On the Toleration of Tolerance

Tolerance, so named, is one of the most popular of the modern political vices. Along with following one's heart, and giving peace a chance, it is one of the most tired of exhortations. Yet few things are more galling than a certain variety of tolerance.
Of course, there is a real virtue of tolerance. It is a branch of justice. It states that people are allowed differences of opinion and one shouldn't use force to change them. Christianity takes pagan tolerance a step further, and commands its followers to love their enemies.
Modern tolerance asks us to do neither. It says something more to the effect of "the things we disagree on are not worth arguing over, so there should be no conflict." Not even sports fans would hold with this. What devotee of the Red Sox would not proclaim from the rooftops that they are emphatically right!!! (they are not in fact, the Angels are best), And that the Yankees are of the devil. And this policy of tolerance tends to be applied to religion. It is offensive because it takes what people hold dear and sacred and holds it to be of less value than the latest economic plan to end world hunger (none of the last million have worked yet, but who knows!).
One can be angered by someone with whom you disagree, but at least the person who thinks you are wrong thinks the question is important. It is hard to tolerate the person who merely tolerates your ideas, and very presence. People aren't meant to be merely tolerated by their fellow man. They are to be loved, and if loved, then their ideas, even their wrong ones, are worth arguing over. We move upon the face of the earth because the earth resists our movements. We cannot move in the tolerant and yielding medium of space.

Assorted Thoughts

It seems now inevitable that Prince Caspian will wait till at least summer 2008. It is not that I am at all impatient; I am merely worried that by the time they get to Dawn Treader, Lucy will have trouble navigating her walker onboard ship. I can almost see the cruel businessman looking down upon the helpless masses from his vast and dimly lit office. I can hear his maniacal laugh as he pushes the release date ever further back. There seems no hint of them filming several movies at once. The time scale is going to get interesting if they insist on making each movie one at a time with a two to three year gap in between.

Just a thought on the first movie, I find it interesting the way Aslan puts things in order for the rule of the children. Aslan assembles the army and then teaches Peter so that Peter can lead the army. He kills the White Witch and gives the children the job of rebuilding Narnia. He atones for Edmund’s betrayal and crowns the four children. He knows the job better than the children and I am quite sure could do it better, yet he wants them to be able to do it. He does everything the children can't do and then allows them to try their best. I rather wonder how that would relate back to the Christian understanding of the work God gives us. It would seem to be that God helps us with what we cannot handle, but then wants us to strike out on our own.

Loch Ness Monster vs. Dracula

Greetings! I am L.D. Reynolds and my Father has graciously allowed me to post on this blog. At my house we have many lengthy debates of military senarios that might well become matters of national, or even global importance. We have discussed such conundrums as whether Chip could defeat Dale (Chip was the universal favorite, far more serious and clear headed despite Dales extrordinary luck), whether Jafar could triumph over Malificent (Obviously Malificent, the dragon trumps the giant snake and she has a cooler pet bird), but we are continually grapling though, with one issue of such momentous difficulty that it has stirred great strife and dispute among all asked. Who would win, the Loch Ness Monster or Dracula?

My poor decieved brother has sadly taken the part of the lake monster and is willing to assert his opinion with foam swords to all dissenters. I however have taken the time to condense a what might be a books worth of information into a short article for the sake of the illumination of the general public to show that indeed Dracula would triumph over all such water lizards.

In the first place it is often asserted by the Nessieites (as I will call them) that the Loch Ness monster would win be sheer mass. In response I will appeal to that genius writer Bram Stoker who chronicled the exploits of that renowned vampire Count Dracula. In his account Mr. Harker slams a shovle down on Dracula's face making only a slight red scar across the forehead. This is only one of many accounts of the durability of Vampires. Could Nessie muster sufficient force to destroy Dracula? I don't know. Further would such destruction profit the monster? Vampires are recorded to have the ability to almost teleport seemingly pulling the matter for their bodies out of the air. Further Dr. Van Helsing does not list to the best of my knowledge that Dracula could be destroyed by such means as the Nessieites propose. And lastly even if the monster could lift his body out of the water to slam the vampire, this would almost surly be a long process which ought to be easy to dodge.

