3. The Practical Application of Narrative Apologetics
3.
The Practical Application of Narrative Apologetics
Stories offer apologetic possibilities that are impossible with more abstract forms of apologetics, such as arguments for the existence of God. Perhaps most importantly, they engage audiences—such as children—who find rational dissection pointless and uninteresting yet are intrigued by stories. As C. S. Lewis once remarked, a well-told story opens the imagination to new ways of seeing things, allowing the Christian story to be displayed in its “real potency,” so that it can steal past the “watchful dragons” of a hardened rationalism.
Earlier in this work (see “Why Apologetics Matters” in chap. 1), I suggested that there were three primary tasks for Christian apologetics. In the first place, it must engage cultural objections to religious belief. In the second, it has to show the ways in which Christianity can connect with people’s lives and concerns. And in the third, it must try to present Christian beliefs in a way that contemporary culture can appreciate and understand. So how can the telling of stories help with these three apologetic tasks?
While later sections of this work will provide more-detailed engagement with these questions, it is important to deal with this general concern immediately. How, many will wonder, can a story answer a question or meet an objection? These are fair questions. While I will draw on many writers in exploring these issues, I shall pay particular attention to C. S. Lewis, who offers both a theoretical explanation of the apologetic potential of stories and suggestions for their practical application. Just as Iris Murdoch supplemented her more analytical works of philosophy with an exploration of its actual outworking in life through her novels, so Lewis enacts his ideas in narratives.
In a perceptive and sympathetic account of Lewis’s use of stories, Gilbert Meilaender focuses on what he believes to be Lewis’s most important achievement: showing how stories help us step inside another way of seeing our world. Meilaender suggests that this is seen at its best in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (1952), as Lewis relates how Lucy Pevensie discovered a book that seemed to bring her close to, if not directly into contact with, something of ultimate significance that lay beyond time.
[Lewis] tells stories which expand the imagination and give one a world within which to live for a time. Like Lucy, the reader can almost forget he is reading a story at all and can be living in the story as if it were real. Lewis offers not abstract propositions for belief but the quality, the feel, of living in the world narrated by the biblical story.
As Rowan Williams has pointed out, the stories of Narnia do not aim to teach us about Christian doctrine and practice but rather seek to help us experience them alongside the characters who are caught up in this imagined yet seemingly real world. Lewis’s approach thus represents a decisive move away from what the philosopher Paul Moser perceptively calls “spectator evidence” for God; rather than passively observing our own world, Lewis invites us to enter another world and, in so doing, come to see our own world in a new way.
Lewis’s apologetic strategy is to invite his readers to step into the Christian way of seeing things, imagine how things look and feel from this perspective, and assess the quality of the Christian narrative. Does this story seem to ring true to life and experience? Does it weave things together in a more coherent and satisfying way? Would those hearing this story like to enter and inhabit such a world?
Lewis offers a theoretical account of the imaginative power and conceptual richness of narratives in several of his essays, most notably “Myth Became Fact” (1944), “Is Theology Poetry?” (1945), and “On Stories” (1947). The basic principles set out in these essays are, of course, put into practice in The Chronicles of Narnia. The theme of incarnation plays a crucial, yet often understated, role in these novels, as it does in Lewis’s own theological vision. For Lewis, the Christian narrative affirms that another and more real world has entered into our history in the form of one specific human being, so that the universal has become embodied and particularized, located in our world of time and space. For this reason, we need not transcend our finitude in order to find that more real world; rather, it has come to us.
Through his deft use of narrative in The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis helps us to see things in a new way, to enter a new world of experience and reflection in which things turn out to be not quite what we thought they were. What seemed like an insurmountable difficulty when seen from one perspective turns out to be a tolerable anomaly when seen from another. The narrative enables us to see perspectives that were otherwise invisible or inaccessible to us.
With these points in mind, we shall explore how Lewis’s Narnian narrative illuminates the three apologetic tasks we considered earlier. First, we consider how Lewis’s approach helps us to engage what many consider to be a significant objection to faith.
Meeting Objections: God as a Projection
Perhaps one of the most commonly encountered objections to belief in God can be traced back to German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued that the idea of God is merely a “projection” of the human imagination. Religion in general, according to Feuerbach, is simply about human feelings and aspirations being projected onto an illusory transcendent plane. Human beings mistakenly objectify their own feelings, interpreting their experience of themselves in terms of an awareness of God.
