The Canon

The canon (from Greek, κανών: “norm,” “rule,” or “standard”) of books recognized as Holy Scripture by Anglicans, Orthodox, Protestants, and Roman Catholics, includes the books that make up the Jewish Scriptures, written before Christ and traditionally referred to by Christians as “The Old Testament”—“old” not, of course, in the sense of “outdated” or “irrelevant” but rather of “original” and “first,” since these are the Scriptures that Christ himself used [1]—and 27 books in Greek, written after Christ and traditionally referred to by Christians as “The New Testament.”

The Canon of the Old Testament   

Thus far, it is relatively easy to describe the canon of Scripture.  As regards the Old Testament, however, the matter is complicated by the fact that at the beginning of the Christian era the canon of Jewish scripture was still fluid. It was certainly the case that “the Law” and “the Prophets” were well enough defined.  There remained, however, a third group, including those books later to be identified in Jewish tradition as “the Writings,” which at this time was by no means well defined. A number of books were used in addition to those that would eventually form part of the Jewish Bible, including Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus [or Sirach], Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, 1 and 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the Prayer of Manasses, and various additions to Daniel and Esther. Although some of these were originally written in Hebrew, and fragments of them have been found at Qumran, they appear chiefly to have circulated in Greek versions outside Palestine.  Thus, all of the above except 2 Esdras are to be found in copies of what is generally known as “the Septuagint” (that is, the Bible of Greek speaking Judaism) [2] and 2 Esdras is found in Old Latin translations of the Septuagint.

It was then natural that these additional books came to be used alongside the others by the largely Greek speaking Christian church.  So it is that while New Testament writers most commonly cite those scriptures that did indeed finally become part of the Jewish Bible (notably the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms), from time to time they also echo the additional books, notably Sirach (compare e.g. James 1.13 with Sirach 15.11–12, James 1.19 with Sir. 5.11), and Wisdom (compare e.g. Romans 1.20–32 with Wisdom 11–15, Romans 9.20–23 with Wisdom 12.12, 15.7, and Hebrews 1.2 with Wisdom 7.26).[3]  It has sometimes been claimed (for example by Frank C. Porter in the 1898 edition of James Hastings’s Dictionary of the Bible) that “such citations do not imply that authority was ascribed to them.”[4]  Such a claim is merely specious.  In fact, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that New Testament writers made the distinction implied by Porter.  Indeed, it is quite clear that such a distinction was not made, either by their contemporaries at Qumran [5] or by their successors such as Clement of Rome (see e.g. 1 Clement 26.5 citing Wisdom 12.12).  We have therefore every reason to suppose that the New Testament writers also did not make it, and the burden of proof must rest with those who suggest they did.

The exact process, criteria, and time frame by which the Jewish canon of Holy Scripture was eventually defined is uncertain.  It is clear that by the end of the second Christian century various books that we now call “apocryphal / deuterocanonical” had been excluded; it is equally clear that they continued to be used by Christians, who had already come to regard them as holy. In other words, though the church inherited Scriptures from Judaism, it did not inherit a canon of Scripture. The church determined its canon for itself.  Nevertheless, once the Jewish canon had been established, it did exercise influence on the Christian, especially in the East. Hence Christian authorities in antiquity as eminent as Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Jerome all claimed in one way or another that a distinction must be made between the books that comprised the Hebrew canon and the others, and expressed varying degrees of reservation about the latter (Athanasius, Festal. Epist. 39; Hilary, Proleg. in Librum Psalmorum, 15; Gregory Nazianzus, Carm. 33; Jerome, In Prologo Galeato, Tom. 1).[6]  It appears to have been the immensely prestigious Jerome who first called them “apocrypha” (that is, “secret,” or “of unknown origin”), and he spoke of them also as “libri ecclesiastici” (“church books”) as opposed to “libri canonici” (“canonical books”).

Following the reformation, Protestant tradition normally referred to the books not found in the Hebrew Bible as “apocryphal” and excluded them from the canon. Roman Catholic scholars called them “deuterocanonical” (indicating that they were added later to the canon, in distinction from “protocanonical” for books of which there was never any doubt); but the Roman Catholic church (following the Council of Trent) continued to treat them as part of the canon, excluding only 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses.  During this period a brief attempt was made by Cyril Lukaris, Patriarch of Constantinople, to persuade the Greek Church to adopt the Hebrew Canon, but it was not successful.  The Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church in general accepts the Apocryphal / Deuterocanonical books as canonical, excluding 2 Esdras, but including Psalm 151 and 3 Maccabees. Slavonic Bibles approved by the Russian Orthodox Church also include 2 Esdras (referring to 1 and 2 Esdras, however, as 2 and 3 Esdras).

Anglican views of the Apocryphal / Deuterocanonical books are in certain respects to be distinguished from all the views outlined above. Article VI of the Articles of Religion (Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation) notes that “In the name of holy Scripture we do understand those canonical books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the church.”  Following this, under the subheading, “Of the Names and Number of the Canonical Books,” the article lists not only the books of the Hebrew Bible, but also “other” books, namely 1 and 2 Esdras (referred to as “third” and “fourth”), Tobit, Judith, Esther, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, The Song of the Three Children, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Manasses, and 1 and 2 Maccabees, noting that they are read “as Hierome [Jerome] saith… for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet it [the church] doth not apply them to establish any doctrine.”  In other words, the framers of the article shared antiquity’s reservations over the Apocryphal / Deuterocanonical books yet remained committed to retaining them within the general category of Holy Scripture, that is, as both sacred and canonical.

Anglican history bears this out.  The Book of Common Prayer from 1549 onward appointed extensive lessons from the Apocrypha for daily Morning and Evening Prayer.  The Bishops’ Bible of 1568 spoke of the Apocrypha in its table of contents as “the fourth part [of the Bible] called Apocryphus,” and provided a classified list of “the whole Scripture of the Bible” under the headings Legal, Historical, Sapiental, and Prophetical that followed, with minor changes, the Vulgate.  The “authorized” or “King James” translation of 1611 distinguished “books called Apocrypha” by the running title “Apocrypha” at the top of the page, but had no separate preface or table of contents for them, and in its table of lessons at the beginning simply included them with the rest of the Old Testament. In 1615 George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the King James translators, issued public notices forbidding the binding and selling of Bibles lacking the Apocrypha on pain of a year’s imprisonment.  Urged by Puritans to discontinue lections from the Apocrypha in the church’s liturgy, the bishops of the Savoy Conference in 1661 replied tartly that it was much to be desired that all sermons should give as useful instruction as did the readings.

Despite the tendency of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century commentators to confuse Anglican views with Protestant,[7] Anglican formularies and practice have in fact continued to hold to the position of the Savoy divines.  The Book of Common Prayer 1979 (USA) is typical.  In the section on “The Holy Scriptures” in the “Outline of the Faith commonly called the Catechism” it notes without comment that in addition to the Old and New Testaments, “other books, called the Apocrypha, are often included in the Bible.” These are books “written by the people of the Old Covenant, and used in the Christian Church” (853).  Readings from the Apocrypha are accordingly appointed on some occasions in the Lectionary for the Sunday Eucharist (for example, Lectionary A, Sundays after Pentecost, Proper 1, 11, 19) and portions of the Apocrypha are read in course at Morning and Evening Prayer (for example, Daily Office Year One, Week of 4 Easter).

