Evangelical (and Reformed) Christians often lack a method and a language for addressing the challenges of our current age.

We have the will and the passion to defend our faith, the biblical knowledge and charity to support our arguments, but something is missing in our language/vocabulary. We seem powerless to convict, engage, and transform the secular world.

Precise Thinking

Imagination

Lewis spent the first half of his life as an atheist and a materialist for whom the Gospels shared the same mythic (nonhistorical) status as Greek and Norse mythology but lacked their aesthetic beauty and imaginative power. He distrusted thinking that was either emotionally charged or logically imprecise, and tended to isolate himself in a pristine world of books.

This twin propensity for intellectual precision and emotional self-protection grew during the early years of World War I, when the shy, unathletic Lewis got the chance to study under a private tutor. William Kirkpatrick was an obsessively rational thinker who beat into Lewis head the need for clear, rational thinking free from all subjective speculation and emotion.

Most students would have crumbled under such relentless logic; to Lewis it was "red beef and strong beer." Lewis committed himself to absolute clarity of thought and to assessing the assumptions on which our ideas are based.

Had Lewis brought to Christian apologetics only his skills as a logician, his works would not have been as effective. The mature Lewis tempered his logic with a love for beauty, wonder, and magic. His conversion to Christ not only freed his mind from the bonds of a narrow stoicism; it freed his heart to embrace fully his earlier passion for mythology. During his overly rational years, Lewis felt the need to submerge his youthful love for fairy stories; his newfound faith in a God-Man who died and rose again reopened for him the enchanted world of his childhood. Nearly all of Lewis's insights into the Christian faith can be traced back to a comment made by one of the church fathers or one of the medieval scholastics, but then these commentaries are seldom read, except by specialists, while Lewis's works continue to sell, challenge, and convict in the millions.

Christian thought is deductive, for it begins with a priori assumptions that must be accepted as givens before logical thought can begin. In contrast, modernism claims that its conclusions are based solely on empirical observation, that its conclusions are "objective," unrestrained by any presuppositions.

Lewis exposes modernist induction for what it most often is: a disguised form of deduction. When a liberal theologian argues that the Synoptic Gospels must have reached their final form after A.D. 70 he is obscuring an assumption that acts as a motivating and controlling factor in his research.

Despite the exalted claims of modernist induction, Lewis writes in the first chapter of Miracles, when it comes to the supernatural, "seeing is not believing. … What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. … The result of our historical enquiries thus depends on the philosophical views [i.e., the a priori assumptions] which we have been holding before we even begin to look at the evidence."

The Narnia novels are not allegories; the characters and incidents do not function simply as pictures whose sole purpose is to illustrate Christian virtues or vices (as they do in Pilgrim's Progress). Rather, they possess their own separate life and integrity. Yes, Aslan is a symbol of Christ, but he is also a very real lion who has his own history.

Though the Chronicles do function as testaments to Christian truths, Lewis did not set out to write a book that would do so. He began with images that he wanted to embody, then found a genre that would enable him do so, then considered how those images and that genre could be used as a vehicle for "smuggling" Christian principles into a post-Christian age.

The Chronicles incorporate stories and figures from a number of different traditions (both Christian and pagan); rather than attempt to synthesize these traditions in a systematic way, Lewis forges a deeper link that plays on the almost unconscious reactions we have to mythic archetypes. The result is to render the spirit of Christ an integral part not only of our theological and philosophical beliefs but of our individual and cultural dreams.

Aslan is a type of Christ not only because he does and says many of the things that Christ said and did but because he inspires in us the same kind of numinous awe that Christ does. When we read of how Aslan was sacrificed on the Stone Table, we receive more than a theological primer of the Crucifixion; we actually experience, viscerally, the pain and sorrow of Calvary. In his apologetics, Lewis uses words to defend Christian doctrines; in his fiction the Word becomes flesh. In Aslan, Christ is made tangible, knowable, real.

Lewis’s understanding of the nature and function of myth influenced many of his writings and even his conversion to Christianity. His acceptance of the Christian “myth” is described in A Biography (Green & Hooper):

“What had been holding me back [from a conversion to Christianity] has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense has the life and death of Christ ‘saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world . . .

“Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me . . . was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.” Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the other are men’s myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things.” Therefore, it is true, not in the sense of being a description of God (that no finite mind would take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.”

“Human intellect is incurable abstract . . . Yet the only realities we experience are concrete—this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma—either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste—or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, living, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, not analyze the nature of humor while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? ‘If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain.’ But once it stops, what do I know about pain?

“Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. At this moment, for example, I am trying to understand something very abstract indeed—the fading, vanishing of tasted reality as we try to grasp it with the discursive reason. Probably I have made heavy weather of it. But if I remind you, instead, of Orpheus and Eurydice, how he was suffered to lead her by the hand but, when he turned round to look at her, she disappeared, what was merely a principle becomes imaginable. You may reply that you never till this moment attached that ‘meaning’ to that myth. Of course not. You are not looking for an abstract ‘meaning’ at all. If that was what you were doing the myth would be for you not true myth but a mere allegory. You were not knowing, but tasting; but what your tasting turns out to be a universal principle. The moment we state this principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstraction. It is only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience the principle concretely.

“When we translate we get abstraction—or rather, dozens of abstractions. What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis (‘In this valley of separation’). Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.”

Myth Became Fact

[t]he heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. … God is more than god, not less: Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about "parallels" and "pagan Christs": they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic?

Myth Became Fact

“It must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself.”

Selected Literary Essays, Bluspels and Flalanspheres: A Semantic Nightmare