Conspiracy theorists who foolishly attempt to dust Satan’s schemes for physical prints are widely dismissed as cranks and crackpots. Though spiritual conspiracy is definitely aloft in this sin-cursed world, all who presume to track it by its physical traces have dedicated themselves to a most dim-witted endeavor. Our enemy, who prides himself in anonymity and ambiguity, never leaves behind evidence of his presence or prints on his handiwork. Furthermore, his human instrumentality is seldom aware of who is pulling their strings or of the collusion that exist between themselves and others similarly duped and employed in devilish designs.
To detect Satan’s schemes demands a spiritual sense that enables one to spot and connect dots that appear incoherent and totally unconnected to the casual observer. Only by connecting the dots can one draw pictures of the devil’s devices. Such pictures help the saints to escape the snares of the fowler and to pursue the Great Commission unencumbered by our adversary’s manifold encumbrances. It is in this vein that I now take pen in hand to connect some disconcerting dots of our day.
Luigi Cascioli, an Italian atheist whose book "The Fable Of Christ" asserts that Jesus never existed, has sued a small-town parish priest in Italy for writing about Jesus in a parish bulletin. According to Cascioli, the priest, Enrico Righi, has broken two Italian laws. First, by fraudulently deceiving people into believing that Jesus actually existed when He really didn't, Cascioli alleges that Righi has broken Italy’s "abuse of popular belief" law. Second, by trying to pass off as Jesus Christ John of Gamala, the son of Judas from Gamala, Cascioli alleges that Righi has broken Italy’s "impersonation" law, which criminalizes attributing false names to others for personal gain.
The eminent scholar F. F. Bruce once said, "The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar." In light of this fact, one would expect Cascioli’s suit to be tossed out of court and Cascioli himself to be admitted to a mental institution for psychiatric evaluation. Yet, it is never safe to assume a sane course of action in today’s crazy world, as Judge Gaetano Mautone has proven. Rebuffing all attempts to have Cascioli’s case dismissed as sheer nonsense, Judge Mautone has set a date for a hearing to discuss preliminary motions in Cascioli’s bid to have a court determine whether or not Jesus ever existed.
Drawing a line from Italy to France, we learn from a recent announcement that the movie version of Dan Brown’s best seller "The Da Vinci Code" will open this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The movie, directed by Ron Howard (Opie has come a long way from Mayberry) and starring two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks, portrays the Christian faith as a hoax perpetrated on the world by goddess-hating male chauvinists. If the film’s success is anything like the book’s, many moviegoers, like many readers, will end up accepting Brown’s fiction as fact and renouncing the Christian faith as fable.
By the way, who was it that pointed people to bookstores and theaters to get their religion from fiction and films? Was it not the church? Did we not encourage unbelievers to get religion from Tim LaHaye’s books and Mel Gibson’s movie? Now that we've done the legwork and provided a substantial readership and viewing audience, Satan comes out with his own best selling book and blockbuster movie. No wonder Jesus said, "The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light" (Luke 16:8). Anytime we attempt to do God’s work the world’s way we'll always be outdone by the world. We simply don't stand a chance at beating the world at the world’s own game.
Moving across the pond from France our next line is drawn to a dot in America, where a new course called "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and Other Religious Mythologies" is being offered at the University of Kansas. According to Paul Mirecki, chair of the University of Kansas’ Department of Religious Studies, the purpose of the new course is to "slap" the "big fat face" of "fundies" (Christian Fundamentalists) by teaching their beliefs under the category of mythology. In defense of the new course and the outlandish comments of his department’s chair, a colleague of Mirecki stated that the Christian faith must be taught as myth rather than fact in a state university.
Are you starting to see a pattern here—Italian courts looking into the "Christ-myth," moviegoers treated to a film portraying the Christian faith as a myth, and college students taught Christianity as mythology? Although all of this is bad enough, what I find far more disconcerting is the complicity of today’s church in this satanic scheme to mythicize Christianity. "How," you ask, "is the church aiding and abetting the adversary in so ignoble an aspiration?" Have you been to see Narnia?