The powers of water to unmake a vampire are also often appealed to. Dracula is a creature of air whose home is in the mountains, Nessie is a creature of water. Let us suppose they battled in Dracula's home not at Nessie's. Even my brother would not hold out that Nessie could win fighting on the mountin crags of Transylvania. My brother argues it needs to be fought by the lake side, and for the sake of arguement I will acquiesce. Now the possibility of Nessie using water to his advantage rests on the assumption that the snake like neck of Nessie can move with greater swiftness than Dracula. Vampires are said to move faster than the speed of human sight so a see little reason to believe this.

Next we will observe the powers of vampire to control the minds of animals. It is usually claimed that the Loch Ness monster is a kind of Plesiosaur. This would seem to place the monster well within the realm of normal animals. My brother claims that St. Columba who tamed a serpent in a Scottish Lake using the eucharist. He says the monster was sanctified and thus immune to mind powers. Even if we assume this dubious staement is true, it is very unlikly that that particular serpent is still alive all these hundreds of years later. It is reasonable to assume that the monster is a descendent of the old serpent. Would any immunity still remain? I don't think so.

Thus using mind powers and super agility and strength Dracula would defeat Nessie. Now that you have learnt the truth go out and evangelize for the just perception of vampire, witness to the decieved Nessieites, change the world.

New Writer!

My son, L.D., is the best young man and brightest lad I know. He is also a true son of Narnia. . . he will be writing on this blog from this point on!

John Mark Reynolds

Narnia rules again

Narnia rules again.

However, briefly the best family movie of the year was number one yesterday again! Kong has been slipping every day (so much for the vaunted word of mouth) and the new releases could not catch Narnia which has shown small growth this week.

I think we know what we needed to know. There is a hungry market for high quality religion-friendly films. Will the studios feed it?

Order in Narnia

One of the best things about Narnia is that it defends hierarchy. Peter and the children recognize their betters, including the Lord of Narnia Aslan, but do not feel demeaned by it. In fact, they are able to be thankful and have appropriate desires because they know their place. We cannot hear this term without thinking of demeaning demands for submission from those who have no right to demand it. However, we now infected with the opposite disease.

We frequently fantasize that we are the equals of the leaders of different fields of cultural endeavors. As a native of West Virginia, I have great respect for the common man and for folk culture. The folk, my folk, are very strong and are the backbone of the nation. However, we need not fantasize that the home made quilt is the artistic equal of the Renaissance painting to enjoy its homely beauty. In fact, we demean it by making the unfair comparison. As a member of the commons, I delight that there exist the wealthy, the powerful, and the very gifted.

I am happy blogging gives power to the folk, but do not expect (or even hope to see) the end of all elites. Natural elites based on God given gifts are to be celebrated and not resented. They are (after all) my betters in role and abilities, but they are not better men! Sainthood is, after all, the one great role open to all!

Americans frequently confuse our equality of personhood with equality of function. As the Declaration makes plain, building on the Biblical world-view, all men (persons) are created equal. There are some rights that one has simply as a human being because God has given them to every person. The Declaration lists the right to life, liberty, and the ownership of private property.

This does not imply that all persons have the same roles. My bishop has no greater right to life than I, but in the order of Christendom he is a better man. I owe him my allegiance on issues ecclesiastical. Without being his inferior (as a man), I bow the need to him as my superior in the church. In the same way, if the President were to come to Torrey, I would have to recognize his superior status. I must honor him as President because in the order of American politics, he is my better. Even for him to speak to me is an act of condescension.

The old word condescension has only bad meanings today. We think of it as what a snob does, but it did not always mean only this. It is also a useful word for when a person who really is superior (functionally) graces a lesser person with undeserved favor. When Dr. Cook speaks kindly to a faculty member at a party where he is acting as President of the University, this is a gracious act of condescension.