Yet this objection to theistic belief has now become detached from its original basis in Feuerbach’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy and become attached instead to the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s Future of an Illusion (1927) develops a strongly reductionist approach to religion, arguing that religious ideas are “illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind.” Belief in God is a mere wish fulfillment, an expression and outcome of human longings, representing an illusion that shields us from the harsh and unbearable realities of an incoherent world. Freud reshapes Feuerbach’s argument, locating the motivation for inventing a transcendent God in a human inability to cope with life without some transcendent basis.
So how might we respond to these objections? One answer, of course, is to challenge the intellectual basis of this argument. Feuerbach, for example, makes the generic point that human beings have a tendency to construct worlds that they find intellectually congenial. If God is seen as a consolation, this indicates that such a belief might be adopted as a protection against a sense of meaninglessness or pointlessness.
Yet this argument works equally well against atheism, which is a worldview that offers human beings autonomy. Those searching for absolute freedom might wish to liberate themselves from transcendental interference. Atheism might therefore be seen as a post hoc intellectual ratification of an emotional desire. A good example of this is philosopher Thomas Nagel’s atheism, which is ultimately an intellectualization of a more fundamental longing on his part for a godless world. “It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief,” Nagel states. “It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” The wish gives rise to the belief; Nagel’s atheism seems to be a post hoc rationalization of his desire for a godless universe.
Or we might use a narrative approach, pointing out that if Freud’s account of the psychogenesis of religious belief is correct, then his own atheism has to be seen as the outcome of his own personal history, especially his troubled relationship with his father. If, as Freud suggests, people come to associate God with their fathers, their religious beliefs will inevitably become entangled with their personal perception of their relationship with their father. “Psycho-analysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the father-complex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal God is psychologically nothing other than an exalted father, and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their religious beliefs as soon as their father’s authority breaks down.” Psychologist Paul Vitz thus uses a narrative approach to deconstruct Freud’s atheism, showing that it was a position arrived at initially not by intellectual argument, but rather was an outcome of Freud’s personal circumstances and contingencies.
Lewis, however, uses a purely narrative approach to engage the general question of whether our beliefs about God are simply extrapolations from our experience of this world, including our own feelings and emotions. Lewis uses a narrative framework to allow an argument to be seen in a new light, allowing its significance to be reassessed. This approach is seen at its best in The Silver Chair (1953), one of the later novels in The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis makes use of an imaginative gambit originally deployed by Plato—a dark underworld cave, illuminated only by the flickering flames of a fire. The inhabitants of that cave, who have lived there since birth, have no notion that there is a greater world beyond this realm of shadows.
Lewis reworks this idea in The Silver Chair, which sets out “the ‘Ontological Proof’ in a form suitable for children.” Eustace Scrubb, Jill Pole, and Puddleglum find themselves in an “Underland” ruled by the Lady of the Green Kirtle, who tries to persuade them that Narnia is simply a figment of their imaginations. Puddleglum tries to explain that beyond the dark realms of the Underland, there really is an “Overworld,” which is illuminated by the sun.
The Lady of the Green Kirtle ridicules this idea. Puddleglum has simply invented his ridiculous idea of a sun, basing it on the lamps he has seen around him in the Underland: “You have put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.” In any case, the idea of a sun is incoherent. Puddleglum talks about the sun hanging in the sky and lighting up the Overworld. Well then, just what does the sun hang from?
The reader of this passage encounters a seemingly sophisticated argument, which would clearly convince any inhabitant of the Underland. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, they knew no other world and would thus probably dismiss Puddleglum’s ideas about the sun as delusional and incoherent. Yet we read this passage from our own perspective—that of knowing that there is indeed an Overworld, illuminated by the sun. The reader can switch perspectives, seeing how an argument that works well from one perspective is shown to be flawed from another.
Lewis’s narrative allows his readers to flip their points of view, thus changing their informing perspectives. It offers another way of seeing things, challenging the narrative of a materialist or naturalist worldview. Unless we see things in this new way, we shall remain trapped in our underground cave, being predisposed to believe not merely that there is nothing beyond it but that there cannot be anything beyond it. Lewis thus creates imaginative space for his readers to place their beliefs about God and show that there are plausible alternatives to naturalism.
