4 - Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism Flashcards
What are Lewis’s four major points (bleats)?
1 - These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. 2 - All liberal theology assumes at some point that Jesus was misunderstood and misrepresented in ancient times, and has only recently been recovered. 3 - That miracles did not occur, if Jesus “predicted the future” then it was written after the event had happened. 4 - The whole idea of textual reconstructionism, creating a sitz im leben for each text is riddled with issues.
Do you agree with him? If so, why? If not, why not?
Yes, I agree especially with bleats 2-4 as we see these all the time in our more liberal commentaries, and to be honest I’ve met scholars who are very guilty of #1.
During his fourth bleat, in what other fields of study has he seen similar things happen? What are some specific examples?
In English literature. Lewis saw it in the reviews of other books too, including his own!
What gaps between the modern scholar and the biblical writers does Lewis mention?
The scholars are among their peers, separated by 2000 years with different languages and customs.
What personal experiences does Lewis cite to support some of his arguments?
The reviewers failing to understand how his narnia books and Green’s stories were made, despite both of them still being alive and the reviewers knowing much about each author.
What advantages did Lewis’s contemporary reviewers have over biblical “reviewers”?
They at least spoke the same langauge and grew up in the same culture as the authors they were reviewing.
P. 356 - 12 advantages (e.g. customs, language, race, class, religious background)
What absurdities does Lewis mention?
- fourth Gospel is regarded by one school as a ‘spiritual romance’, ‘a poem not a history’,
- Jonah, a tale with as few even pretended historical attachments as Job
- Read the dialogues: that with the Samaritan woman at the well, or that which follows the healing of the man born blind
- Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage - though 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. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind.
What is his point regarding the essay on William Morris?
“Experts” claimed it was a terrible essay, but instead of reading it on its own merits, they try to reconstruct how and why he wrote it, which is not only impossible but is almost guaranteed to be incorrect.
How does Lewis use a dog analogy to support his last bleat?
The idea that we are so separated from the biblical writers that if we were plunged into their world to really see what they encountered, it would be like a dog being put into a human’s body - the dog would ask to see a vet!
Genetic fallacy - dismissing an idea on the grounds of knowing where the idea originated (the idea itself is not actually refuted)
Did Lewis’s prediction of what might happen to the Church of England come true?
No, and yet that church has become mired in liberal thought and is well on its way to being made obsolete by society, since it no longer stands for much at all.