The Canon of the New Testament

As regards the New Testament, Article VI of the Church of England concluded that “All the Books of the New Testament, as they are commonly received, we do receive, and account them Canonical”—of which books the article had already observed that they were those “of whose authority there was never any doubt in the church.”  Critical scholarship obliges us to concede that the matter was not quite so simple as the article suggested.  Various doctors of the church at various times in antiquity had expressed uncertainties about the Revelation to John (the Apocalypse), the Letter to the Hebrews, the Letter of James, the second and third Letters of John, the Second Letter of Peter, and the Letter of Jude (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25).  Such doubts continued to be voiced as late as the Reformation. Martin Luther said of the Apocalypse in his 1522 Preface, “I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it… Christ is neither taught nor known in it.”  He relegated it, together with Hebrews and the Letter of James, to the appendix of his Bible.  Although in 1545 Luther somewhat tempered his expression of his opinion of these books, there is no evidence that he ever really changed his views on the subject.  Thomas Cranmer made no statements about the canonicity of the Apocalypse, but it is notable that (in contrast to his quite extensive use of the Apocrypha) he did not include any readings from it in the daily office Lectionary of the Church of England.

Nevertheless, in contrast to their continuing differences over the Old Testament, it may reasonably be claimed that Christians did move quite rapidly to a consensus on the New and have broadly held to it. Origen (born 185) and Eusebius of Caesarea (born 270) both give lists of the New Testament books that are in all important respects the same as our list (Origen, Comment. in Matt. cited in Eusebius, H.E. 6.25.2; Eusebius, H.E. 3.25.1-7). Athanasius in his Festal Letter of 326 gives a list exactly corresponding with ours (Ex Festali Epist. 39).  The Council of Hippo in 393, at which St. Augustine was present, likewise established a canon identical to ours (Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana Lib.II.c.8), and the same list was presented by Pope Innocent I in his letter to Esuperius in 405.  On the question of the New Testament, then, Article VI of the Church of England may fairly be said simply to have ratified the common tradition of the Church.

Other Books

Certain other books of a sacred character, such as the Shepherd of Hermas and the so-called Gospel of Thomas, lingered for a while in antiquity on the edge of the New Testament, and in some cases were for a while accepted as canonical by some individuals and groups.  Such apocryphal and pseudepigraphical (“falsely attributed”) books remain of interest to us as illustrating ideas and aspirations of the age that produced them, but they were never in fact recognized as canonical by any consensus of the Church, and are not so regarded by Anglicans.

Conclusions

These observations should not be seen as polemic. In general, I incline to agree with Albert C. Sundberg: that as far as concerns the apocryphal / deuterocanonical books, it ought now to be possible for Protestants and Roman Catholics to agree.[8]  As for the specifically Anglican position, and Article VI in particular, it should be noted that—even in an age of polemic—the Article was hardly that.  Its form is notably neither prescriptive, admonitory, nor exhortatory, but descriptive and indicative.  These books, it observes without comment, are in fact read for the improvement of morals and manners, and the church does not in fact use them to “establish” doctrine.  It would be hard to see how that statement could be denied, for even among those denominations and groups most adamant in their claims for the identical authority of protocanonical and deuterocanonical books, what single significant article of faith would be claimed as established on the testimony of the latter alone?  Thus, for example, we treasure Wisdom’s testimony to God’s love and faithfulness towards the faithful departed (Wisd. 3.1–9); but we have other texts, including the words of Our Lord himself, by which we establish that hope (Mark 12.26–27; 1 Cor. 15.1–38).  Without the testimony of Wisdom, our liturgy and our prayers would be impoverished, but our faith would not be changed.

As for precise location of the Anglican position on the map of ecclesiastical relations: if it is to be placed anywhere, save at the centre, of a line between Trent and the Westminster Confession, then, granted the connection between lex orandi and lex credendi, the force of continuing liturgical usage must finally place closer to the witness of Trent.

Notes:

1. The Jewish Scriptures are divided by Jewish tradition into three parts, namely the Law (Tora, meaning “teaching,” comprising the five books of the Pentateuch), the Prophets (Nebi’im, subdivided into the Former Prophets, that is, the historic books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings; and the Latter Prophets, that is Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve “minor prophets”), and the Writings (Ketubim, namely Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and 1 and 2 Chronicles). This gives a total of 24, although various combinations are sometimes used to give a total of 22, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
2. The term “Septuagint” and the description here given of its sense, though convenient enough for our present purpose, are not, it should be noted, themselves beyond controversy: for a discussion see Christopher Stanley, Paul and the Language of Scripture: Citation Techniques in the Pauline Epistles and contemporary literature. SNTS Monograph Series 74(Cambridge, England: The University Press, 1992) 41-51 and literature there cited.
3. Other allusions are detected in the margin to Nestle-Aland; see further Albert C. Sundberg,The Old Testament of the Early Church (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963), 54–55.
4. Frank C. Porter, “Apocrypha,” iii, 1, in James Hastings’ A Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 4 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1898).
5. It is impossible to show that the Qumran texts use the books that were eventually included in the Hebrew canon in any way differently from the way they use those later to be identified as apocryphal / deuterocanonical: see B. J. Roberts, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Old Testament Scriptures,” BJRL 36 (1953–54): 84.
6. Others who expressed doubts or preferred the Hebrew canon included Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory the Great, and Cardinal Cajetan. On this entire subject, see further Albert C. Sundberg, Jr., “The ‘Old Testament’: A Christian Canon,” CBQ 30 (1968): 143–55.
7. Thus, for example, articles such as David W. Suter’s “Apocrypha, Old Testament,” in Harper’s Bible Dictionary, Paul J. Achtemeier, ed. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985) and the “Introduction to the Apocryphal / Deuterocanonical Books” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, eds., (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1991), iii–xii AP, especially viii AP, contain some of the relevant information, but obscure its significance by the authors’ failure in both cases to distinguish properly between Anglican and Protestant positions. Whoever composed the end-papers to Harper’s Bible Dictionary, purporting to show the position of the Aprocryphal / Deuterocanonical Books in the various Christian canons, appears to been unaware even that there was an Anglican position. Much better is Robert C. Dentan, “Apocrypha,” in the Oxford Companion to the Bible, since he does include a sentence stating correctly the current position of the Church of England; also Bruce M. Metzger’s article “Bible” in the same volume has a paragraph presenting a reasonable summary of Anglican practice, and noting its distinction from that of both Roman Catholics and “many Protestant denominations.” Alas, the unfortunate last paragraph of John T. Beckwith’s “Canon of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament” in the same volume goes some way toward recreating the usual muddle since it seems, yet again, to reflect entire ignorance of the Anglican tradition: this paragraph might with profit simply be deleted in future editions of the OCB.
8. Sundberg, “The ‘Old Testament,’” 155.

© Christopher Bryan, School of Theology, University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. All rights reserved. This paper is a revision of a paper published some years ago in the Sewanee Theological Review, and subsquently as a chapter in Christopher Bryan, And God Spoke: The Bible in the Life of the Church (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley, 2002).  If you would like permission to reprint any part of this article, please Contact the Author.

I was baptized as an infant and I was taught from my earliest years to say my prayers. But as a family we did not normally go to church—probably because my father was Roman Catholic and my mother Church of England, and in those days neither denomination looked kindly on mixed marriages. But for some reason, as I grew older, I did decide to go to church, and certainly my parents made no objection. I do not know quite what it was that led me first as a child to that strange pseudo-gothic edifice at the end of Gloucester Terrace, and later as a teenager to confirmation classes conducted by Father Walter Cole at Saint Mark’s, Marylebone Road. Nor do I remember much about the classes, save that we seemed to spend a lot of time talking about the atom bomb. Of course I believe that on one level my being drawn to the church was a work of the Holy Spirit, but that does not alter the oddness of it all on the merely human level.

