Authored by C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle is the final entry in his beloved The Chronicles of Narnia series. Not only is it a thrillingly desperate adventure story, it is also a deep commentary on the apostate nature of contemporary Christianity, the agnosticism and atheism that Christianity naturally produces, a warning about what happens when we act as if Evil does not exist, and a confrontation with some very deep questions about the meaning and necessity of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. In short, for a children’s novel, the book deals with some very heavy questions in very powerful ways, all without beating you over the head with them.
In fact, it is an irony that so many who dismiss Lewis’s Narnia books as shallow Christian allegory often are the ones who don’t understand it the most. There is nothing shallow about this book.
Let me explain.
The Story (Spoilers)
First off, The Last Battle is a horror story. And the nature of that horror can be summed up in the observation of Farsight the Eagle:
There goes one who had called on gods he does not believe in. How will it be with him if they have really come?
The Last Battle, pg. 72
The story begins with Shift the Ape and Puzzle the Ass discovering a lionskin. Shift has the devious idea to create a false religion out of it by dressing the rather stupid Puzzle up in the skin, masquerade him as Aslan to all the ignorant Narnians who haven’t seen Aslan in centuries, and use the influence that gathers him to increase his wealth and power. Shift does this by building a stable, having Puzzle only emerge at night when visibility is low, and Shift acting as the messenger between the Narnians and the Fake Aslan (my children dubbed him Asslan.) This allows Shift to assemble a cult around him that does whatever he wants. Shift also allies with soldiers from Calormene, the historical enemies of Narnia from the south.
Shift also preaches that the bird-headed Calormen god Tash, which is worshipped through human sacrifice (pg. 20) and is “fed on the blood of his people,” (pg. 21) is the same god as Aslan. Petrified of “this new angry Aslan — or Tashlan,” (pg. 58) the Talking Beasts of Narnia around the stable are cowed into obedience. Claiming it is the will of an angry Aslan, Shift convinces the Talking Animals to labor like slaves for the Calormen and eventually sells the Talking Animals to the Calormen as slaves.
Tirian, the Last King of Narnia, allied with his Unicorn friend Jewel, Poggin the Dwarf (the only Dwarf who sides with the king because all the rest reject Aslan completely due to Shift’s lies), Jill Pole, and Eustace Scrubb from our reality, fight to reveal Shift’s lies and defeat the Calormene invasion. But it all falls apart around them. Cair Paravel, Narnia’s capital, is conquered by a Calormene naval assault, Tirian’s army is slaughtered, and most of the Talking Animals are too terrified to resist or fight back. Up to this point seems to have been about the desperate last stand of Tirian and his followers, including their faith to die in defense of Aslan and defiance of the Calormen invaders.
Like Patrick Henry, they would rather die than be slaves. There is even a discussion between Jill and Eustace about what happens to them if they die in Narnia and each of them deciding that they would rather risk truly and permanently dying in Narnia than abandon Tirian and the Narnians to subjugation and extermination by returning to England, if they could figure out how to do so. And then everything changes.
The blood drinking, human eating, four armed, bird-headed Tash actually shows up.
And starts eating people.
This is where the horror story kicks in. It is absolute night with only a dying bonfire providing any kind of light and Tash is real. He is there, in the stable, and he is consuming anyone and anything that crosses into it. And everyone knows it. It is first revealed when Ginger the Cat, one of Shift’s allies, has his mind consumed by Tash. Ginger goes into the stable a Talking Animal and comes out a hysteric, maddened, idiot beast. All intelligence has been ripped away. Tirian and his resistance know it, which is horrific for them because they’re backed up against the stable fighting for their lives against the Calormenes. The Calormen know it, which is why they’re so desperate to throw anyone and everything they can into the stable in a desperate attempt to satisfy the endless blood lust of their evil god. As Farsight noted earlier, even the atheists amongst the Calormen now know that they were wrong. And it is dreadful.
Tash is real. God is real. And he hates you.
