Tuesday, November 29, 2005

'Prisoner of Narnia'

This article from The New Yorker, about C.S. Lewis and his Narnia books makes and interesting point:

The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reemerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory.
Props to Neil Gaiman.

2 comments:

Tab said...

It's CS Lewis' B'day today.

ALSO he says himself that he did not set out to write a Christian allegory, rather a story for Children that the story of redemption and the Kingdom of God ended up being wound into. I still think that a lion depicts God really well, I don't think that he was tryign to show a story of the incarnation, just God.

Matt Wilson said...

Also
If all you continually do is remember Jesus as the weak and small, lowley little, God man who was killed by the big bad bullies you lose and incredibly huge part of the Gospel Story.

That Jesus was God, Magnificent, Incredible, That jesus was the lion of Judah, the lamb of God all one and the same.

And so in the same instance that we see the frail boddy of (jim Caviezel) beaten to to a human pulp we also see, the hugley magnificent Lion heart of God with the eye's of pure power and might humble lying down beneath a mere tricksters knife