C. S. Lewis and the Doctrine of Providence
The
following is a guest post by Rev. Jonathan Marlowe, pastor at Chapel Hill and
Midway United Methodist Churches, Reidsville North Carolina. Jonathan is
an ordained elder in the Western North Carolina Conference of the United
Methodist Church.
___
I have
recently been re-reading C.S. Lewis classic children's books, The Chronicles
of Narnia. Although I read them many years ago and appreciated them at the
level of entertaining stories, I am now reading them with an eye towards (among
other things) what I can learn from them theologically. Good stories can
function at many different levels. It would be a mistake to read too much
Christianity into them, but Christians would be amiss if we did not also pay
attention to the theological subtlety with which Lewis crafted his narratives.
Karl Barth developed his notion of "secular parables" in which the
truth of the gospel is manifest even in sources that do not explicitly
acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ.(1) The gospel is known only in and
through Jesus Christ, but once it is known, we can see reflections of it in
other places. I have found one of those other places in The Chronicles of
Narnia, and not just in the oft cited first book of that series.
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