It is a Lovecraftian moment, pure cosmic terror. All the moreso, perhaps even worse, because while Cthulhu doesn’t even pay attention to you, providing you a slim chance of survival, Tash is attentive. And he is hungry. It is little wonder that the Calormen are all too happy to feed their captain to Tash as long a sit means that they do not have to meet him! (pgs. 81-82)
Then everyone dies. And Aslan comes. Because, it turns out, death is not the end. It is merely the beginning of an adventure greater than ever before. The last chapters of the book are the stunningly described Narnian Apocalypse, the reunion of everyone except Susan in Heaven (Aslan’s Country), and everyone discovers that everything which is good and lovely in Narnia exists also in Paradise, but better than ever before. Lewis compares the differences between the Heavenly Narnia and the mortal Narnia with the differences between a reflection of a thing (mortal Narnia) with the thing being reflected in the mirror (Heavenly Narnia.) As someone who loves the holy temple, this image was a powerful one considering the way that we try to illustrate therein the idea of eternal life with mirrors. Then, Lewis ends with one of the greatest descriptions of Heaven and eternal life ever put to pen:
And as He [Aslan] spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
The Last Battle, pgs. 113-114
Philosophy Mingled With Scripture
The Cult of Asslan is a biting criticism of the state of Christianity and a dire warning about where it was already heading in 1956, when Lewis published The Last Battle.
Puzzle the Ass is a False Christ, a fake Jesus, a pathetic Antichrist. He wears a lionskin, masquerading as Aslan. And it works. Ignorant fools who have never bothered to study Aslan and who merely have heard stories of Aslan are easily taken in by the ape and donkey show. They don’t truly know who Aslan is and they don’t want to know. Much like the Israelites who begged Moses to stand between them and God (Exodus 20:18-21) as He manifested on Mount Sinai because they were afraid of the majesty and glory of Jehovah, the Talking Beasts of Narnia do not wish to ascend the hill upon which the stable rests. They do not want to enter the stable and behold their god face to face. They do not want to truly know Aslan. They are content to being told what to think and what to do by others.
Modern Christians are just as content to be told what the scriptures say and to worship the False Christ they are taught to believe in today. They will defend the modern Tashlan – that ridiculous notion of the Triune God simultaneously the Father, the Son, and the Spirit and yet none of them, who resurrected as the Lord Jesus Christ but has no body, who spoke to Moses face to face but has no parts or form, is invisible but yet seen by Isaiah on His throne, who loves you but is beyond all emotions and has no passions, is everywhere but no where – just as fiercely as the Talking Beasts fought against Tirian as he tried to reveal the truth to them. Indeed, the entire concept of the Triune God is nothing more than Tashlan itself inasmuch as Tashlan was a corruption of Aslan by combining him with the worship of Tash and the Triune God is an apostate corruption concocted by combining Jehovah with the philosophies of pagan Greek Platonism and Neoplatonism. As Dr. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, Professor of Early Christianity, Ancient Philosophy at Notre Dame University explained:
…, the principal Greek and Latin pro-Nicene theologians from the late fourth century drew extensively on non-Christian philosophical resources, and Platonism in particular, in their Trinitarian theologies.
The One and the Trinity, pg. 2
Throughout The One and the Trinity, Dr. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz repeatedly shows that Christian leaders after the Apostles used Greek philosophy to interpret the scriptures, and thereby conforming the Christian revelation to that philosophy instead of interpreting everything through the revelations of Christ and compelling the world to conform to the revealed will of God. (For examples: Clement of Alexandria on pages 3-4, Eusebius of Caesarea on pages 4-5, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus on pages 6-7, among others cited in the essay.) Dr. Radde-Gallwitz explains that:
…the pro-Nicene texts instead emphasize the continuity between Platonism and what they take as orthodox Trinitarianism. In Cyril’s words: “the Greeks themselves also agree with the views of the Christians, since they set forth three primal hypostases, insist that the essence of God reaches as far as three hypostases, and sometimes even use the word ‘Trinity.’
The One and the Trinity, pg. 14
Philosophies of men, migled with scripture, indeed.
