Further Up, Further In, Or Farther Down, Further Away

O, for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise. Instead, they seem to sing the praises of exposing all that is evil. Such is the case with the "Narnia and C.S. Lewis are servants of the Devil" camp. Google "Narnia witchcraft" and you'll find no shortage of web sites stating how C.S. Lewis secretly served Satan and how he desired to reintroduce Pan worship and so on. Some go so far as to include mood music and pictures from the Disney/Walden Media releases.

It would be laughable, if not for the tragedy that they're quite serious about it. I once bought into that line of thinking too, but here's what I realized: How can Satan oppose Satan? If Lewis intentionally retold the Gospel and its central theme of the redemption of mankind by God's Son, and he did, and if the readers infer the Gospel message, and they do, wouldn't that do irreparable damage to Satan's cause? If so, then Lewis opposes Satan, and these sites are doing more harm than good. "Logic. Why don't they teach logic at schools?"

Conjuring spirits is almost as bad as conjuring up bad information on C.S. Lewis to assassinate his character or otherwise defame him. A lot of professing Christians have written or said or done a lot of un-Christian things in their lives. Does that invalidate everything associated with them? Babies and bathwater, indeed. Did Christ die for only the sins we committed before we knew him? There is no error as grievous as bad theology, but if Lewis made such mistakes, I believe we have all made them. No one has a perfect grasp of God, because no finite mind can grasp the truly infinite. Lewis, as passionate and creative as he was, his humanity was just as real as the paper he wrote on and he gets some things wrong. Does that mean that all of Narnia perishes in fire and water? I hope not. Let Lewis be human and God will be God, whether we let Him or not.

For Lewis's humanity, he suffers the same humiliation as all other authors: I don't put my Lewis books on the "same shelf" as my Bible. That doesn't mean I don't experience the joy of the resurrection when I read about Aslan's return or feel the hope of heaven when Peter and the others come home into the real Narnia at the end and go further up and further in. It means that there's a place for fantasy, allegory and metaphor in my home and in my mind. It does not have to sweep away all wizards or magic with the same stroke of a broomstick. If a game or a movie or a book helps me show my kids how God has revealed Himself to us in scripture and through His Spirit in our lives, I may make use of it, but only if I feel it's worth the trouble of sifting it. The Chronicles of Narnia are most definitely worth that trouble.