by David H. Lane
President
Wellington Christian Apologetics Society (Inc.)

Republished with modifications from:
- Evening Post (Wellington) -
Wednesday 25th November 1998, page 5
- Challenge Weekly (New Zealand) -
Monday 5th December 2005

THE LION OF NARNIA

Aslan as Jesus Christ reimagined in C S Lewis’s fantasy world of
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe.

CS Lewis, author of the classic children's Narnia books which are about to make their big screen debut, used persuasion and fantasy to popularise and defend what he saw as the essential truths of the Christian faith

Born on 29 November 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, C S Lewis – Oxford don, English literary scholar, Christian apologist, critic and novelist – has come to be recognised as a literary giant of the 20th century.

Sales of his books, which include more than 40 titles written over 30 years, have risen to more than two million a year since his death in Oxford on November 22, 1963.

Perhaps best known as the creator of the much-loved children’s fantasy books which made up The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis is also recognised by scholars as one of the most widely read Christian intellectuals of the 20th century.

Using a wonderful blend of logic and imagination, he brilliantly popularised and defended the essential truths of the Christian faith.

For many years a convinced atheist, he became a Christian believer on September 26, 1932. In his autobiographical work Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955), he documents his pilgrimage to theism and then to Christian faith.

Lewis was a formidable debater and brilliant teacher with a driving passion to make people think and grasp the reality of God and of heaven.

His children’s stories include The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe (1950), the first of the seven Chronicles Of Narnia. Many will remember the sheer delight they experienced as children in reading of the magical land of Narnia opened up to Lucy, Edmund and the children, when they ventured behind the mothballed fur coats in the old wardrobe. Few will forget the epic struggle between the forces of good and evil, unfurled in The Last Battle and the vision of a world transformed under the leadership of Aslan the Lion – symbol of Christ the Redeemer and King.

Lewis’ life was portrayed in the film Shadowlands, staring Sir Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as American divorcee Joy Davidson Gresham, who became Lewis’ wife in 1956 before dying of cancer. The film inspired many to dig deeper into his writings, especially his works dealing with spiritual matters.

Lewis described himself as a “Christian apologist” – one who seeks to provide a reasoned rationale and defence of the faith. Many of his works project a biblical vision of wholeness with its final realisation and fulfilment in heaven. His didactic expositions (The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, Miracles, The Four Loves, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Reflections On The Psalms) and his fiction (the Narnia Tales, The Great Divorce, Till We Have Faces) present a vision of human life under God (or Maleldil, or Aslan, or the unnamed divinity who confronts Orual) that is redemptive, transformational, virtue-valuing, and overflowing with suggestions and flashes of breathtaking glory and eternal light in a world to come.

The vision is humbling and at its deepest level Lewis’ creative identity is that of the mythmaker. Lewis’ close friend the Rev Dr Austin Farrer, Oxford’s most brilliant theologian at the time, observed that in Lewis’ apologetics “we think we are listening to an argument [when] in fact, we are presented with a vision that carries conviction.”

Myth has been best defined as a story that presents a vision of life of actual or potential significance by reason of the identity and attitudes that it suggests we take on. Lewis was an authority on the literary meaning of myth. He argued that in the Incarnation, a myth that recurs worldwide, the myth of the dying and rising deity through whose ordeal salvation comes to others has become a space-time event.

Both before Christ in pagan mythologies, and since Christ, in imaginative fiction from Christian and part-Christian writers, versions of this story in various aspects have functioned as “good dreams”, preparing hearts for the reality of Christ according to the Gospel. Lewis viewed his fictional works as contributing to this stock of materials.

Lewis knew that by becoming a fact in Christ, the worldwide myth had not ceased to function as a story appealing to our imagination and giving us “a taste for the other” – an insight and foretaste of reality. Rather, he found that an experiential knowledge of the reality of the Risen Christ generated and gave birth within him to a host of stories of the same shape – stories that picture redemptive action in words other than our own, whether in the past, present, or future.

In the fantasy novels (Out Of The Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, Till We Have Faces, and the seven Narnias) he became what his close Christian friend J R R Tolkien (author of The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings) called the “subcreator”, generating dreams of his own that, by creating images of Christian fact in the fantasy world, might, he hoped and prayed, prepare hearts to embrace the truth concerning the Lord Jesus Christ.

Lewis once described The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe as giving an answer to the question: “What might Christ be like if there really were a world like Narnia and he chose to be incarnated and die and rise again in that world as he has actually done in ours?”

All Narnia books develop answers to that question. Aslan’s actions are a reimagination in another world of what the Lord Jesus Christ did, does, and will do in this one.

Lewis had an unrelenting grasp of absolute truth and had an ability to put his finger on the nub of any issue. He had no time for woolly thinking and in an age of fashionable relativism, found bitter enemies among the elite intellectuals of British philosophy, many of whom he portrayed in his allegories.

Lewis’ 1943 Durham University lectures published as The Abolition Of Man (1943, 1946), is one of his finest apologetic works, providing riveting reading by the clarity of thought and urgency of the message. In three short chapters, with plain language, he penetrates and demolishes Relativism, demonstrating not only that it is a lie, but that it is a fatal lie.

His work The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) is perhaps the freshest and liveliest of all his apologetic works, and was written soon after his conversion. Mere Christianity, published in 1952, and based on radio talks (1941-44), has been immensely influential in assisting sincere seekers to discover Christian faith.

Chuck Colson, the former special counsel to Richard Nixon who was jailed for his involvement in Watergate and in 1993 received the Templeton Prize in Religion, credits the book as instrumental in his conversion.

Dr Francis S Collins, director of the National Centre for Human Genome Research and widely regarded as one of the leading scientists in the world today, credits the book as directly responsible for his conversion to Christianity.

WCAS Celebrated the Centenerary of Lewis' Birth
1908-1998

Centenary celebrations were organised in Wellington over the weekend of 27-29 November 1998 by the Wellington Christian Apologetics Society to mark 100 years since the birth of C S Lewis. They were part of worldwide celebrations of his life and legacy. A full-day seminar, public lectures at Victoria University and other venues and a special Sunday morning service in honour of the man, held at the Knox Presbyterian Church, Lower Hutt, featured guest speaker, Dr Stephen May - a lecturer then at The College of St John the Evangelist in Auckland and a specialist on C S Lewis. The topic he spoke on was: "To be a Christian: The Example of C.S. Lewis".

These types of events have helped generate huge interest worldwide in the writings of C S Lewis and challenged Christian scholars to bring the message of faith to today’s culture in a more innovative and thought-provoking manner. The Narnia film series will help provoke serious thought and interest in the reality of the Christian faith and vision Lewis sought so passionately to communicate through the witness of his life and writings

Acknowledgement