The intellectual prowess of C. S. Lewis is unquestionable; however, his Christian orthodoxy is certainly suspect. While he believed in purgatory, prayers for the dead and baptismal regeneration, Lewis denied the inerrancy of Scripture and penal substitution. Lewis’ denial of the necessity of Christ’s substitutionary atonement prompted D. Martin Lloyd Jones to warn others of Lewis’ defective view of salvation.
Undoubtedly, many Christians today will be appalled by any assertion that C. S. Lewis, a man often called "the 20th century’s greatest Christian apologist," diminished the importance of doctrinal adherence to Christ’s substitutionary atonement. However, proof of the famous British author’s minimizing of Christian orthodoxy in this most vital doctrinal area is plentiful in Lewis’ most acclaimed apologetic work—"Mere Christianity."
In "Mere Christianity" (pages 181-182), Lewis writes: "You can say that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true. If any of them do not appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does. And whatever you do, do not start quarreling with other people because they use a different formula from yours."
That C. S. Lewis viewed all "theories" of Christ’s atonement as "quite secondary" is clearly stated by him on pages 55 and 56 of "Mere Christianity." Furthermore, his assertion that adherents to false religions may unknowingly belong to Christ (pages 208-209), as did "the good Pagans long before Christ’s birth," stands in stark contrast to our Savior’s claim: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me" (John 14:6). How, one cannot help but wonder, did an Oxford professor who suggested that salvation is attainable apart from the cross come to be regarded within Christendom as one of Christ’s foremost apologists.
To understand C. S. Lewis one must explore his lifelong infatuation with ancient mythology. According to his autobiography, "Surprised by Joy," Lewis became infatuated with mythology as a youngster. This childhood infatuation, Lewis confesses, resulted in something that caused him "plenty of trouble" throughout the rest of his life, namely, a "passion for the Occult." Lewis described this passion as "a disease" and "a spiritual lust," which "has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it last." To Lewis, it was "this passion, more even than the desire for power, which [led men to become] magicians." Perhaps, this explains why J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis’ good friend and the author of "The Lord of the Rings," was dubbed a "wizard" by his son when asked by the army to list his father’s profession.
Lewis’ fascination with ancient mythology led him to become one of the world’s foremost authorities in ancient and medieval-Renaissance literature. Had it not been for a fellow Oxford don’s suggestion that the baggage of mythology may be carried into the Christian life, Lewis’ lifelong love affair with pagan myth would have probably prevented him from ever converting to Christianity. According to Lewis, a stroll taken with J. R. R. Tolkien on Addison’s Walk in the grounds of Magdalen College on the night of September 19, 1931, had "a great deal to do with" his Christian conversion. It was during that walk that Tolkien suggested to Lewis that myths were not "lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver," as Lewis believed, but rather "splintered fragments of the true light" and "eternal truth that is with God." Tolkien also appears to have convinced Lewis on that eventful evening that pagan myth-makers were merely men aspiring "to the perfection [man] knew before the fall."
As a Roman Catholic, an adherent to a faith consisting of baptized paganism, J. R. R. Tolkien had no problem doing with pagan literature what his church had done with pagan liturgy. He believed that pagan myth should be sanctified, that is, made Christian and put into the service of God. It was this unorthodox notion of Tolkien’s that paved the way for Lewis to come to Christ, making it possible, at least in Lewis’ mind, to carry on simultaneous love affairs with Christ and Belial. Apparently, neither Lewis nor Tolkien were ever bothered by the Apostle Paul’s unequivocal condemnation of such an absurd notion (2 Corinthians 6:14-18).
Unlike the learned Apostle Paul, who gladly relinquished all that he had formerly cherished in order to come to Christ, and afterward counted it all "but dung" in comparison to "the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus [our] Lord" (Philippians 3:7-8), C. S. Lewis refused to come to Christ unaccompanied by his former lover—pagan mythology. Lewis admitted as much in an essay entitled: "Religion Without Dogma." In this telltale essay Lewis wrote:
"To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man."
There you have it, to C. S. Lewis Christianity was "the completion, the actualization, the entelechy" of pagan mythology. Lewis viewed pagan myth as a precursor to the Gospel. Far from being Christianity’s foe, paganism was actually its friend. That Lewis clung to this ludicrous contention throughout his Christian life is proven by his description of a trip he took with his wife to Greece in 1960. Commenting on their Greek vacation, Lewis wrote: "I had some ado to prevent Joy and myself from relapsing into Paganism in Attica! At Daphni it was hard not to pray to Apollo the Healer. But somehow one didn't feel it would have been very wrong—would have only been addressing Christ sub specie Appollonius."
