What's Christian About Narnia?
>
> There's that death and resurrection of Aslan, for one thing. But
> that's only the beginning
> By Lauren Winner
>
> Recently, I was chatting with my friend Summer. She's never read C. S.
> Lewis's great apologetics for the Christian faith, "Mere
> Christianity." Nor has she read his conversion story, "Surprised by
> Joy," or his adult fiction, or his essays of literary criticism. But
> she did, years ago as a kid, read his "Chronicles of Narnia," at about
> the same time she read "Anne of Green Gables" and "Nancy Drew." "Now,
> I know these Narnias are supposed to be Christian allegory, but I
> never saw anything Christian about them," she told me. "Frankly, I'm
> not sure I see them as much more religious than Anne or Nancy." My
> friend is not alone. Part of what distinguishes the Narnia series is
> that it can be read on so many different levels. Setting aside any
> religious interpretation, it's still just a heck of a good tale.
> Nonetheless, a deeply Christian vision shapes Narnia. The most
> unmistakably Christian trope in "The Lion, the Witch and the
> Wardrobe"-- Lewis's famous novel about four British children who find
> themselves in a magical land called Narnia where they meet witches and
> fauns and a wonderful lion called Aslan--is Aslan's death and
> resurrection. In order to save one of the children from death at the
> hands of the evil White Witch, Aslan allows himself to be killed upon
> a great Stone Table. The "crucifiers" mock him, just as Jesus was
> mocked: "Why, he's only a great cat after all!"; "Poor Puss! Poor
> Pussy.... How many mice have you caught today, Cat?" These jeers, of
> course, recall the soldiers' cry to Jesus: If you are king of the
> Jews, save yourself!
>
> The resurrected Aslan then reappears to Lucy and Susan. The girls, of
> course, are taken aback--Susan fears that she is seeing a ghost. But
> Lucy realizes this is no specter: "Oh, you're real, you're real! Oh,
> Aslan!" she cries. And Aslan explains that while the White Witch's
> magic is powerful, there is a deeper, truer, more powerful magic at
> work--and now that an innocent and willing victim was killed in the
> intended victim's place, "Death itself would start working backward."
>
> That phrase is about as concise a summary of the Gospel message as one
> could hope for. Yet the story of Aslan is so engrossing in itself that
> readers understandably don't always make the connection. Pauline
> Baynes, who illustrated the first edition of The Chronicles, says she
> wept while creating the illustration for this scene--but she didn't
> realize until later that Aslan's death mirrored Christ's suffering on
> the cross.
>
> The entire Chronicles follow biblical contours. If in "The Lion, the
> Witch, and the Wardrobe" we have a retelling of Christ's suffering,
> death, and resurrection, the subsequent Narnia stories tell about the
> children's adventures in Narnia--their adventures, that is, during the
> time between Aslan's redemption of Narnia, and his final victory. This
> is, from the Christian viewpoint, the very same in-between time in
> which we are living now.
>
> That final coming is reckoned in "The Last Battle," the last book of
> the Chronicles, which describes the ultimate battle between good and
> evil, and the final triumph of Aslan. As David Downing has pointed out
> in his marvelous study "Into the Wardrobe," the very opening of the
> book sets an apocalyptic tone: "On the last days of Narnia�" Echoing
> the foretelling of the end-times in The Gospel of Matthew and the Book
> of Revelation, "The Last Battle" depicts the children dying in London
> and being received at a fabulous banquet by Aslan. Lewis's depiction
> of Aslan's folding all of history and culture into his kingdom never
> fails to give me chills:
> The things that began to happen...were so great and beautiful that I
> cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and
> we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for
> them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in
> this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover
> and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the
> Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in
> which every chapter is better than the one before.
>
> Maybe it's even a little sacrilegious to think of God becoming a cat...
> For literary representations of the end times and the consummation of
> the new heavens and new earth, I'll take that over the apocalyptic
> "Left Behind" any day. Beyond the larger story of Aslan's death and
> resurrection, one could comb through the Chronicles page by page and
> point out innumerable ways in which Lewis specifically invokes
> Scripture. These are just a few examples:
> · A favorite "old rhyme" in Narnia, "At the sound of his roar,
> sorrows will be no more," echoes Hosea 11:10-11--"They shall go after
> the Lord, he will roar like a lion..."--and also Isaiah 65:19, "...no
> more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping and the cry of
> distress."
> · Aslan's admission, shortly before he is killed, that he is "sad and
> lonely" recalls Jesus' telling his disciples "My soul is overwhelmed
> with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me."
> · "The Last Battle"'s "rock with refreshing water" echoes Paul's
> words in I Corinthians 10:4 that "our forefathers... drank from the
> spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ."
>
> Lewis, however, never intended the "Chronicles of Narnia" to be read
> simply as a coded retelling of the Bible. He insisted that he didn't
> set out to write a "Christian children's story." Narnia came to him
> first as a series of images--a faun, a lion. That an unmistakably
> biblical narrative emerged is perhaps a testimony to Lewis's own
> formation, a reminder of how deeply steeped he was in the Christian
> story. Indeed, Lewis never liked to call the Chronicles "allegory,"
> with the term's implication that every last animal, tree, and chair
> was simply a cipher, standing for some specific thing in the Bible. He
> preferred to think of the Chronicles as "supposals"--"Let us suppose,"
> he wrote in his essay "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to
> be Said," "that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God,
> as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine
> what would happen."
>
> Lewis once received a letter from a worried correspondent, who was
> distressed to find that Aslan's death stirred him more deeply than the
> biblical accounts of Christ's passion ever had. "The reason why the
> Passion of Aslan sometimes moves people more than the real story of
> the Gospels is," replied Lewis, "...that it takes them off their
> guard. In reading the real story the fatal knowledge that one ought to
> feel a certain way often inhibits the feeling."
>
> This may be one reason that "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"
> continually delights and startles Christian readers. For the novel not
> only offers an emotionally engaging retelling of the crucifixion
> story. It also gets at the essence of the wonderful, strange,
> remarkable fact of God's incarnation as a human being. For aren't we,
> Christians and non-Christians alike, a little uncomfortable with the
> idea that, in order to have communion with and redeem the creatures of
> Narnia, God became a lion. A lion? Surely not. I mean, maybe it's even
> a little sacrilegious to think of God becoming a cat�
>
> But the biblical story of God becoming man is no less startling. Of
> course, it doesn't startle us so much anymore, because after 2,000
> years we've gotten used to it. Even Christians sometimes forget how
> bold and odd the Incarnation is: All our sweet Christmas pageants have
> domesticated, even tamed, the story of Jesus being born a babe in a
> manger. Christmas rolls around and it is hard, amid all the shopping,
> to recapture the radical shock of God becoming a baby. For those of us
> who proclaim the Christian faith, Narnia makes a fine Advent
> devotional, inspiring in us a little of the awe and discomfort that
> the Incarnation demands.
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
Taken from Belief.net, a multi-faith site: What's Christian About Narnia?
Originally Posted by fingolfin
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