The Hermeneutics of C.S. Lewis: A Review of "Reflections on the Psalms"

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.

Every year or so I see this C.S. Lewis quote make the social media rounds. It is inevitably cheered and championed by progressive and other non-Evangelical Christians and is scorned, challenged, and/or ignored by the Evangelical and Fundamentalist crowd. The quality of the challenge varies but the strongest one I have encountered is this post from William O'Flaherty who has written an (occasionally helpful) book on Lewis misquotes. O'Flaherty's argument is that while it is not a mis-quote (he acknowledges that it comes from a letter Lewis wrote in 1958) it also should not be shared because it is from a letter and is therefore a response to a specific question (the question was about what Lewis though of the doctrine of inspiration but O'Flaherty neglects to mention this). O'Flaherty then suggests that if Lewis had wanted to write extensively or publicly on the subject of inspiration we would have an essay from him on the topic.

This is not an especially good argument (it is essentially an argument from silence that the quote has been taken out of context) but it is at least an argument. For all of that it is an argument which fails pretty miserably as an example of C.S. Lewis scholarship. While it is true that Lewis did not write any essay on the doctrine of inspiration (one has to wonder how careful O'Flaherty is being with his word choice) Lewis did write three chapters on the subject of inspiration and Biblical interpretation in his book Reflections on the Psalms.

The first nine chapters of the book are roughly what you would expect from Lewis: a thematic analysis of the book of Psalms, interspersed with reflections and insights on a variety of topics. While the whole is well worth reading, Chapter 9 A Word About Praising is so insightful and (almost ironically) timely that it merits a detour and select quoting. Lewis project in the chapter is dealing with the "stumbling block" Lewis claims to have encountered early in his time as a Christian. In Lewis' words:

We all despise the man who demands continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people round every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity, who gratify that demand. Thus a picture at once ludicrous and horrible, both of God and of His worshippers, threatened to appear in my mind.

Lewis solves this conundrum (one he thought almost embarrassingly simple to many but which I suspect many in our own age have not even risen to) by reflecting further on his own experiences of delight and love:

I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise--lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game--praise of weather, wines, dishes actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even some politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest , and at the same time most balanced and capacious minds, praised most,  while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works; the bad ones continually narrowed the list of books we might be allowed to read. The healthy and unaffected man, even if luxuriously brought up widely experienced in good cookery, could praise a very modest meal; the dyspeptic and the snob found fault with all.

A few years worth of meditation and spiritual growth lie in those words.

And for all of that wealth (the above digression is the smallest sampling, each chapter contains gems of similar worth), it is Lewis' treatment of Scripture and Scripture interpretation in chapters ten, eleven, and twelve which I was most strongly driven to write about.

Lewis' Hermeneutics

In the last three chapter of Reflections on the Psalms Lewis addresses, not the psalms or themes from the psalms directly, but questions of Biblical interpretation which arise from a study of the Psalms in a modern (and post NT) context and his own methods and approaches to Biblical interpretation. In chapters ten and twelve his primary focus is on what he refers to as second meanings--meanings within the psalms that the original authors themselves might (or even certainly) not have seen in their own works--Lewis comes out in favor of allegorical and prophetic second meaning interpretations of the psalms (as well as other OT passages) and uses an argument from his own work in literary criticism to do so:

The status I claim for such things [second meanings], then, is neither that of coincidence on the one hand nor that of supernatural prevision on the other. I will try to illustrate  it by three imaginable cases. i. A holy person, explicitly claiming to prophesy by the Spirit tells us that there is in the universe such and such a creature. Later we learn (which God forbid) to travel in space and distribute upon new worlds the vomit of our own corruption; and, sure enough, on the remote planet of some remote star, we find that very creature. This would be prophesy in the strictest sense. This would be evidence for the prophets's miraculous gift  and strong presumptive evidence for the truth of anything else he had said. ii. A wholly unscientific writer of fantasies invents a creature for purely artistic reasons. Later on, we find a creature recognisably like it. This would be just the writer's luck. A man who knows nothing about racing may once in his life back a winner. iii. A great biologist, illustrating the relation between animal organisms and their environment, invents for this purpose a hypothetical animal adapted to a hypothetical environment. Later, we find a creature very like it (of course in an environment very like the one he had supposed). This resemblance is not in the least accidental. Insight and knowledge, not luck, led to the invention. The real nature of life explains why there is such a creature in the universe and also why there was such a creature in his lectures. If while we re-read the lectures, we think of the the reality, we are not bringing arbitrary fancies of our own to bear on the text. This second meaning is congenial to it. The examples I have in mind correspond to this third case; except of course that something more sensitive and personal  than scientific knowledge is involved--what the writer or speaker was, not only what he knew.

