C. S. Lewis and the Bible

What do you think Lewis’s response would be to the people who have taken him as their champion?

Oh my gosh.

Because it doesn’t seem like he would, he would be happy about who it is that are most interested in grabbing him and using him.

He would despise it.

Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan. And I’m Dan Beecher. And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Good. Things are good. We’re out here combating misinformation, but this time, maybe it’s not about the Bible. Maybe the misinformation we’ll be combating—or maybe it is, actually, but it’s from a very specific source. And to help us do it, we’ve brought a guest on. Why don’t you, Dan, introduce our guest?

This is Leslie Baynes. She is professor of New Testament and Second Temple Judaism at Missouri State University. And I’m looking at the bio here. She has also served as scholar in residence at the Kilns, which is Lewis’s home outside of Oxford, and as an Inklings Project fellow, which reminds me of the days I used to spend at the Bird and Baby, or the Eagle and Child, the pub—oh, I think it’s on Banbury—with the little plaque above one of the tables that mentions the Inklings used to hang out there until, if I recall the lore correctly, they got annoyed with how they were trying to commercialize their patronage and went across the street to the Lamb and Flag.

I think that’s right. Yeah, they would meet various places, but the Bird and Baby, of course, is the big one. Yeah, it shut down during COVID. It shut down.

Yes, I was, I was there a couple of years ago and yeah, I was like, it’s, it’s not even there anymore. And I went over to the Lamb and Flag. It was—I was on one of my early morning runs, so it wasn’t open yet. But I’ve noticed they have some Elvish, an Elvish carving above the door of the Lamb and Flag. So, so it took, it took a handful of decades, but we see who won that battle, so to speak. But you recently published Between Interpretation and Imagination: C. S. Lewis and the Bible, which I’m excited to talk about for a number of reasons, not least of which I am seeing C. S. Lewis being brought up an awful lot on social media by contemporary, mostly evangelical apologists. And you have a couple of things to say about some of the ways that American evangelicals try to leverage Lewis’s authority but overlook some of the features of his approach to the Bible. I’m looking forward to getting into that.

But before we get too deep in the weeds, what, what is your fascination with C. S. Lewis? Where does, where does this all come from?

Like a lot of people, I started reading The Chronicles of Narnia when I was a kid. Mm. Some people have them read to them, but I read them myself. And then I liked them so much that I got his other books. This is pre-internet, you actually had to go to a real bookstore. So I was, you know, just buying whatever was there, the classics: Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce. Then what I consider to be his best novel, Till We Have Faces. And read all of those before I got to college.

I was gonna say, I hope you didn’t, like, as a child after having read The Chronicles of Narnia, run off and get Screwtape or—.

Yeah, it took a few years. Where are the lions?

Yeah, it did take a few years. So I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know The Chronicles of Narnia, but surely it must have been when I was around 10, something like that. And then, uh, when I was 14, 15, 16, when I was getting more involved in an active Christian faith, I found Screwtape and Mere Christianity and those.

Okay, so you, you were prepped a little bit for, for this pivot into his, his more explicitly at least, religious discourse.

Yeah, you know, I, I’m gonna just pitch for our, our listeners that if, if you want to hear this, you can go to our Patreon and become a patron there and hear Leslie, but we had you do our afterparty there, and you were talking about sort of how you, not unlike Lewis, you had an awakening into religiosity as a young person. Yes. You were a little younger than Lewis was when he did his. Definitely. But yeah, that got you—you got very into it.

I did. Even more so than I told you in the afterparty.

Oh, wow. Okay. All right.

And to—and even Lewis remained with you all this time. If after your degree, after you went off and studied eschatology and the Book of Revelation and Enoch and all those kinds of things, you found yourself involved professionally with Lewis’s work, or at least you occupied areas where Lewis was prominent.

That’s kind of a long story. I’ll try to make it short. Okay.

So, I mean, we got time.

Okay. My entire career I’ve been teaching at Missouri State University, which is in Springfield, Missouri. It is not the University of Missouri. It is not Mizzou.

I made that mistake earlier. That was my fault.

And, uh, my department head came to my office one day early in the time I had been there, and he asked me a very interesting question. He said, if you could teach any course you wanted, what would it be? I didn’t have to think very long. I said C. S. Lewis. And this is the reason why. When I was an undergraduate, my very favorite professor to whom I dedicated this book on C. S. Lewis and the Bible—I’ll just say his name here, Father Jim Heft—uh, he taught a course on C. S. Lewis the last semester of my senior year in college, and if I wanted to graduate on time, I had to take certain courses, and that course didn’t fit. And it was one of the great disappointments of my 4 years in college that I couldn’t take a course on one of my favorite authors by my favorite professor ever. So when I greet my students in my C. S. Lewis course, I say, you’re here because I am teaching the class that I never got to take.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that was a, that was a great— I remember reading that in the book and what a— it is fascinating that, uh, in the realm of serious study of the Bible, that a man who wasn’t a scholar of the Bible but who wrote prolifically about it comes up so much. Uh, talk a little bit about Lewis and the Bible and sort of why it was so important to him to write about it. And, you know, Lewis was obviously well-educated, but not on the Bible.

