Mooreeffoc in Narnia ... and the Bible:
The Value of Fresh Perspective in
Gaining a Hearing for the Gospel
Robert C. Newman
Biblical Theological Seminary
Hatfield, Pennsylvania
Here in the West (andespecially in the U.S.), we live in what is in some sense a Gospel-saturatedsociety. A large fraction of thepopulation has grown up attending church, even if only occasionally. With freedom of religion (and in the U.S.,no state church), many religious groups vie with one another to attractmembers. Secular radio and TVstations carry some religious broadcasting, and recent years have seen aproliferation of Christian stations. The media (though not exactly favorable to Christianity) usually hassome religious issue before the public, whether it be gay rights, theordination of women, birth control, the creation-evolution controversy,abortion, or the foibles of some TV evangelist. In this sense, our society is certainly Gospel-saturated.
All this is not to say that the average person understands the Gospel. On the contrary, it sometimes seemsthat not even the average member of our evangelical churches understands theGospel! The problem is, mostpeople think they understand whenin reality they have no biblical conception of the nature of sin, God=s holiness, real forgiveness, or the radical nature ofChristian discipleship. When suchpeople hear the Gospel, some turn it off because they have Aheard it all before,@ though in reality they have never heard it even once. Others continue to listen, but theyfilter it through their grid of mistaken pre-understandings and so fail to hearit for the hundredth time.
What can we Christians doabout this? How can we present theGospel in such a way that, without presuming to do the work of the Holy Spirit,people will hear us out and begin to see what God is saying to them? Physically, of course, we need to getout where unbelievers are. We needto form friendships with unsaved people so we can reach out to them in theirneeds and so they can see the Spirit working change in our lives. Verbally, we also need to get out wherethey are B to climb out of the rut of worn cliches andstereotyped Gospel presentations in order to help others see what Christianityis really all about. Personally, Ihave been greatly helped in this by the example of C. S. Lewis, and that iswhat I would like to discuss here.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) wasgifted with unusual talent. As anOxford don and later as Cambridge Professor of Medieval and RenaissanceLiterature, he was highly respected as a scholar in his own field. Unlike many scholars, he was also aninteresting communicator, one of the most popular lecturers at the universityand a master of the essay.
Outside his field, Lewis iswidely known for his fiction. Hisseries of seven children=s stories, The Narnia Chronicles, sketches the Asalvationhistory@ of a world inhabited by talking animals. In a science fiction trilogy, Lewisexplores the warfare between good and evil throughout our solar system. In Till We Have Faces, he retells the myth of Psyche and Eros as a sampleof God=s activity among gentiles before the coming ofChristianity. His Great Divorce is an imaginative visit to heaven by a busload of thedamned, nearly all of whom decide they prefer living in hell to giving up theirsins. Lewis= allegory Pilgrim=s Regresstraces the spiritual journey of a certain John (basically Lewis himself), butconcentrates on his experiences before conversion in contrast to thepost-conversion emphasis of Bunyan=s Pilgrim=s Progress.
Not only was Lewis afirst-class writer, but he was arguably the most effective Christian apologistof the twentieth century. He wrotea number of brilliant apologetic essays, several of which have been collectedin his God in the Dock. Yet his fiction, too, has had asignificant value for the proclamation and defense of Christianity. Lewis= effectiveness in presenting Christianity to unchurched intellectualsof his day and ours is partly due to his gifts of vivid imagination, literaryability, and sharp logic. Yet nota little of Lewis= impact comes from his effective use of a literarydevice sometimes known as Mooreeffoc,a technique in which the reader is caused to look at an old subject from afresh and unusual perspective in order to see it in a new light.
The term Mooreeffoc is explained by Lewis= friend J. R. R. Tolkien:
Andthere is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is afantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from theinside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day;and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that havebecome trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.
Lewis is good at finding Anew angles@from which to view the things we take for granted, so he uses this techniquefrequently. Two striking examplesare his delightful little piece AXmasand Christmas@[2] and the first chapter of his unfinished novel AfterTen Years. The former of these gives away too muchin its title; it should have had only its subtitle, AA Lost Chapter from Herodotus.@ Lewisassumes the guise of the ancient Greek historian as he describes the distantisland of Niatirb (Britain), wherethe inhabitants annually perform a rather masochistic ritual called AXmas.@ Here Lewis uses Mooreeffoc effectively by taking us outside our time and cultureto show us how absurd our modern, secularized Christmas really is.
