The irrepressible Louis Markos is responsible for many good things. He is the author of excellent books; he is a regular contributor to the St. Austin Review; and now he has emerged as an indefatigable defender of C.S. Lewis in the wake of the latest efforts by the forces of secularism to co-opt Lewis to the cause of theological and linguistic modernism. Markos has organized a petition to protest the fact that HarperCollins selected the “gender-inclusive” and theologically and linguistically banal New Revised Standard Version of the Bible as the text for its C.S. Lewis Bible. The whole issue has been causing something of a furor, as can be seen by its coverage in the latest issue of Christianity Today:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/february/hideousbible.html
Here is the full text of Markos’ petition that I am honoured to have been asked to sign:
We the undersigned wish to express our disapproval of HarperOne’s choice of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) for their edition of The C. S. Lewis Bible. Though we commend Harper for publishing a Bible that includes thoughts and meditations from C. S. Lewis, we disagree with their choice to key Lewis’s writings to the text of an intentionally gender-neutral translation of the scriptures that Lewis himself would have opposed. By doing so, Harper tacitly suggests that Lewis would have approved of the NRSV and the agenda that underlies its gender-neutral translation. Yet, the majority consensus among C.S. Lewis scholars is that Lewis was firmly against gender-neutral usage and the egalitarianism on which it is based.
We support the right of C. S. Lewis scholars to make use of gender-neutral language in their own analysis of Lewis’s works, but we would not support such writers if they intentionally changed Lewis’s own words (by means of ellipses and brackets) to reflect gender-neutral usage. In the same way, though we support the right of the editors of The C. S. Lewis Bible to choose those passages from Lewis that they feel best capture Lewis’s legacy, we do not support their choice of presenting the NRSV as if it were the Bible Lewis would have endorsed had he been alive today.
We respectfully ask Harper to withdraw The C. S. Lewis Bible from circulation and reissue it with either the Revised Standard Version (RSV) or King James Version (certainly the choice Lewis himself would have made) in place of the NRSV. Such a change would allow Lewis’s timeless thoughts and meditations to be keyed to a Bible translation which is not linked to an agenda that Lewis himself would have rejected.
Adam Barkman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Redeemer University College and author of C. S. Lewis and Philosophy as a Way of Life
Paul Bonicelli, Provost, Houston Baptist University
J. Matthew Boyleston, Associate Dean/Chair of English, Houston Baptist University
James Como, founding member, New York C. S. Lewis Society, editor of C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table
Ben Domenech, editor of The City
Anthony Esolen, Professor of English and translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House)
Scott Goins, Professor of Classics, McNeese State University
John J. Han, editor of Intégrité and Cantos
Nicholas J. Healy, President, Ave Maria University
Joel Heck, author of Irrigating Deserts: C. S. Lewis on Education
David Lyle Jeffrey, Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities, Baylor University
Jason Jewell, Associate Editor, Journal of Faith and the Academy
Michael M. Jordan, Chair of English, Hillsdale College
Bruce Kirby, director, Cambridge Study Center, Plant City, FL
Al Kresta, CEO & Chairman, Ave Maria Radio
James M. Kushiner, Executive Editor, Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity
William L. Lederer, playwright and poet
Bruce Little, Director of the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture
Louis Markos, author of Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis can Train us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World; The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis
Micah Mattix, review editor of The City
Eric Metaxas, author of Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery and Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Peter Milward, SJ, Professor Emeritus, Sophia University, author of A Challenge to C. S. Lewis
Joseph Pearce, author of C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church
Patrick Henry Reardon, senior editor, Touchstone
Milton L. Rhodes, author of Survival at the Intersection of Faith and the Intellect
Leland Ryken, Professor of English, Wheaton College, co-author of A Reader’s Guide Through the Wardrobe and A Reader’s Guide to Caspian
Robert Sloan, President, Houston Baptist University
Robert Stacey, Associate Provost/Dean of the Honors College, Houston Baptist University
Charlie W. Starr, Program Chair Humanities, Kentucky Christian University, author of books and essays in theology, culture, and C. S. Lewis
Michael E. Travers, editor of C. S. Lewis: Views from Wake Forest
Robert Trexler, editor of CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society
John Woodward, author of Man as Spirit, Soul, and Body
Tom Woodward, President of the C. S. Lewis Society of Florida
This is important.
It also casts a light on the necessity for literary estates.
Many have criticized the Tolkien literary estate for its prohibition of the use of any Tolkien creation (setting, character, whatever) for marketing purposes. But without that prohibition, just think of the awful drivel with Tolkien characters, etc., that might have appeared on the market.
One wonders: Is there not a Lewis estate? If so, their permission would be required before anything could be marketed with his name.
Next thing you know, people might even write letters altogether objecting to the whole idea of publishing over-editorialized editions of the Scriptures based on a given personality or for some particular group. Honestly, there’s no such thing as a “C.S. Lewis Bible,” or a “Women’s Bible,” or an anyone-else Bible. There’s one Bible, frequently printed by our Protestant friends with a number of missing pages (and, oddly enough, by our Orthodox friends with a few extra ones), and it’s the same for everyone. The mania for projects such as this is only a degree removed from the aberrations of NRSV itself in the way it treats the Scriptures as an artifact of some particular time and place, rather than God’s Revelation of His Word for all peoples and epochs.
“Is there not a Lewis estate?”
The rights to Lewis’s works belong to his two stepsons, or to one of them individually. As the attractive but somewhat incoherent recent movies demonstrate, they’ve rather sold the farm.