That is correct. Uh, he was never well-educated in theology or religion in general. He was very much self-taught in that. As far as I can figure, and I’m pretty sure I’m right, he never took a single formal course on anything having to do with religion, theology, and biblical studies. And those to me are three different disciplines. Yeah, they all intersect, of course, but they are three different areas of study. Um, he had read the Bible and had it read to him from the time he was a little boy, and he even really appreciated some of the beautiful lines in it. Um, for example, uh, there is a passage in Job that talks about, um, how God created and the stars sang and the sons of God shouted for joy. And he wrote a letter to his best friend Arthur Greaves saying that that verse was ineffably beautiful.

So he appreciated the Bible, uh, because he really appreciated beautiful language. He wanted to be a poet more than he wanted anything else. He wrote poems, he read poems, he, uh, did literary criticism on poems and poetry. So during his atheistic period, he could still appreciate the Bible, uh, in terms of its language, in terms of its story. He continued to do this his whole life, of course, even after he started taking the Bible more seriously. And seriously is a word that he used when he started to return towards the Christian faith that he had been raised in. He was raised in a nominally, uh, Christian home, Church of Ireland, which, if I am correct, is the Irish version of the Anglican Church. Uh, I didn’t spend too much time looking into that.

Lewis left Christianity behind not because his mother died when he was a young boy, but for other reasons when he was a young adolescent, and he didn’t return to the Christian faith until he was about 32, 33 years old.

Hmm. Wow. And in this time period, he doesn’t have his own biblical scholarship that he’s developing. He’s got to rely on what’s available at the time, which is not the same as the scholarship that we have around us today. Could you talk a little bit about what biblical scholarship was like in this period and which of these scholars actually stuck out for Lewis? Because you talk about, um, some that were particularly influential and one that Lewis seems to have adopted perspectives wholesale from. Could you talk a little bit about the— I assume this is like pretty fairly mainline Protestant scholarship, very mainline Anglicanism.

Yeah. So Lewis would read outside of Anglicanism, and there are other people that he read very heavily and seriously besides the two that I’m going to talk about right now. But the two that I really emphasize in the book, um, one is named James Moffatt and the other is Charles Gore.

He became the Bishop of Oxford at one point in his life, and what he’s most famous for is a book that he edited that came out in 1889 called Lux Mundi, which is Latin for Light of the World, right? And Gore gathered around him a bunch of his friends, uh, also Anglican priests, etc. And so it’s an edited book, right? Each chapter is by a different guy. And Gore’s contribution is called The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. And this chapter that Gore wrote garnered more controversy than the entire book combined. Um, these guys in 1889 are kind of on the cutting edge of critical biblical scholarship in the Anglican world. Um, Germany—.

They’re just catching up with Germans.

Germans, yeah, yeah. The German stuff had been going for, you know, um, almost a century before that, right? And it was starting to filter into the Anglican world and coming more to the attention of general readers of the Bible, who were becoming very agitated, uh, when they heard that maybe Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch. And things like that. So Gore got together his group of friends in order to take the best of the German scholarship and to get it across in a way that could be accepted more in the Anglican world.

So it was a devotional scholarship that this book is committed to?

No, no, really?

Or not really? Not really? Okay.

No, not in my reading anyway. Gore did write devotional books, that really influenced Lewis. But, uh, I’ve read Gore’s chapter numerous times. It’s heavy. Yeah. Uh, I, I read some of the other chapters, and I’m not sure how they stand up. All I can talk about for sure is, is Gore’s chapter.

And it is really dense. It is. It’s got a lot going on. And I would bet that your average person in the pew in 1889 might have had kind of a, a tough swim going through it. But it hit like a bombshell in the Anglican world and created a whole bunch of controversy. And Gore was thought to be more of a radical at the time because he was trying to accept as much of the German scholarship as he could, uh, and the only thing that he didn’t accept really was the Germans’ refusal of the possibility of miracles. Gore was a full-on supernaturalist. He would say, yes, miracles are possible. But source criticism and, uh, you know, all of the stuff that was going around in 1889, he’s, he’s going to basically take it all. And Gore says that the Bible is not inerrant. To put it positively, that there are mistakes in the Bible, and it’s fine to have mistakes in the Bible.

And some of the books in the Bible, like Jonah and Job, are actually fiction. And they can still be inspired even when they are fiction. And he said that it isn’t the Bible that is the word of God. He says that no person coming into the church is ever asked, “Do you believe in the Bible?” They’re asked, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” So he says that the Bible is not the word. Jesus is the word. And all of these things Lewis is going to follow to the letter.

