Narnia Study 1: The Power of Story for Christian Discipleship

Introduction: A reading from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe: “Peter’s First Battle”

Why study The Chronicles of Narnia, in particular? Why should Christians read fantasy, in general? Is it right to immerse your mind in the world of non-reality?

Some say, “No”

  • John MacArthur, in his sermon A Death for the Glory of God (John 11:1-16) expresses concern that the genre of fantasy is ultimately a tool of Satan, since it pulls people away from reality.
    • “Unreal things are normalized in our culture, and I’m sure there are many people who don’t know the difference between fantasy and reality…Again, this is Satan’s successful effort at confusing people about the miraculous and confusing them about reality, and Satan is very adept at this. Jesus told stories…He never used fantasy to articulate a spiritual truth, never.  You’re not going to find things like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in Scripture”
  • Why waste our time reading fiction when we could be studying the Bible? Reading theology, history, or practical help?
  • Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. – Phil 4:8

Four Reasons We Should Read Books Like This

  1. Because God made us as storytelling/imaginative beings
  2. Because it helps us discern reality more accurately
  3. Because it cultivates virtue through affection
  4. Because it is enjoyable

Reason 1: The Imagination

  • Whatever is…lovely…think about these things. – Phil 4:8
  • If we are uninterested in story, art, and feeling, we will misunderstand our Bibles.
    • Our Bibles are largely compiled of narrative (43%) and poetry (33%). Straight abstraction (discourse) is the smallest (24%).
    • God assumes that we need the poet’s eye and the storyteller’s mind to read and discern His ways.
      • Example: Exodus 15, Judges 5, Psalm 18, Daniel 7, Revelation
    • “The visual power of the book effects a kind of purging of the Christian imagination, refurbishing it with alternative visions of how the world is and will be." – Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, p. 17
  • God did not reveal Himself as a distant, pulsating energy, speaking in cold, bloodless tones about abstract ideals of truth. He created a world of matter, a people with drama—tragic and wondrous—and sought to reveal Himself via that narrative, frequently in poetic and imaginative form. And we bear His image.
    • The first recorded human language is…poetry!
    • Human history follows the arc of a narrative: beginning, middle, and end.
  • Lewis and Tolkien alike believed that human beings are “sub-creators”
    • Man, sub-creator, the refracted light
      through whom is splintered from a single White
      to many hues, and endlessly combined
      in living shapes that move from mind to mind
      (Tolkien, Mythopoeia)
  • “For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” – Lewis, Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare
  • “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” – Lewis, Abolition of Man

Reason 2: Reality

  • How can fantasy help us discern reality? “Whatever is true…”- Phil 4:8
  • Consider the more fanciful aspects of Scripture, for instance…here is how David describes the manner in which God answered his prayers for deliverance:
    • Then the earth reeled and rocked; the foundations also of the mountains trembled and quaked, because he was angry. Smoke went up from his nostrils, and devouring fire from his mouth; glowing coals flamed forth from him. He bowed the heavens and came down; thick darkness was under his feet. He rode on a cherub and flew; he came swiftly on the wings of the wind.
      - Ps 18:7-10

Nowhere in 1-2 Samuel or 1-2 Chronicles are we ever told that any of these things literally happen. This is David’s mytho-poetic retelling of what happened. The nature of God’s salvation was like this.

  • Reality is stranger than the reductionism of the age
    • ‘Halflings!’ laughed the Rider that stood beside Éomer. ‘Halflings! But they are only a little people in old songs and children’s tales out of the North. Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?’ ‘A man may do both,’ said Aragorn. ‘For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!’ – Tolkien, The Two Towers
    • How does a tree make an apple? Magic
  • “The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by “the veil of familiarity.” The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is bufalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves.” - Lewis, The Dethronement of Power
    • [The boy who reads fairy tales] does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. – Lewis, Three Ways to Write for Children
  • Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.  – Lewis, Three Ways to Write for Children
  • “Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.” – G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

 

Reason 3: Affections

  • Whatever is…honorable, just, pure…commendable, excellent. – Phil 4:8
  • A story has the ability to inform our affections via the narrative. This is what happened to Lewis himself.
    • “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer…I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.” – Lewis after reading George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance, quoted in Surprised by Joy.
  • Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest — the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. – Lewis, Abolition of Man
  • “I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I  thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself  did harm.  The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical.  But supposing that by casting all  these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.” – Lewis, Sometimes Fairy Stories My Say Best What’s to Be Said

 

Reason 4: Enjoyable

  • Whatever is…worthy of praise – Phil 4:8
  • The Chronicles of Narnia are, quite simply, good. And not just for their ethical or spiritual utility. They are good the way a piece of art is good.
  • On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends…The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions. – Lewis, Screwtape