By Harry L. Poe
The
Magician’s Nephew
In
The Magician’s Nephew Lewis explores the problem of evil and the
problem of pain in the context of the doctrine of creation. Aslan does not create
evil, nor is evil a rival to Aslan. Evil corrupts the good of Aslan’s creation,
but it provides the opportunity of free choice. Not all religions believe in
a deity who created the world, nor do all religions believe that the world actually
exists. Lewis introduces the idea of creation into his Narnia stories, but in
doing so, he also explores a number of serious issues for modern science that
represent a different “layer” of the story for adults.
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In
all the Narnia stories, Lewis introduces Narnia time, which allows children
to spend days or years in Narnia while barely moments have passed on earth.
In other words, he tells his stories in Einstein’s universe with its relative
understanding of time and space. In The Magician’s Nephew he introduces
the possibility of parallel universes, rather than merely different planets.
These
modern discussions in science pose no threat whatsoever for Lewis’s God,
who could just as easily manage a billion universes as one universe with billions
of galaxies.
The
Last Battle
In
The Last Battle, Lewis explores what Christians think of as the end of
time, the second coming, and the last judgment. The point of the story is that
heaven is the real thing and earth merely the shadow. Because he has stressed
the reality of the physical world throughout, Lewis is not demeaning the physical
world like the ascetics. Rather, he is confronting the growing materialism of
the West after World War II.
After
introducing ideas of time and space in earlier books, Lewis imagines what it
might be like when a person dies. People die at different times and places,
but Lewis imagines them all arriving in “Aslan’s country” at
the same time; yet our understanding of time hardly prepares us for it.
The
world has not come to an end, but the last judgment has taken place. The children
pass from life to life without experiencing the pain of death (‘O death,
where is thy sting?’). Some are present who experience death as darkness
(dwarves who believed in Aslan but were only for themselves), while one is included
from a different flock (a soldier from Calormen who had worshipped the idol
Tash).
Some
adults get confused at this point, wondering if Lewis teaches that someone may
be saved apart from faith in Jesus Christ. Lewis does not teach anything about
how to be saved in the Narnia stories. He only conveys that we all need to be
saved and that salvation is possible. Aslan is a fictitious character, but the
stories raise the spiritual questions and the occasion for their biblical answers.
_____________
Harry
Lee Poe is Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University
in Jackson, TN.
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1
C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” God in the Dock , ed.
Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 93.
2 Lewis earned a first in Classical Moderations in 1920 and then stayed
on at Oxford to take a first in Literae Humaniores (Greats) in 1922 and a first
in English in 1923.
3 For Lewis’s account of this conversation in a letter to Arthur
Greaves, see C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter
Hooper, vol. I (New York: Harper SanFrancisco, 2004), 976-977.
4 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
Company, 1956), 191.
5 Lewis discusses the power of journey to convey inner spiritual struggle
in C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press,
1958), 63, 68-69.