In After Ten Years, Lewis begins his story of events following theTrojan War with a scene inside the wooden horse. In a most effective use of Mooreeffoc, however, Lewis carefully leaves his readers in thedark about where they are, so that we are left wondering for most of thechapter who Yellowhead is and what it is that he and his companions are coopedup in B a spaceship? A submarine? An armoredpersonnel carrier? Not until thehero mutters AOh Zeus!@does the light begin to dawn!
Mooreeffocin Narnia
Lewis= use of Mooreeffoc in The Narnia Chronicles is especially interesting and relevant to our gaininga hearing for the Gospel. Hisinspiration for these stories began with the incongruous mental picture of afaun from ancient mythology carrying packages and an umbrella on a snowyday. However, Lewis soondiscovered that a fairy tale built around this image had some real apologeticpossibilities:
Ithought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibitionwhich had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel asone was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings ofChrist? I thought the chief reasonwas that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated withlowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all thesethings into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass andSunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear intheir real potency? Could one notthus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.
Thus the whole Narnia seriesbecomes one large Mooreeffoc: thebasic truths of Christianity transposed to a fairy-tale world!
Yet within The NarniaChronicles we find many additionalexamples of Mooreeffoc. Some are merely single incidents orbrief touches. Others are moresustained, occupying several pages of the narrative. Still others are so pervasive as to form a background forthe entire series. Let=s consider an example of each of these.
A small, humorous piece of Mooreeffoc occurs in the second chapter of The Lion, theWitch and the Wardrobe. Lucy has just entered Narnia throughthe magic wardrobe and met Mr. Tumnus, the umbrella-carrying faun. She is now waiting in his sitting roomwhile he prepares their tea. Looking over his library, she spots a book, Men, Monks andGamekeepers: A Study in Popular Legend, or Is Man a Myth? Perhapsno profound apologetic thrust is intended here, yet one can hardly helpwondering: If man, whom we know exists, is considered mythological by somefauns, may not some of the beings we consider mythological also exist? This could easily serve to open theminds of children (and adults) schooled in modern materialism to a moresympathetic reading of those biblical narratives containing angels and demons.
A more extended and clearlyapologetic use of Mooreeffococcurs in the twelfth chapter of The Silver Chair. Eustace, Jill and Puddleglum have just rescued Prince Rilian from anenchanted chair by which a wicked queen had long held him in forgetfulbondage. They are about to maketheir escape from the underground city. Suddenly the Queen of Underland returns. She instantly recognizes what is happening and begins to putall of them under an enchantment. Influenced by her perfumed fire, monotonous music and charming words,they begin to lose all memory of the land of Narnia back up on the surface.
To promote theirforgetfulness, the queen laughingly dismisses their belief in the existence ofthe sun as merely a childish copy of the lamps in Underland. Likewise she explains away theChrist-figure of Narnia, the lion Aslan, as an inflated idea derived from ahousecat. Lewis thus gives hisreaders a new perspective on the atheistic argument that God is only anextrapolation or magnification of man. It now becomes clear that this Aargument@ has no force in itself. Though it might account for the existence of the idea of Godwere it known independently that He does not exist, it does nothing to disproveHis existence. This Mooreeffoc may provide younger readers with an inoculationagainst such an argument when they encounter it later. And of course Lewis did not intend tolimit his readers to children.
Finally, Puddleglum puts astop to the enchantment, stamping out the fire with his bare foot and clearingeveryone=s mind, especially his own. His response to the witch-queen is also a notable apologeticMooreeffoc:
Supposewe have only dreamed, or made up,all these things B trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslanhimself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in thatcase, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the realones. Suppose this black pit of akingdom of yours is the onlyworld. Well, it strikes me as apretty poor one. And that=s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We=rejust babies making up a game, if you=reright. But four babies playing agame can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.[5]
Puddleglum=s argument provides a forceful answer not only to thewitch=s arguments, but to several modern ones as well. As one who teaches both New Testamentand apologetics, I see here a simple and effective answer which aBible-believer can give to scoffers of greater intellect and education. Knowing the unity of Scripture and theprofundity of its worldview, the believer need not be a scholar to see throughmodern attacks on the Bible. Notonly wild theories like those of John Marco Allegro, in which the Bible ismerely a misunderstood code-book for a drug and sex cult,or of Morton Smith, that Jesus was a philandering gnostic magician,[7]but also the less spectacular attacks of liberalism and secular humanism, whichsee the Bible as a collection of superstitions from the Achildhood@ ofour race. Haven=t such scoffers made a Ablack pit@ of society whenever they have controlled it? Don=tmost people really want to live in a country where Christian moral principlesare widely observed? How did allthese Aprimitive children@who supposedly wrote the Bible get all this right?
