Dec 12 2005
Polly Toynbee Doesn’t Get Narnia
‘Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion’
Polly Toynbee at the UK Guardian despises Narnia. It’s not so much C.S. Lewis’ story that causes her to cringe as it is the obvious Christian theme which underlies the story.
After berating Lewis, Disney, Walden Media, Jeb Bush and practically anyone who has ever heard of Narnia or this film, Toynbee gets down to brass tacks:
The lion exchanging his life for Edmund’s is the sort of thing Arthurian legends are made of. Parfait knights and heroes in prisoner-of-war camps do it all the time. But what’s this? After a long, dark night of the soul and women’s weeping, the lion is suddenly alive again. Why? How?, my children used to ask. Well, it is hard to say why. It does not make any more sense in CS Lewis’s tale than in the gospels. Ah, Aslan explains, it is the “deep magic”, where pure sacrifice alone vanquishes death.Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart.
Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass. Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan.
I was struck by the totally barren emptiness of her words, but then I realized that I had the heart and soul of Polly Toynbee once, desparately lost and shaking my fist at God. She doesn’t get it and I didn’t either until the scales were taken from my eyes by the Holy Spirit. As Paul said to the Corinthian church, “[The] word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor 1:18, NIV)
As she says, “Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can.” And what a pitiful job we do of it. Toynbee understands the sin problem (I think), but completely denies the need for - or the glory of - a Redeemer to wash us free of the problem of sin.
Pray for Polly Toynbee and for all those in desparate need of the real Aslan.
