Dr Paul Allen

It’s hardly theological novelty or historical oddity to suggest we should be wary of presenting the immaterial God in physical form. This was the point of my recent article on The Shack movie in which I expressed my concern that its portrayal of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit is a violation of the second commandment. I was surprised by the scope and tone of the response. Yet amid many retorts and accusations, I received one thoughtful question from at least a hundred people: What about Narnia ? If it is wrong to portray God the Father as the human Papa, isn’t it equally wrong to portray God the Son as the lion Aslan ? This is a very good question and I am glad to answer it. In what follows I want to tell why Papa of The Shack is not Aslan of Narnia. I will argue they are not the same in three key ways: they are from different genres of literature, portray different characters, and teach different messages. Different Genres The first key difference between The Shack and...

Image via Wikipedia Many Christian readers, upon discovering additional layers of meaning in the Narnian stories, immediately jump to the conclusion that the Chronicles are allegories.  These same readers would be surprised to learn that C. S. Lewis denied multiple times that the stories are allegories. The Narnian Stories Are Not Allegories But it is not, as some people think, an  allegory  (“Letter to Sophia Storr,” in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis ,  vol 3, 1113). You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books ‘represents’ something in this world. Things do that in  The Pilgrim’s Progress  but I’m not writing in that way ( Walter Hooper ,  Literary Criticism , 426). Lewis defined allegory as “a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in which immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects, e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupy...