The Prayerbook of the Church

I recently finished C.S. Lewis’ Reflections on the Psalms, and he had some things to say on the question of Scripture’s inspiration as well as the realtionship between the OT and the NT that I thought were blog-worthy.

In chapter 10 Lewis takes up the question of “second meanings.” How is that the church can read the Psalms as being about Christ when it seems clear that this is not how the Psalmist(s) would’ve intended them? For instance, from Psalm 8 we read:

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet. (verses 4-6)

On its face this is talking about “man” in general – i.e. humankind.

But in the Letter to the Hebrews we get this:

For unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the world to come, whereof we speak.

But one in a certain place testified, saying, What is man, that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man that thou visitest him?

Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands:

Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see not yet all things put under him.

But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man. (2:6-10)

And again in First Corinthians:

But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.

For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.

Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.

For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him.

And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all. (15:20-28)

This suggests that a “Christological” interpretation of this Psalm was common in the early church. And the numerous other allusions to and quotations from the Psalms in the NT indicate that reading the Psalms Christologically was widespread. And, of course, the Psalms became the basis for the daily prayer of the church as we find it in the services of the Divine Office (continuing a tradition inherited from Judaism). And if the NT can be trusted, the Lord himself quoted from the Psalter at key points in his ministry, implicitly identifying himself with the Psalmist (e.g. Ps. 22).

The question Lewis asks is this: is the church, in interpreting the Psalms (and other parts of the OT) this way, foisting an alien interpretation on them? Or is there a deeper logic at work?

Now, the old style of exegesis might have said that the Psalmist or Isaiah, or whoever was consciously referring to Christ (or at least the Messiah) and so it is in no way foreign to the material to see them as pointing to Jesus Christ. However much that may be true of some of the more explicitly “messianic” material, it pretty clearly doesn’t apply to everything the church has read Christologically (such as Psalm 8).

Lewis thinks there is a sense in which we can say that we are reading these texts rightly when we give them a Christological spin, and this leads into a discussion of his views on the inspiration of scripture.

He distinguishes his view from the liberal/modernist view that sees Scripture as merely a collection of writings reflecting human religious experience and the fundamentalist view that the Bible is inerrant in every detail. He points out that he has been accused of being a fundamentalist because critics suppose that the only way he could believe in the miraculous events recounted in the Bible would be if he had an a priori commitment to its inerrancy. But the real reason he doesn’t discount stories of the miraculous automatically is because he sees no philosophical grounds for doing so. The historical reliability of a given narrative has to be determined on other grounds.

Lewis is quite content to admit, for instance, that the Genesis creation story is a “myth” in the sense that it is an imaginative recounting of events and realities that are ineffable, or at least that were unobserved by any human being. He quotes St. Jerome as saying that Moses told the story of Creation “in the manner of a popular poet.” He even happily concedes that the creation story in Genesis incorporated elements from the myths of surrounding cultures.

The key difference, for Lewis, is that these human “raw materials” were “taken up” into a whole whose composition was in some way guided by God’s Spirit:

Thus at every step in what is called–a little misleadingly–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 re-tellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which acheives 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.

Thus something originally merely natural–the kind of myth that is found among most nations–will 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. Generalising this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature–chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of God’s word. Not all, I suppose, in the same way. There are prophets who write with the clearest awareness that Divine compulsion is upon them. There are chroniclers whose intention may have been merely to record. There are poets like those in the Song of Songs who probably never dreamed of any but a secular and natural purpose in what they composed. There is (and it is no less important) the work first of the Jewish and then of the Christian Church in preserving and canonising just these books. There is the work of redactors and editors in modifying them. On all these I suppose a Divine pressure; of which not by any means all need have been conscious.

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive the word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper adn so learning its overall message. (pp. 110-112, 1958 Harcourt Brace edition)

From this Lewis concludes that we can’t rule out multiple meanings to the texts since behind the process of their composition, editing, collection, and canonization there was another will and purpose.

If the Old Testament is a literature thus “taken up”, made the vehicle of what is more than human, we can of course set no limit to the weight or multiplicity of meanings which may have been laid upon it. If any writer may say more than he knows and mean more than he meant, then these writers will be especially likely to do so. And not by accident. (p. 117)

And if, as Christians believe, the Psalter was not placed in the same book as the New Testament by accident, then it is certainly legitimate to read and pray the Psalms as pointing to Christ, even though the original authors wouldn’t have intended them that way.*
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*In his little book on the Psalms Dietrich Bonhoeffer reinforces the point. Bonhoeffer recommends that Christians pray the Psalms because they are both the word of man to God and the word of God to men. They teach us how to pray in the way God wants. Moreover, they are the prayers that Jesus himself prayed, and continues to pray. When we pray the Psalms, says Bonhoeffer, we are uniting our prayer to that of Christ himself:

“…it is a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself. For then we confuse wishes, hopes, sighs, laments, rejoicings–all of which the heart can do by itself–with prayer. And we confuse earth and heaven, man and God. Prayer does not simply mean to pour out one’s heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty. No man can do that by himself. For that he needs Jesus Christ….If he takes us with him in his prayer, if we are privileged to pray along with him, if he lets us accompany him on his way to God and teaches us to pray, then we are free from the agony of prayerlessness. …If we want to pray with confidence and gladness, then the words of Holy Scripture will have to be the solid basis of our prayer. For here we know that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, teaches us to pray. The words which come from God become, then, the steps on which we find our way to God.”