How Does C.S. Lewis Read Genesis | John Collins
Channel: Henry Center
Date: 2018-08-10

Lecture Title - Reading Genesis with C. S. Lewis

Many disagreements over what to make of Genesis 1–11 stem from different ways of reading the text. I suggest that we can provide a critically rigorous approach to interpreting the Bible by taking linguistic, literary, and philosophical insights from C.S. Lewis, and bringing them into conversation with ideas from modern linguistics, such as lexical semantics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics. Lewis gives guidance in how to talk about imagistic language as having genuine referentiality; he also provides the tools by which we can return the category of phenomenal language to respectability. Further, this study will allow us to evaluate to what extent it is proper to say, as many do, that the Bible writers held a “primitive” picture of the world, and what function their portrayal of the world and its contents had in shaping the community.

C. John “Jack” Collins (PhD University of Liverpool) is Professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary, and was a Senior Research Fellow for The Creation Project. He was Old Testament Chairman for the English Standard Version of the Bible, and is author of Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?: Who They Were and Why You Should Care (Crossway, 2011) and Reading Genesis Well: Navigating History, Poetry, Science, and Truth in Genesis 1-11 (Zondervan, 2018).

The Henry Center for Theological Understanding provides theological resources that help bridge the gap between the academy and the church. It houses a cluster of initiatives, each of which is aimed at applying practical Christian wisdom to important kingdom issues—for the good of the church, for the soul of the theological academy, for the sake of the world, and ultimately for the glory of God. The HCTU seeks to ground each of these initiatives in Scripture, and it pursues these goals collaboratively, in order to train a new generation of wise interpreters of the Word—lay persons and scholars alike—for the sake of tomorrow’s church, academy, and world.

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