“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.”
jAMES 1:17
“I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result, you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.”
C. S. Lewis to his goddaughter
Articles in this Series
As the heading suggests, this little expandable bubble contains all the articles in this series.
Part One: Welcome to the Wardrobe
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe: 2: Daughter of Eve, 3: The Bad Faun, 4: Service under the White Witch, 5: Always Winter and Never Christmas, 6: On Grace and Truth, 7: After Darkness, Light, 8: The War Against Children, 9: Of Fauns and Forgiveness, 10: Truth and Spite, 11: Just Like a Girl , 12: The Ambiguity of Evil, 13: On the Fear of Doors, others WIP
Prince Caspian: WIP
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: WIP
The Silver Chair: WIP
The Horse and His Boy: WIP
The Magician’s Nephew: WIP
The Last Battle: WIP
A Few Words Before the Wardrobe
Firstly, before I explain what this series is about, I want to make it very clear what it is not. I am not primarily aiming at a literary analysis of Lewis’ work, though this may augment my goal. Neither do I seek to relate Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia series to his broader canon, for I have yet to read all of his books. I am the furthest thing from an expert on Lewis; other books will serve a biographical and literary purpose. This wonderful tool called technology will undoubtedly point you towards those. I will probably read a few books on Lewis as I write this series, so please bear with the differing quality.
Secondly, what I aim to do in this series is to provide theological and philosophical reflections on Lewis’ work. The approach will be simple: I will go through Lewis’ series in the order in which the books were published, and for each book, I will plod through, passage by passage, book by book. The book names in the above section will not be mentioned explicitly in article titles; they may nevertheless serve as a useful marker. The passages are somewhat arbitrarily chosen insofar as they were the passages highlighted by me on my Kindle. I will not be providing a sentence-by-sentence commentary on Lewis the same way theologians comment on books of the Bible as it would be far too laborious of a task and also ignore the fact that Lewis himself did not intend for his Narnia chronicles to have a one-to-one correspondence to Biblical Christianity. Each article will deal with one passage, and the time between articles will hopefully be weekly at the very most. Also, each article will probably be shorter and more readable than my usual input. One hopes, at least.
Thirdly, I am not writing this series because Lewis is inspired. No sane Christian would agree that Lewis’ theology is perfect. I am writing this because Lewis communicates Biblical truth in such a resplendent way. He depicts doctrines we may consider commonplace and perhaps even dull in a glorious fashion. It is a peculiar gift of Lewis and a profound quality that I have not discovered in any other writer to make Biblical theology come alive and to have those doctrines running amok all over his pages. For Lewis, theology is not a sombre, worrisome task but more like waking up on Christmas day and uncovering all the great gifts one has received.
My aim here is to explain some of Lewis’ wonder-filled insight and enthusiastically gesticulate and declare, “Look here! And here! Make sure you do not miss this here!” at the world bathed in Christian light that Lewis creates. And “creates” is surely the right word here: the Creator creates man in His image (Gen 1:27), and creativity is part and parcel of this image. By God’s grace, may we realise that Lewis’ light is not restricted to Narnia, for the light that he sees ultimately streams from the Bible (Ps. 119:105). I pray that the same light that shines upon Narnia may shine upon our everyday existences, being bestowed by the Father of lights (Jm. 1:17) and that my articles will be of some use in this regard. Let us realise that the God of Peter, Susan, Lucy, and Edmund is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of all those who have faith in the Lion of Judah (Rev. 5:5).
Let us enter the wardrobe.