Religious writers and audiences

Russ Allbery · 06 Jun 2010, 02:32 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: rra at stanford.edu (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2010 19:32:29 -0700
Subject: (urth) Religious writers and audiences
In-Reply-To: <4C0AFBCB.1050908 at gmail.com> (James Wynn's message of "Sat, 05
	Jun 2010 20:37:15 -0500")
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James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> writes:

> As for Narnia, if people didn't continuously and erroneously INTRODUCE
> people to the books as "Christian allegory", not that many people would
> catch on to the Christian themes mixed in there -- not until the final
> volume if at all.

I agree for most of the series, but the explicit Christian parallels in
_The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ are pretty blatantly obvious if
you know the corresponding bits of Christianity.  The stone table scene in
particular is, I think, difficult to read as anything other than an
explicit parallel to the death and resurrection of Christ.

The degree of explicit parallelism drops off a *lot* in the other books,
with (as you note) the possible exception of _The Last Battle_.

> Lewis noted that most did not and those that did were usually
> children. I have had very astute readers tell me that they didn't note
> any Christian themes in "Til We Have Faces" until *I* began discussing
> them.

_Til We Have Faces_ is more in line with books like _The Voyage of the
Dawn Treader_, where the Christianity is there if you want to look for it
but it's fairly easy to not see it if you're not looking for it.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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