How did it happen that C.S. Lewis moved to the right rather than to the left as time passed? The more serious and focused an academic he became, the more seasoned a scholar he proved to be, the less impressed he was with liberalism or perhaps we might say, with the so-called “modern” approaches to research and learning then prevailing especially where religion was concerned.

I have in mind particularly Lewis’ approach to old texts (or ostensibly any text for that matter). A couple of excerpts from Lewis’ remarkable 1942 Preface to Paradise Lost will help to illustrate what I mean:

“The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about a cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing is to understand the object before you. . . . The first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost is what Milton meant it to be.”

From a certain vantage point, the quest to achieve such utter submission to “author intent” defines the fundamental divide between “liberal” and “conservative” treatment and use of the Bible. A liberal approach knows beforehand the message sought in the text and exerts itself in the search and construal mission necessary for the extraction of that message. A conservative approach is devoted to truth and so submits itself to the object of its interest fully prepared to let the chips fall—to be shocked, amazed, corrected or bored. The conservative fears projection of its own biases, blind spots, and predilections because it wants to learn, it wants to know its object, not use it as such.

When conservatives and evangelicals lose this posture of the true learner, and settle for concordance-fixated ransacking of the Bible for the heaping up of ammunition in the defense of predetermined goals, we unwittingly lapse into exactly the kind liberalism we claim to abhor and eschew. Lewis calls us back to that exacting historico-grammatical posture before the text without which Luther could never have defied emperor and pope for the sake of the gospel.