C. S. Lewis and the Bible With Leslie Baynes  🔗 **Source:** [C. S. Lewis and the Bible With Leslie Baynes](https://share.snipd.com/episode/689a95d5-0c9f-48c1-aedf-523ed6e56bda) ## Highlights - **Scholar Turned Student Taught The Lewis Class She Missed** - Leslie Baynes taught a C.S. Lewis course she wished she'd taken as an undergraduate and dedicated her book to a favorite professor Father Jim Heft. - Her personal path from childhood Narnia reading to academic Lewis scholarship motivated her career and residency at the Kilns. Transcript: Dr. Leslie Baynes My entire career I've been teaching at Missouri State University, which is in Springfield, Missouri. It is not the University of Missouri. It is not Mizzou. I made that mistake earlier. Dan Beecher That was my fault. Dr. Leslie Baynes And my department head came to my office one day early in the time I had been there. And he asked me a very interesting question. He said, if you could teach any course you wanted, what would it be? I didn't have to think very long. I said, C.S. Lewis. And this is the reason why. When I was an undergraduate, my very favorite professor to whom I dedicated this book on C.S. Lewis in the Bible. I'll just say his name here. Father Jim Heft. He taught a course on C.S. Lewis the last semester of my senior year in college. And if I wanted to graduate on time, I had to take certain courses. That course didn't fit. And it was one of the great disappointments of my four years in college that I couldn't take a course on one of my favorite authors by my favorite professor ever. So when I greet my students in my C.S. Lewis course, I say, you're here because I am teaching the class that I never got to take. ([Time 0:08:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5f96652c-1c0d-472e-982c-1d44019fc95e)) - **Lewis Read The Bible As Literature First** - C.S. Lewis loved the Bible primarily for its language and narrative rather than formal theological training. - He valued poetic lines (e.g., Job) and read the Bible as a source of beauty while remaining self-taught in theology. Transcript: Dr. Leslie Baynes Is correct. He was never well-educated in theology or religion in general. He was very much self-taught in that. As far as I can figure, and I'm pretty sure I'm right, he never took a single formal course on anything having to do with religion, theology, and biblical studies. And those, to me, are three different disciplines. They all intersect, of course, but they are three different areas of study. He had read the Bible and had it read to him from the time he was a little boy. And he even really appreciated some of the beautiful lines in it. For example, there is a passage in Job that talks about how God created and the stars sang and the sons of God shouted for joy. And he wrote a letter to his best friend, Arthur Greaves, saying that that verse was ineffably beautiful. So he appreciated the Bible because he really appreciated beautiful language. He wanted to be a poet more than he wanted anything else. He wrote poems, he read poems, he did literary criticism on poems and poetry. So during his atheistic period, he could still appreciate the Bible in terms of its language, in terms of its story. He continued to do this his whole life, of course, even after he started taking the Bible more seriously. And seriously is a word that he used when he started to return towards the Christian faith that he had been raised in. ([Time 0:10:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a1939e05-3401-4b74-9ea6-91e53ddfcfa3)) - **Lewis Adopted Anglican Modernist Views On Inspiration** - Lewis relied on Anglican modernist scholarship like James Moffatt and Charles Gore to interpret Scripture, absorbing their nonverbal inspiration views. - Gore argued the Bible can contain errors, fiction, and still be inspired, a stance Lewis adopted in key ways. Transcript: Dr. Leslie Baynes Yeah. And Moffat wrote translations of the Bible that Lewis relied on for the rest of his life. Okay. Gore, however, is the one whose ideas of the Bible, biblical history, biblical criticism, really stuck with him for the most part. And I'll say for the most part, because Lewis diverged from Gore in some pretty serious ways too. And the ways that Lewis diverged from Gore have to do with the biggest mistakes that Lewis will ever make in biblical scholarship. I'm setting this up. So Charles Gore was an Anglican priest. Became the Bishop of Oxford at one point in his life. And what he's most famous for is a book that he edited that came out in 1889 called Lux Mundi, which is Latin for light of the world. And Gore gathered around him a bunch of his friends, also Anglican priests, etc. And so it's an edited book, right? Each chapter is by a different guy. And Gore's contribution is called The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. And this chapter that Gore wrote garnered more controversy than the entire book combined. These guys in 1889 are kind of on the cutting edge of critical biblical scholarship in the Anglican world. German biblical scholarship. They're just catching up with Germans. Germans. The German stuff had been going for, you know, almost a century before that. Right. And it was starting to filter into the Anglican world and coming more to the attention of general readers of the Bible who were becoming very agitated when they heard that maybe Moses Didn't write the Pentateuch and things like that. So, Gore got together his group of friends in order to take the best of the German scholarship and to get it across in a way that could be accepted more in the Anglican world. Dan McClellan So it was a devotional scholarship