Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 28:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: The Grand Miracle: C. S. Lewis On The Person And Work Of Christ
Author: Anthony Ronald Mizer

The Grand Miracle: C. S. Lewis On The Person And Work Of Christ

Anthony Ronald Mizer

Anthony Ronald Mizer is a PhD student in systematic and historical theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. He is a member of Third Avenue Baptist Church, Louisville, Kentucky. A native of Sweetwater, Tennessee, he has a Master of Divinity in theology and Christian ministry from Southern Seminary. He was a youth ministry leader at Highview Baptist Church, Louisville, Kentucky (2011–2013), and Pastor of Education at Fairview Baptist Tabernacle in Sweetwater, Tennessee (2014–2021).

Clive Staples Lewis viewed the gospel as the great myth—the true myth. “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences … to a historical Person crucified … By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle … To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths.”1

To Lewis the gospel accounts were not myths, for they “had not the mythical taste” and yet, the story they told, in their “artless, historical fashion … was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson … yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world … God. Here and here only in all time the myth

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must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man.”2 In other words, no one is like Christ, no one is as real. He is the one—and only—myth which became fact. He is the true Word of God made flesh, God became man. All of the myths about the dying and rising god pointed to Christ, who came to us as a man in time and space.

C. S. Lewis often prefaced his theological writings with the statement that he was not a theologian and was only offering his perspective. His perspective was to be considered and if found lacking it was to be rejected. He was open to correction. However, he was presenting and writing about theology in just about everything he wr...