A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby

      ON SCRIPTURE, MYTH, AND THEOLOGY

      Summarizing four Lewis titles, Kilby discusses the Oxford professor’s rare ability to encapsulate profound and sometimes complex theological ideas in simple, figurative language. Kilby is very aware that he is introducing Lewis to an American evangelical Christian audience for whom a belief in the divine inspiration of Scripture is foundational. Thus he goes to some pains to defend Lewis’s high view of Scripture, and especially the idea that divine truth can—indeed must—be conveyed in myth, metaphor, and symbol. Thus, like much of Kilby’s writing, this essay is as much a defense of literature as it is of C. S. Lewis’s view of Scripture.

      In what follows I should like to outline some of C. S. Lewis’s theological beliefs, particularly as they are expressed in Reflections on the Psalms, Miracles, Mere Christianity, and Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. It is not correct to say that Lewis has a “theology” if by that term is meant a systematic, all-embracing complex like that of John Calvin or Karl Barth. He repeatedly declared that he was not a theologian. Perhaps his chief aim in attempting to retain amateur status is that he may be “one person talking to another.” Yet anyone who writes a score or more of books on Christian topics inevitably will possess, in some sense, a theology. Perhaps the big difference between Lewis and the “professional” theologian is less abstraction and more particular instance and creativity. I am especially interested here in Lewis’s view of the Scripture itself as the source of theological truth.

      REFLECTIONS ON THE PSALMS

      One of the important ideas in Reflections on the Psalms is that the Bible itself has a creative rather than an abstractive quality. The Psalms are poems rather than doctrinal treatises or even sermons. The Bible is literature. Of course one must not read it merely as literature, thus missing the very thing it is about. On the other hand, unless such parts as the Psalms are read as poetry “we shall miss what is in them and think we see what is not.” The Psalms, Lewis continues, are great poetry—some, such as Psalm 18 and 19, perfect poetry. At the same time the Bible is made up of a great variety of elements, some of which may seem inconsequential, crabbed, practical, or rhapsodic.

      Lewis starts with those elements in the Psalms that trouble him. Most troubling for a modern reader, says Lewis, are the vindictive or cursing Psalms. Occasionally indeed we come upon a verse that is nothing short of devilish, as where the psalmist asks the Lord to slay his enemies or that extreme instance in which a blessing is offered to anyone who will crush a Babylonian baby against the pavement. Such maledictions, declares Lewis, are sinful, and when seen as such rather than minimized in any way, will suggest to the Christian reader similar sins in his or her own life, even if such sins are more cleverly disguised. Nor can Old Testament believers be excused, since they had plenty of Scripture against vengeance and grudges, in fact plenty of teaching very similar to that of Christ’s. The truth is that Christ’s teaching was anticipated by all teachers of truth, some even outside of Judaism. This, Lewis insists, is exactly what should be expected as a result of that Light which has lighted everyone from the beginning. All truth is from God.

      Nevertheless, the Hebrews seem to have been even more vitriolic than their Pagan neighbors. Lewis thinks this might be based on the principle of “the higher the more in danger,” that is, a person with greatness of soul and an abiding conception of right and wrong is more likely to show an ugly fanaticism than a smaller person who is not so much above temptation as below it. Under some circumstances the absence of indignation may be a worse sign than indignation itself. The very elevation of religion is bound to make a religious bad person the worst sort of bad person. Satan himself was once an angel in heaven. Shocking as the cursing Psalms may be, then, it is clear that their composers were people neither morally indifferent nor willing, like some today, to reduce wickedness to a neurosis.

      With these difficulties out of the way, Lewis turns to the great positives of the Psalms. First is the robust, virile, spontaneous, and mirthful delight in God, displayed by the Hebrews. They often felt a genuine longing for the mere presence of God that shames Christians. They had an “appetite” for God that did not let a false sense of good manners preclude their enjoyment of him. They were ravished by their love of God’s law, which they believed to be firmly rooted in his nature and as real as trees and clouds.

      Lewis reminds us that the ancient Hebrews were not merchants and financiers at all but farmers and shepherds. Though their poetry says little about landscape, it does give us weather “enjoyed almost as a vegetable might be supposed to enjoy it”: “Thou art good to the earth . . . thou waterest her furrows . . . thou makest it soft with the drops of rain . . . the little hills shall rejoice on every side . . . the valleys shall stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing” (see Ps. 65:9ff.). The Jews understood better than their neighbors, and perhaps we also, a pristine doctrine of God as creator of nature, one that at once empties nature of anything like a pantheistic divinity and at the same time makes her a symbol or manifestation of the Divine.

      Lewis confesses that when he first became a Christian he was disturbed by the continuous command in the Psalms to praise God. It sounded as if God were saying, “What I most want is to be told that I am good and great.” Even the very quantity of the praise seemed important to the psalmists. Then he discovered the principle that praise is simply the sign of healthy understanding. To ascribe praise to whatever is truly praiseworthy reflects the character of both the thing praised and the one who praises. Praise likewise completes enjoyment, whether of God or a sunset or one’s friend.

      Lewis completes his reflections by three chapters devoted to what he calls “second meanings,” that is, prophetic or allegorical meanings, and the doctrine of scriptural inspiration. Since both these topics are in Lewis’s view related to myth, I should like to give special attention to them.

      As to prophecy or allegory, he cites the famous passage from Virgil that describes a virgin, a golden age beginning, and a child sent down from heaven, also Plato’s discussion of the fate of a perfect man in a wicked world, and says that a Christian reading either of these two non-Christian accounts will be struck by their similarity to the biblical accounts. Now Lewis holds that the similarity in Virgil was doubtless accidental but in Plato only partially so. Plato perhaps had in mind the recent death of his teacher Socrates, a great man who died at the hands of people who feared and despised justice. It was not mere luck but rather great wisdom that enabled Plato to extrapolate from the experience of Socrates the vision of the perfect man who dies as a sacrifice to evil, even though Plato probably had no intuition that such an instance would ever become history.

      Mythology is replete with the dying god, with death and rebirth, and the idea that one must undergo death if he would truly live. The resemblance between such myths and Christian truth has the same relation as the sun and its reflection in a pond. It is not the same thing but neither is it a wholly different thing. The kernel of wheat is indeed, as Christ said, “reborn” after “death.” Because God made wheat thus, it should occasion no total surprise if a Pagan sees there a symbol and puts it into the form of a myth. Because, like all men, the Pagans suffered longing for Joy, even when they were unable to