Dr. Radde-Gallwitz takes pains to explain that saying that the doctrine of the Trinity was heavily influence by Greek philosophy is not the same as equating Neoplatonism and Trinitarianism. They are not, but the development of Trinitarianism owes at least as much to Greek pagan philosophy as it does the revelations of God found in scripture. Neoplatonism is the foundation upon which the house of the Trinity is built, with selected Bible verses and interpolations acting as the nails by which the house is held together. The Triune God is the pagan Tash amalgamated with Aslan in order to form the bastard Tashlan.
Priests And Tyrants
Shift the Ape is a false priest, a false prophet even. The idea for the cult is his and his entire purpose for it is to use it as a tool to oppress and dominate his fellow Talking Beasts. He wants courtiers, servants, and slaves, fine silks, fine foods, and the comfortable life. And to get these things he has made himself the Voice of Aslan. God talks to him alone and he protects the foolish Talking Beasts by being their go-between with their angry and violent god. He puts all his wants into Aslan’s mouth, reduces his fellow Narnians to slavery, first to him and then to the Calormen, and they praise him and thank him for it. Shift is, in short, the very image of priestcraft:
For the time speedily shall come that all churches which are built up to get gain, and all those who are built up to get power over the flesh, and those who are built up to become popular in the eyes of the world, and those who seek the lusts of the flesh and the things of the world, and to do all manner of iniquity; yea, in fine, all those who belong to the kingdom of the devil are they who need fear, and tremble, and quake; they are those who must be brought low in the dust; they are those who must be consumed as stubble; and this is according to the words of the prophet.
… He commandeth that there shall be no priestcrafts; for, behold, priestcrafts are that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain and praise of the world; but they seek not the welfare of Zion.
1 Nephi 22:23, and 2 Nephi 26:29
Priestcraft then is the building up of churches for the express purpose of getting gain. These false religions profess in name to follow the true god, Jehovah/Jesus Christ, but in truth seek after wealth and power. Consequently, they do not teach the truth. Instead, they tell the people what they want to hear, that which will get the people to obey the false priests that run these churches, to give them money, influence, and subservience. Instead of of following Jesus Christ and the Prophets and Apostles whom He has sent into the world, these false priests and false prophets set themselves up as the messengers of the will and Word of God. And it isn’t just the obvious liars – the Joel Olsteens and Robert Morrises and Max Lucados of the world – that qualify.
Every person who thinks he or she can just start up some church in any building, slap the name of Jesus (or some other vaguely biblical word on it), and start preaching what he or she declares to be The Truth, all without the authority and revelation from God to do so, is practicing priestcraft. The nondenominational pastor in his overalls is just as guilty of this kind of arrogance as any Pope ever has been, worse because at least the Pope claims to have legitimate authority. Shift is the Protestant preacher trying to become the Pope of his very own Church of Aslan, with all the power and prestige that entails.
Of course, he is willing to ally with worldly tyrants to do so. Rishda Tarkaan, the Calromen Captain in charge of the soldiers that Shift has been working with, is a classic example of political tyranny. It is his men and his arms at Shift’s back that prevent the doubters (few as they are) from fighting back. In exchange for their military power, Shift declares that Aslan and the bloodthirsty Calormen god Tash are the same being in order to create an idol that justifies the violence, brutality, oppression, and slavery of the state. Lewis understood that is tyranny is the entire point of mixing the philosophies of men with scripture in the first place, to rob the revelations of God of their radical truth and replace it with ideas that justify the horrors of human political rule.
Tashlan is the god of the Death Cult of the State in Narnia just as Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, has been bastardized and amalgamated with the values of the world such as nationalism and patriotism in order to justify endless slaughter and mass murder by those professing His name. Because the nations of the world ultimately serve Satan, this has always been their plan in achieving Satan’s ultimate cause – to reign with blood and horror upon the Earth.
With Enmity
Confronted with this monstrous religion, the Dwarfs reject it all – Tash, Aslan, everything. The abuse they suffered at the hands of the Cult of Asslan, the nonsensical nature of it all, has developed within them a deep hatred of everything and their leader Griffle openly declares their atheism:
The Dwarfs at once began repeating “not a tame lion, not a tame lion,” in a jeering singsong. “That’s what the other lot kept on telling us,” said one.
“Do you mean you don’t believe in the real Aslan?” said Jill. “But I’ve seen him. And he has sent us two here out of a different world.”