During a Super Bowl party, I once had a chance to meet Bart Starr, the great quarterback on the championship Packers teams of the sixties. Now in the world of football it would be impossible to find a lower ranking person than I. It would be hard to find a greater individual than the Hall of Fame quarterback that I desired to meet. There was certainly nothing about my role or status that should have led me to expect kindness and personal attention from Mr. Starr. Of course, he owed my common human dignity, but he did not owe me a conversation or an autograph. He gave me both and I was thrilled with his condescension. To speak to me was to lower himself (functionally) and to elevate (for a moment) me by his attention. I was grateful for his attention for it was not owed, but freely given by a man who turned out not to be just a great football player, but a gentleman.

How much we miss in our culture by failing to understand this distinction! As a dad, I am not better than my children as a person. They have the right to always be treated with the dignity due every human. On the other hand, as their dad, I will always be entitled to a certain respect and honor. Of course, the age of obedience soon passes, but there will always remain the role of aging patriarch which my own Father now fills. May he continue to fill it for many years! When Dad condescends to share his wisdom with me in a kindly way, I am blessed. When he gives me good gifts, I am thankful. He owes me nothing at this point and all that he gives me is a super-abundance of blessing.

I think we fail to enjoy so many blessings, because this confusion makes us view all of these blessings as our right. We demand and so are not able to enjoy what is, after all, merely our due. The man who knows he does not deserve what he is given can rejoice in it, but though a man is glad to get his wages he is not thankful for them. He deserves his pay, receives it, but nobody is thrilled with mere virtue!

The divine condescension of the manger is the best example, of course, of the undeserved gift. We did not deserve what God did for us and yet He did it. We can only enjoy it when the full glory of being able to commune with God hits us. He speaks to us, reveals Himself to us, and allows us to know things about the Unknowable!  Glory! It is greater condescension than if the President were to become a worm to reveal the glories of Western civilization to those that live burrowing in the earth.

Christ is born! Glorify Him!

  

A Letter to My Secular Friend

Here is a continuation of my letters to friends about Narnia inspired by Hugh’s question. The following is a letter to a friend who is a secularist. (I do have such friends!) Yesterday, I wrote to my religious friend.

Dear Edmund,

You just finished Narnia and I admire your being open minded enough to see the film. It is the sort of thing that irritates you a bit; the way a paean to atheism can ruin an otherwise fun night out for me. You end up wanting to argue with the movie and talking back to the screen simply ruins any date!  

Christmas must make the USA seem like a god-centered culture. I know “Merry Christmas” must grate on your nerves the way the “God bless America” closing of a President’s speech does. You have to put up with hymns to our God, disguised as holiday cheer, on your favorite political shows. The easy assumption of all your friends (eighty-five percent of us!) that everyone is religious is also tough. I have been in “tiny minority” situations so I know how it feels. Good cross-cultural manners taught me to accept my minority cultural status, when in Mongolia act like a Mongolian and not the “ugly American,” and that is one thing I have never understood about you.

You are a sensible guy. You know that most Americans are religious, have always been religious, and are likely to stay that way. Yet for some reason the fact that you have chosen to reject majority American culture means that the rest of us must change in order to become what you wish us to be. I don’t expect the Buddhists of Ulan Bataar to wish me a merry Christmas, but you seem offended if the Baptists of Alabama wish you one. That is odd, I think, and may have more to do with your personal pain than the best side of your personality.

Of course, my strong disagreement with your position often strains our friendship. I would argue that best evidence suggests that if society adopts your views it will ruin our culture (or it least make it extinct in short order) and damn our souls. There are plenty of people who are wrong, but Christians believe you to be perniciously wrong. You often return the favor by viewing us as the Taliban or a group of theocrats.

The problem, however, seems to me to be simple. You really do want America to be secular, more like Sweden than it is now, while I don’t want it to be a theocracy. No Christian I now wants the kind of religious rule found in Iran, for example. We are opposed to your actual position, while I feel that sometimes your Internet friends are opposed to a cartoon version of ours. Thank you for not making that mistake about your Christian friends!

Of course, I know you are smart. Your position is not stupid and there are good arguments for it. Heaven knows we can be annoying (or at least I can be annoying!) in our seemingly smug surety that we are right. However, please forgive us for that and realize that we too (at our best) are on a dialectical journey. I believe Christianity is true at some personal cost because I believe best reason and best experience demand it. It is not always what I wish were true, but it is what my intellect and my heart unite in demanding of my better self.