Explaining Significance: Narrating the Incarnation
The figure of Jesus Christ stands at the heart of the Christian faith—a person who is to be known and adored, rather than being merely the object of theological analysis and dissection. An integral element of Christian apologetics is the effective yet faithful explanation of the significance of Christ, adapted to the vocabulary and situation of specific audiences. Yet terms such as “incarnation” are now not well understood outside the Christian church. So how can their significance be communicated outside the community of faith?
One important answer is to translate these terms into cultural dialects. Consider, for example, the important Pauline idea of redemption, which denotes the actions through which God rescues human beings from the state of sin, decay, and death to which they have become subject. Paul views the situation of humankind as spiritual slavery, from which it has been redeemed by Christ (Gal. 4:5). The analogy with slavery is not so much about moving from bondage to freedom as about moving from the domain of servitude to the elements of the universe or the law to a new domain—that of belonging to God. The transference is thus not from service to absolute freedom, as a modern Western reader might assume, but rather takes the form of a radical status reversal, in which believers become subject to a new—yet infinitely preferable—owner.
Narrative apologetics, however, attempts to communicate the significance of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ through telling stories—such as those embedded within the New Testament. The Gospel narratives emphasize the transformative impact of Christ upon those whom he encountered, such as the first disciples on the shores of Lake Galilee. The earliest Christian witness seems to have taken the form of an invitation to “come and see what we have found” (e.g., John 1:45–46), rather than any attempt to conceptualize Jesus’s significance and thus proclaim a set of ideas, rather than point to a person. The New Testament itself mingles narrative accounts of Christ with theoretical accounts of his significance. Although the latter are clearly grounded in the former, they take a different form, appealing to intellectual comprehension rather than personal encounter.
The central Christian idea of the incarnation emphasizes that the “God of the Christians” (to use a phase from third-century theologian Tertullian) chose to enter into the place of human habitation. “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). This act of divine incarnation is seen as affirming the importance of the created order, disclosing God’s compassion and care for both the world and humanity, and making possible a transformation of the human situation (which the Christian tradition describes using the language of “salvation” or “atonement”) that allowed those who embraced this new way of existence to live in hope.
Some will have questions about how a narrative can be said to mediate salvation—as opposed to revealing the way things really are. Many will find themselves puzzled by the question of how a narrative can have any salvific function. The point is that the Christian narrative brings us to a point at which we realize our sinfulness, on the one hand, and the fulfillment and joy of the gospel, on the other. The narrative makes us want to turn our backs on the past and embrace the gospel. The story thus leads us to want to open our lives to the transforming grace of God. To use an analogy familiar to many medieval theologians, it is like opening a shutter to allow light into a dark room. The act of opening the shutter is a human action that parallels the removal of an obstacle to grace, but the ensuing illumination of the room parallels the work of God’s grace. We don’t cause the sun to shine or God to be gracious—but we can do something that makes us recipients of the warmth and light of the sun or the transforming grace of God.
Or, to alter the image, the Christian story might help us realize that we are ill and hence cause us to seek a cure. The story itself does not cure us, but it becomes a means by which we are cured, in that it prompts us to discover how the gospel can make us whole and hence how we can be healed by God’s grace. Or, to return to the theme of the incarnation, we realize that the Son of God took on human flesh, suffered, and died in order to redeem us—so we reach out to embrace Christ and become transformed through his living presence within us.
While the incarnation helps us grasp the significance of Jesus Christ for humanity, it also tells us something about the kind of God whom Christians love and worship. During my own atheist phase, I thought of God as a distant reality standing behind or outside history, detached from human existential concerns and shielded from the traumas of history. I could see no intellectual or existential case for believing in a God like that. Yet the biblical affirmation that the “Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14) offers a radically different concept of God—not the abstract and remote “God of the philosophers,” but a God who cares for us, not as a passive distant observer, but as an active fellow traveler and constant companion within the historical process. God is someone we can know and address in worship and prayer. Philosopher Roger Scruton has expressed this point rather nicely: “The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second.”
Yet as Christianity expanded into the Mediterranean world in the late first and early second centuries, a subtle change took place, in which vivid narratives about Jesus Christ came to be displaced by a philosophically conceptualized Christ. As a result, the identity and significance of Christ came to be framed in terms borrowed from secular Greek metaphysics, so that Christ was proclaimed as being “consubstantial” with God. The biblical narratives on which such conclusions were based receded into the background, partly because the Hellenistic culture of the eastern Mediterranean region had come to see logos as being superior to mythos as a vehicle for truth. Rational argument, rather than the recounting of narratives, thus became central to the apologetic task.
