The Myth That Saves
C. S. Lewis & the Doctrine of Theosis
by W. E. Knickerbocker
In speaking with others about the Christian faith, issues of moral theology often come up. Quite predictably, especially on a university campus, the conversation will turn into disagreement over issues of morality such as abortion, sexuality, hedonism, discrimination, greed, consumerism, or religious nationalism.
But behind the disagreements about moral theology lie disagreements about soteriology and dogmatic theology, and behind these disagreements, at the deepest level, there is a fundamental clash of two incompatible mythologies. In this clash, the criticisms leveled against traditional Christian moral theology, soteriology, and dogma arise from a rejection of what C. S. Lewis called the Christian Myth in favor of a contemporary Western myth that Lewis dubbed the Myth of Developmentalism.
This new myth has permeated Western culture and many have absorbed it unconsciously into their hearts and minds. While it is important to recognize the nature of this new myth and its incompatibility with Christianity, it is critical to understand that the power of the Christian Myth lies ultimately in its affirmation of theosis, the participation of man in the life of God, a belief reflected in the writings of C. S. Lewis. In his presentation of the traditional Christian Myth, Lewis offers readers an important and accessible vision of man’s salvation, one that is uniquely capable of satisfying man’s deepest aspirations and longings, unlike the new myth.
The Two Myths
C. S. Lewis understood that myths are common to all cultures and that all myths give rise to numerous theological propositions that concern metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy. The Christian Myth, the myth of Jesus Christ, differs from other myths by being both myth and fact. Lewis teaches that other myths can be unfocused gleams of God’s prevenient grace upon the imaginations of all people. In the Christian Myth, God’s grace is focused in Jesus Christ, the incarnation of myth in history; Myth has become fact.1
The center of the Christian Myth is Jesus Christ, i.e., his Incarnation, Life, Atoning Death, Resurrection, Ascension, High Priesthood, and Second Coming. But the Christian Myth actually begins with a myth of origins, both the origin of all creation and mankind and the origin of supernatural evil and sin. It continues with a myth of redemption, which is spread through the Old Testament, and, after the center of the myth, the coming of Jesus Christ, continues with the incarnation of Christ in the Church, his Mystical Body, and the incarnation of the Church in culture. It concludes with a myth of consummation, the restoration and redemption of all creation.
In contrast, according to Lewis, since the end of the Enlightenment, the Western mind has been characterized by its gradual acceptance of a new myth, which people usually do not recognize as a myth. As he writes, “The central idea of the Myth is what its believers would call ‘Evolution’ or ‘Development’ or ‘Emergence.’”2 He says that the finest expression of the myth in English is in Keats’s Hyperion, which was written nearly forty years before Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Lewis concludes that in the making of this myth, imagination runs ahead of scientific evidence. Other writers, such as Shaw, Wells, and, on the Continent, Wagner, are mythmakers who contributed to this Western myth.3
For contemporary Western people, says Lewis, Developmentalism is “the key principle of reality.” To us “it seems simply natural that an ordered cosmos should emerge from chaos, that life should come out of the inanimate, reason out of instinct, civilization out of savagery, virtue out of animalism. . . . The modern mind accepts as a formula for the universe in general the principle ‘almost nothing may be expected to turn into almost everything.’”
This Myth of Developmentalism gives rise to what Lewis calls the “pseudo-philosophy” of “Historicism.” This is “the belief that the scanty haphazard selection of facts we know about History contains an almost mystical revelation of reality, and that to grasp the Worden and go wherever it is going is our prime duty.”
W. E. Knickerbocker taught Church History and Spiritual Theology at Memphis Theological Seminary for 32 years. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest under the Pastoral Provision in 2009 and now serves at St. Theresa Catholic Church in Junction, Texas.
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