Christianity has problems, of course, like the problem of natural evil that are very difficult. I feel the force of them and sometimes think you might be right. Sadly, that old demon logic keeps forcing me back to traditional Christianity. But enough of that . . . philosophical argument can be endless! I will quote Plantinga and then you will quote Flew . . . at least the earlier Flew! I will get my favorite IVP book and you will lug out your Prometheus titles. We are not going to make much progress that way.

What does this have to do with the Narnia film? I think that the problem with your world-view is that it is fundamentally without beauty. It is not ugly since your world view cannot allow for a real beautiful.  If we struggle with the problem of evil, it is because we rejoice in being able to see goodness that is not subjective or merely an arbitrary label placed on reality by our own prejudices. Christianity can lead to ugliness, but it can explain that ugliness with resources from within. We don’t expect humans to be perfect and can account for forgiveness.

The story of Narnia, which is very much a Christian story, contrasts so strongly with the story of secularism. Ours is the world view of Aquinas, the founding of the Universities, medicine, modern science, the Renaissance, and most of the great art of the West, but we are also the religion of the fairy tale. Now I know you have been taught to be view fairy tales as childish nothings . . . myths by which you mean merely false stories.

But isn’t it obvious from a film like Narnia that some stories strike very deep? Themes of redemption and divine love may be overdone in our Western culture, but they are overdone because they still have the power to make men and women weep. Aslan dies for Edmund. That makes no sense by the calculus of atoms and scales that will not allow for the personal, but makes perfect, logical sense to a cosmos full of personality. Narnia is a grand romance and it is not an accident that secularists are not able to tell good fairy tales, but must rely on those old Oxford dons, Tolkien and Lewis, to do it for them. Your great truths cannot be found in myth for you have reduced romance to nothingness in a university without personality.

It is personality and romance that is missing from your universe. When your best thinkers tell me that my love for my wife is one set of selfish genes looking for another set, then I think that he has never read Trollope or Shakespeare or been in love. This is not soft sentimentality, but a set of facts that must be taken into account. Your worldview explains them away by reducing them to some fog floating off matter and energy in mindless motion. My worldview recognizes that we are more sure of love and passion than we are of the existence of that matter and energy themselves. Christians do not explain love away . . . they account for it in the Divine Mind.

Can secularism produce beauty or must it always be parasitic on it? If it is true that religion has produced horrors like the Inquisition, but we have also produced the Renaissance and the great cathedrals of Europe. Can a world-view that believes at bottom that life is meaningless (finding meaning only in the creation of meaning by the individual) inspire the sacrifice necessary for great art? There is no evidence that it can.

Narnia stands for the small against the strong. It stands for the importance of even the animals against the barren and bleak efficiency of an all powerful state. Christianity cannot tolerate the abuse of the individual by either big government or big business and as Narnia demonstrates provides a basis for the nobility of the common. Every sentient being is created in the Image of God and has value. Every voice must be heard and in that universe a hierarchy of gifts can be recognized without fear for basic human rights are secured by who were are and not what we can do.  

The mindless consumption of the unfettered pursuit of wealth, living for self, and not for others can never be made consistent with the religious mind. The jollification of Christmas can be commercialized but only destroyed in doing so. A feast day is about human values and can be enjoyed as well by the poor as by the great and mighty. Religion can account for this, but secularism cannot. Where is the value of the small man in the world where personhood is reduced to DNA? If merit can be measure and worth is based on merit, I fear that is mere sentiment on your part (or a residual Christianity) that prevents debasing the average in favor of the great god of the famous and the powerful. Heaven knows that this is a great enough temptation for Christians, even with our example of the humble Virgin and the crucified Lord, what will happen when our role models come not from the martyrs, but only from the “successful?”

I love free markets, but do not worship them and where they break the dignity of the human person and the laws of God, and then I can limit them. Where shall you find your limits to the desires of the brightest and the best in the meritocracy that you would create?

