Timeline for In-universe, is Aslan actually Jesus?
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23 events
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| Nov 30, 2021 at 0:40 | history | edited | DavidW | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:43 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Mar 6, 2016 at 23:50 | vote | accept | Rand al'Thor♦ | ||
| S Feb 11, 2016 at 15:55 | history | mod moved comments to chat | |||
| S Feb 11, 2016 at 15:55 | comment | added | Null♦ | Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. | |
| Feb 11, 2016 at 15:52 | comment | added | Hypnosifl | @Graham - From what I've read I don't think traditional Catholics claim the Pope is incapable of doing bad things, rather that on certain kinds of official pronouncements on Catholic doctrine, God guides them to prevent them from error. Anyway, Lewis was an Anglican, I don't think they believe anyone other than Jesus is infallible. | |
| Feb 10, 2016 at 22:53 | comment | added | Richard Venable | @Mazura suggested that a Christian cannot say that "Aslan IS Jesus Christ", but there is a lot Christian fiction about Jesus, going back to Milton and Dante. Narnia is a fictional story about Jesus interacting with an alternate world while incarnate as a lion. | |
| Feb 10, 2016 at 14:19 | comment | added | Graham | @Mazura If we're talking heresies, remember that "The Last Battle" features a line from Aslan to the effect of "Everything good done in his name was actually done in mine, and everything bad done in my name was actually done in his". This is morally sound but theologically very dodgy, because it requires moral judgement on everyone claiming to act in the name of God. That explicitly removes the possibility of any religious person (up to and including the Pope) being infallible. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 20:31 | comment | added | Ryan | @Shane, off the top of my head I can tell you, you are totally wrong about Krishna, Zoroaster(who isn't even a divine figure at all...) and Mithra. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 18:14 | comment | added | Wayne Werner | @Mazura While not deeply thought out at first, you can hardly suggest that he wrote the entire series and went, "Oh, crap... what did I do???" From the tone of the quote (esp. "that element pushed itself in of its own accord.") it seems far more likely that he did decide to adopt Christian themes. Besides, we're talking about the man who wrote the Screwtape letters. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 18:12 | comment | added | Shane | "If there is another person who meets that description, I am ignorant of them." There's at least, Krishna, Dionysus, Zoroaster, Attis of Phrygia, Horus, Buddha, and Mithra. Each of those guys share all 5 attributes, I believe. There's probably more also. And there's a lot more if you only look at 2, 3, and 4. That being said, yeah, Lewis wasn't talking about any of those guys. He was talking about Jesus. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 17:04 | comment | added | Mazura | @PLL -By his own admission it was most certainly not deeply thought out from the start as you surmise. Lewis says, "At first there wasn't anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord." However, Rev. Abraham Tucker has to say: "There had been times in Christian history when Lewis might have been branded a heretic for far smaller creative innovations in theology." It's a touchy subject, one that you don't go throwing in the church's face. Intentional or not IMO this saved him a lot of grief. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 16:26 | comment | added | Foo Bar | Randal Thor is mistaken. Every Lewis quote I've seen argues "Aslan doesn't REPRESENT Jesus; he's Narnia's incarnation of Jesus". Google Lewis Narnia allegory and you'll see many references. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 16:09 | comment | added | Mazura | @FooBar - I fail to see the distinction. Also what about, "clearly intended as Christian allegory (and there are quotes by Lewis to confirm this)." | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 15:44 | comment | added | Foo Bar | @Mazura, FWIW: CS Lewis explicitly avowed that Aslan is not an allegory; he is "suppositional" (supposing Narnia were real). In modern terminology Lewis would call him "parallel universe" Jesus. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 14:50 | comment | added | Mazura | @PLL - I haven't read any of his work. My point is that a devout Christian cannot in good faith say that Aslan IS Jesus Christ. That's why he has to dance around it. My answer would be a no but I'm neither an expert on him, his work, nor his religion. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 14:42 | comment | added | PLL | @Mazura: do you know CS Lewis’s other work at all? He wrote very seriously about Christianity in multiple genres. Whatever he considered Aslan’s relationship to Jesus to be, it was almost certainly deeply thought out from the start, not some after-the-fact response to criticism. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 13:42 | comment | added | JAB | "Arrived at the same time as Father Christmas." Well that rules out Jesus given he wasn't actually born at Christmastime. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 2:08 | comment | added | Rand al'Thor♦ | @JanusBahsJacquet The middle one is the clincher and definitely in-universe, since it's a response to asking "what Aslan's other name in our world was (mentioned in VDT)". | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 1:24 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | These all seem to be more out-of-universe than in-universe, though. Maybe not the last one (that's more indeterminate), but the first two seem fairly firmly rooted in out-of-universe-ness. | |
| Feb 9, 2016 at 0:07 | history | edited | Jack B Nimble | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Feb 9, 2016 at 0:05 | history | edited | Jack B Nimble | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Feb 8, 2016 at 23:57 | history | answered | Jack B Nimble | CC BY-SA 3.0 |