Lewis proceeds to helpfully apply this lens to New Testament and Patristic readings of the Old Testament. As an aside I suspect that he has established here a principle which may go a great ways towards resolving certain tensions between "death of the author" and "authorial intent" disputes in our own day. In Chapter ten Lewis primarily deploys this insight to defend the idea of true pagan prophets (he points primarily to Plato and to Virgil though I think the same argument serves in favor of Lao Tzu as well) making similar arguments to those he makes in Mere Christianity and other works concerning similarities between pagan "Corn King" myth and the truth myth of Christianity. In Chapter twelve he applied the ideas more directly to Old Testament passages and to the surprising, allegorical, and symbolic readings of them that we find in the New Testament and the Patristics.

Chapter eleven is an exposition of Lewis' own beliefs on the nature of the Bible and of Bible interpretation (hermeneutics), and it is the existence of this chapter which wholly undermines the claims O'Flaherty makes about the quote I began with. Throughout the chapter Lewis shows himself to be very much in line with a neo-orthodox and christocentric/red-letter understanding of the nature of inspiration and the proper interpretation of the Bible.

The chapter merits a close, point-by-point examination. Lewis opens by straightforwardly disclosing his project:

For us these writings are "holy", or "inspired", or, as St. Paul says, "The Oracles of God". But this has been understood in more than one way, and I must try to explain how I understand it at least so far as the Old Testament is concerned. [emphasis mine]

Lewis will, in fact, also clarify a good deal of how he understands inspiration in the New Testament as well. He continues,

I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that includes the miraculous.

I do not think that any Lewis scholar would suggest that Lewis was anything but a thoroughgoing supernaturalist and, from the perspective of those who subscribe to "liberal theology" in the 19th century German tradition, this would seem to locate him in the camp of the Fundamentalists or Evangelicals. This, however, is a mistake of the sort we call the false dilemma. There are more than two possible theologies of inspiration--even when painting with a very broad brush--and Lewis is neither a 19th century German style liberal or a Fundamentalist as he goes on to clarify:

 Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific truth. But this I do not hold, any more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation "after the manner of a popular poet" (as we should say mythically) or than Calvin did when he doubted whether the story of Job were history or fiction. [emphases mine]

Lewis here is clearly in the same position which so many of us who are currently being labeled "progressive" Christians find ourselves: on the one hand, robust supernaturalists happy to affirm the creeds and the rest and thus seen as still "Evangelical" or "Fundamentalist" by certain liberal and mainline theologians (I remember one moment in recent Twitter history wherein non-Evangelical Chrisitian Twitter was shocked to discover that so many still believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ); on the other hand non-interrantists who cheerfully apply non-literalist readings of a wide variety when approaching the text of the Bible.  Lewis clarifies that his reason for accepting the miraculous is philosophical:

I have never found any philosophical grounds for the universal negative proposition that miracles do not happen. I have to decide on quite other grounds (if I decide at all) whether a given narrative is historical or not. The Book of Job appears to me unhistorical because it begins about a man quite unconnected with all history or even legend, with no genealogy, living in a country of which the Bible elsewhere has hardly anything to say; because, in fact, the author quite obviously writes as a story-teller not as a chronicler. [emphasis mine]

In that last clause we get a glimpse of how Lewis individual vocation as a literary scholar informed his hermeneutic. As a man well versed in genre, he allowed what he knew about classical and ancient literary writing and genre to inform the way he interpreted the Bible.

If all of this were not enough, Lewis breaks cleanly from any Fundamnetalist (and many Evangelical) intepretative doctrines when he continues:

I have therefore no difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical.