Can secularism even produce children let alone children’s literature? Children are difficult and they get in the way. They seem a bother and secularists, who proclaim that they are only a Darwinian vehicle for making babies, seem very chary about actually having them. I understand that feeling and Lewis himself, steeped in the comfortable atheism of his intellectual class, missed any chance to have his own children. Surely it is no accident; however, that he began to write stories for children, got married, and became something of a step-father in his later years as he became more thoroughly a Christian? He had a basis in an immortal soul and in eternity to think that present selfishness would be judged as bleak and worthy. Exactly what does a secularist need children for and if secularism itself causes its proponents to stop making babies then how is its embrace of Darwinian fitness coherent?

The world of Narnia on the other hand knows nothing of Darwin or of men and women too selfish to “sacrifice” their present happiness for eternity. This is a world where Peter must fight, because it is his duty to fight. It is a world where children are not just called to stern duties, but an entire world rallies to save them from the secular modern who would stamp out all children to preserve her reign for all eternity. It is the essence of Christianity that the old human order changes and gives way to the new. This is not merely sad, but part of the very fabric of the world, and the sorrow is mitigated by our future hopes. Secularism has no such future hopes and so must try to botox what it has to preserve it in the face of change.

And oddly enough this allows Christians to face the world that way it is, full of death and suffering caused by our evils, and still find joy.

The Narnia film calls for jollification! It opposes a world where it is always bleak winter and never Christmas. Pardon me, but that looks a great deal like your world, old friend. The great philosopher W.V. Quine once said that he preferred ontological deserts . . . he wanted a universe with as few things in it as possible. Pardon me, but some of us, for good reason it seems to me, prefer the fecundity of the Narnian spring to the barren “purity” of the Narnian winter.

All things being equal, and surely you must concede that there good arguments on our side as there are on yours  . . . why shouldn’t we prefer to believe in a world where real goodness, real truth, and real beauty are possible?

“God rest you merry, gentleman.” That is the first line of an old carol. It bids busy men, worldly men like the two of us, to retreat from despair. Why? Christ our Savior was born on Christmas day! The fact that it is an old story and a beautiful one does not make it any less true. The fact that it has profound philosophical defenses does not make it any less beautiful. It is the old story that is at once rational and moving. It unites head and heart by worshipping a divine Logic made flesh.

The Narnia film shows that all the old religions had a fore taste of that great truth. Christianity need not be dour or Puritanical. It has been, and still can be, the basis for science . . . which we both know was the product of the Christian West. It has been, and still can be, the basis for a Bach, Mozart, and Michelangelo. Bluntly, it seems to me that you worldview cannot have both. Where are your fairy stories? Where is your beauty? Where is an adequate basis for the life of self-sacrifice, almost monastic self-sacrifice, which high science demands? As religion fades in this land or in Western Europe, I see more sterility in the culture and more death. I see more despair and bluntly more drugs and less jollification.

At least consider that this children’s story might point to a better way!

Merry Christmas my friend,

John Mark    

A Letter to a Religious Friend

Dear Peter,

You told me that you were going to see the Narnia film and asked my thoughts about it.

Of course, I am not a professional film reviewer. I loved the movie, but then the books made such an impact on me as a child that it is safe to say that just the sight of Lucy meeting Tumnus (the faun in the woods) was going to put a smile on my face for the rest of the Holidays. You have not read the books so you are wondering who Tumnus is and if I have lost my mind. How does someone with a doctorate in philosophy from an analytic department end up raving about a modern fairy tale?

Oddly enough to the modern mind what the world needs now is a good fairy tale. Now sadly most people have been taught that “fairy tale” or the better word “myth” just means false stories people make up to explain things when they don’t have science. We both know (thank goodness) that this wrong. A myth, the way Plato or Lewis would use it, is a big story used to make sense out reality. It explains the facts as best it can. It is likely, but can never be known (for sure) to be true. In this sense, all of “big science” is a myth.

Of course, some myths are better than others. When not infected with secularist assumptions modern science is one of the best myths ever developed. It explains a great many facts and does so in a way that uncovers many other important things. However, modern the modern scientific myth has limited itself from exploring the personal and final causes in the cosmos. This is not the place to ask whether that is a good idea. That is the way it is at the moment, but this means science (despite the pretensions of some scientists) cannot explain a big chunk of reality. Amazingly it cannot explain the very bit of reality that must persons (since they are persons) find most interesting.