Yeah. Before we get deep into Lewis and his interaction with Gore, though, I did want you to— because before you get into it in the book, you do mention Lewis’s connection to mythology. And I wanted to sort of explore that a little bit because it seems really vital to not only his work as as a, you know, his biblical work, but also it obviously, it just plays out so, so hugely in his, in his literary work. So, so talk a little bit about his connection to, to mythology and how he views, uh, that word when it comes to Christianity.

This is huge. So many books have been written on this. So Lewis was a words guy and a story guy. He loved story and narrative, and particularly if it would take him away from the here and now. His mother died when he was 9, and within the month he had been sent away to a boarding school in another country. He grew up in what’s now Northern Ireland, in Belfast, and was sent to England and his brother had been going to the same school for a couple of years. His brother was 12, he was 9, and the two little boys were put on a boat and sent to a boarding school in another country.

Um, the guy who ran the school was later put in a hospital for the insane.

Well, that, that doesn’t bode well.

No, not a bit.

Not a bit. Sounds like Roald Dahl as much as, uh, as— yeah, you’re right, very much so.

So, uh, poor Lewis escapes into his books, and he had always done that. Like I said, you know, his brother had been at the boarding school before. He was at home by himself. He wrote stories, he read things. It was how he survived as a child. Uh, so one time he came across a line in a poem: “Baldur the beautiful is dead, is dead.” Baldur is a Norse god who is killed, goes down into the underworld, and is then brought up. And there’s so much going on in these lines and how they affected Lewis. He keeps Baldur always as an example of a dying and rising god before the time of Christ. And the line, he says, shot him into the Norse world of cold and huge skies with stars.

He just loved Norse mythology. So Norse mythology seems to have been his favorite. He also liked Celtic mythology. He also really liked Greco-Roman mythology. And for him, he said in his spiritual autobiography called Surprised by Joy that everything in my real world was awful, everything in my imaginary world was beautiful, and there was just a line between them that could not be crossed. Everything real, hateful. Everything not real, wonderful. So again, this sounds very much like a traumatized boy surviving as best he could. And he didn’t care that the myths weren’t true. They fed him like nothing in his real life did. He was kind of estranged from his father. He didn’t like school. He loved books and reading, but he couldn’t stand school.

He was not what we would call a jock today, far from it. He was very much a nerd.

And he just wanted to be left alone to read. So for him, myth is something to live on. It is something that points you to a longing that he called Joy with a capital J.

Yeah, he had a very interesting— he had his own— like, joy to him was not the way we use that word.

No, no. One of the things about Lewis is that he’ll have words that have regular meanings to us, and he will give them totally different meanings. It’s really annoying sometimes.

Well, and then, and then just to complicate things, he marries a lady named Joy. So that, that—.

You couldn’t make this up. If you put it in a novel, they’d say, no, you’ve got to take that out. It just can’t happen.

Yeah. Well, and this is really tapping into something kind of fundamentally human, our reliance on narratives for everything, our understanding of ourselves, our understanding of the world around us, our place within it. We structure so much of our thinking, our communicating, our memories, our plans, everything is wrapped around narrative. So it sounds like he was— that was kind of the iron rod for him that he clung to in order to find direction. And I highlighted a line in the book, “Human doctrine is but a shadow of true myth, and it is never as good as myth. Story trumps doctrine every time.” And this is a vibe that I can really get behind, because I find it fascinating that people will talk about the inspiration of the scriptures, the inerrancy of the scriptures, the historicity, all this kind of stuff.

I’ll say one of the most powerful stories in all of the Bible is explicitly not historical, is the parable of the Good Samaritan, is one that I bring up a lot. This is clearly not a historical thing, but because of the story, the lesson that is embedded in this narrative, in this story, it becomes so incredibly powerful. And when I bring this up, it’s funny how frequently people will say, you don’t know it’s not true. It could have been based on. So there are an awful lot of people who are who are clinging to historicity, but it resonates with me, somebody who is more about story than they are about the minutia of the inerrancy and the historicity and inspiration of all of that kind of thing.

Lewis really disliked this kind of minutia. He only talked about inspiration and inerrancy because people asked him about it. He said, I don’t care. I don’t care whether a story is historically true or not. Yeah, it speaks to me whether or not it is.

Oh wow.

No, no, no, I’m wrong. Not of that talk, that was in September. The 100th anniversary of Lewis and Tolkien meeting one another was just a few days ago as we’re recording here. So in May of 1926. Yeah. So Lewis was getting more and more interested in God, but he really didn’t want to move into that realm, and that’s another story. So he and Tolkien and Dyson went out on a walk where they talked about myth and story and theology and God and all kinds of things. And Tolkien convinced him that he could believe in Christ as a true myth. Jesus’s incarnation, death, and resurrection was true, but it was also a myth.

And this was the key that opened the door to Lewis to be able to accept Jesus. He says in a letter to his best friend Arthur Greeves, who is back at home in Ireland, uh, that the idea of the atonement had always been a problem for him. Uh, he couldn’t get through what we would call the systematic theology about the atonement. But if he could accept it as a myth, it just— all the lights went on.