To men like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, pagan myths were products of human imagination that contained hints, shadows and gleams of divine truth. Whether or not they were historically and scientifically true was inconsequential, since myths were meant to communicate something bigger than history or science, namely, divine truth. Much of the Old Testament was seen by Lewis as Jewish mythology, which he believed had been elevated above all other ancient mythology due to God’s choosing of the Hebrews as His chosen people. Armed with such a view of Scripture, Lewis was able to acclaim the Bible as divinely inspired and God’s primary vehicle for communicating sacred truth to the world, while at the same time contend that the stories of Job, Jonah and Esther were non-historical, that whether or not the early stories of Genesis—the Creation and the Fall—were literally true was "of no consequence," and that the Bible itself, particularly the Old Testament, contained errors, contradictions and even "sub-Christian" ideas.
When it comes to the New Testament and the incarnation of Christ, Lewis taught that "the myth became fact." That which had previously been myth (imagination) became historical (fact). In his essay, "Myth Became Fact," Lewis wrote:
"The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle...To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths."
That the Gospel must be embraced imaginatively is the deadly mix in Lewis’ Christian cauldron. Although he held to the historicity of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, Lewis believed that the "miracle" of the Gospel was found in the fact that one must still enter into the story through the door of imagination. The Bible, Lewis insisted, could not be read like an encyclopedia or encyclical, but must be approached with a willingness to lay one’s reasoning faculties to the side and grant to one’s imagination a free reign. Only by approaching the historical as a myth and by viewing the "fact" through the eyes of our imagination can we hope to be divinely illuminated. Until we are divinely illuminated by losing ourselves in the Gospel story, the story’s truths will never become real to us.
Never minding that his teaching was classic occultism, Lewis never waned in his insistence that the heart of Christianity was a myth. Indeed, Lewis insinuated that the myth (the imaginative) was more important than the fact (the historical). In his essay, "Myth Became Fact," Lewis makes some incredible assertions. First, he asserts "that men" sometimes derive "more spiritual sustenance from myths they [do] not believe than from the religion they [profess]." Second, he argues that a man who disbelieves "the Christian story as fact but continually [feeds] on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who [assents] and [does] not think much about it."
Unlike the Apostle Paul, who preached nothing but "Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 1:23; 2:2), men like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien believed that "the old, old story of how a Savior came from glory" was inadequate for the salvation of the world. According to Lewis and Tolkien, "the old, old story" had to be romanticized if it was ever to satisfy what Lewis called man’s "romantic longing."
The Apostle Paul’s Joe Friday approach to the Gospel—"nothing but the facts"—was in Lewis and Tolkien’s minds incapable of captivating man’s imagination. Therefore, man needed myths, fantasy and fables. Only through these intriguing fairy-tales of other worlds and magic kingdoms, heroes and heroines, wizards and witches, hobbits and elves could sacred truth be imparted to men through the captivation of their imagination. As Tolkien put it, "There is indeed no better medium for moral teaching than the good fairy-story." I suppose this means that Tolkien viewed the Brothers Grimm as superior to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.
When it comes to good myth-making, Lewis insisted that "the essence of a myth [is] that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader." Of course this necessitates multiplicity of meanings. Readers must be left to freely interpret the meaning of a myth differently and to find in the myth whatever truth is meaningful to them. That Lewis personally succeeded as a good myth-maker is proven by the comments of Tilda Swinton, the actress who plays the White Witch in Disney’s "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." According to Ms. Swinton, "Faith is in the eye of the beholder. You can make a religious allegory out of anything if that’s what you're interested in."
Holding to the belief that the Gospel is a myth, caused C. S. Lewis to argue that nowhere in Scripture is there "unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form." As a staunch opponent of systematic theology, Lewis insisted that men be left to make out of the Bible whatever truth the Bible made real to them. He even implied that what is considered orthodox today may be found false and replaced tomorrow. No wonder Lewis has always held the unique distinction of being popular with everyone—Catholics, Protestants, cultists, etc. The only voices every raised against him are a few fundamentalist ones crying in the wilderness. Of course, they're all quickly dismissed as the imbecilic babblings of uneducated buffoons against an academic giant who still cast a long shadow over today’s world.
