Marginal Christianity

The role of the Bible is a vital topic many are wrestling with today. The most promising of the proposals made about this is that the Bible is one large, if rambling, story. God meets us in the witness to this story in the Bible and through the Spirit we are made a part of it. The biblical story becomes our story too. It’s in this story that discover the character and will of the God made known in Jesus Christ. We learn that we do not and cannot know God apart from the Bible’s portrayal of this figure. In short, through meeting God in the biblical story we learn that the most characteristic and distinctive thing Christian faith says is that its God is Jesus-like. So the Bible’s witness to Jesus, its revelation through him of God’s character and will, his word to us as a form of God’s presence, is its chief role in the church’s life. Yet too often we read the Bible for very different reasons. Devotional inspiration (a thought-for-the-day approach), an ethics rulebook, a doctri...

          Lent is over. Easter is here. Hot Cross buns have been eaten. Pageants performed. The great Easter hymns sung. But what’s next? Where do we go from here?           Life seems to return to “normal.” But the Easter message is that the Risen Christ has made all things new. What is this newness and how do we identify and participate in it?           Fortunately, C. S. Lewis has given us a wonderful fictional depiction of our participation in Christ’s resurrection triumph. In Prince Caspian , the second in the original published order of the Narnia Chronicles, the four Pevensie children from our world have returned to Aslan’s world of Narnia. There are a great kings and queens. They have been called to aid Prince Caspian, a young royal whose scurrilous uncle had his father killed and claimed the throne of Narnia for himself. Having no male hei...

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....

The book of the Twelve for Lent 2016 Idolatry and Injustice – Amos (1) Lent 11           With Amos, a shepherd from Tekoa, a southerner called to preach to the northern kingdom of Israel, we enter a different world. Hosea and Joel have set the table (as it were) for reading the book of the Twelve with their exposure of i-dolatry as the people’s basic problem, the necessity and urgency of their “return” to God, and God’s sovereign rule over every nation and all history. The preaching of these first two prophets of the Twelve gives us a framework and the essential presuppositions for reading the Twelve. With Amos, however, the book of the Twelve goes from preaching to meddling! Now the prophets “name names” so to speak with a specificity that makes it almost impossible to deny the prophetic accusation or avoid the realization that we today are implicated in similar such perverted behavior. Or that we have normalized such attitudes ...

In The Last Battle C. S. Lewis portrays a group of dwarves in Aslan’s country (heaven).   Now these dwarves don’t love Aslan or support Narnia.   They’re only for themselves and committed solely to preventing themselves from being taken in by and manipulated by any other party, be it Aslan (the Christ figure) or Tash (the pagan deity of the Calormenes, Narnia’s arch-enemy).   Surprisingly, it is just these dwarves who find themselves in Aslan’s country. Well, almost.   They are in Aslan’s country surrounded by glorious beauty and splendor, extravagant provision, people who care for and about them, and, of course, Aslan himself. Yet, focused and turned in on themselves, the dwarves only see themselves scrunched into the corner of a smelly, nasty stable.   Closed to the beauty and glory around them, they sit dirty and blinded in the dark, experiencing Aslan’s feast as dirty stable grub, able only to hear Aslan’s call to them as a frightening roar, and t...

How are you remembering the 50th Anniversary of C. S. Lewis’s Death? I’ll be at Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Longview, TX enjoying Turkish Delight, Coffee and Fellowship and giving a presentation on “The Aslan We’ve Never Known: How Knowing Aslan in Narnia Helps Us Know and Experience Jesus Here." 3800 Judson Rd. November 22, 7:00 - 8:30 pm. (Childcare provided)

 Tirian looked and saw the queerest and most ridiculous thing you can imagine. Only a few yards away, clear to be seen in the sunlight, there stood up a rough wooden door and, round it, the framework of the doorway: nothing else, no walls, no roof. He walked toward it, bewildered, and the others followed, watching to see what he would do. He walked round to the other side of the door. But it looked just the same from the other side: he was still in the open air, on a summer morning. The door was simply standing up by itself as if it had grown there like a tree. “Fair Sir,” said Tirian to the High King, “this is a great marvel.” “It is the door you came through with that Calormene five minutes ago,” said Peter smiling. “But did I not come in out of the wood into the stable? Whereas this seems to be a door leading from nowhere to nowhere.” “It looks like that if you walk round it,” said Peter. “But put your eye to that place where there is a crack between two of the planks and l...