Yeah, it made it a lot more useful to him and his worldview. You mentioned the idea of dying and rising gods. That would be— that’s like a Frazerian kind of approach to kind of an evolutionary approach to religiosity and myth. Myth was a huge part of Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Do you— I don’t know that you’ve done any work on that, but did he have an anthropology, a theory of religion that derives from Frazer that kind of was intertwined with this approach to the myth that is true kind of?

I have had my hands on Lewis’s personal copies with his notes on them of Frazer’s Golden Bough.

Oh, wow.

There you go.

It was a very big deal to him.

Yeah, which I know it’s— you talk about how stuff trickles down from like German scholarship to English language Anglican scholarship. It seems like these days a lot of the folks on social media are just finding out about Frazer, so the trickle is slow in a lot of ways.

Okay. Very slow.

Yeah, and you know, it’s been around for a while, but you see a lot of stuff on social media, the conspiracy theories that are out there seem to be informed more by Tylor and Frazer than by somebody like J. Z. Smith or more scholars from at least the last century if not this century. So that’s interesting that Lewis, who’s held up as kind of an apologetic source for a lot of people these days, was kind of deeply embedded in a lot of the sources that stand opposed to a lot of what apologists for Christianity are doing these days.

Yeah, he was definitely an apologist, but he was also a scholar. And there’s kind of an uneasy, uh, uneasy force field, I guess, the only way that I can think about saying that, between the two, uh, because he, he pops in and out of, of both. And of course, what I’ve looked at mainly is the Bible, and it’s kind of frustrating, you know. It frustrates both biblical scholars and, um, Christian apologists.

Yeah, it does seem like, uh, what I got from your book was a sense that, uh, that Lewis had this idea— had— he didn’t want to hold anything too tightly. He didn’t— it, like, he, he— it felt to me like— and, and maybe you can confirm or deny this, but it felt like he, you know, he found the things that worked for him and that he liked, but he didn’t want to argue too— he didn’t want to dig in so much that he had to hold himself to something too heavily, or he didn’t want to trap himself into any specific line of logic. It felt like he very much wanted to flow and ride, you know, ride the wind of wherever he wanted to go. I don’t know, what are your thoughts on that?

I would agree with that to some extent. Definitely with the Bible, he did not want to think much about inerrancy. He didn’t want to think at all about theories of the atonement, particularly if intra-Christian debates, Christians arguing among themselves, would be a stumbling block to people outside of the faith. He thought it was much more important for Christians to come together where they would agree. And of course, that’s where, uh, the title Mere Christianity comes from.

Uh, but he’s trying very, very hard to be winsome, to be attractive, to not be controversial. Uh, but there are a couple of things that he’ll really hold to. He wrote a book called Miracles, and he is very insistent that miracles are not only possible but have actually happened. And to him, if you don’t believe in the possibility of miracles, you’ve put yourself outside the Christian fold.

He does seem to approach this on more kind of almost sociological terms. He’s interested in the community more than he is in the doctrines.

Oh, absolutely.

He wants it to be— he wants to be a group that is attractive to outsiders, a group that is attractive enough to insiders to keep people in the fold. And I’m curious if you’ve thought much about the degree to which this is an artifact of the amateur nature of his ability to engage the scholarship and the details of questions of inerrancy and questions of theology, like theories of atonement and things like that.

Absolutely. He was well aware of the fact that he had no formal training in these areas. And over and over in his books, in his essays, he will say, “I am an amateur.” So for example, in his pretty good little popular book called Reflections on the Psalms, it is written by a layperson for laypeople. It is reflections on the Psalms, not critical analyses of the Psalms or an introduction to the Psalms, just his own personal reflections. Very first page, he says, I am not a biblical scholar. I have no Hebrew. And he just keeps saying that over and over. So he, he always, uh, wants to defer to experts, but they have to be his own approved experts. So he will not accept anyone who does not believe in the possibility of divine supernatural intervention in the world and in people’s lives.

It’s interesting. You talk about how he’s not hung up on inerrancy or whatever, but he did— I remembered that there was a part that I underlined where he was talking to, or writing, corresponding with someone named Emily McLay. And he said that he takes it as a first principle that we must not interpret any one part of scripture so that it contradicts other parts. And I think this was a— you write, for example, one must not pit the letters of Paul against the Gospels as McLay was doing. So talk about just sort of how he squared that circle where nothing is allowed to contradict another thing.

He did believe that the Bible was full of contradictions and errors. For example, when people would write him asking about inerrancy, He would say that the two, uh, descriptions of the death of Judas contradicted each other. Uh, he would say that the genealogies contradicted each other. He would say that there were errors of history in the historical parts, as he called them. And at the same time, he said that we must not interpret the Bible so that Uh, one part contradicts another part. And I’ve just got to admit here, I had a really hard time writing this because I wasn’t exactly sure what Lewis meant either, because he was very, very clear that the Bible contradicts itself multiple places, but he told people, uh, basically just to sit with it.

