Exploring God’s Word with C.S. Lewis

Between Interpretation and Imagination: C.S. Lewis and the Bible

Leslie Baynes
Eerdmans, 2025.

In the back row of my university classroom, I could not stop crying. I was in my second year, studying philosophical logic and there I was, shedding tears and more tears. A month earlier, my only sibling Margaret had died of leukemia. She was 17 and I 20. The grief felt unremitting.

I did not understand. I was a devout Christian ever since the age of four when I felt God’s call in a Sunday service at Maranatha Christian Reformed Church. But nothing – not Christian school, not catechism and profession of faith, not all my prayers and Bible studies over the years – prepared me for her death and I was angry. In that moment in the middle of logic class, I decided that I did not want to believe in a God who could do such a terrible thing, or at least let it happen.

I needed to process this shocking conclusion and slipped from the back row to the nearest exit. I trudged across campus, up a nearby hill to the main library. I had been a Christian all my life and wondered what it meant to give that up now. Who would I be if not a follower of Jesus?

Halfway up the hill, I stopped and recalled something I had read over a year and a half earlier. C.S. Lewis said that with all Jesus’ amazing claims, he must have been a liar, lunatic or precisely who he claimed to be. While there was much about Christian faith that did not compute in that moment, I still loved Jesus and wanted to be faithful to him. My ten or fifteen minutes of atheism dissipated. I have felt indebted to Lewis ever since.

Challenging Lewis

Not everyone – not even all Christians – like Lewis’ argument. In fact, Leslie Baynes, a New Testament professor at Missouri State University argues that it is not properly biblical. I don’t need to argue with her, but Lewis’ words were a faith saver for me.

Baynes has written an academic tome in Between Interpretation and Imagination: C.S. Lewis and the Bible. A lover of C. S. Lewis literature, her love language is careful analysis and even critique. While Lewis was one of the great Christian apologists of the twentieth century and obviously loved the scriptures, Baynes argues that at times his scriptural analyses do not stand up to scholarly standards. She thinks that he tried, too casually, to harmonize the gospels. She also argues that Lewis was not a fundamentalist and often was out of step with North American evangelicalism, even though many evangelicals claimed him. He did not believe the Bible was inerrantly dictated and he mocked the end-times fascinations. He also was in tension with theological liberals, robustly defending the reality of miracles and the divinity of Christ.

She herself says Lewis’ “mind was saturated with the Bible”; he playfully and imaginatively engaged the scriptures. Baynes speaks of “the subtle beauty of his work with Scriptures.”
Intriguingly, while Baynes often argues with his Bible interpretation, she maintains that the Chronicles of Narnia is “his best work with Scripture.” Lewis believed “that the story of Jesus demands an imaginative as well as an intellectual response.” That rings true for me. I even appreciate some of his scholarship, for example his Reflection on Psalms, his only book entirely devoted to Bible texts.

Lewis was humble. A scholar of many kinds of literature, he knew that the Bible posed “a rare challenge: a text he cannot master.” He also believed that “mastering it isn’t the point. Living it, to the end of conforming himself to the image of God is.” To that I say a hearty “Amen.” I am still grateful that Lewis helped bring me back to the life-giving path of living within Jesus Christ’s loving call and embrace.