A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
THE BOOK AND THE TIMES
Again, Dr. Pittenger says that Lewis’s Christianity is often not orthodox. At the same time Lewis is said to hold to an “uncritical traditionalism” and to be dogmatic in his proclamation of it. Dr. Pittenger says that Lewis proceeds in his books by a “smart superficiality” and does not present a “credible theology.” Dr. Pittenger makes fairly clear as he goes along what he believes to be credible theology. He declares that never in the Synoptic Gospels is there either statement or implication that Christ claimed to be the Son of God. He is upset with Lewis for using the Fourth Gospel so uncritically. The validity of our Lord’s unique place, says Dr. Pittenger, does not rest on such “mechanical grounds” as Lewis advances but on “the total consentient witness of all Christians from the apostles’ time.” Lewis is declared to be “too cavalier about the actual historical Jesus,” who is described by Dr. Pittenger as “a Prophet who announced the coming of God’s kingdom and who may even have thought that he himself was to be the Anointed One, or Messiah, who would inaugurate it.” In other words, Dr. Pittenger diminishes the impact of the Fourth Gospel, holds to a “credible theology” based to a considerable extent, apparently on general belief through the ages which he interprets as denying that Christ was the unique Son of God, and at the same time accuses Lewis of unorthodoxy and “uncritical traditionalism.” Lewis’s faith, says Dr. Pittenger, is not a reasoned one. Instead, Dr. Pittenger prefers a faith “open and reasoned . . . built on history, confirmed in experience, checked by reason, and demonstrated in Christian life.” (Note the double emphasis on reason.) He is unhappy with Lewis for his preferring “the Pauline ethic based on man’s sinfulness and helplessness” (Dr. Pittenger’s language) to the Sermon on the Mount. Isn’t Dr. Pittenger himself behind the times here? Does current theology divide Paul’s ethic from Jesus’s?
Furthermore, says Dr. Pittenger, the sophisticate Lewis “pretends to be very simple indeed” by taking what the church has said in the Scriptures “as the last word.” What does Dr. Pittenger put beside this for his own authority? He repeatedly accuses Lewis of failing to take cognizance of recent theological research. Lewis, for instance, confounds “the Fall” (quotations Dr. Pittenger’s) “with an event in history,” and confuses “biblical myth” concerning Adam with “a literal description.”
GOD AND HIS WORD
But Dr. Pittenger’s article is taken up in large measure with a somewhat detailed criticism of Lewis’s Miracles. Again it seems to me that Dr. Pittenger is far-fetched in his denunciation. He describes Lewis’s book as “one of the worst books ever written on the subject.” In the first place, Dr. Pittenger appears to forget that Lewis, as Chad Walsh has well said, is the “apostle to the skeptic.” No one who has read the Bible with any care could possibly be unaware that it teaches the omnipresence of God. God dwells in the heart, but he also dwells in the heavens. It is therefore altogether proper for Lewis to speak of God as being outside his creation. In the second place, throughout the whole of Miracles Lewis makes clear that all his discussion is, of necessity, metaphoric. His effort is to deny the deterministic and deistic conception that God is confined to his creation. Hence his metaphor of “intervention” to the idea of which Dr. Pittenger objects.
In appendix B to Miracles and elsewhere Lewis makes his metaphoric usage very clear. “If God directs the course of events at all then he directs the movement of every atom at every moment; ‘not one sparrow falls to the ground’ without that direction.” Does this sound as if God is an absentee landlord? Dr. Pittenger’s own list of quotations from St. Augustine and others show that they also spoke metaphorically of miracles. In fact, his quotation from St. Augustine contains the same word—“above”—to which Dr. Pittenger seems to be objecting in Lewis.
Lewis is also accused of being fifty years behind the times for not knowing that a self-explanatory universe is out of date. No “respectable philosophical writer and no first-rate scientist” during the last half century has held to a deterministic universe, says Dr. Pittenger. Only ignorant people are “naturalists” in Lewis’s sense, and there he has proceeded in his “smart superficiality” to knock down a straw man. To answer Dr. Pittenger on this point it is perhaps sufficient to let the reader think a moment for himself. It is true that at some point in their studies many scientists have acknowledged that they were confronted by a mystery or have even spoken of the whole universe as mysterious, but that is no indication whatever that they have come over to the side of the angels. Admittedly, deistic-type mechanism is passé, but is this all there is to materialism? A great many philosophers and theologians are wrong unless our zeitgeist may properly be described as “naturalistic” in Lewis’s precise meaning. Whatever they may imply or print or state on occasions, men live as if no miracle is possible, and it was this condition to which Lewis was addressing himself—not to a “classical” theory of miracles.
It might be well to stop for a moment and cite from a couple of reputable science-philosophers who hold to a nonsupernatural view of life. In his William Vaughan Moody lecture at the University of Chicago in 1931, Anton Julius Carlson said, “As I see it, the supernatural has no support in science, it is incompatible with science, it is frequently an active foe of science.” Here, then, is one reputable scholar who can hardly be described as anything other than a “naturalist.” In Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, published last year, he says: “There are some who maintain that physiology can never be reduced to physics, but their arguments are not very convincing and it seems prudent to suppose that they are mistaken.” Also, a little later, “God and immortality, the central dogmas of the Christian religion, find no support in science.” Can this reputable scholar be described as anything other than a “naturalist”?
Lewis is also accused of writing a book on miracles without looking at the words translated “miracle” in the Old and New Testaments. Isn’t this a little too much? I do not know what sort of Hebrew scholar Lewis is, but I do know that he reads Greek with as much facility as most of us read English. Dr. Pittenger tells us that had Lewis read his Greek New Testament he would have been more fully aware of the Sitz im Leben of the miracles described there, i.e., he would have noted that though they are symbolically accurate they are not necessarily factually so. I suppose it would do little good to quote the New Testament itself against Dr. Pittenger, since he can assume the same symbolistic finality for all situations, but one does not need to be a theological student to notice that thousands swarmed around Christ in his days on earth simply because of what they at least supposed to be miracles—just plain miracles without “classical” or scholarly qualifications.
NATURALISM IN OUR BONES
Could it be that Dr. Pittenger’s objection to Miracles arises in part from an unstated criticism? In the last chapter of Miracles Lewis gives an unmistakable warning to his readers: “If . . . you turn to study the historical evidence for yourself, begin with the New Testament and not with books about it. . . . And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as sheep among wolves. Naturalistic assumptions, beggings of the question such as that I noted on the first page of this book, will meet you on every side—even from the pens of clergymen. . . . We all have Naturalism in our bones.”
In all my reading of Lewis I think one of his very best qualities is his avoidance of technically theological language. It is the very thing that has made him spiritually thrilling to thousands of people around the world. This directness, this “orthodoxy,” is the element Dr. Pittenger appears to dislike most. There is of course a place for theologians and all the fine points of theological discourse. As to C. S. Lewis, I am sure that he would be the first to acknowledge that his works are not flawless. But let not the theologians smother this man who brings into the soul the fresh air of spiritual reality.
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