Marginal Christianity

          Guilt is a problem most Christians face more or less regularly throughout their lives. Pastors and counselors see it all the time in their work. Few things disable Christian practice more readily or thoroughly than guilt.           By guilt I mean that sense that we are in the wrong for this or that reason. And that sense activates what sin has made our default baseline – that we are wrong. We incur guilt because we are guilty.           Edmund Pevensie in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe exemplifies this issue and how followers of Aslan, the Christ-figure in the stories, should deal with it. Edmund is guilty of betraying his siblings and Aslan to the White Witch under whose evil enchantment he has fallen. Aslan, like Christ, “saves” Edmund from the death his betrayal earned him under the Deep Magic, the moral order of Narnia....

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:   A Fallen World Over the next seven weeks I explore the seven stories in The Chronicles of Narnia offering brief reflections on various images of faith and discipleship in the stories.   In them Aslan, the great lion, is what in Lewis’ imagination Christ would have been like had been incarnated in Narnia.   The various creatures and their diverse responses to Aslan are also what faith and discipleship (and their opposites) look like in Narnia.   Thus we will read these stories with an eye to what these images might say to us who seek to follow Jesus in our own world. We begin with the first of these stories (in their published order), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The four Pevensie children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy (from oldest to youngest) find their way into the magical land of Narnia through a magical wardrobe in an old professor’s home during the bombing of London in World War II.   The land is sn...