Continue reading “Why Do We Like to Tell Stories”

Another Ash Wednesday arrives.  Another beginning to Lent.  Again we receive the ashes on our foreheads and begin to sing the Lenten hymns.  Again we are called to fasting, penance, and self-examination.  What shall we find?  Very probably the same sins as last year, unless, of course, we have actually succeeded in adding a few new ones.  Shall we feel that we have made any progress at all in the intervening twelve months?  Probably not.  But then, as our spiritual directors will have reminded us if they know their job, it is really not up to us to say.  God knows, just as God knows what God has in mind for our fellow disciples.  “What is that to you? Follow me!”

So—another beginning.  But perhaps that is the very thing on which to reflect: another beginning.  And here, indeed, the name of the season may help us, for our English word “Lent” is so much more usefully informative than its rather prosaic romance equivalents, such as Italian quaresima—equivalents that tell you nothing save the length of a season that begins on “the fortieth day before the Paschal time,” as Lo Zingarelli says.  English “Lent,” by contrast, says something about the season’s quality, for it derives from Middle English “lenten,” which means “Spring.”  “Lent” speaks to us of new life, of

                                                    daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty

–as Shakespeare’s Perdita puts it.  Should such a season—season of love, stagione d’amore, as tradition has it—be also a time for personal reflection, for penance and fasting? If Geoffrey Chaucer knew anything of the matter (and we may well suppose that he did) then our forebears certainly thought that it should:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit

The drought of March has pierced unto the root

And bathed each vein with liquor that has power

To generate therein and sire the flower;

When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,

Quickened again, in every holt and heath,

The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun

Into the Ram one half his course has run,

And many little birds make melody

That sleep through all the night with open eye

(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-

Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,

And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,

To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.

And specially from every shire’s end

Of England they to Canterbury wend,

The holy blessed martyr there to seek

Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak[i]

So Chaucer begins his The Canterbury Tales.  Not just when things are sad and cold and dark, but when they are merry and warm and light—that is when we should look to our soul’s health, and ask ourselves, in view of all that is good and lovely in the possibilities of life, what manner of women and men are we?  Lent speaks to us, or should speak to us, not only of penance and fasting, but also new life and new hope: day following night, summer following winter, new birth, birth from above.  The universe is a place where all things die, but it also throbs with resurrection.

In the same way, theologians tell us, heaven itself will always be a beginning.  There will always, to all eternity, be more of paradise ahead of us than we yet have known or dreamed, always new possibilities, new things to learn and to become: for God’s possibilities are infinite, and God will always give more of God’s Self to those who seek.  Heaven, Israel reminds us, is to be a perpetual Shabbat.  It is to be an eternal rejoicing in the divine Shalom, the everlasting peace and harmony of God.  We Christians rejoice in that insight given us by our Jewish friends, and add to it our own – that heaven is also always a first day of the week, a perpetual Sunday, a perpetual day of resurrection.

I remember as a teenager reading Fred Hoyle’s Nature of the Universe, some of which I found rather exciting.  For a while I wanted to be a cosmologist!  But one little bit of it—a bit that seemed to me to have little or nothing to do with the nature of the universe, made me sad.  Hoyle said that he would not want everlasting life, because after a certain length of time there really would be nothing else to do, and he would become bored.  Even as a teenager, I remember thinking what an extraordinarily limited imagination that betrayed.  Here was a man who had seen many wonders in the universe, yet had somehow failed to see its secret — “l’amor che move il sole e l’atre stelle,” the love that moves the sun and the other stars.  Always there will be new hopes, new beginnings, and new life in the inexhaustible possibility of the One who makes all things new.   Of one thing we may be absolutely sure: there is no coming to the end of God, and no exhausting of God’s infinite possibilities and variety.  That is what Lent is about.  That is why it is a good preparation for Easter, and not just for Easter, but for eternity.

The following was originally published in the Sewanee Theological Review for September, 2011.  It remains the copyright of the author and The University of the South.

It is ten years since the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, the attack on the Pentagon, and the downing of United Airlines Flight 93 which, but for the resistence of the passengers, would probably have been used to destroy the United States’ Capitol or possibly the White House.   These events, whatever else they achieved, made a new phrase part of the English language.  There can be few people in the west with any awareness at all of public affairs who do not know what is meant by the expression “nine eleven.”

Shortly after it happened, I remember hearing someone on television say, “The world has changed,” or words to that effect.  Of course it hadn’t.  No one who had lived through the London Blitz, as I did when I was a small boy,[1] no-one who had even been paying attention to the news since World War II, could seriously think that the world had changed on nine-eleven.  The world was what it had always been, a world in which the innocent often die at the hands of the violent, a world which crucified Jesus.  Perhaps a certain American perception of the world, the notion that such things could not happen here – perhaps that had changed.  If so, it was all.

What has happened since then?  Most obviously, we and our allies have involved ourselves in two wars, costly to us and others in blood and treasure.  Whether those wars were, in the sense in which Saint Thomas and others would understand the word “justifiable,” [2] is a matter of debate. Some say yes, some say no. What is not in doubt is that the initial reason why we claimed the right to undertake one of those wars (ius ad bellum) was based on a falsity.  We said we were invading Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein using his weapons of mass destruction against us.  On investigation, it appears that he did not have any[3] – as, incidentally, the United Nations inspection teams had warned us might be the case.  The French in particular, even accepting the possibility that Iraq might have WMD capability, still counseled against immediate war.[4]  We were not to be checked.  Whether those who led us into this war were none the less sincerely convinced that Hussein did have those weapons of mass destruction and was about to use them (the charitable view) or whether their allegations were merely a pretext for invasion (the uncharitable view) remains, again, a matter of dispute.

Since 9/11 we have talked much of “the war on terror” – and that, in my opinion, has been among our gravest mistakes.  I wrote at the time that we needed to treat what had happened as what it was, that is, a crime.[5]  And we needed to assign responsibility for dealing with it to the sphere which is proper for crime – that is, law enforcement, national and international.  We did not do that.  Instead, we immediately talked of war – and by doing that we bestowed on the murder of thousands of defenceless civilians precisely the dignity that its perpetrators wanted, for wars are waged by warriors and may have some degree of nobility, whereas crimes are committed by criminals and are merely shameful.  We would have done better to keep the distinction clear, at least in our own minds.  Ironically enough, when Osama bin Laden was finally brought to book, it was by what was in effect an extraordinarily well executed police action, carried out by trained specialists on the basis of good intelligence obtained by legitimate means (mostly surveillance) with very few collateral casualties.  If we had proceeded along those lines from the beginning, instead of rattling and then drawing our sabres, bin Laden might have been brought to book much sooner, with thousands fewer deaths, our own and others.

