The “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” has gone wide without a cultural apocalypse. Narnia, it turns out, is pretty ambiguous theologically, and the next few books in Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” series are vaguer still. Two sequels hence, in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” Eustace’s transformation into and from a dragon rates mention in sermons, while in “The Silver Chair” we spend a lot of time in a hellish (or purgatorial?) netherworld. But in the final book of the series, “The Last Battle,” the politics of the apocalypse get downright hairy. Lewis’s End Times scenario plays out as a nasty face-off between Aslan, the good lion who rules over Narnia, and Tash, the god of the Calormenes, who are a desert people “smelling of garlic and onions, their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their brown faces.” As this site explains, Lewis argues for justification by works in the end, but let’s hope that we’re not still trying to patch things up with our Middle Eastern bretheren by the time the movie comes out sometime next decade.
Beliefnet
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