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Christian Network

The movie version of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is due out within the week and with it comes the inevitable rekindling of interest in the man who has been called the greatest apologist for Christianity of the 20^th Century. While we must be careful not to gloss over his imperfections it is a good thing to pay proper homage to Lewis for the sparkling insight into spiritual reality he has left us with through the written word. We can also be thankful that a man of his intellectual character could also be so warm as to leave behind such a wellspring of affection among those who knew him, both personally and through his writing.

A recent issue of Christianity Today magazine began with its editor’s description of how most of his staff owed Lewis gratitude for how, at one time or another, each had been blessed by the reading of some part of his extensive corpus of work. I suspect this is true not only for his fellow writer’s, but also for any thinking Christian who has had the pleasure of entering into his world; for the world of C.S. Lewis is a place where the truths of God are made manifest in a way that can only be described as delightfully compelling.

This author must confess to having trouble not putting this Oxford professor on a pedestal. Of all the extra-biblical literature I have read in my 15 years as a believer none has so quickened my love for God as has his. Lewis’s writing is sometimes challenging. It is not something that can be quickly taken in or read in large dollops. This was a brilliant, classically trained university don from a time when a liberal arts education was not something taken lightly or easily achieved. His work takes skills of contemplation and comprehension that does not come easily to children of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Centuries. That said, when time is taken to fully take in his thought the results are entirely satisfying. No one can make the facets of divine truth sparkle quite as well as Lewis. His writing is very close to pure light.

The man who liked his friends to address him as "Jack" has never been out of the literary spotlight entirely. Books with enduring appeal like Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters and Surprised by Joy have seen to that in the world of adulthood and The Chronicles of Narnia has done the same for children. But perhaps never has he been in both the Christian and secular media spotlight as much as now, on the eve of Disney’s release of the first cinematic installment in the Narnia series. One has to wonder what Lewis, who died in 1963, would have thought of the translation of his work onto the big screen and the media hype that invariably must accompany it. Many of the accoutrements of the modern world never seemed to appeal to this man whose locus of being seemed to be in an earlier, more noble time in Western history.

I, for one, hope that the movie will make a big splash in our popular culture. Anything that draws the world’s attention to such an exemplar of Christian thought as Lewis cannot be a bad thing. From what has been written about the film it would appear that Disney has been careful to stay faithful to the spirit of the original story. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham, for instance, has been consulted, as have others who knew both the author and his worldview well. We can only hope that this allegory of Christ wrapped in the symbols of childhood imagination will survive the trip from the written page to celluloid.

It is far too early in the new century to predict whether someone of Lewis’s stature will arise to capture the public’s imagination, as he did, through a fresh literary embodiment of the nature of God. In the meantime now is as good a time as ever to delve deeply into the vivid and bracing "Shadowlands" that he so brightly illumined for us more than half a century ago.