A matter that perhaps calls for even deeper concern is that in the process of conducting this alleged “war on terror” we have also, in the opinion of some, grievously compromised our own laws, most obviously habeas corpus and the laws of evidence.  The significance of those compromises, if compromises they are, remains to be seen.  Especially problematic is our admitted use of “enhanced interrogation,” that is, techniques of questioning suspects that, however we may choose to play linguistic games with them, seem difficult to distinguish in any practical way from torture.  The fact that torture and things like torture are not reliable ways of gathering intelligence has been known for centuries – anyone who doubts the matter need go no further than Freidrich Spee von Langenfeld’s Cautio Criminalis, originally published in 1631.  But even if such methods were reliable, even if the “ticking bomb” scenarios claimed by some (and denied by others) as justification for them were real, even if as some claim (and others deny) the information obtained by them saved lives, still there are those who believe that techniques such as waterboarding should be beneath us both as Christians and as upholders of a Consititution that forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.”[6]  Here, clearly, is matter for long and serious debate.  There are issues to be weighed.  What I find personally most disturbing about the present situation is that to judge by our media there is no debate, or not much.  We are far more interested in the sad, sad story of a Casey Anthony.  As for the torture (or whatever it was) that was conducted in our name, it is as if we have just accepted that this is the way things have to be.  Is it?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what still may be hoped for out of all this?  Where shall we go from here?  I have already mentioned the London Blitz of 1940-41.  Later on, of course, we in our turn with our American allies carpet-bombed the German cities. Dresden was turned into an inferno of fire. Thousands were killed.  To the angels this must have seemed like insanity piled upon insanity.  Could any meaning, any sense, or any hope possibly come out of it all?  There was a moment when perhaps it began to, though it was not until some years after the war.  It was when the teenage children of German pilots who had bombed Britain and the teenage children of British pilots who had bombed Germany embraced each other, weeping, in the ruins of their cities.  It was when together they erected an altar in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral that bore (and bears) the two words, “Father, forgive.”

Alas, we are very far from the moment when the children of Osama bin Laden and the children of those who died in the World Trade Center can embrace each other weeping.  But such a thing did not seem very likely in 1941, either.  If we are serious about what we claim to believe, then we must not cease to pray for such reconciliation and, if we have opportunity, to work for it, however improbable it may seem just at present.  Why must we pray for it?  Why must we work for it?  Because we believe in the generosity of God.  “Forgive us our sins,” we say, depending on that generosity – but in so doing we pledge ourselves to show the same generosity: “as we forgive those that sin against us.”  Do we mean it?  Or is it just words?  It is not easy to forgive our enemies.  I know that.  The picture of one of those towers crumpling, with all those people still inside it, is still etched in my mind.  I do not find it easy to pray for those who did it.  I do not find it easy to pray for the repose of the soul of Osama bin Laden.  But then, we do not pray for our enemies because it is easy.  We pray for them because Christ commanded it and set us an example.   And we follow Christ not because it is easy, but because he is Lord.

The following is based in part on an article on C. S. Lewis’s attitude to biblical scholarship that I wrote for A Sewanee Companion to “The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis.”[i] It remains the © of The University of the South and the author.

C. S. Lewis was not, as he made clear more than once, by any means a 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.’”[ii]  As he pointed out in a letter written from Magdalen College in 1955, his very awareness of the biblical texts as literature, and, moreover, as different kinds of literature, made this impossible for him.

“[T]he 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 known history, geography, and genealogies (2.) Books like Esther, or Jonah orJob which deal with otherwise unknown characters living in unspecified periods, and pretty wellproclaim 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’.[iii]  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 for us to have sacred myth and sacred fiction as well as sacred history… 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.”[iv]

Lewis did not consider that he was at all limiting or questioning the Bible’s authority by designating some parts of it “myth,” though he did find it possible to envisage a kind of progression from “myth” to “fact.”  He expressed such a view, tentatively, in a footnote in Miracles.

“[J]ust as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History.  This involves the belief that Myth in general is not merely misunderstood history (as Euhemus thought) nor diabolical illusion (as some of the Fathers thought) nor priestly lying (as the philosophers of the Enlightenment thought) but, at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.  The Hebrews, like other people, had a mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology—the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical.  Whether we can ever say with certainty where, in this process of crystallisation, any particular Old Testament story falls, is another matter.”[v]

This notion of Jesus and the story of Jesus as “myth become fact” was clearly important to Lewis: “Just as God is none the less God by being Man, so the Myth remains Myth even when it becomes Fact.  The story of Christ demands from us, and repays, not only a religious and historical but also an imaginative response.  It is directed to the child, the poet, and the savage in us as well as to the conscience and the intellect.”[vi]

In some quarters this insistence on the presence and significance of Myth in Scripture has been seen as calling into question Lewis’s credentials as an Evangelical.  But then, as Kevin J. Vanhoozer points out, Lewis “was not terribly troubled over his Evangelical credentials”[vii]– nor, we might add, over his credentials in the eyes of Roman Catholics or Anglo-Catholics or anyone else.  Lewis was concerned, as the title of his short and probably best-known apologetic indicates, with “mere Christianity”[viii] – and as my friend and colleague Brown Patterson reminds me, we may be sure Lewis used the word “mere” with a full awareness of the senses that it could carry – “pure, unmixed, undiluted… that is what it is in the full sense of the term; nothing less than; absolute, entire.”[ix]  Thus, and again to the disappointment of some Evangelicals, Lewis seems to have been uninterested in adapting or adopting any particular doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture.  He is quite clear that, “The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to [Christ].”[x]  Nevertheless, “It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God.”[xi]

Lewis’s Critique of Biblical Critics

These very concerns and commitments led Lewis, however, to be hostile to the tenor and direction of some critical biblical scholarship, and in particular, some New Testament scholarship.  This does not mean that he was hostile to all.  In June 1950 we find him writing to the President of the Socratic Club at Oxford to say if he had carte-blanche in arranging the program for the coming term he would have Austin Farrer read a paper on “The Historical Value of the New Testament.”[xii]  But he was certainly hostile to some critical scholarship, a hostility that he expressed in forthright fashion in a paper on “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” that he read to students at Westcott House on 11^th May, 1959.[xiii]

What concerned him were, he said, views expressed or implied by New Testament scholars that called into question “a huge mass of beliefs shared in common by the early Church, the Fathers, the Middle Ages, the Reformers, and even the nineteenth century.”[xiv]  More precisely, he challenged the grounds on which these scholars put forward their views and were heard by many as speaking with authority.  In this connection, his paper raised four issues – four “bleats,” as he called them, as from a hungry sheep looking to be fed.

The first stemmed directly from his view of the Bible as literature.  There was indeed (and is) a kind of talk about reading the Bible as literature that Lewis rejected: that is, the notion that one might profitably read it “without attention to the main thing that it is about; like reading Burke with no interest in politics, or reading the Aeneid with no interest in Rome.”[xv]  That he regarded as nonsense.  “But there is,” he said, “another, saner sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature, and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.”[xvi]  What then?  His problem was that as he read the work of certain New Testament scholars, he found that however learned they might be as Biblical critics, he distrusted them “as critics” – by which, of course, he meant literary critics:

“They seem to me to lack literary judgement, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading.  It sounds a strange charge to bring against men who have been steeped in these books all their lives.  But that might be just the trouble.  A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of the New Testament texts and other people’s studies of them, whose literary experience of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious things about them.  If he tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spent on that Gospel.”[xvii]

By way of illustrating this distrust, and his reasons for it, Lewis pointed to Bultmann’s often-quoted observation that, “the personality of Jesus has no importance for the kerygma of either Paul or of John… Indeed the tradition of the earliest church did not even consciously preserve a picture of his personality.  Every attempt to reconstruct one remains a play of subjective imagination.”[xviii]  These remarks drew from Lewis a blistering response:

