C.S. LEWIS. – OCCULT FANTASY HERESY

As a believer in, and follower of the Lord Jesus, who is also a literature major,  I have grave  misgivings with using pagan mythology, in the preaching the gospel of C.S. Lewis.

For your information, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, one of seven stories called The Chronicles of Narnia, is about four children who enter a magical country called Narnia through a closet. It is perpetually winter in Narnia, because the land is under the spell of a witch. A prophecy predicted that two boys and two girls would come to the land and become the rightful kings and queens. The great lion Aslan, supposedly a Christ figure, dies and rises from the dead to make the defeat of the witch and the fulfillment of the prophecy possible. 

What about the alleged Christian aspects of this story? At best, any biblical doctrine that is presented in Lewis’s Narnia is vague and distorted and overlaid with heathen mythology.  Although some argue that the Bible uses parables to present truth, but Lewis’s fiction is filled with unscriptural things that one will never find in a biblical parable. 

Jesus was the greatest storyteller.  He never made up any stories about worlds that didn’t exist. He never had any stories that contained alien beings. He never had stories with talking animals or creatures with supernatural powers. He never told stories about life and conflict in some other place, in some other time, and some other dimension of existence.  All His stories were about real people, in real places, in real life, in common experiences. 

Christ’s parables did not contain a mixture of truth and paganism, but Lewis’s stories unblushingly intertwine a few vague biblical themes with pagan mythology: nymphs, fauns (part man and part goat), dwarfs, centaurs (part man and part horse), Dryads (tree-women), and Naiads (well-women). All of these creatures are depicted as serving Aslan. Lewis presents the deeply heretical idea of good magic. He calls Aslan’s power “Deep Magic” and Aslan’s father’s power as “Emperor’s Magic.” He introduces the vile pagan god Bacchus and his orgies as a desirable thing that was part of Narnia’s past before the White Witch worked her spell. He presents the myth of “Father Christmas” as if it were innocent and wholesome. He teaches that Adam’s first wife was not Eve but rather a woman named Lilith and that she was a witch.   As for Aslan’s resurrection, Lewis calls it “more magic.”

As for the heart of the story, which is the death and resurrection of the lion Aslan, at best it is a corrupt depiction of Christ’s salvation. Aslan dies and sheds his blood not to satisfy God’s law but to satisfy the “Deep Power” and the White Witch. 

This confusion is a reflection of Lewis’s heretical stand on the atonement. He said, “The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has SOMEHOW put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. … Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all of this are, in my view, quite secondary…” (Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco edition, 2001, pp. 54, 55, 56). This is heresy.

 God has revealed exactly what Christ did and what the atonement means. It is not a matter of theorizing or believing one “formula” over against another. The Bible says our salvation is a matter of a propitiation, a ransom, whereby our sins were washed away by Christ’s bloody death, which was offered as a payment to satisfy God’s holy Law.