THE SHOCK ABSORBER
The Pevensie children have just discovered that the one they’ve been told is coming back: the king, the great hope of Narnia, is a lion. Susan turns to Mrs Beaver and asks the obvious question: is he safe?
“Safe?” said Mr Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
The Tolkien Argument
Before there was Narnia, there was a late-night conversation between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien on the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, that changed the course of Lewis’s life.
Lewis was not yet a Christian. He had moved, by his own account, from atheism to theism, he believed in God, but the step to Christianity still eluded him. His problem was myths. He loved them: the Norse myths, the Greek myths, the dying-and-rising god stories that seemed to recur across human cultures. But he couldn’t reconcile that love with the claims of Christianity, because the Christian story seemed to him to be doing the same thing those myths were doing. Which meant either Christianity was myth, or the myths were dim echoes of something else.
Tolkien’s answer was the “true myth” argument. All those stories across all those cultures resonate with people because there is a true story underneath them. The dying and rising god appears in myths everywhere because one Man actually died and rose. The sacrifice that saves the world moves us in Avengers Endgame because the actual sacrifice that saves the cosmos happened. The resonance is not coincidence. It is the sound of reality.
Lewis became a Christian shortly after that conversation. And the insight that brought him in, that great stories carry the shape of the gospel because the gospel is the true shape of reality, never left him.
What Aslan Shows You
Lewis was careful not to call Narnia allegory. He disliked the term, probably because allegory implies a one-to-one mapping, a code to be cracked. Narnia is something different: a world in which the logic of the gospel is woven into the fabric of how things work, so that when Aslan does something, it feels true before you have time to analyse it.
The Jill scene in The Silver Chair is a good example. Jill arrives in Narnia desperately thirsty, sees a stream, and heads towards it — only to find Aslan blocking the way. She asks if he will move. He tells her she has to come past him if she wants the water.
It is a fictional riff on John 4 and John 7. Jesus tells the woman at the well he has living water she doesn’t know about. He stands up at the Feast of Tabernacles and calls out to the crowd: if anyone is thirsty, come to me. The logic is the same. There is no getting to what you’re actually thirsty for by going around Jesus. Lewis doesn’t say any of that. He just shows you Aslan and the stream, and something in the reader recognises it.
The Horse and His Boy works on a different register; providence rather than salvation. A boy is riding through the mist, and his horse keeps inexplicably driving him into a cliff wall. He doesn’t understand why. It isn’t until morning that he sees what the horse was doing: the path was narrow, and on the other side was a sheer drop. The horse was saving his life. The presence directing events — invisible, not fully comprehended, working through circumstances the boy couldn’t see clearly — turns out to be Aslan.
That image lands differently from a Bible verse about God’s sovereignty. Not because it’s truer, but because it reaches a different part of you. The intellectual assent to providence is one thing. The felt experience of recognising it through a story, in a character, is something else.
The Danger of Agenda
There is a version of Christian art that announces itself in the first scene and never lets up. It is earnest, well-meaning, and almost always ineffective. The moment readers feel they are being preached at, they switch off. Not because they object to the message, but because they’ve stopped believing in the world. A story in which every character is a vessel for the author’s agenda stops being a story. It becomes a lecture with better production values.
Lewis’s skill was that he loved Narnia first. He built a world that obeyed its own internal logic, populated it with characters who had their own desires and fears and complications, and let the Christian resonance emerge from the structure rather than the dialogue. Aslan doesn’t explain the gospel. He enacts it.
This is the test for any piece of creative work carrying a worldview: does the art serve the message, or does the message serve the art? Great Christian storytelling does neither. It makes a world in which the gospel is true, and then tells the story honestly. The resonance does the rest.
Why Great Stories Feel True
It is not only explicitly Christian art that works this way. Avengers Endgame is a blockbuster franchise film with no religious intent, and yet the scene in which Tony Stark snaps his fingers and trades his life for the universe is genuinely moving in a way that most conscious attempts at emotional manipulation aren’t. The sacrifice of one for many. The only way through is through death. A willing laying down of life to defeat the great evil.
The true myth framework explains this. It isn’t that Endgame is secretly Christian. It’s that Lewis and Tolkien were right: certain story shapes resonate because they are echoes of the actual structure of reality. Human beings are made in the image of a God who sacrifices himself for his creation. They recognise that story when they see it, even when they can’t name what they’re recognising.
The same logic runs through murder mysteries; the premise is that sin has entered the world and disrupted the peace, that there is a wrong which demands justice, and that the investigator is the one who sees through the concealment and sets things right. It runs through The Matrix, in which Neo discovers he is “the One,” dies, and returns from death to defeat the forces of enslavement. It runs through The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which Jack Skellington’s reach for something he was never designed for ends in ruin.
None of these are Christian films. All of them carry the shape of something true.
Engaging More Deeply
There’s a practical question sitting underneath all of this: what do you do with it? How does this change how you watch a film or read a novel?
Cal Newport’s idea of “deep hobbies” is useful here. The opposite of shallow engagement — passive consumption, half-watching something while also looking at your phone, is the kind of sustained attention that lets you actually inhabit what you’re reading or watching. Deep engagement with art is a skill, and it can be developed.
One starting point is simply asking the question: what is underneath this? Not every piece of art has a Christian layer. Some have an explicitly anti-Christian layer — a nihilistic worldview, a vision of reality in which meaning is a human construction and death is the end. Knowing which is which matters. Art shapes the imagination, and the imagination shapes how people see the world.
Lewis understood this from both ends. He knew what fiction had done to him — feeding his imagination with beauty, with courage, with a vision of the world in which goodness was real and worth fighting for — long before he became a Christian. And he knew that the stories a culture tells about itself are not just entertainment. They are, in a real sense, a form of catechism.
Narnia was his contribution to that argument. Whether the Greta Gerwig adaptation does justice to it remains to be seen. But the line stands regardless: of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.
Discussed on this episode
Lifeway — Five Reasons Your Church May Need a Podcast
The Holy Post
RebuildersTwo Ways News
The Pastor’s Heart
Cross Formed Kidmin
Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast.
The Shock Absorber is a podcast for church leaders doing church a little differently. Next episode: the tangibles of church project management. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Email Joel at joel@shockabsorber.com.au, and join the Shock Absorber Network at shockabsorber.com.au.
Soul Revival Church is an Anglican church in the Sutherland Shire and Ryde.