“So there is no personality of our Lord presented in the New Testament.  Through what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all except him see?  What evidence have we that he would recognize a personality if it were there?  For it is Bultmanncontra mundum.  If anything whatever is common to all believers, and even to many unbelievers, it is the sense that in the Gospels they have met a personality…. Even those passages in the New Testament which superficially, and in intention, are most concerned with the divine, and least with human nature, bring us face to face with the personality.  I am not sure that they do not do this more than any others.  ‘We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of graciousness and reality… which we have looked upon and our hands have handled.’  What is gained by trying to evade or dissipate this shattering immediacy of personal contact by talk about ‘that significance which the early Church found that it was impelled to attribute to the Master’?  This hits us in the face.  Not what they were impelled to do but what impelled them.  I begin to fear that by personality Dr. Bultmann means what I would call impersonality: what you’d get in a Dictionary of National Biography article or an obituary or a Victorian Life and Letters of Yeshua Bar-Yosef in three volumes with photographs.”[xix]

Lewis’s second ground of complaint against the New Testament scholars of his day was that what he called “theology of the liberal type” invariably “involves at some point – and often involves throughout – the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has been recovered or exhumed by modern scholars.”[xx]  Having pointed to the same phenomenon in other fields of academic discourse, and the degree to which its suppositions in those fields are regularly exploded, he observed: “The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous. There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance.”[xxi]

Thirdly, Lewis objected to “the constant use” among New Testament critics “of the principle that the miraculous does not occur.”  He noted,

“I do not here want to discuss whether the miraculous is possible.  I only want to point out that this is a purely philosophical question.  Scholars, as scholars, speak on it with no more authority than anyone else.  The canon ‘If miraculous, unhistorical’ is one they bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it.  If one is speaking of authority, the united authority of all the Biblical critics in the world counts here for nothing.  On this they speak simply as men: men obviously influenced by, and perhaps insufficiently critical of, the spirit of the age they grew up in.”[xxii]

Lewis’s fourth complaint concerned the attempts of Biblical criticism “to reconstruct the genesis of the texts it studies; what vanished documents each author used, when and where he wrote, with what purposes, under what influences – the whole Sitz im Leben of the text.  This is done with immense erudition and great ingenuity.  And at first sight it is very convincing.  I think I should be convinced by it myself, but that I carry about with me a charm – the herb moly[xxiii] – against it.”[xxiv]  This charm was Lewis’s own experience of critics and reviewers who had tried to explain the genesis of various aspects of his and his contemporaries’ work, producing to that end ingenious and in many respects plausible theories that Lewis knew on the basis of personal knowledge to be nevertheless completely wrong:

“Am I then venturing to compare every whipster who writes a review in a modern weekly with these great scholars who have devoted their whole lives to the detailed study of the New Testament?… If the former are always wrong, does it follow that the latter must fare no better?

“There are two answers to this.  First, while I respect the learning of the great Biblical critics, I am not yet persuaded that their judgement is equally to be respected.  But, secondly, consider with what advantages the mere reviewers start.  They reconstruct the history of a book written by someone whose mother-tongue is the same as theirs; a contemporary, educated like themselves, living in something like the same mental and spiritual climate.  They have everything to help them.  The superiority in diligence and judgement which you are going to attribute to the Biblical critics will have to be almost superhuman if it is to offset that fact that they are everywhere faced with customs, language, race-characteristics, class-characteristics, a religious background, habits of composition, and basic assumptions, which no scholarship will ever enable anyone now alive to know as surely and intimately and instinctively as the reviewer can know mine.  And for the very same reason, remember, the Biblical critics, whatever reconstructions they devise, can never be crudely proved wrong.  St Mark is dead.  When they meet St Peter, there will be more pressing matters to discuss.”[xxv]

Is Lewis to be taken seriously?

Lewis was in the habit of prefacing any public comments he made on Scripture by proclaiming his status as an amateur.  He was “extremely ignorant of the whole thing” and “may have nothing but misunderstandings to lay before you.”[xxvi]  He wrote “for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself,”[xxvii] and “as one amateur to another.”[xxviii]  He presumed to write only because it is sometimes the case “that two schoolboys can solve difficulties for one another in their work better than the master can.”[xxix]  Now I am as willing as any to be charmed by this captatio benevolentiae.  How should we not listen courteously to one who comes before us with such modest self-deprecation?  In his chapter in The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, Stephen Logan notes “an impulse in Lewis towards self-abnegation, which, paradoxically but in a way fully consistent with Christian teaching, became a distinctive feature of his literary personality.”[xxx]  As far as Christian teaching is concerned, Logan appears here to be confusing “self-abnegation” with “humility,” which is not at all the same thing – as Lewis made clear in Chapter XIV of The Screwtape Letters.  As far as the impulse is concerned, I am not sure that something of this should not simply be attributed to the manners of the age: I still recall J. R. R. Tolkien addressing us in class, and gently reminding us that “the writers whom we were considering were just possibly rather greater than ourselves.”  In other words, as literary critics we were taught to be modest, and certainly not to imagine that it was our task to set our authors to rights, or that all who came before us were thieves and robbers.  All that granted, perhaps in Lewis’s case this modesty has worked a little too well.  It may even have led some to take him at his word, which would be folly indeed.

Thus Lewis, as I have noted, insisted that biblical texts could not properly be approached except as literature, since they were literature, albeit of a certain kind.  If he was right – and in my opinion there is no question that he was[xxxi] – then ability as a literary critic is evidently an element, and a major element, in competence as a biblical critic.  And if that is so, then we must concede that in at least one area relevant to discussion of Scripture Lewis was anything but an amateur.  The author of The Allegory of Love,[xxxii] A Preface to Paradise Lost,[xxxiii] and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama,[xxxiv] was, in both ancient and modern literature, one of the most widely read and deeply learned scholars of his own or any generation.  So when he says, for example, of the Fourth Evangelist’s account of Jesus meeting with the Samaritan woman (John 4:1-26), “I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life.  I know what they are like.  I know that not one of them is like this,”[xxxv] then while we may not necessarily agree with Lewis’s own view of the passage, still we need to take his comment seriously.