“Ah,” said Griffle with a broad smile. “So you say. They’ve taught you your stuff all right. Saying your lessons, ain’t you? …We’re on our own now. No more Aslan, no more kings, no more silly stories about other worlds. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
The Last Battle, pg. 45
The Dwarfs more or less repeat every bog standard atheist reaction to religion. They mock faith in God, profaning that which is sacred in the process. Any claim by someone to know that God is real is met with contempt and accusations of blind indoctrination if not outright brainwashing. Religion is silly and religious people are stupid. The assumption of a self-centered superiority and worship of their own desires is the natural consequence of their faith. It isn’t that they have no god, it is that their god is their self.
Where does this lead? Lewis shows us vividly. Later in the story, all the main protagonists and antagonists are eventually thrown through the stable door and either cross over into Aslan’s country or are eaten by Tash. All the protagonists from all the books, the Friends of Narnia, are gathered together in Aslan’s country and the stable door is still visible. One their side of it is Paradise, on the other side is Narnia. One group stands out as being different though. The Dwarfs that followed Griffle, the atheist Dwarfs, have been thrown through the stable door, but have neither been eaten by Tash nor crossed over into Aslan’s country. This exchange between the Friends of Narnia and Diggle, one of the Dwarfs, occurs:
“In where?” asked Edmund.
The Last Battle, pgs. 90-91
“Why you bone-head, in here of course,” said Diggle. “In this pitchblack, poky, smelly little hole of a stable.”
“Are you blind?” said Tirian.
“Ain’t we all blind in the dark!” said Diggle.
“But it isn’t dark, you poor stupid Dwarfs,” said Lucy. “Can’t you see? Look up! Look round! Can’t you see the sky and the trees and the flowers? Can’t you see me?”
“How in the name of all Humbug can I see what ain’t there? And how can I see you any more than you can see me in this pitch darkness?”
…”Well if that doesn’t beat everything!” exclaimed Diggle. “How can you go on talking all that rot? Your wonderful Lion didn’t come and help you, did he? Thought not. And now — even now — when you’ve been beaten and shoved into this black hole, just the same as the rest of us, you’re still at your old game. Starting a new lie! Trying to make us believe we’re none of us shut up, and it ain’t dark, and heaven knows what.”
Ain’t we all blind in the dark? But what if it is only dark because you refuse to open your eyes and see? The scriptures tells us that scales had to fall from Saul’s eyes before he could begin to understand the truths of the Gospel and to do the work that God had for him. (Acts 9:1-20) Saul had to have the way he saw the world taken from him, first blinded by God and then stripped of the errors that warped his vision, before he could know the truth. It is true for all of us as well. But it can only happen if we are willing to repent, willing to see, and willing to be shown the truth.
The Friends of Narnia stand in the purest daylight under the bluest sky and amongst the most beautiful of flowers, in Aslan’s Country. But the atheist Dwarfs can’t see it. They’re too blind by the scales on their eyes to see it. The errors of atheist ideology, atheist philosophy, and atheist faith which are the bedrocks of their rejection of true religion warp their understanding of reality. More to the point, they won’t see it. And any effort to awaken them to the truth just arouses the self-justification that religious people are either stupid or liars (or both) out to manipulate the far more intelligent atheists in order to gain control over them. This is what Jesus Christ meant when He warned:
The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
Matt. 6:22-23
If the light inside you which is supposed to guide you to ever greater understandings of the truth is darkness, then you can only ever be lost. Forever. This is one of the point’s that the Lord was making in the interpretation of Lehi’s Dream. What you believe matters because it can either lead you to salvation or destruction and you won’t always be able to tell the difference because you’ll be too blind to see the truth, even as you wander off into the terrifying mists of darkness and fall into the yawning chasm of Hell. (1 Nephi 12:16-17)
To emphasize just how much they’ve blinded themselves with atheism, Aslan appears and provides a scrumptious feast for them. But instead of the “pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and …goblet[s] of good wine,” (pg. 91) that Aslan has provided, all they can see and taste is hay, a bit of rotten turnip, raw cabbage, and fetid trough water. And as soon as any one Dwarf suspected that another might have something slightly better then that Dwarf was savagely attacked and beaten in order to get, which only resulted in all the food being trodden under foot and everyone bruised and beaten. (pg. 92) Other than being an implicit criticism of Socialism (the attempt to forcibly equalize everything only destroys all things of value), Lewis is showing the kind of mental degradation and infantilization that atheism causes for those who believe in it. They make themselves blind to the Sun at noonday and hate anyone who tries to tell them otherwise. As Aslan explains:
“Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they can
The Last Battle, pg. 92
not be taken out.”