He told Emily McLay that what you must not do is choose one side of the contradiction over the other, but essentially to hold them in creative tension. He brought up an analogy. He says, think of the physicists who say that— is it energy? I’m not sure— is both a light and a wave.

Light is both a particle and a wave.

Yeah, a particle and a wave. Uh, I wrote this and I forgot it. You know how that goes. So He says just sit with it and God will enlighten you, enlighten you as to the meaning of what you want to know if and when you’re ready for it, if that ever happens.

And I think that’s a pretty thoughtful approach because this is one of the main things that I talk about is this presupposition of univocality, that it almost means the same thing. And ultimately we negotiate with things where there is tension. We tend to just say Okay, well, the thing I already agree with is obviously the point of reference, and then we’re just going to renegotiate the other part away and make it, you know, subsume it within the part that I already agree with. So that strikes me as a slightly more kind of self-conscious and slightly more critical approach to say, no, you can’t give preference to one over the other.

I don’t know how much we would— I think we would have gotten along better than I get along with some people people who quote Lewis.

I think you’re probably right. Yes. Um, I, I think of, of your, your phrasing, the Bible is not univocal. I use it with my students. Oh. And, uh, I don’t know that Lewis would have gone that far because he thought that the Bible was all one message because it all came from God. It was all inspired. But it could be inspired and have errors and contradictions and fiction in it.

Yeah. So you mentioned that one of the things he appropriates from Gore is the notion that it is not a verbal inspiration.

Correct.

Which is the foundation of an awful lot of evangelical approaches to inspiration these days.

But yeah, yeah, he rejected that really hard.

Which was— was this a movement that was going on at the time? Was he kind of riding the the winds of change, winds of doctrine, or was he striking out on his own in that regard?

Well, Moffatt also said it in the preface to his New Testament that you had to reject the idea of, uh, plenary verbal inspiration, mechanical inspiration, uh, however you want to phrase the thing. And I know that people who are really into this can be very picky. Well, this one means that, and that one means that. I’m not gonna go there. Uh, so Moffatt was a, a big force in the Anglican world in the first third of the 20th century, but Gore was even more. Okay. And of course Gore said the same thing. Basically, even though Gore’s book, uh, and Gore himself were thought to be radicals when they came out in 1889, by the time Gore died around 1932, he was considered to be a fundamental mainstream figure in Anglicanism. Yeah. So yeah, um, I, I guess if we can take that, that Gore was sort of the mainstream figure in Anglicanism, yes, it was a movement.

Yeah. And the, the Fundamentals were written in the, in the 1910s, and, and that would be a separate movement that, uh, that I’m sure Lewis would, would lament it having become as, uh, has become as influential as it is today.

Oh, he would have hated it.

But, but it sounds like he was kind of being a popularizer of something that was coming out of critical scholarship. He was helping spread the word to some degree, at least that part. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to ask, there’s, there was an interesting chapter, I think when we, when we mentioned, hey, we want to talk about this, that and the other, I think I forgot to mention this, but you have quite an in-depth discussion about supersessionism and antisemitism related to Lewis. Do you have anything that surprised you about Lewis and his relationship to Judaism, or anything that you think a lot of other people will be surprised to know?

Hmm, surprised might be a bit too strong. Lewis, along with Tolkien, thought of themselves as being pro-Jew, pro-Judaism. Um, just a little biographical section about Lewis. You mentioned that he married a woman named Joy. Her name was Joy Davidman. She was raised as a secular Jew. Her father was an atheist, and she was an atheist. And then mainly by reading the books of C. S. Lewis, she became a Christian. Uh, she was married at the time, had two kids, and Joy Davidman’s scholarship is just fascinating too. I haven’t done a lot of it, but, um, it looks as if from what people have been able to dig up through writings that were stored in an attic and found 10 or 20 years ago, that Joy essentially decided that she was going to leave her husband and marry C. S.

Lewis.

Oh wow, bold. I like it.

So she, uh, her marriage was in trouble and she went to England and basically set her cap at C. S. Lewis and she won. Um, she divorced her husband and Joy and Jack— that was his name, uh, Clive Staples was his given name, he never used it, he always wanted to be known as Jack— so Jack and Joy got married. And Joy, even though she hadn’t been raised in a practicing Jewish home, was very aware of Jews and Judaism and ideas about all of them. She, uh, she may be called a Jewish antisemite. The things that she wrote were really shocking.

Uh, Joy had two sons, an older son named David and a younger one named Douglas. And David decided that he wanted to go back to the Judaism of his forebears. While he was living with, uh, Lewis and Joy in Oxford. And Lewis went out of his way to get Hebrew lessons for his son, to get him kosher food, which could not have been easy in Oxford in the 1950s.

