Marginal Christianity

Does one have to believe in Jesus to make it into heaven? This perennial question Lewis addresses in the final story in the series, The Last Battle. The title event takes place on a hill with a stable. A Calormene soldier, a traditional enemy of Narnia, dies and finds himself alive in a more beautiful country than he had ever imagined. He believes it is Tash’s country.As he wanders taking in all the glories of this strange land and seeking Tash, he suddenly meets the last thing he ever expected to see. You see, Calormenes believed in the God Tash. In these last days Calormenes were told that Tash and Aslan were the same, Tashlan. This soldier, named Emeth (which in Hebrew means “truth” or “truthful”) had been a fervent and genuine devotee of Tash. So you can imagine his surprise, perplexity, fear when he sees a great lion coming toward him. This is, of course, Aslan. Let’s listen to Emeth tell the story of this encounter:   "So I went over much grass and many flowers...

                Talk about Hell is and has been a convoluted topic in the history of Christian thought. Though the view that Hell is a “place” where the unbelieving will spend eternity in conscious torment has been dominant for much of this time that time seems to have come to an end. In this post I want to consider (speculate) on a possible image for Hell that may address the issue of the ultimate fate of those who enact the “impossible possibility” (Barth) of resisting God’s love to the end. I’m not going to try to sort and categorize all the different views around this matter. Instead I want to explore an image that C. S. Lewis provides in his Narnia story The Last Battle (LB).           Now Lewis was a traditionalist in his view of Hell. He believed that if a human being did not do as God willed God would allow them to experience the result of their will...