re: #310 William Barnett-Lewis

In the essay linked he touches on the subject of the “fall”, asking if only man fell and not all of nature.

In wrestling with the problem of evolution, in his day, Lewis could toy with the idea of an old earth and evolution as long as man was special.

Lewis is often invoked by some contemporary Christian thinkers who want to allow for evolution but keep traditional Protestant soteriology. But they do this by keeping man special.

Even Biologos has undergone a transformation since its founding, with the more religious staying and some of the more radical leaving. That’s why they’ve tried to come up with scenarios to try and keep man special, by having not a biological Adam and Eve but some nameless couple in the middle east who somehow were magically empowered with moral superiority and then somehow “fell”.

Today, if Lewis were confronted with the biology, he’d either have to go the way of the latter-day Protestant heretics (in the minds of fundamentalists), like Peter Enns or any of the other faculty that have had to leave their previous institutions on doctrinal grounds, or he’d join the fundamentalists.

I don’t know what Lewis would do if he knew what we know today. In The Great Divorce Lewis already toys with a vision of Hell and damnation that is somewhat removed from the fundamentalist/evangelical view. Perhaps Lewis would likewise have modernized, or become “liberal” as the fundamentalists would label it.

But the Lewis of 2014 still would not have been the Lewis of the 1950’s (when that book linked was published.) The Lewis of today would have to contend with much more awkward evidence (some of which I have raised) that the traditional Christian system, especially the Protestant one, fails in light of modern discoveries.