Into the Wardrobe

This has come up before somewhere.... Here are some previous threads on the subject.










Unfortunately this is the one point where Lewis and I disagree. I believe the Bible when it says, "If you will believe on the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ, you will be saved." The name is what is important; knowing the Person whom you believe and have faith in.

Good deeds won't save anyone or get us to heaven. Scripture says that,"Our righteousness is as filthy rags." God does not acknowledge good deeds or clean living as a payment for sin; "The wages of sin is death." Only our own death (in hell) or the death of Christ on the cross can pay our sin debt.

Granted, the idea that a nice Calormen boy was really saved by doing good things all his life is an attractive sweet idea; but unfortunately it isn't true.

This is a subject which comes up quite often, as Christians (in particular) try to decide what Lewis was really saying in the Emeth incident. This young Calormene (not Telmarine) has not merely grown up without knowing Aslan, but has given his good service and worship to a being which turns out to be an evil demon. Aslan gives this young man a place in Aslan's Country on the basis that he has served the One he thought to be good, using good deeds and a pure heart etc, which Aslan takes for himself.

This is NOT Lewis telling the gospel with an easy wide-gate option for anyone who lived a good life. The Chronicles of Narnia are not the gospel or the Bible. They are a set of stories for children, to prepare their hearts and imaginations for knowing the One whose name we call on for our salvation and our eternal life.

Anyone using them as parallel or allegories will find plenty of places where they do not measure up exactly to the truth of the Bible.

So what WAS Lewis saying? I have always said that he is mentioning the fact of God's sovereignty, the fact that there will be things that happen for eternity that we did not expect, and that God gets to make decisions that we might not - because He is God and he can. There will be surprises galore in heaven, when we discover who is there and who is missing.

But a crucial point about the stories needs to be made: although there is a suggestion that going into the stable was the point of death, this is NOT clear nor consistent. Emeth was definitely alive enough to kill a soldier standing guard inside the door, and to throw his body out the door. The guard had also not died by going inside. Lewis is quite vague and ambiguous about who dies when, and I think this is to allow himself to show several aspects about passage from life to afterlife.

We know that Emeth himself killed another soldier who was standing inside the door, so he was alive until then - and so was the soldier who'd been inside! Lewis has Emeth describe the encounter with Aslan, but never showed properly whether this was in life or death or in some vague "place between". This allows for the option that Emeth's conversation with Aslan was just before he died - like a deathbed conversion.

There are similar ambiguities about when Jill and Eustace die, evidently not in the English train crash but in Narnia. Lewis avoids details like where their bodies were - because after all it's a book for children. And avoiding details creates ambiguities, which means it is unwise to look for exact gospel truth in the Narnia books - no matter how much we love and re-read them!