that this book is committed to. No, not really. Dr. Leslie Baynes Not really. No, not in my reading anyway. Gore did write devotional books that really influenced Lewis, but I've read Gore's chapter numerous times. It's heavy. I read some of the other chapters and I'm not sure how they stand up. All I can talk about for sure is Gore's chapter. And it is really dense. It's got a lot going on. And I would bet that your average person in the pew in 1889 might have had kind of a tough swim going through it. But it hit like a bombshell in the Anglican world and created a whole bunch of controversy. And Gore was thought to be more of a radical at the time because he was trying to accept as much of the German scholarship as he could. And the only thing that he didn't accept really was the Germans refusal of the possibility of miracles. Gore was a full on supernaturalist. He would say, yes, miracles are possible, but source criticism and, you know, all of the stuff that was going around in 1889. He's going to basically take it all. And Gore says that the Bible is not inerrant. To put it positively, that there are mistakes in the Bible. And it's fine to have mistakes in the Bible. And some of the books in the Bible, like Jonah and Job, are actually fiction. And they can still be inspired, even when they are fiction. And he said that it isn't the Bible that is the word of God. ([Time 0:14:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bd90708c-6e72-4938-b7ef-4288b473a3fe)) - **Myth Fueled Lewis's Spiritual Imagination** - Myth and story were central for Lewis: myths pointed to a longing he called Joy and offered the aesthetic escape he craved from a traumatic childhood. - He embraced Norse, Celtic, and classical myths and kept 'myth' distinct from conscious allegory. Transcript: Dr. Leslie Baynes So Lewis was a words guy and a story guy. He loved story and narrative, and particularly if it would take him away from the here and now. His mother died when he was nine. And within the month, he had been sent away to a boarding school in another country. He grew up in what's now Northern Ireland in Belfast and was sent to England. And his brother had been going to the same school for a couple of years. His brother was 12, he was nine. And the two little boys were put on a boat and sent to a boarding school in another country. And it happened to be a boarding school that was so terrible that it scarred him for the rest of his life. And he was looking for escapism. His mom had died. He was lonely. He was in this really, it was like something out of a Dickens novel. The guy who ran the school was later put in a hospital for the insane. Dan Beecher Well, that, that doesn't bode well. Dr. Leslie Baynes No, not a bit. Dan McClellan Sounds like Roald Dahl as much as Dickens. Dr. Leslie Baynes You're right. Very much so. So, poor Lewis escapes into his books and he had always done that. Like I said, you know, his brother had been at the boarding school before he was at home by himself. He wrote stories, he read things. It was how he survived as a child. So one time he came across a line in a poem, Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead. And Balder is a Norse god who is killed, goes down into the underworld and is then brought up. And there's so much going on in these lines and how they affected Lewis. He keeps Balder always as an example of a dying and rising God before the time of Christ. And the line he says, shot him into the Norse world of, of cold and huge skies with stars. He just loved Norse mythology. So Norse mythology seems to have been his favorite. He also liked Celtic mythology. He also really liked Greco-Roman mythology. And for him, he said in his spiritual autobiography called Surprised by Joy, that everything in my real world was awful. Everything in my imaginary world was beautiful. And there was just a line between them that could not be crossed. Everything real, hateful. Everything not real, wonderful. So, again, this sounds very much like a traumatized boy surviving as best he could. And he didn't care that the myths weren't true. They fed him like nothing in his real life did. He was kind of estranged from his father. He didn't like school. He loved books and reading, but he couldn't stand school. He was not what we would call a jock today, far from it. He was very much a nerd. And he just wanted to be left alone to read. So for him, myth is something to live on. It is something that points you to a longing that he called joy with a capital J. ([Time 0:19:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2abc6902-9de2-48df-b057-6d7e64a45aad)) - **Tolkien Offered Lewis The True Myth Key** - Tolkien convinced Lewis that Christ could be a 'true myth'—true in reality while mythic in form—and that unlocked Lewis's acceptance of the incarnation and atonement. - Lewis described this as the key moment when doctrinal problems (atonement) resolved for him. Transcript: Dr. Leslie Baynes Jesus's incarnation, death, and resurrection was true, but it was also a myth. And this was the key that opened the door to Lewis to be able to accept Jesus. He says in a letter to his best friend, Arthur Greaves, who is back at home in Ireland, that the idea of the atonement had always been a problem for him. ([Time 0:31:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75a4d132-73a6-4122-b54d-d447f42e7898)) - **Lewis Prioritized Unity Over Theological Detail** - Lewis avoided divisive doctrinal minutiae, aiming for a 'mere Christianity' that would unite believers rather than fracture them. - He still insisted on miracles and held that denial of miracles placed one outside Christian