[This is a draft from my upcoming book on C. S. Lewis--which is way of way of saying you'll probably find a few typos. I hope you also find some insights on Lewis. In any event, let me know what you think.]
We
proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to
Gentiles
Paul, 1 Corinthians 1:20
 |
| Lewis, at the moment he was writing about Jesus |
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 C. S. 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 written book of all things? That second topic I will take that up in 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 new 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 in addition to Jesus.
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 of these rebuffs: his Christian faith would prevent him from
receiving a professorship at Oxford. He was always a don there. It was
Cambridge that finally offered him a chair in 1954. Lewis 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]
Nevertheless, we have arrived at Lewis’s
fourth apologetic argument. Having reasoned that naturalism is self-defeating
(argument one), he then contended that we desire something more than this world
can offer, and that, by nature, we have a sense of right and wrong that leads
us to believe in God who gives us this law. In this final apologetic Lewis
poses the question, Who is Jesus Christ? He asserts that Jesus is either liar,
lunatic, or Lord. This is his most famous argument, but probably the least
elaborated of the four. I’ll look first at how this resolves one of Lewis’s
central crises.
Lewis’s walk with Tolkien and Dyson
I
can imagine the thirty-two year old Lewis walking that memorable September 1931
Saturday night in Oxford with his 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 until 4am. The conversation was decisive for Lewis.
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 a cynical atheist
colleague at Oxford, T. D. (“Harry”) Weldon, who was a tutor and lecturer in
greats (or classical philosophy) at Magdalen College with Lewis. Lewis wrote
that Weldon, “believes he has seen through everything and lives at rock
bottom.” That day in April 1926, Weldon grumbled about Jesus’s rising and dying
in light of the other myths such as James 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 struggle with the truth 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.
“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, but
appears two years earlier in The Problem
of Pain—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 the first time:
There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the
son of, or to be “one with,” the Something which is at once the awful haunter
of nature [a form of Lewis’s second apologetic argument] and the giver of the
moral law [third apologetic]. The claim is so shocking—a paradox, and even a
horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly—that only two views
of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually
abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no
middle way.[8]
And then, later in the BBC Broadcast talks
that eventually became published as Mere
Christianity, it appears as follows:
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.[9]
This argument appears in a rather lapidary
form in Mere Christianity.[10]
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 in the Gospels, there is 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 scene 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]
Is view of Jesus
too narrow?
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 know that no one can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that
only those who know Him can be saved through Him.”[14]
In this fulfillment paradigm for Jesus,
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.[15] Similarly, there can be salvation for
those who don’t necessary name Jesus.
Similarly the character of Emeth in The Last Battle embodies this other
side: that those who don’t hear about Jesus in life can be saved. Put another
way, there is 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.”[16]
Evaluation
So,
my overall contention in this book is that Lewis has something to say, not
simply to mid twentieth-century Christians, but to us as well. How then do I
evaluate Lewis’s fulfillment model of Jesus in a world of pluralism? How well
does the “liar, lunatic, Lord” argument work today?
I’ll begin with some concerns.
To take more particularly his “liar, Lord,
or lunatic” argument: it needs further engagement with other putative
“gospels,” especially those popularized by the best-selling book of all time, The Da Vinci Code. These non-canonical sources
have only gained in acclaim since his death. Most of them are so late and
tainted by gnostic thought that they are not historically useful, at least in
understanding Jesus of Nazareth, although I, having learned from biblical
scholars of many theological convictions, believe there is historical tradition,
embedded within the Gospel of Thomas.
Nevertheless, the most secure historical documents for finding who Jesus is are
the biblical Gospels.[17]
The contemporary reader probably also
brings a higher degree of skepticism about the Christian Church. 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.
The last issue may be idiosyncratic, but
I, like Lewis could grasp initially how Jesus’s death somehow substituted for the penalty for sin I
needed to pay. This didn’t make a great deal of sense. It didn’t make sense to
Lewis either, and he struggled with how the death of Jesus two thousand years
ago could have an objective effect on our lives today. After becoming a convert
and even a Christian, Lewis could not easily subscribe to the notion that
Christ “substituted” himself for us. “What I couldn’t see was how the life and
death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and
now—except in so far as his example
helped us.”[18]
Though I’ve come to appreciate the substitutionary
death better over the subsequent years, I still would resonate with Lewis’s
conclusion that he drew a little over a decade after his conversion. In effect,
theories about Christ’s atonement are not the final issue. (Historically in
fact, Lewis is in good company with the Church historically. Though it has
defined who Christ is—or Christology—there has been no ecumenical statement on
atonement.)
The footnotes aren't entirely elaborated, but I think they give sufficient information... until the final draft comes.
[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] Jack:
A Life of C. S. Lewis, 222, and Surprised
by Joy, 223-24.
[6] Reflections
on the Psalms, 129.
[7] Surprised
by Joy, 235.
[8] The
Problem of Pain (MacMillan,
1962), 24.
[9] Mere
Christianity (New York: MacMillan, 1960), 56. It interests me that G. K. Chesterton used the “fried egg”
image in Orthodoxy, and I have
wondered if Lewis is making an allusion here.
[10] He also made this claim a few years
earlier in The Problem of Pain, 62.
[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] Mere
Christianity, 65.
[15] How
to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York: Oxford University,
1991), 278-9.
[16] The
Last Battle, 164-5.
[17] Though I have learned a great deal from
several biblical “history of Jesus” scholars such as Jon Dominic Crossan and
Marcus Borg, N. T. Wright has done the most significant work. Among his
voluminous writings, one could begin with Jesus
and Victory of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, Volume 2
(Fortress, 1997).
[18] 18 October 1931 letter.
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