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A review by neilrcoulter
The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration by C.S. Lewis, C.S. Lewis
4.0
There’s no shortage of books about C. S. Lewis. Every year brings more. A few become essential classics (Planet Narnia and The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, for example); others are adequate but don’t add anything particularly new to the understanding of the author, his works, and his context.
Into that mix comes this book that sounds almost like it would be a parody: The C. S. Lewis Bible. It isn’t a joke, and it isn’t a comprehensive book about Lewis. It is, in fact, the Bible, with excerpts of Lewis’s writing interspersed in appropriate places throughout the text. I love the Bible, and I love Lewis, but I was skeptical of this combination. Lewis, after all, was not a Bible scholar or a theologian by training (he himself would have freely admitted that), and he didn’t write books intended as commentaries on particular sections of the Bible (even Reflections on the Psalms is a look at some of the major themes in the Psalms, rather than explications of specific Psalms). Is this edition of the Bible a good idea?
I suspect Jack himself would raise an eyebrow at the idea. I can’t imagine he’d love this mix of selections of his own writings attached to parts of the Bible that they weren’t explicitly intended to comment on. At least the publishers used the NRSV translation, which is not far from the RSV the Lewis would have heard regularly. Had they paired Lewis’s writing with the NLT . . . that would’ve been very strange.
I’ve now read the whole book, cover to cover, including all of the Lewis excerpts, and I can say that it is sometimes quite interesting. Though Lewis’s writing isn’t usually keyed to the specific passage in which it appears, it does often give me something intriguing to ponder—though sometimes I’m left thinking more about what Lewis wrote and less about how it relates to that part of the Bible. The weakness of this project is that it can feel like every second or third Lewis excerpt is from Mere Christianity (I’m pretty sure I’ve read the whole book, in disconnected parts, while reading the Lewis Bible). It’s actually not my favorite book Lewis wrote, possibly because it has become so very familiar through over-quotation. So turning a page of the Bible and finding yet another excerpt of Mere Christianity was not the best for me. Other oft-cited books in this Bible are Miracles, Reflections on the Psalms, Letters to Malcolm , and essays from The Weight of Glory. Along with these major influences, the editors have excerpted a number of Lewis’s letters, and those are the parts that most interested me, as they tend to be less familiar to me.
Overall, it was an interesting time using this Bible as my daily reading text. It’s not a Bible I’ll return to often, due to the randomness of finding whichever Lewis excerpts the editors chose to include in various places. But it’s not a bad way to read through the Bible, especially for readers with basic familiarity of Lewis already (enough familiarity, that is, to understand a little of the bigger context of the selected excerpts).
Into that mix comes this book that sounds almost like it would be a parody: The C. S. Lewis Bible. It isn’t a joke, and it isn’t a comprehensive book about Lewis. It is, in fact, the Bible, with excerpts of Lewis’s writing interspersed in appropriate places throughout the text. I love the Bible, and I love Lewis, but I was skeptical of this combination. Lewis, after all, was not a Bible scholar or a theologian by training (he himself would have freely admitted that), and he didn’t write books intended as commentaries on particular sections of the Bible (even Reflections on the Psalms is a look at some of the major themes in the Psalms, rather than explications of specific Psalms). Is this edition of the Bible a good idea?
I suspect Jack himself would raise an eyebrow at the idea. I can’t imagine he’d love this mix of selections of his own writings attached to parts of the Bible that they weren’t explicitly intended to comment on. At least the publishers used the NRSV translation, which is not far from the RSV the Lewis would have heard regularly. Had they paired Lewis’s writing with the NLT . . . that would’ve been very strange.
I’ve now read the whole book, cover to cover, including all of the Lewis excerpts, and I can say that it is sometimes quite interesting. Though Lewis’s writing isn’t usually keyed to the specific passage in which it appears, it does often give me something intriguing to ponder—though sometimes I’m left thinking more about what Lewis wrote and less about how it relates to that part of the Bible. The weakness of this project is that it can feel like every second or third Lewis excerpt is from Mere Christianity (I’m pretty sure I’ve read the whole book, in disconnected parts, while reading the Lewis Bible). It’s actually not my favorite book Lewis wrote, possibly because it has become so very familiar through over-quotation. So turning a page of the Bible and finding yet another excerpt of Mere Christianity was not the best for me. Other oft-cited books in this Bible are Miracles, Reflections on the Psalms, Letters to Malcolm , and essays from The Weight of Glory. Along with these major influences, the editors have excerpted a number of Lewis’s letters, and those are the parts that most interested me, as they tend to be less familiar to me.
Overall, it was an interesting time using this Bible as my daily reading text. It’s not a Bible I’ll return to often, due to the randomness of finding whichever Lewis excerpts the editors chose to include in various places. But it’s not a bad way to read through the Bible, especially for readers with basic familiarity of Lewis already (enough familiarity, that is, to understand a little of the bigger context of the selected excerpts).