Personal causes exist. Narnia was written by a person and is not the product of chance. The work of C.S. Lewis or Shakespeare or Isaac Asimov for that matter cannot be reduced (so far as anyone knows) to the impersonal. No little atoms colliding with each other could produce the character of Aslan, Hamlet, or Mule. Narnia, like much of the best literature from Trollope to Tolstoy is partly an attempt to tell a story that explains (without explaining away) these personal facts. Why do people act as they do? What is meaning of sacrifice and of duty? What is honor? These are not questions the modern scientific story even attempts to answer. Narnia provides provisional answers to a few of these questions that is satisfying to both children and to adults.

Of course, this sort of myth-making, or fairy tale, has its limits. Lewis is not trying to explain how the cosmos goes, but he is telling a counter-factual story (an alternative cosmos) to illuminate who the personal agents in the cosmos go! Narnia is not anti-science (fairy tales versus science) as some silly reviewers might say, but an attempt (and only a rudimentary and partial one) to complete our modern view of reality. Dante could write both best science (of his day) and best poetry (dealing with the personal) at the same time. We have limited ourselves to doing one at a time (to our loss I think), but Lewis is trying to fill the gaps of our scientific education.

At the same time, you will notice how wholesome this is for education. Lewis is not placing fairy tales against reason or science. He is for science and for logic. He just not simple enough to believe that poetry is merely feelings-based while what we call science is merely factual. Both poetry and the most technical of scientific papers are parts of a whole description of the truth of the world. Our fairy tales must account for our science just as our science should account for the truths found in our fairy tales. Scientists who complain about ethical limits to their investigations have not learned the first lesson of what it is to be human . . . and so they repeat the mistake of the wizard in Aladdin and assume that knowledge or power is its own justification. At the same time, the typical Hollywood fairy tale (so unlike Narnia) wants us to follow only our hearts against our best reason. The importance of Narnia is that it will urge you to account for both your head and your heart!

Never confuse reason with bad news.  That is a prejudice of our times. Sometimes my friends who are secularists will have certain doomed nobility about them. They think it brave that they have decided that goodness, truth, and beauty do not exist and I suppose if that is what best reason taught us then they would be right. But surely it has not come to that! There are many good reasons to believe in a real and personal good. Analytic philosophy has been undergoing a revival of the most traditional sorts of theism which, by the way, never died in any case. Just because the news is good: there is a God and He loves us, does not mean we have to reject it. In fact, all things being equal good news should be believed over bad news if one is healthy.

Narnia, even the film which is simpler than the book, is a wholesome vision of reality in an alternative world. One thing to keep in mind, despite what you read in the press: Narnia is not a Christian allegory. Aslan is not Jesus. His death on the stone table is like the death of Jesus Christ, but also different.

Your experience with science fiction should help understand the difference. Narnia is a thought experiment, a bit of what-ifery. We both like the sort of book that asks, “What if Lenin had not taken the German train to Russian?” or “What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo?” Such experiments in the counter-factual often illuminate important events or ideas in history.

If all of that made sense, then you can see that a modern worry is removed by Narnia. Some foolish Christians, aided and abetted by anti-religious types, have acted as if the truth of Christianity meant that our world’s story must be the only story to be told. Now I do not know if there is life in the rest of the Universe. As a neo-Platonist, I think there might be. On top of that, I have no reason to think that this reality is the only one. For some reason, whenever people here that there might be another world they imagine a secular one or one that cannot account for the Divine events (the birth of Jesus Christ) that happened on this planet, but this is just a failure of imagination or better a conditioning of the imagination by hundreds of films and science fiction stories written by folk hostile to Christianity.