The Christian understanding of Jesus Christ, traditionally affirmed in the doctrine of the incarnation, is often stated in terms of the “two natures of Christ,” both human and divine. Dorothy L. Sayers offers a neat summary of Christ’s significance, which many have found to be helpful apologetically: “The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if He is only God, then He is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life.” Yet Sayers’s helpful summary of the significance of the incarnation is still framed conceptually. So what stories might we tell to help us grasp the significance of Christ? What narratives might we use to explore both how Christ is to be properly understood and what his significance for the human situation might be?
Happily, we do not need to invent such stories, in that the Gospels contain many such narratives that are rich in apologetic possibilities. Consider, for example, this familiar episode from Mark’s account of Christ’s early Galilean ministry: “When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’ Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, ‘Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?’” (Mark 2:5–7). The narrative is set in the town of Capernaum and tells of Christ’s healing of a paralytic man who was lowered through the roof of a house. Underlying the narrative is a core Jewish theological assumption that only God is able to forgive sin. Yet the paralytic is healed. The reader is left with a question: If only God can forgive, and Christ has forgiven, who must Christ be? We see here a clear trajectory from christological function to christological identity. We begin by establishing what Christ did and then explore what this implies for who he is.
The Gospel narratives of individual encounters with Christ emphasize his transformative impact—something that is best expressed by narrating what happened. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis captures something of this in his description of the impact of the name Aslan on the four children when they hear it spoken for the first time.
Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.
Each of the children experiences thinking of Aslan in a different way, perhaps adapted to his or her individual narrative. In the end, it is this experience of Aslan that leads the children—each in his or her own way—to unfold his full significance. Aslan is no “tame lion” who is easily mastered. Lewis here uses the word “tame” to imply the kind of conceptual mastery that allocates objects to predetermined categories of meaning. Lewis wants his readers to realize that Aslan is wild—demanding that we make categories specially created to accommodate his uniqueness, rather than trying to force him into existing ways of thinking. The old wineskins prove incapable of coping with the new wine.
Perhaps the best example of Lewis using a narrative to explain the significance of the incarnation imaginatively is to be found in a sermon that he preached in London during the Second World War. Lewis here attempted to explain the meaning of the incarnation by telling the story of a diver who is determined to rescue something precious that has fallen into the mud at the bottom of a deep lake. He plunges into the cold, dark water, going deeper and deeper until, his lungs close to bursting, he finally takes hold of the object of his quest and rises again to the surface. For Lewis, this is the story of God entering into the world, in order to take hold of us and redeem us. God “descended into his own universe, and rose again, bringing human nature up with him.”
It is a helpful narrative that is open to further development and exploration—for example, in highlighting the costliness and commitment of redemption. Yet its chief function is to give imaginative substance to a central Christian theme that can too easily become an intellectual abstraction. The “incarnation” is not a static and timeless idea but rather the Christian way of interpreting something that happened—the life, death, and resurrection of Christ—and its implications.
Yet Lewis has another card to play in this sermon: an argument for the centrality of the incarnation to the Christian faith. Lewis asks us to imagine a manuscript of some great work, such as a novel. Then someone tells us that he has found a missing chapter—a chapter that plays such a pivotal role that the whole novel turns around it. Like Anselm of Canterbury, Lewis invites us to consider a world without the idea of incarnation (remoto Christo)—and then to discover the difference that the addition of this new chapter makes. In the case of Christianity, the incarnation “constantly brought out new meanings,” enabling us to “notice things in the rest of the work” that had hitherto been overlooked. Lewis here echoes a point made by Niebuhr, who stresses the capacity of the narrative of Jesus Christ to open up an expanded vision of reality: “Through the cross of Christ, we gain a new understanding of the present scene; we note relations previously ignored; find explanations of our actions hitherto undreamed of.”
