C.S. Lewis on the Historical-Critical Method
There has been an interesting exchange concerning the goals and methodology of the historical-critical method of scholarship. The catalyst for this latest discussion was a post at biblicalia which brought a quote from C.S. Lewis that included the following,
The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge–to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour–this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.
There have been a number of interesting responses to this first post. In chronological order they are: this one at Ancient Hebrew Poetry, this one at Thoughts on Antiquity, and another one at Ancient Hebrew Poetry. While for Lewis the acceptance of Christ was central to his intellectual development,
Lewis came to believe that the story of Christ is “a myth working on us in the same way as the others,” but with a difference: this time the myth actually happened.
this does not prevent non-Christians from gaining insight from Lewis’ thought and intellectual struggles.