Ideology matters. What you believe really matters. It dictates how you think and act, how you see and interacted with the world around you. And not even God Himself can force you to see what you refuse to see, to know what you refuse to know. The Dwarfs could have Heaven. Instead, they place themselves into Hell, shut the door, and refuse to be liberated. Atheism has made them incapable of learning the Truth and that arrogant ignorance traps them in Spirit Prison.
The Path To The Tree of Life
When the covenant people of God have been unable to build physical temples, He has used mountains as holy sites to function as temples. Hence, Abraham journeys up to Mount Moriah to make sacrifices to God, Moses takes the people to Mount Sinai to receive the revelations of the Divine Law, and Isaiah speaks of “the mountain of the Lord’s house.” (Isaiah 2:2) The problem is that the people have not always been willing to receive the truths that God has for them. The example of Moses at Sinai in Exodus 20:18-21 is instructive. The Prophet of God has ascended to the temple-mountain and received revelation from God. Jehovah descends upon Sinai and His power is revealed in the way that nature itself roils around the crown of the mountain. The people, terrified by being even in this close of proximity to God, beg Moses to stand between them and the Lord, to be His mouthpiece and spare them the threat of the possibility of having to enter the direct Presence of the Lord themselves.
This desire, to not have to face the Holy One of Israel and His divine will themselves, would be the root of apostasy ever onward. (See Isaiah 30:9–11)
Lewis, consciously or not (and I would suggest it was purposeful) repeats this same imagery of Exodus and the temple mount of Sinai. There are at least three echoes of temple settings in The Last Battle. That the stable is set on a hill echoes the ancient role of mountains as natural temples where one could come into contact with God, as Moses did on Mount Sinai. That it is a physical building in which God is said to dwell echoes the human built tabernacle and temple in Jerusalem. That it is a stable links it to when Jehovah Himself came down and took upon Himself human flesh and turned a Bethlehem stable into the House of God. But in The Last Battle, it is all twisted. It is a hilltop, not a mountaintop. In it dwells a false god, Puzzle/Asslan, not Jehovah. And instead of the Babe of Bethlehem, it gives physical form to the monstrous evil god, Tash.
Shift is the false prophet and/or false high priest who maintains access to the god which dwells within the temple-stable. Shift, also pronounces the commandments of the god, just as Moses did in Exodus 20 and its following chapters after coming down from Sinai. Like the Israelites, the Narnians want a god to cower in front of, not a god who will welcome them into His presence. The Narnians, desiring a smooth god, a comfortable god that is in their image, that is to their understanding, and who will ask nothing too deep or difficult of them, want Shift to boss them around just as the Israelites cried for Moses to come between them and Jehovah. Better to be told everything the should do than live with the burden of having to confront your own choices, recognize your own flaws, and gain revelation for yourself! Thoughtless labor is a lot smoother than the soul searching and often heart-wrenching repentance required by true discipleship. Which is easier, to abandon a lifetime of your favorite sins, or to get an Ape some of his favorite nuts?
The stable then isn’t just a way for Shift to hide Asslan from the Talking Beasts. The stable is a false temple. It is the false house of the false god of a false religion. Its rites and its teachings do not lead people to God, they lead they to slavery and destruction. Atheism, ignorance, oppression, darkness, suffering, and damnation are the products of this false religion and its false temple. It is, in short, a temple to Satan. The Narnian adherence to the Cult of Asslan become slaves, not just to Shift, but to the Calormen and, finally, Satan/Tash himself.
In contrast to all this stands the true temple and its purpose.
