, that if I met the idea sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself… I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels.[3]
But on this early morning walk in Oxford, which lasted until 3am, these two fellow
academics demonstrated something new. This was a turning point, or what I’ve
termed a key “plot point” for Lewis:
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working in us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one much be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where others are men’s myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things.”[4]
This
is a rather extraordinary conclusion for Lewis. Notice that he was able to
simultaneously sustain a deep appreciation for Pagan mythology—even describing
them as a place where God is “expressing Himself”—while upholding the ultimate
nature of the story of Christ. In Jesus, we see a “true myth,” but it is
different in one significant way: it “really happened.” Admittedly, no crisis
is resolved in an instant: there are always precedents. Lewis had been set up
for this conclusion by a stunning conversation with an atheist colleague at
Oxford who grumbled “Rum thing” about Jesus’s rising and dying in light of the
other myths such as Fraser analyzed in his famous book The Golden Bough, “Rum thing. It almost looks as if it
had really happened once.”[5]
Lewis’s
conclusion about Jesus implies there are truly valuable elements in other
religions and “myths.” It also implies the uniqueness and supremacy of Christ.
Because these two emphases combine in Lewis, I will have to take them together.
But first I would like to weave in my own experience with the crisis of
uniqueness of Jesus Christ.
My
coming to faith in light of other religions
To
speak personally for a moment, as I read through journals from my late ‘teen
years, one of the first things that struck me—besides the unbelievable
emotional swings of a late adolescent—was my struggle with the uniqueness of
Jesus. In a section from January 1981 named “My Belief in Religion: What Stops
Me,” I have a very sparse but poignant entry: “So many religions.” And then a
bit later this: “I’m having a lot of problems believing in Jesus Christ. It’s
so narrowly defined.”
These
concerns are not in any way diminished today for people seeking to understand
Jesus. In fact, as a pastor to college and university students, I know that
these concerns are tantamount for people considering Christian faith and for
those who are believers in Christ to keep believing.
And
in 1981, I needed to know about where Jesus fit. During that decisive,
life-altering winter quarter of my freshman year, I took Religious Studies 90A,
an introduction to the basic menu of “world religions”: Hinduism, Buddhism,
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with some animism and Chinese religion thrown
in. One thing struck me: I discovered that there was a pervasive reverence for
Jesus among world faiths. Buddhism describes him as an “enlightened” figure.
Hinduism easily fits him into their rather expansive worship of numerous
deities. Islam considers him one of the prophets. Judaism? That provided a
fascinating exception: it bestowed the seeds of his teachings and yet
simultaneously denied that Jesus fulfilled Jewish messianic hopes. Of course,
Christianity—the largest and most globally universal faith—centers on him, even
worships him.
Here,
on the subject of the uniqueness of Jesus, C.S. Lewis came as a mentor, or
perhaps, in Lewis’s words, a “Teacher.” (In one of his later books, The Great
Divorce, Lewis’s great
Teacher, the pastor and fantasy writer, George MacDonald, accompanies him in
the afterlife, revealing that he has been there throughout Lewis’s earthly
life. Lewis, it seems, is my George MacDonald.) Lewis helped me understand the value
of other religions and myths, but also see that Jesus Christ is unique and
worthy of our worship.
Nonetheless,
there is one contemporary difference on the subject of Jesus’s uniqueness:
Lewis does not spend much time on the uniqueness of the Christian Church per
se, which remains a key
issue today for those outside the church. Or perhaps better formulated, Lewis
sees a fairly direct line of continuity between believing in Jesus and the
community of believers in Jesus as the church. As he famously wrote—or
actually, intoned over the airwaves of the British Broadcasting Corporation—he
promoted “mere Christianity,” not any particular denomination. So if I were to
become a Christian, it would be based on belief in Jesus as the Son of God, not
belief in the church.
“Fulfillment”
model
Lewis’s
view of the uniqueness of Christ was not that all other faiths were entirely
false, but were brought to completion with the revelation of Christ. I call it
a fulfillment model—
“Christ, in transcending and abrogating, also fulfills, both Paganism and
Judaism.”[6] Lewis, more generally, believes the
Christian story fulfills the hopes and directions of other religions, but in
stating this conviction, Lewis implies that the other religions, or myths,
contain truth. He phrased the issue this way as he approached his own
conversion to Christianity at age thirty-two:
The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, “Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?”[7]
This
approach struck me then as reasonable and still does. For the purposes here,
Lewis led me to resolve the problem of the uniqueness of Jesus in a secular and
pluralistic world.