faith. Transcript: Dr. Leslie Baynes I would agree with that to some extent. Definitely with the Bible, he did not want to think much about inerrancy. He didn't want to think at all about theories of the atonement, particularly if intra-Christian debates, Christians arguing among themselves would be a stumbling block to people Outside of the faith. He thought it was much more important for Christians to come together where they would agree. And of course, that's where the title Mere Christianity comes from. He tries to talk in that book about things that he thinks all Christians will accept, will agree upon. He's actually wrong. And even my undergraduates that I teach in my C.S. Lewis course can see this because he holds to particular views of baptism and the Eucharist that not all Christians hold. But he's trying very, very hard to be winsome, to be attractive, to not be controversial. But there are a couple of things that he'll really hold to. He wrote a book called Miracles, and he is very insistent that miracles are not only possible, but have actually happened. ([Time 0:35:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/33a15313-1e7e-4a16-8b84-e9d4f4521b98)) - **Sit With Biblical Tensions Instead Of Forcing Harmony** - When faced with biblical contradictions, Lewis advised 'sit with it' and hold tensions rather than forced harmonization. - He used the particle/wave analogy and urged patience for God to enlighten understanding over time. Transcript: Dr. Leslie Baynes But he told people basically just to sit with it. He told Emily MacLea that what you must not do is choose one side of the contradiction over the other, but essentially to hold them in creative tension. He brought up an analogy. He says, think of the physicists who say that, is it energy? I'm not sure. It's both a light and a wave. Simultaneously, a particle and a wave. I wrote this and I forgot it. You know how that goes. ([Time 0:40:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f7c935a3-e7dc-46f7-a056-65e940c3016e)) - **Lewis Was Pro-Jewish Yet Problematically Supersessionist** - Lewis's relationship to Judaism was mixed: he considered himself pro-Jewish yet expressed common prejudices and rarely engaged Jewish scholarship. - He supported his stepson David's return to Judaism practically, but also wrote problematic comments about Jews. Transcript: Dr. Leslie Baynes This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Having insurance isn't the same as having State Farm. It's like thinking your crush messaged you back, but it's just your roommate asking for rent. You wouldn't settle for a disappointing DM, so don't settle for just any insurance. When it comes to getting the help you need, State Farm is a real deal. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. And play! Come together on a Windows 11 PC. Dan McClellan The best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com/student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th. Dr. Leslie Baynes Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. So she, her marriage was in trouble and she went to England and basically set her cap at C.S. Lewis and she won. Um, she divorced her husband and Joy and Jack, that was his name. Uh, Clive Staples was his given name. He never used it. He always wanted to be known as Jack. So Jack and Joy got married and Joy, even though she hadn't been raised in a practicing Jewish home, was very aware of Jews and Judaism and ideas about all of them. She, may be called a Jewish anti-Semite. The things that she wrote were really shocking and even verging on hideous. And if anyone wants to know what they are, go buy my book. So sometimes Lewis had to tamp her down and calm her down a little bit. Joy had two sons, an older son named David and a younger one named Douglas. And David decided that he wanted to go back to the Judaism of his forebears while he was living with Lewis and Joy in Oxford. And Lewis went out of his way to get Hebrew lessons for his son, to get him kosher food, which could not have been easy in Oxford in the 1950s. ([Time 0:47:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/29b4b1eb-3522-4d0f-b4ea-5c5100536d12)) - **Narnia Is Mythic Story Not Systematic Allegory** - The Chronicles of Narnia are not literal allegory to Lewis; he insisted they were mythic narratives containing meanings even the author might not fully intend. - Lewis hid explicit biblical phrases (e.g., 'good news') inside the stories to 'get them past watchful dragons.' Transcript: Dr. Leslie Baynes There's so much controversy about this among Narnia nerds. And boy, are there Narnia nerds. So a lot of people think of the Chronicles of Narnia as being quote unquote biblical allegory or Christian allegory. And he hated that idea. He says multiple times that I did not create them as allegory. And he was a professional literary scholar. His very first book of literary scholarship that he published is called The Allegory of Love. And he knew what he was talking about when he defined allegory and he said that his books were not allegory. But some people even today insist on that. So his definition of an allegory was when every character, every scene, every event had a meaning, a double meaning, had a meaning outside of what was said that referred to something Else. And an author creates an allegory consciously, putting in every meaning as he constructs every element of that story. And at one point talking about myth, he says a myth is completely different. A myth has meanings that the author himself will never be aware of. A myth is more mystical. An allegory is a created thing. It's very, very detailed, very