Questions About the Bible
On trying to read the Bible “devotionally”
To Dom Bede Griffiths April 4, 1934
Devotion is best raised when we intend something else. At least that is my experience. Sit down to meditate devotionally on a single verse, and nothing happens. Hammer your way through a continued argument, just as you would in a profane writer, and the heart will sometimes sing unbidden.
(CL 2, 136)
Are all the books of the Bible equally historical?
To Corbin Scott Carnell April 5, 1953
I am myself a little uneasy about the question you raise: there seems to be almost equal objection to the position taken up in my footnote and to the alternative of attributing the same kind and degree of historicity to all the books of the Bible. You see, the question about Jonah and the great fish does not turn simply on intrinsic probability. The point is that the whole Book of Jonah has to me the air of being a moral romance, a quite different kind of thing from, say, the account of King David or the New Testament narratives, not pegged, like them, into any historical situation.
In what sense does the Bible “present” this story “as historical”? Of course it doesn’t say “This is fiction”: but then neither does Our Lord say that His Unjust Judge, Good Samaritan, or Prodigal Son are fiction. (I would put Esther in the same category as Jonah for the same reason). How does a denial, or doubt, of their historicity lead logically to a similar denial of N.T. miracles?
Supposing (as I think is the case) that sound critical reading reveals different kinds of narrative in the Bible, surely it would be illogical to conclude that these different kinds should all be read in the same way? This is not a “rationalistic approach” to miracles. Where I doubt the historicity of an Old Testament narrative I never do so on the ground that the miraculous as such is incredible. Nor does it deny “a unique sort of inspiration”: allegory, parable, romance, and lyric might be inspired as well as chronicle. I wish I could direct you to a good book on the subject, but I don’t know one. With all good wishes.
(CL 3, 318–319)
On dealing with baffling passages in the Bible
To Mrs. Emily McLay August 8, 1953
Your experience in listening to those philosophers gives you the technique one needs for dealing with the dark places in the Bible. When one of the philosophers, one whom you know on other grounds to be a sane and decent man, said something you didn’t understand, you did not at once conclude that he had gone off his head. You assumed you’d missed the point.
Same here. The two things one must NOT do are (a) To believe, on the strength of Scripture or on any other evidence, that God is in any way evil. (In Him is no darkness at all.*) (b) To wipe off the slate any passage which seems to show that He is. Behind that apparently shocking passage, be sure, there lurks some great truth which you don’t understand. If one ever does come to understand it, one will see that [He] is good and just and gracious in ways we never dreamed of. Till then, it must be just left on one side.
But why are baffling passages left in at all? Oh because God speaks not only for us little ones but also to great sages and mystics who experience what we only read about and to whom all the words have therefore different (richer) contents. Would not a revelation which contained nothing that you and I did not understand, be for that very reason rather suspect? To a child it would seem a contradiction to say both that his parents made him and that God made him, yet we see both can be true.
*I John 1:5
(CL 3, 356–357)
On progressive revelation in the Bible
To Mrs. Johnson May 14, 1955
My own view about Elisha and the bears* (not that I haven’t known small boys who’d be much improved by the same treatment!) and other such episodes is something like this. If you take the Bible as a whole, you see a process in which something which, in its earliest levels (those aren’t necessarily the ones that come first in the Book as now arranged) was hardly moral at all, and was in some ways not unlike the Pagan religions, is gradually purged and enlightened till it becomes the religion of the great prophets, and of Our Lord Himself. That whole process is the greatest revelation of God’s true nature. At first hardly anything comes through but mere power. Then (very important) the truth that He is One and there is no other God. Then justice, then mercy, love, wisdom.
*2 Kings 2:23–24
(CL 3, 608)
On claims that Bible characters did not drink alcohol
To Mrs. Johnson May 14, 1955
Of course Our Lord never drank spirits (they had no distilled liquors) but of course the wine of the Bible was real fermented wine and alcoholic. The repeated references to the sin of drunkenness in the Bible, from Noah’s first discovery of wine* down to the warnings in St. Paul’s epistles,** make this perfectly plain. The other theory could be (honestly) held only by a very ignorant person. One can understand the bitterness of some temperance fanatics if one had ever lived with a drunkard: what one finds it harder to excuse is any educated person telling such lies about history.