The purpose of the true temple has always been to reverse the Fall of Adam and Eve. Eden was Paradise, a walled garden created by God in which He could and did reveal His presence and will to Man. Thus, Eden was a temple, sectioned off form the rest of the world and dedicated to the revelations of God’s will to those He deemed worthy. When Adam and Eve fell, they left the Presence of God and left His holy temple. The purpose of temples has always been to reverse this, to give us the knowledge, authority, purity, and power to walk the (covenant) path that lets us re-enter Eden, pass by the angels that stand guardian with their flaming swords, and enter the Presence of God and Christ to receive our eternal exaltation. By doing this ritually, we are prepared mentally and spiritually to one day do it literally. Now that we have tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, God wills to give us the fruit of the Tree of Life. The temple has always been about showing us how to obtain and partake of that fruit via the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.
The Friends of Narnia are all products of the true temple. The true temple ritual, both anciently and modernly, was about transforming those undergoing the ritual into kings and queens, priests and priestesses to the Most High God. Fully realized, the ceremonies of the temple turned the officiates into “angel priests attending the heavenly throne,” with the high priest becoming “the great angel in human form, the Man, who passed between heaven and earth.” The Great Angel was another name for Yahweh, the Son of the Most High God. The high priest then became a manifestation of God, leading the others in the rites of eternal life. In the modern temple, all men and women act as the royal high priest clothed in the robes of the holy priesthood, entering the Holy of Holies, the Celestial Room that is the dwelling place of the Presence of God, and thereby become ritually divinized, become gods themselves.
In this context, the matter of crowns is a rather important symbol as it represents the royal and divine nature of the priests. The ancient priests wore mitres representational of crowns while the high priest, representing God Himself, and thus already a King, wore an additional golden headband with HOLINESS TO THE LORD emblazoned upon it. This symbolism is preserved in modern temples where the holy mitre is part of the robes of the holy priesthood worn by the temple worshippers as they encounter God and cross into the Divine Presence. The Friends of Narnia, when they finally cross into Heaven, the Celestial glory that the Celestial Room represents, are all described as, “Seven Kings and Queens …all with crowns on their heads and all in glittering clothes.” (pg. 82.) They were fully realized human beings, divinized gods and goddesses, products of the true religion and the true temple.
In contrast, Shift could only manage a paper crown, jeweled slippers, and a scarlet jacket made for a dwarf. (pg. 17) His priesthood robes are a mockery of the Dwarfs, the Sons of Earth (pg. 79), which can never make him an angel-priest Son of God. The culminating symbol, his crown of paper, is a flimsy farce of holiness that rips, tears, rots, and is destroyed with little effort at all. The false Cult of Asslan with its false temple is a temple of the Earth, can lift its worshippers no higher than the Earth, and is doomed for destruction along with all those apostates devoted to it.
It is clear that Lewis knew, at least in part, what the Prophet Lehi knew in whole. There are only two choices in life – liberty and eternal life through Jesus Christ or captivity and death through Satan. (2 Nephi 2:26-27) The only source of liberation in this life is Jesus Christ. Only the Gospel of Jesus Christ will liberate humanity from the mental, emotional, social, and, yes, political, slavery each of us labors under. You may sell your Self for the cheaper pottage of a lifetime of slavery to the desires of the body and ways of the world and call this “freedom,” but in the end all you will do is forge upon your soul chains which will drag you down into misery and endless woe.
Why? Because you have turned your Self into a slave by the choices in your life and you will continue to be that miserable slave in the next life. (Alma 41) God will not need to damn you, you will have intentionally damned your Self. God will not need to cast you into the Lake of Fire, for you will have already jumped into it willingly. Who you made your Self into is one who is antithetical to Heaven. This is why Shift, getting the very god he proclaimed he wanted, is fed to Tash (pg. 89) and all those who devoutly followed Shift flee from the salvation offered by Aslan into the damnation of Outer Darkness. (pgs. 95-96) It isn’t that Aslan didn’t want them, it is that what they chose to be made them into someone who did not want Aslan, who hated him and light and truth so much that eternal damnation was preferable. They had made themselves slaves to sin in this and now chose that slavery forever.