Lewis’s
“trilemma”—which he presents most famously in Mere Christianity—poses the question of whether Jesus is
liar, lunatic, or lord: We do not have the luxury of calling him a “great moral
teacher,” and the first two options are nonsensical. Therefore Jesus is who the
Gospels present him to be: the Son of God, the Lord. Here’s how Lewis phrased
it:
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.[8]
This
conclusion may sound exclusivist, narrow, parochial and frankly impossible in a
world where so many call on other names of other gods or who have never heard
the name Jesus. In that light, a few pages later, he offers this clarification:
“we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.”[9]
In
this fulfillment paradigm for Jesus, where Lewis brings together the uniqueness
of Jesus Christ with an appreciation for other myths, he sounds a great deal
like the twentieth century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, in this case as
interpreted by Princeton Seminary’s George Hunsinger: Barth, like Lewis,
presented “exclusivism without triumphalism or, alternatively, inclusivism without compromise.” In other words, they both believe in
one theological scheme represents the Truth—I would offer instead, one
Person—but other schemes (and for Lewis myths) are not entirely mistaken.[10] Similarly, there can be salvation for
those who don’t necessary name Jesus.
This
argument appears in a rather lapidary form in Mere Christianity. How can he expect to resolve Christ’s
uniqueness in one paragraph? Thankfully, he doesn’t, but elaborates his
thinking in an essay that appeared later in the collection assembled as God
in the Dock, entitled,
“What Are We to Make of
Jesus Christ?”[11] Lewis presents several key points: First
of all, that Jesus forgives sins, not simply offenses against him, but all
sins. Jesus says, “before Abraham was, I am” and a host of other statements
that would characterize him as a megalomaniac. Nonetheless, his moral teachings
are sane and humble. Lewis asks, Would his first followers have exaggerated his
claims? As Jews, they were the least likely because they believed in the One
God. If the claims were exaggerated, they would have to come in the form of
legend. But there realism, like Christ scribbling in the sand in John 8:6-8,
does not correspond to the form of literature known as legend. It can only be
compared to twentieth century novels: “the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an
imaginary scence more convincing is a purely modern art.”[12]
Above all, there is the Resurrection, which is not simply the hope of survival,
but something the New Testament writers present as something entirely new and
earth-shattering.
Lewis
continues to return to this fulfillment paradigm in a variety of ways, one of
which appears in the first and last installments of his famous The Chronicles
of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
In
Lion, where Lucy and
Edmund have both discovered Narnia through the wardrobe door, but Edmund (who’s
trying to hide the fact that he has met the White Witch, Jadis), denies the
experience and asserts that Lucy is lying. The next morning, Peter and Susan
approach the Professor. They are convinced that he will immediately contact
their parents when Lucy tells her story. He invites the children into his study
and listens to their story from beginning to end, without interrupting. When
they are finished, the Professor, to their surprise, asks them why they are so
certain that Lucy's story isn't true. He asks them to consider their own past
experiences with Lucy and Edmund. Who, he asks, is more truthful? He then
admonishes them to use logic, lamenting, "Why don't they teach logic at
these schools?" Logically—and here’s the key—the Professor concludes that
Lucy is either telling lies, going mad, or telling the truth. Since Lucy is not
a liar, and is not going mad, she must therefore be telling the truth. The
witnesses to Jesus’s unique status as the Son of God are credible witnesses to
what they tell us, even if it seems absurd.[13]
Similarly
the character of Emeth in The Last Battle embodies salvation “outside of the church.” (This has been a famous theological
question through the ages: “Is there salvation outside the walls of the
church”? in other words, for those who haven’t heard.) Emeth (whose name means
“truth” in Hebrew) has been a Calormene prince who has never served Aslan, but
instead the god of his country, Tash. When he dies, he’s surprised to find that
Aslan greets him in the life to come: “all the service thou has done to Tash, I
account as service to me…. For all find what they truly seek.”[14]
Conclusion
In
sum, we’ve seen that Lewis believed that many myths pointed to God’s truth, but
that in Christ, “myth became fact” and that we had to deal with his claims and
whether therefore he’s “liar, lunatic, or Lord.” It’s important then to see
where the trilemma fits in Lewis. He isn’t arguing with this a triumphalistic,
narrowly defined argument of Christ’s supremacy. Instead it’s imbedded within
his sense that God is already speaking through other religions and myths, but
has spoken uniquely and definitively in Jesus.
[1] Surprised by Joy, 228-29.
[2] See “Second Meanings” in Reflections on the Psalms, especially 106.
[3] 18 October 1931 Letter to Arthur
Greeves.
[4] 18 October 1931 letter to Arthur
Greeves.
[5] Surprised by Joy, 223-24.
[6] Reflections on the Psalms, 129.
[7] Surprised by Joy, 235.
[8] Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan, 1960), 56. It interests me that G. K. Chesteron
used the “fried egg” image in Orthodoxy, and I have wondered if Lewis is making an allusion here.
[9] Mere Christianity, 65.
[10] How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of
His Theology (New York:
Oxford University, 1991), 278-9.
[11] “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?” God
in the Dock, edited by
Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 156-60.
[12] “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?”
159.
[13] The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
[14] The Last Battle, 164-5.
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