*Genesis 9:20–21
**Romans 13:13; Ephesians 5:18; 1 Timothy 3:3
(CL 3, 608)
The Bible as sacred history, but also as sacred myth and sacred fiction
To Janet Wise October 5, 1955
My own position is not Fundamentalist, if Fundamentalism means accepting as a point of faith at the outset the proposition “Every statement in the Bible is completely true in the literal, historical sense.” That would break down at once on the parables. All the same commonsense and general understanding of literary kinds which would forbid anyone to take the parables as historical statements, carried a very little further, would force us to distinguish between (1.) Books like Acts or the account of David’s reign, which are everywhere dovetailed into a knowing history, geography, and genealogies (2.) Books like Esther, or Jonah or Job which deal with otherwise unknown characters living in unspecified periods, and pretty well proclaim themselves to be sacred fiction.
Such distinctions are not new. Calvin left the historicity of Job an open question and, from earlier, St. Jerome said that the whole Mosaic account of creation was done “after the method of a popular poet.” Of course I believe the composition, presentation, and selection for inclusion in the Bible, of all the books to have been guided by the Holy Ghost. But I think He meant us to have sacred myth and sacred fiction as well as sacred history.
Mind you, I never think a story unhistorical because it is miraculous. I accept miracles. It’s almost the manner that distinguishes the fiction from the histories. Compare the “Once upon a time” opening of Job with the accounts of David, St. Paul, or Our Lord Himself. The basis of our Faith is not the Bible taken by itself but the agreed affirmation of all Christendom: to which we owe the Bible itself.
(CL 3, 652–653)
In praise of the Psalms
To Mary Van Deusen February 5, 1956
I am so glad you took to Psalm 36. My other great favorite is 19. First, the mere glory of nature (between the Psalms and Wordsworth—a long gap in history—you get nothing equal to either on this theme). Then the disinfectant, inexorable sun beating down on the desert and “nothing hid from the heat thereof.” Then—implied, not stated—the imaginative identification of that heat and light with the “undefiled” law, the “clean” fear of the Lord, searching every cranny. Then the characteristically Jewish feeling that the Law is not only obligatory but beautiful, ravishing: delighting the heart, better than gold, sweeter than honey. Only after that, the (more Christian like) self-examination and humble petition. Nearly all that could be said before the Incarnation is said in this Psalm. It is so much better Paganism than the real Pagans* ever did! And in one way more glorious, more soaring and triumphant, than Christian poetry. For as God humbled Himself to become Man, so religion humbled itself to become Christianity.
*In Lewis’s terminology, pre-Christian classical writers
(CL 3, 701)
What do we mean by the “inspiration” of Scripture?
To Lee Turner July 19, 1958
The main difficulty seems to me not the question whether the Bible is “inspired,” but what exactly we mean by this. Our ancestors, I take it, believed that the Holy Spirit either just replaced the minds of the authors (like the supposed “control” in automatic writing) or at least dictated to them as to secretaries.
Scripture itself refutes these ideas. St. Paul distinguishes between what “the Lord” says and what he says “of himself”—yet both are “Scripture.” Similarly the passages in which the prophets describe Theophanies and their own reactions to them would be absurd if they were not writing for themselves. Thus, without any modern scholarship, we are driven a long way from the extreme view of inspiration.
I myself think of it as analogous to the Incarnation—that, as in Christ a human soul-and-body are taken up and made the vehicle of Deity, so in Scripture, a mass of human legend, history, moral teaching etc. are taken up and made the vehicle of God’s Word. Errors of minor fact are permitted to remain. (Was Our Lord Himself incapable, qua Man, of such errors? Would it be a real human incarnation if He was?) One must remember of course that our modern and Western attention to dates, numbers, etc. simply did not exist in the ancient world. No one was looking for that sort of truth. . . . The blessed and significant thing is that none of all this has bothered your personal faith in Our Lord. Do you see clear reason why it need bother anyone else’s?
(CL 3, 960–961)
Gentle Jesus meek and mild vs. the real Jesus
To Edward Lofstrom January 16, 1959
“Gentle Jesus,” my elbow! The most striking thing about Our Lord is the union of great ferocity with extreme tenderness. (Remember Pascal? “I do not admire the extreme of one virtue unless you show me at the same time the extreme of the opposite virtue. One shows one’s greatness not by being at an extremity but by being simultaneously at two extremities and filling all the space between.”)