It was Russell Kirk, American novelist and political philosopher, who said, "Our time, sick nigh unto death of utilitarianism and literalness, cries out for myth and parable." To this, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis would have added a hearty "Amen." Today’s church, duped by the Kirks, Tolkiens and Lewis’ of our world, no longer sees the simple message of Christ and Him crucified as "the power of God unto salvation" (Romans 1:16). Consequently, modern-day believers are increasingly turning away in their evangelizing from the unimaginable power of God and the simple preaching of the cross to the imaginations of myth-makers and the special effects of Hollywood.
In its lavish praise of Lewis’ "The Chronicles of Narnia," Christianity Today exclaimed, "In Aslan, Christ is made tangible, knowable, real." Are we to infer from Christianity Today’s accolades of Lewis’ mythical lion king, Aslan, that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are incapable of making Christ real to us? Do we need an exciting romp through Lewis’ mythical land of Narnia—where animals talk, mythical beasts abound, and magic is common—because the divinely inspired quills of gospel writers and the quickening power of the Holy Spirit are incapable of making God’s truths come alive to us? Although such preposterous pretension is a most dangerous and deadly spiritual proposition, today’s Christians appear ever ready to abandon their Bibles for the fiction section of Barnes & Noble and the closest "Cinemaplex."
Anne Rice, whose occult books, "The Vampire Chronicles," have sold over 75 million copies, recently announced that she had returned to her Roman Catholic faith. As a result, her most imaginative mind and considerable writing talents have produced a new book, "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt." The book, a fictional depiction of Jesus’ childhood narrated by "Jesus" Himself, is receiving rave reviews from Christian leaders. For instance, Christian pollster George Barna praises Rice’s new book for creating "a moving and credible portrait of [our] young Lord." A "nicely-paced story," Barna adds, that helps others "to connect with the young Master."
Is it really the Biblical Jesus that readers of Ann Rice’s book will be connecting with? Or is it a fictional Jesus conjured up in Rice’s imagination? Will readers hear the still, small, voice of the Spirit while reading Rice’s fanciful tale? Or will they only hear a made-up savior whose mouth has been filled with Ann Rice’s own words? Despite the fact that no one ever comes to know the real Lord Jesus by encountering fictional ones, today’s fantasy-driven church appears determined to introduce the Biblical Jesus to others through a host of conjured up counterfeits.
In the recent fracas over James Frey’s book, "A Million Little Pieces," Oprah Winfrey initially defended Frey by suggesting "that the truth of the book mattered less than its story of redemption." Until turned by her viewing audience’s turning on her, Oprah insisted that the truthfulness of Frey’s book was "irrelevant." All that mattered was whether or not the book helped people. If it did, then it was "real" to those it helped.
This same argument is made by many of today’s so-called Christian leaders when it comes to books like Ann Rice’s "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt." Whether or not the book is a Biblical depiction of our Lord is irrelevant. All that matters is whether or not the book helps people. If it does, then it is real to those it helps.
The real danger in this line of thinking is seen in the fearful prospect of its eventual application to Scripture. Are we headed in the direction of mythicizing the Bible; and if so, is today’s church leading the parade? Are we fast coming to the place where the factual accuracy of the Scripture and the truthfulness of its content will be dismissed as irrelevant; where the only thing that matters anymore will be whether or not the reader can imagine something from the text that he or she finds helpful?
If this proves to be the soon destination of today’s church, then the devil’s dots are lining up to form a most sinister picture. Not only is the master of deception preparing to use our "vain imaginations" to estrange us from Christ (Romans 1:21-15), but also to erect a high wall between lost humanity and a true "knowledge of God" (2 Corinthians 10:5). Furthermore, if we fall prey to this snare of the fowler, we'll no longer be worshipping Christ, but antichrists—false images of Christ conjured up in our own minds and made real or alive to us by the power of our own imaginations (Revelation 13:11-15).
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