Christianity tells a story about God, humanity, and the world that pivots around the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The incarnation both gives coherence and focus to the entire Christian narrative and allows us to grasp its relevance for human life and thought. Above all, it expands our vision of reality, helping us realize that we too often satisfy ourselves with inadequate accounts of ourselves in the universe. As Marilynne Robinson puts it, rationalism ends up imprisoning us within a limited world, diminishing our hopes and expectations and failing to capture what is so important about being human: “The modern world, insofar as it is proposed to humankind as its habitation, is too small, too dull, too meager for us. After all, we are very remarkable. We alone among the creatures have learned a bit of the grammar of the universe.” The Christian story affirms that and unfolds how God has paid us the compliment of coming to where we are in the incarnation, taking our form, in order to free us from this restricted and restricting vision of reality. God constructs and unveils a new habitation that we are invited to enter—and enjoy.
Translation and Transposition: Visualizing Sin
Western culture has become resistant to the notion of sin. The philosophers of the French Enlightenment dismissed it as irrational superstition, fearful that people might take the idea of a flawed human nature seriously. Yet the history of the twentieth century—supposedly the most “enlightened” in human history—witnessed such violence, oppression, and destructiveness that awkward questions about a naive belief in human goodness simply cannot be overlooked. As philosopher R. G. Collingwood famously remarked, “The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.”
One of the reasons that philosopher John Gray achieved such fame with his breakout book Straw Dogs (2002) was its relentless demolition of the cozy certainties of Western liberalism. For Gray, “humans cannot live without illusion”—such as an intellectually indefensible blind faith in cultural progress or in the fundamental goodness of human nature. Humanists may like to delude themselves that they have a rational view of the world, yet their core belief in moral progress is simply a “superstition.” Advances in science and technology are driven by selfish and corrupting human agendas, often aimed at securing domination over potential enemies. “Without the railways, telegraph and poison gas, there could have been no Holocaust.” Many will feel that Gray has overstated his case. Yet the points he makes about the flaws in human nature can hardly be overlooked. For Gray, recognizing human limits should be seen not as a humiliating defeat but rather as a potential source of wonder and enrichment, as we are forced to be realistic about ourselves.
Some, of course, will find such a thought unbearable. Perhaps this helps us understand a second aspect of human nature—what Rowan Williams once termed a “dangerous taste for unreality,” in which we close our minds and eyes to awkward truths about ourselves. The Christian idea of sin is unpopular, precisely because it articulates an unpopular truth: that human nature is deeply flawed, wounded, and broken, and that part of our problem is that we refuse to accept that there is a problem in the first place. Yet a truthful narrative has the power to release us from its destructive alternatives and offers us ways of seeing through the distortions of reality that are present in contemporary culture.
How is this truth to be communicated? How can we help people to be receptive to such an uncomfortable idea, which raises deep and troubling questions about our true identity and moral capacities? Narrative apologetics offers some important possibilities. One of these is to personify sin, thus making it the subject of a narrative. This approach appears to be used in some of the Pauline Epistles. A good example is the personification of sin (and righteousness) in Paul’s reflections in Romans 6:15–23. The line of thought here is that believers were once slaves of sin, subject to its direction and authority; through Christ, they have now been liberated from the power of sin and transferred to the domain of Christ. Sin is here treated not primarily as a conceptual abstraction but as a personal force at work within humanity, whose power can be broken. This transposition from sin as an abstract idea to sin as a personal force that is active within us enables us to identify narratives of liberation that can be used effectively apologetically—such as the biblical narrative of the exodus from Egypt, to which we shall return presently (see “The Story of the Exodus: The Hope of Deliverance” in chap. 4).
Another narrative option is to tell stories that raise questions about the reliability of the dominant cultural metanarrative, which marginalizes and refuses to countenance the notion of sin—as expressed, for example, in the pervasive idea that education is the key to human self-improvement. One such story concerns the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, held at a villa in a leafy suburb of Berlin, which laid the groundwork for the “Final Solution”—the attempted extermination of the Jews at death camps like Auschwitz. This conference was attended by thirteen Nazi technocrats. Their task was to agree on protocols and procedures for the elimination of Jews from Germany and the occupied territories.
Yet those who planned this event were highly educated, with doctorates or medical qualifications from leading German universities. They were part of the elite of one of the most cultured states in Western Europe. So if education humanizes people, how could such individuals have plotted mass murder on an industrial scale? George Steiner has pointed out that human beings are rather more complex than optimistic educationalists appreciate. Someone could quite easily read great poetry or play great music in the evening and then take part in mass murder on an industrial scale the next day. Steiner observes, “We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”
Now other narratives could be brought forward to present a more positive account of human nature. Yet this does not negate the notion of some abiding flaw within us; it merely indicates the need for a more complex account of humanity that acknowledges both our desire to do good and our apparent inclination to do something that we know to be wrong, so beautifully summarized in Paul’s famous reflection on his personal limitations: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom. 7:18–19).