And Lewis has already shown in chapter ten why such a proposition is no threat to his view of scripture as a whole--much less his faith. He spends a few paragraphs making this connection explicit, concluding:

There are poets like those in the Song of Songs who probably never dreamed of any but a secular and natural purpose in what they composed. There is (and it is no less important) the work first of the Jewish and then of the Christian Church in preserving and canonising just these books. There is the work of redactors and editors in modifying them. On all of these I suppose a Divine pressure; of which not by any means all need have been conscious.

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing psalms) wickedness are not removed. [emphasis mine]

So much for the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

Immediately following this Lewis locates himself squarely within the neo-orthodox tradition on inspiration and summarily demolishes Mr. O'Flaherty's argument:

The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper ad so learning its overall message.

This statement might have appeared in any of a number of the theologians who claim that the Bible is a  medium through which we come to know the Word of God but is not itself that Word (a title the Bible grants to Jesus).

From here, Lewis goes on to recognize that the nature of the Bible as an "untidy and leaky vehicle" is frustrating to some (so much so that many of them resort to denying it altogether)

One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalist's view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic's view of the Church. 

but, Lewis holds that it is actually a very good thing, and in his argument to that effect his christocentric/red-letter hermeneutic shines through:

We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the 'wisecrack'. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be "got up" as if it were a "subject". If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, "pinned down". The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.

Lewis argues that what is true of Jesus' teaching is also ultimately true of Paul's teaching and of the Bible as a whole. In fact it is in his statement on that point that the final piece falls into place and the degree to which he affirmed the doctrine (currently enunciated by Greg Boyd and others) that the Bible is most accurately interpreted when Jesus' teachings are taken to be the center and highest point of revelation such that the rest, in varying degrees, should be understood by the light of what Jesus more authoritatively taught. Lewis in fact divides the Bible into three levels or degrees for the purpose of interpretation, first the teachings of Jesus, then in the teachings of Paul (for myself I would want to expand that to the epistles as a whole), and then the rest of Scripture. Each lower level can thus best be interpreted only by the light of the level(s) above it; all (as we saw earlier) only being profitably interpreted by the light of grace and the supervention of the Holy Spirit. As Lewis puts it:

Thus on three levels, in appropriate degrees, we meet the same refusal of what we might have thought best for us--in the Word Himself [Jesus], in the Apostle to the Gentiles [St. Paul], in Scripture as a whole.

Lewis goes on to connect this view of Scripture to the meaning of the incarnation where he almost tangentially embraces the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis:

For we are taught that the Incarnation itself proceeded "not by the conversion of the godhead into flesh but by the taking of (the) manhood into God"; in it the human life becomes the vehicle of Divine life. If the Scriptures proceed not by conversion of God's word into a literature but by taking up of a literature to be the vehicle of God's word, this is not anomalous. 

Returning to his beloved theme of anti-reductionism, Lewis ventures an explanation for why and how all of this should be so:

Because the lower nature, in being taken up and loaded with a new burden and advanced to anew privilege, remains, and is not annihilated, it will always be possible to ignore the up-grading and see nothing but the lower. Thus men can read the life of Our Lord (because it is a human life) as nothing but a human life. Many, perhaps most, modern philosophies read human life merely as an animal life of unusual complexity. The Cartesians read animal life as mechanism. Just in the same way Scripture can be read as merely human literature. No new discovery, no new method, will ever give a final victory to either interpretation. For what is required, on all these levels alike, is not merely knowledge but a certain insight; getting the focus right. Those who can see in each of these instances only the lower will always be plausible. One who contended that a poem was nothing but black marks on white paper would be unanswerable if he addressed an audience who couldn't read. Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer's ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say "This is the poem". Those who can read however, will continue to say the poem exists.

Thus the Bible is, according to Lewis, a fundamentally spiritual text without at any moment ceasing to be a material and literary text. The great mistake of the fundamentalists in his view amounts to a sort of bizarre flattening in which the spiritual dimension of the Bible is substituted for the material and literary text, with the result that Fundamentalists and Evangelicals are constantly, and futilely, trying to equate the spiritual meaning of the Bible with the standard and literary lower meaning of the Bible. The materialists commit the same error of flattening the text but they do it by simply denying the second meaning. Neither group is, in the end, willing to let the Bible be the haunted and holy text that it is.

So Anyway

I highly recommend Reflections on the Psalms 5/5