I'm only “a sheep telling other sheep what only sheep can tell them.”--"Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” (1959)[1]
Having spent these past two weeks in Wales, wandering through green
pastures around Hawarden Castle, and reading and teaching a seminar on C.
S. Lewis and Alec Vidler in the 19th century "Temple of Learning" at Gladstone’s Residential Library, I offer a tiny piece from my course on miracles in the Bible.
Here is a hoof-print from Lewis’s ‘four fine bleats’ against modern criticism of the Bible from a
lecture he gave to faculty and seminary students at Cambridge University in
1959. He says he’s just “a sheep telling
other sheep what only sheep can tell them,” and his ‘bleats” are still relevant
today.
Dr. Alec Vidler, Anglican priest, former Warden of Gladstone
Residential Library, and then Dean of the Chapel at Kings College,
Cambridge, had delivered a sermon entitled “The Sign at Cana” in which he
lifted up the spiritual significance of Jesus’s turning water into wine at a wedding—a
spiritual ‘sign’ he said and not a supernatural miracle--and called for a more
secular faith and demythologized form Christianity for modern times. In response, Professor C. S. Lewis gave a Monday
morning talk on modern theology and biblical criticism in the Common Room of
Wescott House (the more liberal seminary community at Cambridge). Vidler and Lewis remained friendly, but
represent two quite different and opposing views of Christian faith,
characterized as “modernist/liberal” and “conventional/conservative.”
During the talk, Lewis bellied out his four major bleats,
summarized as follows:
1.
Some biblical critics lack literary judgment; they
read between the lines of ancient texts, reconstruct its supposed sources and
shaping influences, not understanding literary genres (e.g., reading John’s
Gospel as a romance rather than reportage of historical events and
remembrances)
2.
Some claim without good reasons that the real
teachings of Christ came rapidly to be misunderstood, and only now have been
recovered by modern scholars (Vidler is an example)
3.
Some claim that miracles don’t occur in nature,
based on their presupposition that belief in the supernatural is not reasonable
or tenable.
4.
Critical attempts to recover the origin or
pre-history of an ancient text (in Plato, Shakespeare or the Bible) are
suspect, based on the fact that critics almost always get it wrong when they
try to reconstruct the sources of many modern writers, including Lewis’s
writings and those of his friends.
Here’ a taste in the page images below, of Lewis’s light
touch and artful way of engaging his more liberal critics (most of whom were in
training to become shepherds of churches):
“I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle
that the miraculous does not occur, thus any statement put into our Lord’s
mouth by the old texts, which, if He had really made it, would constitute a prediction
of the future, is taken to have been put in after the occurrence which it
seemed to predict. This is very sensible
if we start by knowing that inspired prediction can never occur. Similarly in general, the rejection as
unhistorical of all passages which narrate miracles, is sensible if we start by
knowing that the miraculous in general never occurs.
Now, 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, obviously influenced by and perhaps insufficiently
critical of the spirit of the age they grew up in.” But my fourth bleat which is also my loudest
and longest is still to come…"
[1] “…the
proper study of shepherds is sheep not save accidentally other shepherds and
woe to you if you do not evangelize. I am not trying to teach my grandmother, I
am a sheep telling shepherds what only a sheep can tell them. And now I start my bleating…” Lewis, C. S. “Modern Theology and Biblical
Criticism” in Christian Reflections,
Walter Hooper, ed.
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