A third example of Mooreeffoc in the Narnia stories, almost as extensive as theseries itself, is Lewis= backdoor approach to the subject of angels. This is probably too subtle to benoticed by younger readers B I didn=t notice it myself until the sixth reading! But as we identify with the childrenwho travel back and forth from our world to Narnia, we begin to function asangels in Narnian salvation-history. If this isn=t an example of Lewis Astealing past the watchful dragons,@ Idon=t know what is!
Lewis= use of Mooreeffoc to catch his readers off-guard demonstrates the valueof this technique. It can be used not only by apologists writing essays andauthors producing Christian fiction, but also by pastors preaching, evangelistsevangelizing, and by lay people witnessing to their unsaved friends.
But perhaps you feel uneasyabout using this technique. It=s new, isn=tit? Is it consistent with biblicalstandards? Is it even honest?
Mooreeffocin the Bible
Actually, the technique is atleast three thousand years old! And Jesus Himself used it, so it must be OK. The parables of Scripture often use a form of Mooreeffoc to help the audience see the truth by presenting itin a fresh light or from a different angle.
One important use of Mooreeffoc in the parables is to get the audience to make amoral judgment before they realize they have judged themselves. This is how the prophet Nathan broughtDavid to see the enormity of his sin with Bathsheba (2 Sam 12:1-7). If David had realized that Nathan wasgoing to rebuke him for his sin, he would probably have sent him packing orworse. But once David hadcommitted himself by angrily condemning the rich man for slaughtering his poorneighbor=s pet lamb, there is no way out when Nathan says, AYou are the man!@
In a similar way Jesusexposed the hypocrisy of Simon the Pharisee for judging a woman Christ hadforgiven (Luke 7:36-50). WhenSimon answers Jesus= question about which debtor would be more thankful,he naturally supposes it would be the one let off the larger debt. Once the Pharisee has thus committedhimself, he has no excuse when Jesus makes it clear that the woman=s apparently exaggerated affection is only anindication of her gratitude for having been forgiven far more than Simon has.
Other parables may sneak bythe Awatchful dragons@ ofour moral stubbornness more quietly. In the three parables of the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, and Lost Son, Jesusgradually brings the lesson closer and closer to home for the Pharisees in hisaudience who objected to his seeking and accepting tax collectors andprostitutes. In the first two ofthese parables, the natural concern of a shepherd for his sheep and a woman forher money are used to defend God=sconcern for his creatures who have strayed from Him. In the third parable, the younger son shares manycharacteristics with the harlots and sinners turning to Jesus. The uncharitable attitude of thePharisees finds full expression in that of the elder son, though Jesus neversays, AYou are the older brother!@ Andperhaps the picture of this older brother is ugly enough to awaken thePharisees to their need to change.
In many other parables, Jesususes this technique of Mooreeffoc,so we need not fear that it is an unbiblical innovation. In our Gospel-saturated butsin-hardened society, there is a real need for Christians to bring home theGospel to sinners with clarity and force. Used properly, Mooreeffoccan be a powerful and biblical way to gain a hearing and help people (includingourselves) see things as they really are!
[1]J. R. R. Tolkien, AOnFairy Stories,@ in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), p. 58.
[2]C. S. Lewis, AXmasand Christmas,@ in God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970),pp. 301-303.
[3]Available in either of two Lewis collections: OfOther Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), pp. 127-145; or The Dark Tower andOther Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 133-154.
[4]C. S. Lewis, ASometimesFairy Stories May Say Best What=s to Be Said,@ in Of Other Worlds, p. 37.
[5]C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Collier, 1970), p. 159.
[6]J. M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (New York: Bantam, 1971).
[7]Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper and Row, 1982).
[8]For further discussion of Mooreeffoc and other rhetorical techniques in the parables, seeRobert C. Newman, APerspective Transformation by Means of Parables,@ in Interpretation and History: Essays in Honour ofAllan A. MacRae, ed. R. Laird Harris,Swee-Hwa Quek and J. Robert Vannoy (Singapore: Christian Life Publishers,1986), pp. 139-154.