In comparison, Tirian and the other true Friends of Narnia, along with hose who truly worship Aslan, find themselves at the end of the Path to the Tree of Life, Aslan’s country – Heaven itself. Products of the true religion and the true temple, they were liberated by Jesus Christ and delivered to the Celestial Glory to which the true temple is designed to prepare for and deliver you to. And it turns out that (covenant) path was not an end unto itself, but merely the trailhead of a much greater and eternal adventure filled with unimaginable experiences and joys beyond human articulation.
Through All Eternity
This is what Christianity has become – a false temple leading its followers toward an easy god who asks nothing meaningful of them while leading them ever so carefully straight down to Hell. Christianity has built its churches to be much more beautiful than Shift’s stable, but they’re all the same in the end. They’re false temples, led by false priests seeking to enrich themselves by preaching the philosophies of men and doctrines of smooth gods, asking of the people little meaningful and demanding nothing important. Lewis’s critique of Christianity is thus stunning, damning, and right on the money.
This is not to say that Lewis wasn’t a devout Christian. It isn’t even to say Lewis himself isn’t fooled by some of these damnable doctrines. (The lamest part of Mere Christianity is when Lewis tries to defend the Trinity.) Rather, it is to say that Lewis was as devout a Christian as he could possibly be and saw the problems of that which masqueraded as Christianity as only someone truly faithful can see them. And he desperately understands the danger of it all. It is no wonder so many atheists and agnostics today react like the Dwarfs who, because of the ridiculousness of it all, reject not only the claim that Aslan is in the stable, but the idea that Aslan exists at all. The apostate errors and evils of Shift have made faith in Aslan look stupid altogether. The apostate errors and evils of modern Christianity have made faith in Jesus Christ look stupid altogether. And Lewis knew that something had to be changed before it was too late.
This why I prize the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ so deeply. Christianity has obviously gone off the rails and filled with doctrines that aren’t just unbiblical, but nonsensical. It’s God is silent, absent, unreachable, and uncaring while the world goes to Hell in a handbasket ever more quickly. And the most faithful Christians can see it, even as they have no idea what to do about it. But God does, and He did something about it.
The Restoration testifies that God is speaking now. It answers all of the most pressing questions of human existence with doctrines that are clear, logical, scriptural, and powerful. And God doesn’t just speak to His Prophets and Apostles, not just to the “important” people who “make the decisions” on the large scale operations of His church. There are no Shifts in the Restored Church. Today, right now, God is also speaking directly to you and me, giving us direct revelations that are immediately relevant and important for our lives. His Church is not a stable with a false priest who oppresses and rules with violence and terror. Rather, His Church is a Kingdom of Priests and Priestesses where each is gifted at baptism and confirmation with the authority, power, and ability to approach Him directly and receive inspiration and revelation right from the Lion’s mouth, so to speak.
Through the ordinances of His Gospel, Jesus Christ is imbuing us with His power, making us equal to the questions and challenges of our day. He is giving us exacting guidance applicable to the exact conditions that we live in concerning every opportunity and trial of modern living. He gives us the ability to bind ourselves to Him in defiance of all Earth and Hell, building relationships and communities that defeat Death itself and unite us together to each other and to Him eternally. The true temple has been restored and leads us not just back to Eden, but beyond Eden into endless eternity and godhood. Because, as the Restoration has restored, the point of all this, of Christianity itself, is to transform us – to help us to achieve our highest potential, to have eternal life and become like our Heavenly Father. The goal of the Restoration, and the work of the restored holy temple, the true House of the Lord upon the Earth, is to take us, who Lewis recognized as “possible gods and goddesses” (pg. 10) and fulfill that possibility in word and deed.
What a powerful time to be alive! When God has reversed the decline of Christianity by restoring the fulness of His truths and the purpose for which those truths have always been given! What amazing gifts He has for us! What glorious blessings He has made available to us! Unlike the foolish Talking Beasts, we need not despair at our God or labor under the slavery of error and slavery of self. We have been given true liberation and the true path through the true temple, the covenant path through the House of the Lord, which leads ever upwards and and eternally progresses ever onwards, to a Life “which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before,” i.e. godhood and eternal life. (D&C 132:19-20)