Uh, so he thought of himself as someone who loved the Jews and was very pro-Jewish, but at the same time He had some very— he expressed some prejudices that were very common, if I may extrapolate a little bit, I wasn’t there, to his class and his time. So for example, the word Pharisee and Pharisaism for him. Pharisaism was self-righteousness. You couldn’t be a Pharisee and a good person. And he wrote some things in Reflections on the Psalms and in the foreword to his new wife’s book called Smoke on the Mountain, which was a reflection on the Ten Commandments that Joy wrote. Joy has some really awful things in Smoke on the Mountain, uh, and Jack has some things too that don’t sound so good.

He says something like, “A Jew is a Christian manque,” someone who should have grown into it, who has been chopped off and is now not able to become the person that he should be. And this is pretty awful stuff if you read it through a Jewish lens.

Right. Yeah.

But also kind of par for the course for a lot of the crowd, imagine he was running in at the time.

That’s what I’m thinking. From what I can tell, he never read any books that were written by Jewish scholars. He read books by Catholics, by Eastern Orthodox, by Hindus, but never as far as I’m aware Did he read books by Jewish scholars who, of course, were writing things in the late 19th century, trying to correct Christian scholars’ viewpoints?

Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like there is a tradition of scholarship in Judaism that goes back, oh, a fair bit. So it does seem like that seems like a pretty, pretty large omission.

Mm-hmm. One of the parts that I cut out of the book was some material I found by a Jewish scholar contemporary with Lewis who was really arguing back against ideas like this. But for space, I had to keep it out, but it was good stuff. And it seems like the Oxford Christian scholars didn’t really engage it at all.

That’s unfortunate, but not surprising about the state of affairs at that time period.

But he was—.

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, please. I was just going to say, you mentioned the word supersessionism, and I didn’t even really use that word. I would call him a mild supersessionist. He definitely believed that to be a Christian was better than to be a Jew, and that God’s plan is that everyone becomes a Christian. But so far in what I’ve read of Lewis, I haven’t found any place where he speculates about the ultimate destiny of Jews or the Jewish people.

Well, I, I don’t think we can let you go. You know, we’re— I don’t want to run out of time before we get to the latter third of your book, which is sort of, uh, the exploration of the non-explicitly Christian writings, but rather the Narnia stuff and how he injected biblical and scriptural references and ideas into these books that are beloved by, you know, I’m sure most of our listeners have read these books or as you said, had them read to them, as was my— as was the case with me. My mom read me those books when I was a kid.

Yes. So, so talk a little bit about, uh, about Lewis and his approach to— like, obviously he was— he injected a lot of his, of his Christianity and, and the things that he loved about the Bible into the books, but he didn’t do it as overtly as, you know, as he could. I mean, Santa’s in there, but Father Christmas. That’s right. Talk a little bit about that.

There’s so much controversy about this among Narnia nerds, and boy, are there Narnia nerds.

So a lot of people think of The Chronicles of Narnia as being quote-unquote biblical allegory or Christian allegory, and he hated that idea. He says multiple times that, “I did not create them as allegory,” and he was a professional literary scholar.

A myth is more mystical. An allegory is a created thing. It’s a very, very detailed, very conscious creation.

So he’s using some definitional jiu-jitsu here to kind of get around.

Yes, he is. And people will disagree about what allegory means. But I think if you’re calling an author’s works allegory, you should go with the definition that that author uses for allegory, especially if that author is, is using definitions specifically to say, don’t see this as allegory. Don’t see this as allegory. And he didn’t like it when people allegorized the work. He wanted them to see the story as a whole. And here I have to throw in, uh, some work by my friend Michael Ward, who wrote a book called Planet Narnia. It was such a groundbreaking work, came out something like 2008, 2010, something like that. And he saw that one of the things that Lewis wrote into his book, uh, were the ancient ideas of the influence of what were called the Seven Planets at the time, uh, and the Sun and the Moon were considered planets with this. And there’s a view that if someone is under the influence of one of these planets, they have particular characteristics.

And Michael Ward argued that each one of the Chronicles of Narnia is under the influence of one of the planets. So for example, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Sun, you can see it in the title, and the Sun is emphasized in this book. So it’s not just biblical stuff, is the point that I’m making. Uh, Dan, you mentioned Santa Claus, Father Christmas, uh, and Michael Ward actually has an explanation for why Father Christmas is in there because it has to do with the influence of the planet Jupiter, which rules The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. So it’s not just biblical stuff. You’ve got Norse mythology, Greco-Roman mythology, the influence of the planets. Uh, some people have tried to look at the books as, uh, connecting to Shakespearean plays or, uh, the Seven Deadly Sins.

You know, they’re just so much richer than the Bible, which means that they are not biblical allegory. Uh, but of course there’s also biblical themes. And what I was arguing, uh, particularly in this last part of the book, is that Lewis wants to hide his exact quotations of the Bible to, as he put it, get them past these watchful dragons.

Yeah, you mentioned, uh, him talking about good news, a feeling of good news.

Yes. Oh.

Which he was sneaking in that gospel there.