conscious creation. Dan McClellan So he's using some definitional jujitsu here to kind of get around. Dr. Leslie Baynes And people will disagree about what allegory means. But I think if you're calling an author's works allegory, you should go with the definition that that author uses for allegory. Dan Beecher Especially if that author is using definitions specifically to say, don't see this as allegory. Dr. Leslie Baynes Don't see this as allegory. And he didn't like it when people allegorized the work. He wanted them to see the story as a whole. And here I have to throw in some work by my friend Michael Ward, who wrote a book called Planet Narnia. It was such a groundbreaking work. Came out something like 2008, 2010, something like that. And he saw that one of the things that Lewis wrote into his book were the ancient ideas of the influence of what were called the seven planets at the time. And the sun and the moon were considered planets with this. And there's a view that if someone is under the influence of one of these planets, they have particular characteristics. And Michael Ward argued that each one of the chronicles of Narnia is under the influence of one of the planets. So, for example, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Sun, you can see it in the title. And The Sun is emphasized in this book. So, it's not just biblical stuff, is the point that I'm making. Dan, you mentioned Santa Claus, Father Christmas. And Michael Ward actually has an explanation for why Father Christmas is in there, because it has to do with the influence of the planet Jupiter, which rules the lion, the witch, and The wardrobe. So it's not just biblical stuff. You've got Norse mythology, Greco-Roman mythology, the influence of the planets. Some people have tried to look at the books as connecting to Shakespearean plays or the seven deadly sins. They're just so much richer than the Bible, which means that they are not biblical allegory. But of course, there's also biblical themes. And what I was arguing, particularly in this last part of the book, is that Lewis wants to hide his exact quotations of the Bible to, as he put it, get them past these watchful dragons. Dan Beecher Yeah, you mentioned him talking about good news, a feeling of good news. Yes. Which he was sneaking in that gospel there. Dr. Leslie Baynes I love how he does this a couple of times. ([Time 0:54:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/421656fa-9ed6-4661-a16c-cf64cdc22f5c)) - **Apologists Use Lewis's Name But Miss His Nuance** - Modern apologists often weaponize Lewis while ignoring his nuance; Baynes argues Lewis would despise being idolized by partisan movements. - She notes some conservative readers resist critique because they treat Lewis as infallible authority. Transcript: Dr. Leslie Baynes You're much more in that world of online apologetics than I am. I pay zero attention to it. Dan McClellan Well, you've got better mental health circumstances than most of us. Dr. Leslie Baynes But one thing, I don't know that Lewis ever went away. Do you see a resurgence? Do you see a time when his popularity kind of dipped or wasn't being used and is now rising again? Dan McClellan Well, maybe it's just that I'm seeing it a lot more frequently on social media now than I used to. With the kind of loneliness epidemic and the Christian outreach to men that has arisen from this in combination with MAGA and all these things, I think the apologetic outreach project Has become more fervent over the last couple of years. And maybe that's why I'm seeing more of it on social media online. So yeah, that's not to say that he just wasn't being talked about and suddenly he is, but it seems to me that he's a lure that's being tossed out a lot more frequently on social media these Days. Dr. Leslie Baynes He's definitely a big name. I would say that he would be the most read Christian author in English in the 20th century. I made that claim in the book. I have zero to back it up. It's just... But no challengers yet, huh? No challengers yet, thank goodness. Maybe given them something else to attack me on here with this. And you brought up the liar, lunatic, or Lord argument. And that's why I'm thinking of attacks because so many people are so desperately committed to this argument. And when I've had pushback on the book, that's where I have pushed back from very conservative. And so far they've all been men. Very conservative men. What's that, Dan? Dan Beecher No shock there that they're all men. Dr. Leslie Baynes Does the apologetics world seem to be dominated much more by men than women. I've noticed that. Oh, significantly more so. Yeah. Dan McClellan In fact, even the women who are involved in it tend to kind of punt in a lot of ways to the authority of men just as to try and re-inscribe that patriarchy, which is such a significant feature Of it all. Dr. Leslie Baynes Dan, as I read the comments to your stuff on social media, on Twitter, on Facebook or whatever, by the names, it seems like almost all of them are men. No doubt about that. And in the field of C.S. Lewis scholarship, there are relatively few women. There is no doubt about that. I've thought about that for a long time. Dan Beecher What are your thoughts about, what do you think Lewis's response would be to the people who have taken him as, uh, as their champion? Oh my gosh. Because it doesn't seem like he would, he would be happy about who it is that are, that are, uh, that are most interested in grabbing him and using him? Dr. Leslie Baynes He would despise it. ([Time 1:01:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d29b541c-cb07-458c-be98-99726a1db6ea))