What does narnia have to do with christianity

The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis's view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis's earth. Does any of this matter?

Not really. Most children will never notice. But adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gives the film five stars and says, "There is no need for anyone to get into a PC huff about its Christian allegory. Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and "make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life".

Holiness drenches the Chronicles. When, in the book, the children first hear someone say, mysteriously, "Aslan is on the move", he writes: "Now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different.

Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it had enormous meaning Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come.

Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass.

Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan. This article is more than 15 years old. Most of the greatest writers write on several levels. Lewis and Tolkien went way beyond this. The church used to look at reality in terms of many different levels, such as: the kerygma or message, which is presented clearly here in this movie; the incarnational, which is the presence of God as manifested in Aslan; and, the sacramental , which is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.

In other words, regarding the sacramental, when a married person wears a ring, the ring is not the marriage, it is an outward sign of the spiritual condition of being married. This is missing in the movie to a degree, although the filmmakers have done an incredible job of capturing some allegorical and metaphorical meaning. Today, Christian evangelicals usually focus on the message; Catholics often focus on the sacramental; and, others such as traditional main line Protestants focus on the incarnational — and so, the different groups of the church can barely understand each other.

Lewis understood this and was trying to bring it all together. That journey begins with a symbolic baptism when Lucy, Edward and their silly, mean cousin, Eustace, suddenly find themselves in the Narnia ocean near the Dawn Treader, on which King Caspian is leading an expedition to find the seven lost lords who were friends of his father.

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 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 "They shall go after the Lord, he will roar like a lion 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. 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. 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.

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