IN his book Between Interpretation and Imagination, Professor Leslie Baynes gives a biblical scholar’s perspective on C. S. Lewis’s various engagements with the Bible and with biblical criticism. The result is an astonishingly good book: richly detailed, deeply researched, and extremely readable.
Baynes begins with an account of Lewis’s “life with scripture”, which includes what he read and wrote concerning the Bible through the decades. This provides a useful guide to what Lewis’s ideas were, and it gives valuable insight into the context in which he developed them. Baynes emphasises Lewis’s reading of Charles Gore, and suggests that some ideas that American readers tend to think of as Lewisian can be traced back to Gore. (She also suggests intriguingly that Gore, and the mainstream early-20th-century Anglicanism that he represents, continue to have particular “traction” through people’s current reading of Lewis.)
This section builds a helpful sense of what people were asking about the Bible at the time in Britain. This is particularly useful for modern Christians, who are, perhaps, used to assuming that Lewis is answering the same questions as them.
The middle section of the book provides a series of “case studies and controversies”. These set out Lewis’s views on controversial aspects of the Bible, as well as the discussions that these views involved him in at the time, and what some later writers have thought about them. Questions of biblical inspiration, demythologisation, and textual criticism provide fascinating ground for Baynes’s lucid expositions.
Her account of Lewis’s writings is forensic in the best sense: she is scrupulous to give a fair account of Lewis’s case, and that of people who argued against him, and to detail any points of fact which bear in either direction. This extends sometimes to pointing out when Lewis misquoted or distorted the meaning of his sources, and then further to finding other elements in that source which might have provided support for him.
Readers who are unfamiliar with Auerbach’s Mimesis or Drummond’s An Inquiry into the Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel will find themselves in safe hands as Baynes explains precisely and clearly why these works were important and how they relate to the bigger questions. I was reminded of a biblical scholar from an older generation, James Barr, in the combination of courtesy and rigour in these chapters.
One can imagine a sensationalist click-bait article with the title “Some Times When C. S. Lewis Literally Made Up Quotations From The Bible”, but Baynes uses the topic as an opportunity for nuanced investigation that illuminates how Lewis thought and what the Bible passages meant. She asks, for example, why he misremembered a detail from the Garden of Gethsemane in St John’s Gospel, and provides a religiously and psychologically persuasive solution.
The final section of the book examines biblical allusions in the Narnia novels. It begins with a discussion of allegory. Baynes recognises why people might want to see them as allegories, and why the idea provokes strong feeling for different kinds of reader. She outlines what Lewis regarded as allegory in the technical sense, and how he explained the books’ origins. Then there follows a delightful series of short chapters in which the biblical allusions are unearthed and examined.
Church TimesBishop Gore, whose theology influenced Lewis
Baynes points out narrative patterns, such as biblical allusions clustering around the appearance of Aslan. She identifies the biblical books that most shaped particular novels, such as the influence of Exodus on The Horse and His Boy and the distinctively Johannine flavour of The Dawn Treader. She finds this “most mystical” of the Narnia stories infused with the most mystical of the Gospels.
Some of the biblical allusions are proved very neatly by demonstrating which translation Lewis took them from. It seems that Coverdale supplied the unicorns at the battle against the White Witch, and Moffatt provided key terms for Rabadash’s transformation into a donkey. Baynes makes the particularly engaging point that when the novels quote the Bible exactly, it is unobtrusively and with words that could be used by chance, but are full of biblical meaning when recognised. Small phrases such as “well done”, “come and have breakfast”, and “very good” would not stand out as “biblical quotation” in most contexts, but they have a quiet power when used in these tales. Between Interpretation and Imagination is an erudite and hugely enjoyable book, which sets out its arguments with a lively seriousness.
Dr Jem Bloomfield is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Nottingham and a Reader in the Church of England.
Between Interpretation and Imagination: C. S. Lewis and the Bible
Leslie Baynes
Eerdmans £29.99
(978-0-8028-7400-9)
Church Times Bookshop £26.99