It may be worth reflecting on this passage, and Lewis’s opinions about it, in a little more detail.  Lewis claimed that it was either “reportage – although it may no doubt contain errors – pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell.  Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative.”[xxxvi]   In my opinion, Lewis was here vastly oversimplifying: but he was surely oversimplifying no more in one direction than does Sandra M. Schneiders in another. InThe Revelatory Text,[xxxvii] Schneiders (a scholar, let me say, whom in many respects I greatly admire and from whom I have learned much) sees the Samaritan woman as a “representative figure,” “symbolic not only of the Samaritan community but… of the New Israel who is given to Jesus the Bridegroom ‘from above’.”  Thus, as Schneiders points out, it is significant that in their dialogue the woman questions Jesus on “virtually every significant tenet of Samaritan theology.”[xxxviii]  So far, so good. I have no quarrel with any of this.  It is what Schneiders claims as its concomitant that is the problem: because “the entire dialogue between Jesus and the woman is the ‘wooing’ of Samaria to full covenant fidelity in the New Israel by Jesus,”[xxxix] therefore (in Schneiders’s view) the dialogue can have nothing at all to do with a real woman – and certainly not with a real woman who might have a “shady past” or a “private moral life.”[xl]  But this fails to take into account precisely that literary quality of the passage to which Lewis draws our attention, namely, that it is not at all like parables or merely symbolic narratives.  The Samaritan woman’s contribution to the conversation leaves us with far too rich and robust a sense of her as an individual for that.  Moreover, pace Schneiders and various other critics from Origen onward who have sought by farfetched expedient to drag out of this text something that is not there, there is absolutely nothing in this narrative to suggest that “five husbands” is to be understood as a reference to Samaria’s worshipping “the false gods of five foreign tribes”[xli] or “the religious situation of her people,”[xlii] or in any way at all other than in its plain and obvious sense.  Thus feminist biblical scholar Adele Reinhartz frankly and sensibly concedes its reference to a “sexual history.”[xliii]  If this plain sense is accepted, then the passage does imply a “shady past” and a “private moral life” for the Samaritan woman.  It is part of her story, as, indeed, in one way or another it is part of the story of just about all the women and men whom God calls and uses throughout Scripture except for Jesus and his mother Mary.  In short, Schneiders’s hermeneutic oversimplifies as much in one direction as Lewis’s unqualified “reportage…or realistic narrative” oversimplifies in another.  For my part I suspect that both (as is often the case) are right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny.  An analogy to the way we ought to understand this narrative is, I would suggest, offered by much of Dante’s Commedia.  In considering Canto II of theInferno, for example, we may reasonably say that Mary represents prevenient grace, Lucy is illuminative grace, and Beatrice is the specific vehicle of grace to Dante.  Each of them, like the Samaritan woman in the fourth gospel, is a “representative figure.”  That, so far as it goes, is well and good.  But if we take the further step of turning Dante’s narrative into mere allegory or meresymbol, if we forget that the poet is a real man talking about real women who are concerned about his fate because one of them happens to love him (I mean the Beatrice of Dante’s narrative of course, not necessarily the historical Beatrice Portinari)—if we forget that, then we have lost Dante, we have lost his poem, and we have lost his theology.  As Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi observes, “always, Dante begins from a personal fact in order to declare facts and values whose range is universal.”[xliv]  Mutatis mutandis, I would say that the same is true of John 4.5-42, and, indeed, of much of the fourth gospel.  It is, incidentally, true of much good poetry, one gift of which is to see the universal in the particular.  I have just been reading (with great delight) A. E. Stahlings’s Archaic Smile.[xlv]  Poems such as The Dogdom of the Dead, The Mistake, and Elegy for the Lost Umbrella evidently raise universal issues about life and death: yet they also speak clearly of real dogs (and cats), of real dandelions, and of a real umbrella.  Lose either, and you lose both: which is the incarnational and sacramental principle.

Lewis graduated from Oxford with a first in “Greats.” This meant that before turning to English literature as his major area of study, he had a thorough training not only in Greek and Latin literature – in other words, that his Greek (and also, incidentally, his Latin) was at least as good as and possibly better than that of most New Testament specialists – but also that he had received a thorough grounding in philosophy. True, as he became committed to the study of English literature, he was not able to keep abreast of developments in philosophy. Not even Lewis could read everything! Nevertheless, he had received that basic training, and his first job at Oxford was as tutor in philosophy. When therefore he points out to New Testament scholars, most of whom do not have anything like such a basis, that the question of the possibility of miracle is a philosophical one, with regard to which their expertise in matters concerning the New Testament is irrelevant, it is again, generally speaking, they, not he, who are the amateurs in the matter under discussion.

While we are reflecting on the question of the propriety of taking Lewis seriously, we ought also to say something about his written style. Lewis wrote like an angel. That was one of his strengths, both as an academic and an apologist. It is certainly one of the qualities that drew me to him, and I am sure it is a quality that has drawn and continues to draw many. It has helped to make him “popular.” But precisely because of that it has also, I suspect, made him suspect in the eyes of some.  Lewis had an ability to carry massive learning and deep reflection with a lightness that made it seem effortless, even casual.  Let chapters 10, 11, and 12 in Reflections on the Psalms[xlvi] stand as an example of the kind of thing I mean.  In these pages he tackles the difficult question as to whether and in what senses we may, or may not, understand the Old Testament to be speaking of Jesus Christ.  To approach that question he ranges over literature ancient and modern, pagan and biblical.  Such a discussion could easily become heavy going and with most writers I dare say it would.  Yet Lewis does the thing with a lightness of touch that seems as effortless to us as to him.  There is even whimsy and humor – neither of them virtues often found in academic prose.  Yet precisely because it is all done so gracefully, those of us who are used to heaviness and mile-long footnotes may well be tempted not to take it seriously.  We ask ourselves, can this really be academically sound?  Can something so enjoyable really be deepenough?  Perhaps we should take Lewis at his own word as a dilettante, an amateur who knows nothing of the matter!  Nothing, in my view, could be farther from the truth.  Lewis gives us a discussion that is overall as good as any I have seen, and comes to a series of decisions that still, after over fifty years, appear to me to be generally and fundamentally sound.  I would unhesitatingly recommend any student or believer wrestling with the question of “Jesus in the Scriptures of Israel” to read those chapters in Reflections on the Psalms.  They should be on every seminarian’s reading list.

Why was Lewis Hostile to Some Biblical Scholarship?

I would suggest that Lewis’s hostility towards some biblical scholarship sprang from his sense that the scholars of whom he spoke were violating two principles, the former of which he regarded as important for clear thinking, the latter as important for the health of humanity itself.

As regards the former: in 1924, while Lewis was teaching philosophy at “Univ”[xlvii] for a year, he read Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity.[xlviii] There he met with a distinction that he “accepted…at once and have ever since regarded as an indispensable tool of thought.”[xlix]  The distinction was between “enjoyment” and “contemplation,” used by Alexander as technical terms.  “Enjoying” an experience has nothing to do with pleasure as such: it means participating fully in the results of attending to the object of your experience.  Likewise “contemplating” does not refer to the contemplative life: it means consciously examining and analyzing those results.  The essential point, for Lewis, was that the two forms of attention were mutually exclusive:

“It seemed to me self-evident that one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire was attention to their object.  To cease thinking about or attending to the woman is, so far, to cease loving; to cease thinking about or attending to the dreaded thing is, so far, to cease being afraid.  But to attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object.  In other words, the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible.  You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself.  Of course the two activities can and do alternate with great rapidity; but they are distinct and incompatible.”[l]

In An Experiment in Criticism, which was among his latest published work, Lewis appears to be applying this distinction to literary criticism. In Lewis’s view our primary task as good literary critics – our task, in fact, as good readers – must be to pay attention to the texts in front of us and toreceive them as well as we can: that is, in Alexander’s sense, to “enjoy” them.  This is the basis of a properly appreciative approach to any art.  “The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)”[li]

How then is the best to be distinguished from what is inferior?  It will distinguish itself, because only the best will be able to endure such close attention and reward it.  An inferior production “cannot be enjoyed with that full and disciplined ‘reception’ which the few give to a good one.”[lii]  Thus John Gatta speaks to us of such close attention and its reward when he describes encounter with the narratives of the Transfiguration of the Lord – indeed, with the story itself: “Like the visual icon, a text that functions as a verbal icon requires us to look through the surface, to behold the dynamic source behind the individual words or brushstrokes. This beholding is a meditative act, drawing forth impulses of emotion and will beneath the plane of rational cognition…. What the Transfiguration gospel thus conveys to us about Jesus, beyond his previously unforeseen power and majesty, is the all-surpassing beauty of his presence. So it is indeed ‘good for us to be here,’ in a world hallowed materially by virtue of its infusion with the Lord’s body.”[liii]  A great work of art, a great text, shows itself by the very fact that it can endure and reward such reception over long periods of time among many of people.

