Between Interpretation & Imagination

A literary genius reads a sacred book

Lewis is the most widely read Christian writer of the last century. The Chronicles of Narnia have sold more than a hundred million copies. Mere Christianity reshaped modern apologetics. Generations have taken their first theological bearings from his prose.

And yet — until now — no one has written a book-length study of how he actually read the Bible.

In Between Interpretation and Imagination, Leslie Baynes brings a New Testament scholar’s tools to the question. She reconstructs Lewis’s scriptural formation from his Belfast childhood through his Oxford years to the final Cambridge decade, identifies the figures who shaped his interpretive instincts — Charles Gore, James Moffatt, and others largely forgotten outside academic theology — and examines the marginalia Lewis left in his own copies of commentaries and Bibles. Many of those notes appear here in print for the first time.

The book is direct where Lewis was wrong and generous where he was brilliant. Baynes argues that Lewis’s nonfiction engagement with academic biblical scholarship — including his famous essay “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” and the “Liar, Lunatic, Lord” argument — is weaker than his admirers believe. But she finds that Lewis’s greatest gift as a reader of Scripture was never exegetical. It was imaginative.

The Chronicles of Narnia, she shows, are saturated with biblical and classical allusion in ways even devoted readers have missed: the talking animals rooted in rabbinic tradition, the Calormene theology drawn from ancient sources, Aslan’s death and return carrying more than the obvious cross-shaped echo. It is, in the end, a book about how a literary genius reads a sacred book — and about what the rest of us can learn from both his failures and his triumphs.