I love how he does this a couple of times. He will take a phrase like “good news,” and in Greek, the word that we can translate as “good news” is “evangelion,” if I may take one pronunciation of it. You can also translate it as “gospel.” So if you look, say, in the NRSVUE and you open up to Mark 1:1, it says, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.” And then you look at the nice little note that goes underneath it. You can also translate that gospel. So when the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are talking to Mr. Beaver as he is trying to take them to safety in his beaver dam, which is just such a lovely thing and again has no biblical parallel whatsoever, right?

Yeah, sure.

He mentions the name of Aslan, and the narrator says, “It sounded to them as if they had heard good news.” So what Lewis is saying here is that Mr. Beaver is preaching the gospel to them, but he can’t use the word gospel here, right?

It would, it would feel weird.

It would feel super weird, and it would kind of break the magic of the story.

Yeah. What do you, what do you make these days of the kind of resurgence and appeals to, to Lewis among, uh, apologists? I think, I think I just saw a video the other day where a prominent apologist was bringing up the liar, lunatic, or lord, uh, saying Lewis has a lot of cachet these days.

Dan, you’re much more in that world of online apologetics than I am. I pay zero attention to it.

Yeah, well, you’ve got better mental health circumstances than most of us then.

But one thing, I don’t know that Lewis ever went away. Do you see a resurgence? Do you see a time when his popularity kind of dipped or wasn’t being used and is now rising again?

Well, maybe, maybe it’s just that I’m seeing it a lot more frequently on social media now than, than I used to, because there’s—with the kind of loneliness epidemic and the Christian outreach to men that has arisen from this in combination with MAGA and all these things, I think the, the, the apologetic outreach project has, has become more fervent over the last couple of years. And maybe that’s why I’m seeing more of it on social media online. So, yeah, that’s not to say that, you know, he just wasn’t being talked about and suddenly he is. But it seems to me that he’s a lure that’s being tossed out a lot more frequently on social media these days.

He’s definitely a big name. I would say that he would be the most read Christian author in English in the 20th century. I made that claim in the book. I have zero to back it up. It’s just—

But no challengers yet, huh?

No challengers yet, thank goodness. Um, maybe I’ve given them something else to attack me on here with this. Uh, and you brought up the liar, lunatic, or lord argument, and, uh, you know, that’s why I’m thinking of attacks, because so many people are so desperately committed to this argument. And when I’ve had pushback on the book, that’s where I have pushback from very conservative—and so far they’ve all been men. Uh, very conservative men. What’s that, Dan?

No shock there that they were all men.

Does the apologetics world seem to be dominated much more by men than women?

I’ve, I’ve noticed significantly more.

Yeah, yeah.

In fact, even, not even the women who are involved in it tend to kind of punt in a lot of ways to the authority of men just as to try and reinscribe that patriarchy, which is such a significant feature of it all.

But—Dan, as I read the comments to your stuff on social media, on Twitter, on Facebook or whatever, by the names it seems like almost all of them are men. No doubt about that. And in the field of C. S. Lewis scholarship, there are relatively few women. There is no doubt about that. I’ve thought about that for a long time.

What are your thoughts about—what do you think Lewis’s response would be to the people who have taken him as, uh, as their champion? Oh my gosh, because it doesn’t seem like he would, he would be happy about who who it is that are most interested in grabbing him and using him?

He would despise it. He was a very kind man. And one of the things that he did that he absolutely hated, but felt was a duty that God placed on him, was to answer every single letter that he received. He didn’t want to write letters. He says that some days he would spend 6 to 8 hours answering his correspondence. And as he got older, he got arthritis, and you can see his handwriting degrading as he writes these letters when you look at the manuscripts that people have saved. And he will complain, he’ll say, you know, my handwriting is so bad, I’m sorry, I’m I’m getting older. And the most tedious people—he would talk about, for example, some tedious American women who wrote him literally for years, and he would say, I just can’t do anything but be as kind as I can to them and help them along.

But he knew that he could be wrong. He knew that he was not a professional in these fields. And there are people who seem to worship him almost as a mistake. They will call him Saint Jack. I’ve, I’ve seen like kind of fake, uh, Eastern Orthodox style icons with him in it, which he would despise so much. And in one of the reviews of, uh, of my book, one of these men essentially argues in as many words that if I say Lewis is wrong in his liar, lunatic, lord argument and how he uses the scripture in it, that the scripture does not back up what he says it does to prove his liar, lunatic, or lord argument, that I must be wrong because Lewis can’t be wrong.

Hmm, there you go.

Uh, you know, if dogma is what you hold to and one of your favorite people isn’t as dogmatic as you are, then maybe you have to get dogmatic about him in some way.

Oh, incredibly. Yes. Yes. So, I think that Lewis in the apologetic world is appealed to as a name. He’s a big name. Um, maybe I’d say he’s brought up much more even than someone who was much huger in the United States, like Billy Graham.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people like that he was, you know, an Oxford guy. He was so erudite and probably had an accent that people would have liked and all this sort of stuff. And Graham was, you know, someone like Graham was so populist and so, you know, a country boy sort of vibe. And I think that a lot of, especially Americans, Americans just want the British accent, the Received Pronunciation to be, to grant its approval to their—

And the Oxford. I’m sure that Billy Graham had some popular books, but I couldn’t name one today.

