C.S. Lewis wrote many remarkable books and papers. My own view, is that his Christian apologetic essays are the best, followed by his academic writing on literature, and then his novels. The volume Faith, Christianity and the Church, opens with “The Grand Miracle.”
The essay opens with a tremendously clear and insightful statement that the miracles cannot be removed from Christianity without turning it into something other than Christianity because: “… the Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, … that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him.” (3) I would only say that when God brought “nature up with Him,” it was, it seems to me, to have been in principle, i.e. establishing the possibility, the potential, and then releasing souls who had been unable to ascend. Of course, the Mother of God at some time thereafter also was taken up: the Assumption.
Lewis then goes on to discuss the curious fact that even before the time of Our Lord, there were pagan notions of a “dying and rising god.” I am not confident in his views of ancient religion and legends, but what is of some value is his appreciation that the fact of these myths does not negate the fact of the reality in Christianity.
I shall not go into the essay at great length: I think the most interesting point is the first. But purely as a matter of logic, the argument that because there were pagan resurrecting gods, therefore, the resurrection of Christ must also be a legend, is extraordinarily weak. It could be that the evangelists recycled such legends, but it does not have to be so. It could be that there were these legends, but then the reality occurred, in a manner no one had expected. I shan’t go into the reasons now, but that is what I believe did happen.