Of course we may, and some of us must, still go on from this enjoyment to ask questions about them, just such questions as Lewis asks about the John Milton’s work in A Preface to Paradise Lost: What is it about them that gives them their greatness?  Why have they worked as they do?  What is it that their authors were seeking to do?  In other words, we may legitimately move from “enjoyment” to “contemplation,” the analysis of our experience.  There is a place for academic detachment – or, at least, the nearest to it that we can attain.  And no doubt, when we are considering the New Testament, historical questions will be a part of that contemplation.  Since the New Testament writers’ overall claim to be telling us about things that really happened, in the plain and obvious sense of the word “really,” it is perfectly reasonable for us to explore that claim.[liv]  And obviously Lewis did not object to that activity in principle: we have already seen him proposing a paper on precisely that subject (“The Historical Value of the New Testament”) for the Socratic Club.  What then was Lewis’s objection when Bultmann and others did it?  His answer, as we have seen, was that these scholars seemed to him “to lack literary judgement” and be “imperceptive” about the quality of the texts they were reading.  What this meant, I think, was that Lewis did not see in Bultmann’s work evidence of that essential surrender, the Alexandrian “enjoyment,” that in his view had to come first in any just encounter with a text.  Consider, for example, Bultmann’s approach to the gospel that led him to question that there was a “personality” of Jesus—the passage for which Lewis so excoriated him. Then contrast Erich Auerbach:

“The random fisherman or publican or rich youth, the random Samaritan or adulteress, come from their random everyday circumstances to be immediately confronted with the personality of Jesus; and the reaction of such an individual in such a moment is necessarily a matter of profound seriousness and very often tragic.”[lv]

The difference between the two is not hard to see.  Bultmann’s concerns – to discern the history of the tradition, its relationship to what Jesus may actually have taught[lvi] – these concerns, no doubt legitimate enough in themselves, constantly lead him away from the actual gospel to text to what lies – or to what he imagines lies – behind it.  Auerbach, by contrast, was paying attention to what was in front of him, to what was written.  He could hear it, because he was listening to it, not deconstructing it.  And that was what enabled Auerbach to see what apparently escaped Bultmann – the “personality” of Jesus.  Let me here be clear.  I am not speaking of Bultmann personally.  I have every reason to believe that Bultmann was a faithful Christian, and loved the texts he studied.  I am speaking merely of the effect his written examinations of them had on Lewis.  I think Lewis perceived Bultmann and his colleagues as challenging the witnesses without really listening to what they were trying to say, and therefore as lacking respect.  “All criticism,” he wrote, “that is not based on reading authors as they wished to be read – e.g. reading Hooker, Mill for what they have to say – is chimerical. Those who are not interested in an author’s matter can have nothing of value to say about his style or construction.”[lvii]

That, I think, was one violation that Lewis perceived.  But there was another.  Throughout much of his life, Lewis expressed concern about changes he perceived in our understanding of what it is to be human.  He described and criticized these changes in The Abolition of Man,[lviii] gave a fictional account of their effects in That Hideous Strength,[lix] and touched upon their implications in parts of The Screwtape Letters[lx] and The Great Divorce.[lxi]  Lewis believed that there were some values that were absolute and axiomatic, being in themselves not principles that reason itself could arrive at or defend unaided, but rather the basis of all sound practical reasoning.  Such values included justice, compassion, honesty, good faith, and veracity.  Lewis referred to them collectively in The Abolition of Man as “the Tao,” and pointed out that an acceptance of some version of theTao had hitherto been universal in human history:

“Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it – believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract ‘sublime’ and disagreed with the one who called it ‘pretty’ was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same….’Can you be righteous,’ asks Traherne, ‘unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem? All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.’  St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it.  Aristotle says that the sum of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.”[lxii]

Against this, however, in his own time Lewis saw a different idea gaining ground, the idea that all such values and ethical judgments were merely subjective, the product of our own feelings or possibly (at certain times) the needs of society; that therefore any view that took them seriously as statements about reality needed to be “debunked”;[lxiii] and that an enlightened society would naturally “see through” and “explain away” such old-fashioned notions.  Lewis regarded this new thinking as dangerous, not only because he thought it mistaken, but also because he believed that if taken to its logical conclusion it threatened to undermine everything that makes humanity humane – hence the title of his book, The Abolition of Man.  Of course he granted that sometimes humanity had made gains by explaining some things away:

“But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away.  You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever.  The whole point of ‘seeing through’ something is to see something through it.  It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque.  How if you saw through the garden too?  It is no use trying to see through first principles.  If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.  But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.  To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”[lxiv]

I believe Lewis sensed in some New Testament scholarship a tendency toward just such “debunking” as he had spoken of in The Abolition of Man.  When New Testament scholars easily abandoned long-held Christian beliefs, when they claimed that they alone could for the first time understand what “really” happened or what Jesus “really” meant, and perhaps above all when they imported into their allegedly “historical” work facile and undemonstrated philosophical assumptions about miracles: then, he suggested, however scholarly they might be in other ways, they were not speaking as scholars or as literary critics or as historians, but simply as persons “obviously influenced by, and perhaps insufficiently critical of, the spirit of the age they grew up in”[lxv] – the very “spirit of the age” that he had, of course, criticized in The Abolition of Man.

We all of us at all times tend to see the insights and assumptions of other ages and societies as relative, limited, and conditioned, but our own as absolute.  Other people’s beliefs and ideals are ideologies and may be dismissed; ours of course are true.  One of Lewis’s gifts was that he resolutely refused such distinctions.  He regularly pointed out how newly established and local are many assumptions that seem to us normative and universal, and encouraged us to be skeptical about them.[lxvi]  Quite by coincidence (if there is such a thing) I happened this morning to be reading James H. Charlesworth’s useful little book, The Historical Jesus. Speaking of miracles in the gospel tradition, he reminds us that “we should avoid two distorting myths: the ancient one that blindly follows the miraculous and the modern one that categorically denies the supernatural.”[lxvii]  Lewis would have agreed; and he would have pointed out that of the two it is the second, for the present, that is the more dangerous.  Why?  Precisely because it is ourdistorting myth, and therefore the one whose operations we can most easily overlook.

© Christopher Bryan, School of Theology, University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. All rights reserved. If you would like permission to reprint any part of this article, please Contact the Author.

“Left Behind and All That” is owned by the author and the University of the South, which originally published a version of it in the Sewanee Theological Review. “Left Behind and All That” may not be reproduced without the permission of the copyright holders, except for personal use.

I have observed in other contexts that talk about the “plain sense” of Scripture is not always helpful, because the plain sense of Scripture as one person sees it is not necessarily the plain sense seen by another. Nothing, I believe, could illustrate the point more clearly than Left Behind: A Novel of Earth’s Last Days.[i]  A major premise of this novel is that it is not only proper, but even in a sense required, that “bible believing Christians” look to Scripture and the signs of the times, not merely to reassure themselves of the certainty of Christ’s coming and God’s judgment, but also – and this is the problem – to inform themselves as to its timing and its manner.  This is precisely the activity engaged in by a pastor who is, in the authors’ view, manifestly right with God, and it is the activity to which that pastor exhorts others who would be saved.

“Nearly eight hundred years before Jesus came to earth the first time, Isaiah in the Old Testament prophesied that the kingdoms of nations will be in great conflict and their faces shall be flames. To me, this portends World War III, a thermonuclear war that will wipe out millions.

“Bible prophecy is history written in advance… Study so that you will know what is coming and you can be prepared” (214–15, my italics).

In Left Behind, all who are true believers are marked, so far as I can see, by their indulgence in this activity, or by their approval and acceptance of those who indulge in it (for example, 308–14).