Right.

Yeah. No, and I think that’s a big part of it as well, that he has made a significant contribution to the English-speaking world outside of religious scholarship. And so that just adds to the myth, adds to the cachet that he leverages. And so that he has written such a fundamental piece of English literature, or pieces of English literature, but also contributes to Christian identity politics, I think is probably a reason he’s leveraged as well.

But the Christian identity politics in the US don’t include loving the poor and giving to the poor sacrificially, which is something that Lewis said over and over again.

Which is one of the primary reasons it’s just identity politics, is they’re just leveraging the authority to serve their own interests without having any concern at all for the contents of his arguments and his person. They just want to be able to leverage the name and the—

The cachet.

Yeah, and the reputation that he has and say he was on our side, right? And so therefore, you know, he’s on— he’s arguing for us when I don’t think he would have considered himself on the side of the folks who are leveraging him most belligerently today.

I would agree with you.

Well, you’re a greater expert than I on C. S. Lewis by far, so I appreciate the agreement. But I’m— and you mentioned there in works, folks who are working on C. S. Lewis, there are a lot more men than there are women in the field. You’ve talked a bit about the reception of the book in that field, how has the reception been apart from folks who are just retreating to Christian identity politics? Are there— certainly there are more critical scholars who are able to engage things more thoughtfully? Or is it mostly just conservative Christian men who are—

So far, the book has only been out for about 6 months, and I am looking forward hopefully to, uh, some folks in JBL, the Journal of Biblical Literature, and maybe, maybe Catholic Biblical Quarterly. Those can take a year or two to come out. Yeah. Um, there have been— everybody who has read the book loves part 1 on Lewis’s influences. We talked about Moffatt and Gore, and everybody adores the third part on Narnia. Uh, unless you’re a Narnia hater, and there are those out there, um, everybody enjoys reading about Narnia. And I loved writing that part, and I found a bunch of biblical quotations that Lewis buries deeply, like good news, uh, but where the more conservative readers tend to, uh, take umbrage is in the part on the Liar, Lunatic, or Lord because they just depend on it so much.

Yeah, I get the impression from a couple of reviewers that essentially if the Liar, Lunatic, or Lord argument were not to be correct, then the world would come to an end. Uh, it’s just not possible. You just can’t even entertain the idea. Uh, and it makes me wonder, you know, how strong their faith actually is.

Yeah, it sounds an awful lot like these folks, um, that’s one of the load-bearing arguments for their own faith and their own identity. And so if that goes, then that’s something— that’s a bridge too far for them. So they have to try to defend it.

I’ll just mention here, um, there is a big C. S. Lewis conference coming up at George Fox University in Portland, Oregon in September. It is the second, uh, the first one was 2 years ago. They’re hoping to have it every 2 years, and I attended and gave a paper at the first one in 2022, and I was invited to be a keynote speaker for the one here in September, and I was asked to give my keynote speech on the Liar, Lunatic, or Lord argument.

Yeah, they’re gonna throw you to the lions, huh?

I argued with the organizer for weeks. It’s like, “No, can’t I talk about Narnia, please? I’d really like to talk about Narnia.” And he said that they really wanted the liar, lunatic, or lord. So that’s gonna be a very interesting talk and very interesting reception. But the critical reception, the scholarly reception that I have had so far, people like Michael Ward say that it’s the best book on Lewis yet. You may know the name Mark Noll, an eminent historian who loved the book, and David Bentley Hart also really loves the book. So I feel pleased. I was just so so excited when those three guys endorsed the book and had such kind things to say about it.

Um, in addition, now here’s something interesting. Uh, you know Russell Moore? He included the book on his list of top 10 books of 2025.

Really? Yeah, love it, love it.

So there’s been a mixed reaction to the middle section of the book that is critical of Lewis. But among more critical established scholars, they’re on board.

Well, we’re on board too. Uh, the book is called Interpretation and Imagination: C. S. Lewis and the Bible. Uh, it is available. I’m sure a lot of our listeners are intrigued and are going to want to go and get it. I’m so, uh, go check it out. Leslie, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you coming on the show.

Thank you so much, it’s been fun.

Well, friends, uh, if you would like to help make this show go, you can become a patron over on patreon.com, uh, slash Data Over Dogma, which is where you can hear some more, uh, fun chat, less, uh, less scholarly stuff, but a lot a lot of fun that we had with you, Leslie, and have every week. That’s extra, extra bonus content that you can get. You can also get access to an early and ad-free version of every episode over there. So please consider doing that. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing. Thanks for JJ for being our producer. And thanks to all of you for joining us. We’ll talk to you again next time.

Bye, everybody.

C. S. Lewis and the Bible

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