Yet many apologists would argue that the fundamental difficulty here is that sin is very difficult to visualize. It is too easily perceived as an abstract idea that lacks substance and imaginative appeal. There is an important point being made here: we need a way of grasping the reality and significance of sin by becoming imaginatively receptive to it. And one of the best ways of doing this is through narratives that engage our imaginations in order to help us reflect on their intellectual substance.
So what narrative could be told to help convey the idea of sin as a force that entraps us and from whose power we cannot escape? How can we become imaginatively receptive to such an idea? In his Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” C. S. Lewis tells of the “undragoning” of one of his more unpleasant literary creations, Eustace Clarence Scrubb. Lewis portrays Scrubb unsympathetically as a materialistic and self-centered person whose objectives are dominated by greed and self-advancement. Scrubb sees himself in terms of a narrative in which the possession of riches leads to him becoming a master of his destiny and world, only to discover that the narrative is flawed. Instead, he realizes that he has been mastered by his desires, which he finds he cannot control.
Lewis explores the corruption of Eustace Scrubb using a literary analogy: the Norse legend of the greedy giant Fáfnir, who turned himself into a dragon to protect his accumulated treasure. On finding a hoard of riches in a dragon’s lair, Eustace becomes intoxicated by thoughts of his sudden acquisition of both power and wealth. In a dramatic and beautifully rendered moment, Lewis describes Eustace changing into a dragon as a result of his “greedy, dragonish thoughts.” Eustace has become trapped within his own imagined and self-serving story—and, as disillusionment sets in, he realizes that he cannot break free from it. Hoping that he is merely wearing a dragon costume, he discovers that he cannot tear off the dragon’s skin; every attempt to do so merely reveals yet another layer of scales beneath it. It is difficult for the reader of this passage not to feel sympathy for Eustace, who finds himself in a hopeless and helpless situation.
Yet the story then takes a dramatic, unexpected turn. A lion appears and tears at the dragon flesh with his claws. Eustace does not know the lion’s name; the reader, of course, knows it is Aslan. The lion’s claws cut so deeply that Eustace is in real pain, which he describes as “worse than anything I’ve ever felt.” And when the dragon scales are finally removed, the lion plunges the raw and bleeding Eustace into a well from which he emerges purified and renewed, with his humanity restored. The immersion in the water of the well picks up on the New Testament’s language about baptism as dying to self and rising to Christ (Rom. 6), in effect breaking free from a narrative of oppression and captivity and becoming part of a narrative of liberation.
Eustace had been trapped by forces over which he has no control. Wanting to master others, he discovers that he has himself been mastered. The dragon is a symbol, not so much of sin itself as of the power of sin to entrap, captivate, and imprison. The power of sin can be broken and mastered only by the redeemer—by Aslan, the one who heals and renews Eustace, thus restoring him to what he was intended to be. Eustace, having become trapped in a web of falsehood and self-deceit, realizes that he has become so deeply enmeshed and entangled within this story that he cannot break free from its tissue of deception. Only Aslan can break the power of this story and enable Eustace to enter another story—within which he really belongs.
Lewis’s narrative serves a double function. First, it represents a narrative transposal of the Christian themes of sin and salvation, vividly and realistically depicting sin as an enslaving force that cannot be overcome by human agency. God’s grace alone can break the power of sin and liberate us from its spell. But, second, it invites apologists to reflect on what stories they might tell to make those same points in an imaginatively engaging and compelling manner.
This chapter has sketched out some possibilities for narrative apologetics, indicating some ways in which narratives might be used to communicate important aspects of the Christian faith, to suggest some ways in which we can connect with the gospel, and to point to solutions to traditional apologetic questions.
Yet this raises some important questions, of which perhaps the most obvious is, What biblical narratives can be used apologetically? Writers such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Marilynne Robinson offer us a rich seam of narrative possibilities, which can easily be adopted and adapted for apologetic purposes. But what about the Bible itself, so central to Christian preaching, teaching, and personal devotion? In the chapter that follows, we shall reflect on how we might use biblical narratives in the commendation of faith.