Now, if there is one thing that appears to me to follow from the plain sense of Scripture, it is that such activity as this is forbidden to Christians.  “It is not for you to know the signs or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power,” says the risen Jesus in answer to a question on just this subject (Acts 1.7).  Indeed, as he was held to have said earlier, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.  But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father” (Mark 13.23 // Matt. 24.36, compare Mark 4.19, Matt. 25.13, Luke 12.45, 21.34, 1 Thess. 5.6–7).  As for details of God’s coming, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Cor. 2.9; compare 1 John 3.2).  The most we can say, apparently, is that it will be something more wonderful than we could possibly imagine, so that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Rom. 8.18).

Evidently, therefore, I have a foundational problem with Left Behind as a portrait of Christian life.  What it presents as a major element in that life appears to me, on my reading of Scripture, to be a sign of disobedience, unfaithfulness, and arrogance.  According to Genesis, the sin by which humankind is thrust from Paradise is its desire to be “as gods” (or, as the Hebrew might equally well be rendered, “like God”) “knowing good and evil” (3.5).  A dark side of the history of God’s people has again and again been its eagerness to tailor the certainty of God’s promise to its own desires and understanding.  This eagerness is classically manifested in the apostasy of the golden calf (“These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” [Exod. 32.4]), but it is equally evidenced in the willingness of countless Christians over the centuries to treat the Book of Revelation as if it were a schedule of what God is going to do at the end of times – which times are always, of course, their times.  Throughout those same centuries such interpretations have, of course, invariably turned out to be wrong (as will, most probably, be the fate of the interpretation implied by Left Behind).  That fact may not be unconnected with another: that if biblical tradition is to be trusted, the temptation to seek or claim divine knowledge is in its origins and by its nature satanic (Gen. 3.5, compare Rev. 12.9, 20.2), and Satan is a liar (John 9.44, Rev. 12.9).

Thus distracted by its quest for kinds of knowledge about God’s judgment and kingdom that biblical tradition forbids, it is perhaps not surprising that Left Behind fails to mention other aspects of God’s judgment and kingdom about which the scriptures are, as it happens, rather clear.  Thus, an essential element in the biblical and prophetic understanding of judgment is God’s desire for justiceon the simplest and most human level – justice for the weak, justice for the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner, justice for those who do not have resources to maintain their own cause (see Isa. 1. 17, 23, Jer. 7.6, 22.3, Ezek. 22.7, Amos 2.6–8; compare Deut. 14.29, 16.11, 14, 24.17–21, 26.12–13, 27.19, Psalm 82.3, 94.6, 146.9). I may be mistaken, but I do not believe that the word “justice” – let alone the idea that it enshrines – ever even occurs in the pages of Left Behind.  Symptomatic of this failure of theological understanding and imagination is the novel’s treatment of the State of Israel.  Early in the novel we hear of a wonderful new formula discovered by an Israeli scientist that enables the desert to “bloom like a greenhouse,” with the result that in Israel “everyone prospered” (8).  The fact is, however, that Israel (like the rest of the world) already has resources sufficient to enable all who live in it to prosper.  Israel’s problem in the real world, as Martin Buber saw, has from the beginning been a problem of injustice: the injustice of Arab toward Jew and Jew toward Arab.  Yet of this the authors of Left Behind appear to have no awareness at all.  Indeed, one who read nothing but Left Behind would have, if I am not mistaken, no way even of knowing that thereis any non-Jewish population in Israel or that there are any “occupied territories.”  This particular example aside, the theological deficiency in Left Behind to which I point means that, while one may rejoice that its authors perceive the universality of human sin and our need for God’s forgiveness, it remains that their conception of sin, though not necessarily wrong so far as it goes, is desperately and dangerously limited.

There are other ways in which one might critique Left Behind.  It is not especially well written, even for a thriller (Ian Fleming could have taught its author a thing or two), but it is written more or less well enough, most of the time.  The chief exception to this, significantly, is in dialogue between characters when they are supposed to be showing genuine emotion.  There is, for example, a conversation between a young man and a young woman who are, we are given to understand, falling in love (364–67).  The conversation here seems to me to be so badly written as to be embarrassing.

It would, then, be easy for us to end consideration of Left Behind at this point, quietly congratulating ourselves on being members of a mainstream Christian denomination that has no truck with the nonsense that it represents. It would be easy, but it would be unwise. As will be obvious, I did not enjoy Left Behind. To tell the truth, I found reading it about the mental equivalent of chewing ashes, and I finished it because I had promised the student who lent it to me that I would. I am glad, nevertheless, that I did. For the experience has drawn my attention to a phenomenon that Christians should not, I think, ignore. However mistaken and even heretical Left Behind and its sequels (which, frankly, I do not intend to read) may be, and however mediocre their literary quality, the fact remains that they are best sellers – and without the benefit of a major publisher. Why?

Heresy flourishes when orthodoxy presents a vacuum. Anglicans (along with Christians of all the other mainstream denominations) claim at every Sunday Eucharist to believe and hope in Jesus Christ “who will come in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”[ii] We have moreover in Advent an entire liturgical season devoted to reflection on this – a season directed, as the Collect for the First Sunday reminds us, to looking for grace so that “in the last day, when [Jesus Christ] shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who lives and reigns with [the Father] and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.”[iii] That is what the Advent season is for, but is that how we use it?

Because of my work, I hear more Episcopal sermons than do most people: on many days I hear two, one at the office and one at the Eucharist. As I look back over this past Advent (I am writing on the Tuesday after the Third Sunday) I have to admit that very few of the sermons I have heard have been devoted to any kind of serious consideration of Advent themes: God’s judgment and coming kingdom, and the connection of those things with God’s desire for justice. I embarrassed to have heard within the last few days of an Episcopal parish priest who is willing to say – quite openly and with, so far as I can see, with no sense of chagrin – that he would not have the slightest idea how to preach a sermon about the themes of the Book of Revelation. For a priest of the church to admit cheerfully that he does not know how to preach on a book of the New Testament appears to me to involve a level of professional incompetence on a par with one who set up as a dentist while admitting that he knew nothing about fillings.

In other words, unlike Left Behind, the kind of preaching I am talking about does not pervert the church’s Advent hope: it simply ignores it, which is perversion enough. People turn to religion as much as anything because, in the midst of a grief-filled and unjust world, they look for hope. But hoping means having something to hope for: therefore, as I have said in other contexts, Christian hope is not a belief alongside other beliefs, to be thought of when there is leisure from more pressing matters. Christian hope springs directly from the Old Testament promise, is affirmed and clarified in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and so undergirds and gives direction to all other belief and action. Because we hope, it is worthwhile now engaging in the creative subversion that is Christian witness, going from the Liturgy into the world to be “faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.”[iv] But if the Christian church is unwilling to preach and explain Christian hope, then there will always be purveyors of nonsense who are willing to fill the gap. That, I suspect, is why Left Behind is a best seller, and it is to our shame.

© Christopher Bryan, School of Theology, University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. All rights reserved. If you would like permission to reprint any part of this article, please Contact the Author.

A version of this note was originally published in the Sewanee Theological Review: it remains the copyright 2003 © of the author and The University of the South

The publication of the fifth of J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books is perhaps a suitable moment for a glance at them in the Sewanee Theological Review, since they have, as a series, caused a degree of fluttering in some theological dovecotes.

In case there is anyone left in the western world who does not know who Harry Potter is, let me begin by saying that he is a boy who discovers that he has magical powers, and who is therefore able to attend Hogwarts, a school for boys and girls who, like himself, have magical powers. The five books so far published describe the life and adventures of Potter and his friends and enemies at the school.

Continue reading “Reviewing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”