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"On Preaching" by Scott Hoezee
Reflections on Preaching from the Center for Excellence in Preaching.
Media Maelstrom (Posted on November 11, 2005)
Those of us who preach have recently found ourselves in the crosshairs of a full-blown media P.R. blitz in advance of the December 9 release of the new Narnia film based on C.S. Lewis’ classic book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I myself attended one of several local events aimed at pastors and church leaders at which the folks at Walden Media loaded us up with an entire box worth of posters, door hangers, brochures, and other Narnia-related folderol as they attempted to tell us that the release of this new movie represented a huge evangelistic opportunity that we as church leaders simply could not miss.
The people who ran these events were sincere and clearly believe that we in the church can do some kingdom good by taking advantage of what promises to be a “movie with a message.” Of course, the folks who have sunk $150 million into this movie won’t mind it a bit if churches rent out whole theaters to see the film. After years of failure in trying to get a big-screen version of the Narnia books made, there can be little doubt that two factors converged to finally get the folks at Disney to agree to distribute this movie. One is the grand success of The Lord of the Rings films by director Peter Jackson—films that revealed that you can now make a movie filled with fantastic creatures and that audiences are hungry for yarns that contain myth and mystery. But the second reason behind Narnia’s finally getting to the big screen was the meteoric success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which likewise revealed that even films with overtly Christian themes can succeed nicely at the box office.
So the media full-court-press that we pastors have recently experienced is motivated in part by a sincere desire to reach out to people with the gospel but also in part because Hollywood is always after the bottom line. Still, most of us like good movies, and so if the new Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe film is good, then we will be happy to pay for our tickets, take our kids, maybe even invite our friends and neighbors.
But what about this business that this is an evangelistic opportunity? Recently here at Calvin Theological Seminary, a local pastor and I hosted two luncheons at which we gathered a dozen pastors each time to talk about just this. In advance of those lunch meetings, I consulted with Lewis scholars Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College and Peter Schakel of Hope College, each of whom recently wrote a book about C.S. Lewis and specifically about his Narnia stories. I also received a paper from John Bowen of Wycliff College in Toronto, a version of which he will deliver in a public lecture here at Calvin Theological Seminary on Thursday, December 15.
I asked each of these scholars what he would tell his own pastor if he heard his pastor say that he planned to weave this new movie (and the larger Narnia story) into some sermons even as the church itself was planning to use The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as an evangelistic tool by which to reach out to unbelievers. Let me summarize what these scholars had to say. Most of what follows clearly falls under the heading of cautions.
- Not an Allegory: Unlike The Lord of the Rings, which had broad resonance with Christian themes, many parts of Lewis’ Narnia stories have much tighter connections to specific Christian doctrines and even gospel events. Hence, it’s easy to view something like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a straightforward allegory, as a re-telling of the gospel in which only the names of the characters have been changed. But it is vital to note that Lewis himself did not view the Narnia stories as allegorical tales but rather as suppositional stories. That is to say, SUPPOSE that the Son of God had been made incarnate in a different world—a world with different problems and contours than ours but still a world in need of some kind of salvation. What might the Christ look like in that world? This idea of suppositional versus allegorical may seem subtle and yet it is important. We don’t want Aslan on the cross nor Jesus on the witch’s stone table. To do so—to assume that Narnia is simply a re-telling of the gospel in different guise—threatens to do harm to both stories. It also can lead to some wrong ideas about Jesus. There are analogies between what Aslan does and what Jesus does, but analogies are the starting point for discussion not a 1:1 correspondence between two different worlds.
- Narnia as Evangelism? C.S. Lewis had his own very definite ideas about evangelism, though we cannot get into that here. However, there are serious questions to ponder in terms of thinking we can bring nonbelievers to this movie in order to give them entrée into the gospel. Scholars Jacobs and Schakel believe that Lewis himself saw the Narnia tales more as analogies of sanctification for those who are already Christians, not as the portal through which a non-Christian might be converted. Beyond that point, however, is a more significant one: Lewis saw the Narnia tales as a way to “baptize the imagination.” As John Bowen has written, in that sense the Narnia tales could be seen as a kind of pre-evangelism experience for people. That is, by having their minds/imaginations opened up to new possibilities involving myth, mystery, the power of sacrifice, etc. they may become more open to similar ideas when they encounter them in other stories (principally the gospel story, of course). But if we tell our neighbors that they can be converted via this movie, they may stay away in droves. As Jacobs put it, doing so will turn this movie into the equivalent of broccoli for children: the more you tell the kid it’s good for him and so he MUST eat it, the more he doesn’t want to touch the stuff!
- There can be no doubting that Lewis smuggled theology into his Narnia stories but he did so in the guise of another world precisely to keep people’s prejudices against theology/Scripture from going up. If we do an end-run on Lewis in ways that make people put up those very defenses all over again, we may find that what evangelistic use the Narnia stories may ultimately have will have been ruined from the start.
As Frederick Buechner memorably wrote in his book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, there can be no doubting the fairy tale-like features to also the gospel story. We need to uncover those wonderful elements and weave them into our preaching because, as Tolkien also wrote, in all fairy stories—including that one such story that is also the truest story that ever was, the gospel itself—in all such stories there is that moment when one encounters the “turn” when the frog is revealed as a prince, when the ugly duckling becomes a gorgeous swan, when the baby in the manger is revealed as the King of kings. And when that turns happens, joy happens. If the recent success of The Lord of the Rings and now the Chronicles of Narnia films helps us to recover all that is spine-tinglingly mysterious and joyous about the gospel, then that is a profoundly good thing and a fitting use of the new movie. Baptized imaginations—and also RE-baptized imaginations—may indeed be a fertile field in which gospel crops may grow. That should be our prayer for all to whom we preach, both those for whom it is an old, old story and those for whom it may be a new story in which they find Life!