Guide #1: CS Lewis

A Sacred Chain story

My new book is not a memoir, but in it I tell a lot of stories from my life — particularly as they relate to my coming to terms with the science of evolution. I’ve packaged these as responses to five different challenges that the consideration of evolution has posed to my faith. I try to do this in an “everyman” (or more properly, “every person”) story so it is less about me and more about the ideas that might be relevant to anyone. But to be honest, the challenges I faced are a direct result of the conservative Christian community I came from. Other people might have different challenges.

The first challenge for me was what to do with the Bible. I inherited a “high view” of Scripture according to which God used the Bible to reveal true things to us humans. So whatever the Bible means, that must be true; and for the most part, the Bible means what it says, which should be fairly obvious in most passages.

All my life I’ve had questions about this and wondered whether it was a contest to have the highest view of Scripture possible. If it is, I’m afraid that Islam has a higher view of the Qur’an, which they say was dictated to Mohammed, who simply repeated it verbatim to some scribes. And Mormons might have a higher view than that of the Book of Mormon, which supposedly came from gold plates that fell from heaven and were found by Joseph Smith.

I’m more interested, then, in having an accurate view of Scripture. I’m happy to say that God inspired the writing of Scripture, but it is a further question to ask what that means, exactly. So particularly when you start to examine what the human authors of Scripture believed about the world, it becomes a pretty important question to ask what of that it is incumbent upon us to believe if we want to be faithful to Scripture. Should we believe that the bowels are the seat of our emotions? That the heavens are a separate space walled off from us by the firmament? That slavery is OK? That the mustard seed is the smallest seed? That we should greet each other with a kiss? That everything was created in six days about ten thousand years ago?

There is a lot of sophisticated biblical interpretation that grapples with such passages, and there are many, many more we could list. Obviously there are some passages that were not meant to convey some timeless truth to all of us (when Paul says “bring my cloak and scrolls” in 2 Timothy, nobody thinks that applies to us today!). The problem is: there is no asterisk in the text that alerts us to when a particular verse is instructing everyone as opposed to reflecting a particular time- and culture-bound episode of some sort.

So, when I started considering evolutionary theory and its concomitant billions of years of Earth’s history, I had to figure out how I might still understand Scripture as inspired. One way is to think that God actually smuggled into the text little hints about modern scientific theory that wouldn’t be discovered for many centuries. Some people today like to try to show how the Bible was predicting modern science, and therefore it should be believed to be of divine origin.

For example, Genesis 1 actually says “let the land bring forth” and “let the seas bring forth”. Isn’t that really saying that creatures evolved?? I don’t think so. I don’t think it makes sense to think that God was revealing to the ancient Hebrew people a scientific theory that they themselves knew nothing about it. Instead, I found a guide for understanding the nature of the Bible as both an ancient text that was situated in a particular culture, and as inspired by God.

C.S. Lewis is practically a patron saint of conservative Christianity in America, so it might surprise some of that community to hear him say things like this:

Thus something originally merely natural — the kind of myth that is found among most nations — 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. Generalising this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature — chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of God’s word.

That comes from his short (and under-appreciated) book, Reflection on the Psalms. His chief concern there was with the imprecatory or cursing Psalms where David asks God to dash his enemies’ babies against the rocks, and other similarly un-Christian sounding things. It turns out that David wasn’t a Christian!

The main point I take from this is that the high views of Scripture I had inherited assumed a “top-down” view of inspiration, according to which God’s word dropped down from heaven to us. Lewis, instead, argues for a “bottom-up” view of inspiration according to which the Bible becomes the word of God because the culture-bound literature was taken up into divine service.

There is a lot to unpack here, and I do some of that in the book (and I’d hate to tell you all of it here and prevent you from reading all about in the book!). Let me just say that this view of Scripture seems very consistent with Jesus using very normal and flawed people to accomplish his mission.

I’ll also say that one my favorite parts about the book is that each chapter (all 28 of them) begins with a black-and-white sketch made by my daughter Sloan. She’s an art school graduate and got none of her artistic ability from me. The sketches are inspired by some episode or idea from the chapters. This one is from the chapter called, “Finding Deeper Faith with C.S. Lewis” and it is something like the Inklings sitting in an English pub discussing things:

Sloan’s interpretation of CS Lewis and the Inklings