{"id":33528,"date":"2015-06-25T16:43:55","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T21:43:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=33528"},"modified":"2015-06-25T17:02:23","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T22:02:23","slug":"c-s-lewis-on-inspired-adaptation-and-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2015\/06\/c-s-lewis-on-inspired-adaptation-and-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"C.S. Lewis on Inspired Adaptation and Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote recently<\/a> that there\u2019s no reason why God, who spoke to ancient Israelites \u201cin their weakness, after the manner of their\u00a0language\u201d could not adapt familiar myths so \u201cthat they might come to\u00a0understanding\u201d (D&C 1:24<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Here, I cite\u00a0that prophet-with-a-small-p “Elder” C.S. Lewis, who argues that inspiration can include adaptation of uninspired sources.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have therefore no difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the account of<\/p>\n

\""Elder"<\/a>
“Elder” Lewis<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical. We must of course be quite clear what ‘derived from’ means. Stories do not reproduce their species like mice. They are told by men. Each re-teller either repeats exactly what his predecessor had told him or else changes it. He may change it unknowingly or deliberately. If he changes it deliberately, his invention, his sense of form, his ethics, his ideas of what is fit, or edifying, or merely interesting, all come in. If unknowingly, then his unconscious (which is so largely responsible for our forgettings) has been at work.<\/p>\n

Thus at every step in what is called \u2014a little misleadingly\u2014 the ‘evolution’ of a story, a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved. And no good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. When a series of such retellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which achieves the idea of true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.<\/p>\n

Thus something originally merely natural\u2014the kind of myth that is found among most nations\u2014will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served. Generalizing this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature\u2014chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of God\u2019s word<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So wrote “Elder” Lewis in his 1958\u00a0Reflections on\u00a0the Psalms<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>Note that I emphasized his conclusion about different genres within the Bible:\u00a0the\u00a0same\u00a0sort\u00a0of\u00a0material\u00a0as\u00a0any\u00a0other\u00a0literature\u2014chronicle\u00a0(some\u00a0of\u00a0it\u00a0obviously\u00a0pretty\u00a0accurate),\u00a0poems,\u00a0moral\u00a0and\u00a0political\u00a0diatribes,\u00a0romances,\u00a0and\u00a0what\u00a0not<\/em>. Obviously not a comprehensive list, but compare it to the also non-comprehensive\u00a0list made by Horace Cummings in 1911, summarizing some problematic approaches at BYU<\/a>\u00a0which\u00a0asserted the Bible was\u00a0\u00a0a collection of myths, folk-lore, dramas, literary productions, history<\/em>…<\/p>\n

What’s my point? Lewis is warm and fuzzy. People know him. He is, as I joked earlier, often cited in General Conference and well-respected. It’s one thing for me to cite random scholars, and the average Mormon reader has no idea who s\/he is, their theological leanings or associations, or a way to judge their scholarship. It’s why I tend to mine Church history for those\u00a0General Authority statements I can marshall in support of this or that idea. It’s not<\/em> to prove that idea X is correct and True Doctrine, as much as to show that X has had a place in LDS thought in the past, and General Authority Y didn’t consider it a foreign apostate idea completely incompatible with Mormonism. (To see a good example of this, note how the different perspectives presented here,<\/a> and that you can simply cite different authorities in support of different positions. Talmage and Lee on the one hand, Clark and McConkie on the other. Theological diversity.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

But when I don’t have a good\u00a0General Authority, I’ll settle for the pseudo-authority of Lewis as the sugar which helps the medicine go down.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote recently that there\u2019s no reason why God, who spoke to ancient Israelites \u201cin their weakness, after the manner of their\u00a0language\u201d could not adapt familiar myths so \u201cthat they might come to\u00a0understanding\u201d (D&C 1:24.) Here, I cite\u00a0that prophet-with-a-small-p “Elder” C.S. Lewis, who argues that inspiration can include adaptation of uninspired sources.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":33529,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/cslewis.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33528"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33538,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33528\/revisions\/33538"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}