C.S. Lewis—The Work of Christ Revealed

Book excerpt: C. S. Lewis--The Work of Christ Revealed focuses on three doctrines or aspects of Lewis's theology and philosophy: his doctrine of Scripture, his famous mad, bad, or God argument, and his doctrine of christological prefigurement. In each area we see Lewis innovating within the tradition. He accorded a high revelatory status to Scripture, but acknowledged its inconsistencies and shrank away from a theology of inerrancy. He took a two-thousand-year-old theological tradition of aut Deus aut malus homo (either God or a bad man) and developed it in his own way. Most innovative of all was his doctrine of christological prefigurement--intimations of the Christ-event in pagan mythology and ritual. This book forms the second in a series of three studies on the theology of C. S Lewis titled C. S. Lewis, Revelation, and the Christ (www.cslewisandthechrist.net). The books are written for academics and students, but also, crucially, for those people, ordinary Christians, without a theology degree who enjoy and gain sustenance from reading Lewis's work.