Add to this that HE is also a supreme ironist, dialectician, and (occasionally) humorist. So go on! You are on the right track now: getting to the real Man behind all the plaster dolls that have been substituted for Him. This is the appearance in Human form of the God who made the Tiger and the Lamb, the avalanche and the rose. He’ll frighten and puzzle you: but the real Christ can be loved and admired as the doll can’t.
(CL 3, 1011)
To a correspondent who felt that Lewis’s books challenged him more than reading the Bible
To Don Holmes February 17, 1959
If my books are sometimes permitted by God to deliver to particular readers a more perceptible challenge than Scripture itself, I think this is because, in a sense, they catch people unprepared. We approach the Bible with reverence and with readiness to be edified. But by a curious and unhappy psychological law these attitudes often inhibit the very thing they are intended to facilitate. You see this in other things: many a couple never felt less in love than on their wedding day, many a man never felt less merry than at Christmas dinner, and when at a lecture we say “I must attend,” attention instantly vanishes.
(CL 3, 1022–1023)
What is meant by the inspiration of Scripture?
To Clyde S. Kilby May 7, 1959
(Clyde S. Kilby was a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. Kilby sent Lewis a copy of the college’s statement on the inspiration of Scripture and asked for Lewis’s opinion. Kilby later began collecting Lewis’s letters and papers, a collection now housed at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College.)
Thank you for your kind letter. I enclose what, at such short notice, I feel able to say on this question. If it is at all likely to upset anyone, throw it in the waste paper basket. Remember too that it is pretty tentative, much less an attempt to establish a view than a statement of the views on which, whether rightly or wrongly, I have come to work.
To me the curious thing is that neither in my own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question in fact even assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth and that of Antigone—both first class as literature—is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question “Is Ruth historical?” (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It would still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning. But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g. the Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened: but the value of others (e.g. the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain.
Whatever view we hold on the divine authority of Scripture must make room for the following facts
It seems to me that 2 and 4 rule out the view that every statement in Scripture must be historical truth. And 1, 3, 5, and 6 rule out the view that inspiration is a single thing in the sense that, if present at all, it is always present in the same mode and the same degree. Therefore, I think, rule out the view that any one passage taken in isolation can be assumed to be inerrant in exactly the same sense as any other: e.g. that the numbers of O.T. armies (which in view of the size of the country, if true, involves continuous miracle) are statistically correct because the story of the Resurrection is historically correct. That the overall operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs His inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t. The very kind of truth we are often demanding was, in my opinion, never even envisaged by the Ancients.
*1 Corinthians 7:10: “yet not I, but the Lord”; 1 Corinthians 7:12: “I say, not the Lord”
(CL 3, 1044–1045)
How could a good God command atrocities in the Old Testament?
To John Beversluis July 3, 1963
On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua.* I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the danger of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him “good” and worshiping Him, is a still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scripture is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.
To this some will reply “Ah, but we are fallen and don’t recognize good when we see it.” But God Himself does not say we are as fallen as all that. He constantly, in scripture, appeals to our conscience: “Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?”—“What fault hath my people found in Me?” And so on.
Socrates’ answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker.** Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because He sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine will is the obedient servant of the Divine reason). The opposite view (Ockham’s & Paley’s)*** leads to the absurdity, if “good” means simply “what God wills” then to say “God is good” can mean only “God wills what He wills.” Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.
But of course having said all this, we must apply it with fear and trembling. Some things which seem to us bad may be good. But we must not corrupt our consciences by trying to feel a thing as good when it seems to us totally evil. We can only pray that if there is an invisible goodness hidden in such things, God, in His own good time will enable us to see it. If we need to. For perhaps sometimes God’s answer might be “What is that to thee?” The passage may not be “addressed to our (your or my) condition” at all.
*Deuteronomy 7:1–2; 20:16–18
**In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asks, “Is piety loved by the gods because it is pious, or it is pious because it is loved by the gods?” Richard Hooker was a sixteenth-century English theologian.
***William of Ockham, fourteenth-century Franciscan philosopher; William Paley, eighteenth-century English clergyman
(CL 3, 1436–1437)