Since we have no idea what life is like on any other world or reality there are many possibilities. However, the only world with life on it of which we are aware (our own) is the most reasonable guide to what we will find. If the evidence points to the truth of Christianity here, then that evidence would not change on Mars or Vulcan or any other reality. The Christian God is not some local tribal deity. He rules as Creator over all things . . . which would include any other planet of reality. If this is so, and philosophical arguments for His existence do not depend in any way on the parochial notion that this is the only reality, then it is most sensible to think of those worlds in Christian terms and not secular ones.

In short, we are likely to find other worlds (if we are allowed to find them) either in a sinless state (in which case I hope we don’t go there as their own Satan introducing our evil) or going through their own process of redemption. Since God is rational and the Incarnation has happened, I would assume that process of redemption would be like ours but also take into account the facts that occurred at the first Christmas. Why not?

You should view Narnia as a baptism for your imagination. When I mention the idea that “other worlds” (if found) may confirm not deny the truth of the Gospel, most people are shocked, but they have no good reason for such unbelief. The arguments for the divinity of Christ do not depend on His having no other flock on other worlds. If they are good arguments, then they are not bound by space or time! The fact that the world of Narnia, where our myths are real, seems shocking to you is an indication of the effectiveness of secular propaganda. They pretend to know something (what other worlds will be like) that they do not know or they imagine (as we do not) that what we have learned on this world will have no bearing on the worlds we shall find.

Both of us understand that atheism or secularism is too simplistic to account for the world. Such folk are good hearted, but they try to explain too much with too little. Simple answers are better only if they explain all the facts otherwise they become simplistic. Goodness, truth, and beauty are at least as real as atoms, cars, and trees. I am much more sure that a “self” exists than that “things” exist. Maybe ideas can be reduced to matter, but it seems more likely that “matter” can be reduced to ideas. Better still is the Christian answer (the answer of Narnia) that both exist!

Narnia reminds us that reason and faith are related and not in opposition. You are never asked to believe anything despite your experience, but you are asked (as the children are reminded by the Professor) not to dismiss your experience or some other person’s just because it does not fit your simple secularist picture of reality!

You have often asked me how I can believe that Christianity is the “answer” when there are some many other world religions. What about Zeus or other gods?

Narnia is a very clever man’s partial answer to that question. Lewis believed, and I think he was right, that all the world’s religions (the great ones) have seized on truths. These truths, to the extent that they are truths, must be part of a sane world view. When Lewis has Bacchus, the pagan god of wine, appear in Narnia it is not because he is partly a pagan. It is because he saw the appeal in Bacchus. He knew the jolly times one can have with good wine and merry company, but also the corruption that came of worship of Bacchus. The strength of the Christian myth and Narnia shows this, is that it can account for Bacchus and get the good of him without turning him into God. Bacchus is too small for God and his pleasures too little.  

Of course this is not the silly idea that all religions are equally true. Lewis rightly saw and argued that Christianity was the fullest account of the truths of religion. This was not arrogance, but the product of careful examination. One need not dismiss all other religious as utterly false to say that Christianity is the largest truth nor can one merely assume that only the bigot thinks he is right. I believe that other religions contain dangerous falsehoods, but I feel no desire to persecute them (how contrary to the Law of Love!) or deny the great truths within them. On the other hand, I have never found any great truth in another religion that is not more fully (and nobly) expressed in the traditional Christian faith. Either that is right or wrong, but let’s not be silly enough to simply yelp about intolerance before examining carefully whether or not this is correct.

We live in a world in dire need of a good solid Narnian word: jollification. The Narnia film is cheerful, but realistic. There are real dangers in the woods . . . in a past 9/11 world we know there are real wolves in the woods. Some of our friends will sell us out to the wolves for a bit of personal peace. However, one need not despair or become intolerant. One can simply do one’s duty while enjoying a bit of Christmas. It is the totalitarians (on the right and left) who are always serious. We know how limited is our power and how little our dreams of utopia would match reality in this age! As a result, we can stop in the midst of even the most serious war and have some toast (with jam!) and wait for our gifts from Father Christmas. Our opponents on the secular lefts can never tell jokes . . . they can only deal in sarcasm and irony. They never feast for they fear too greatly dying to enjoy feast foods. Real Christianity is jolly without being unserious.  

I hope this Christmas brings some jollification your way.

Under the Mercy,

John Mark