Edwards writes:

God’s providence may not unfitly be compared to a large and long river, having innumerable branches beginning in different regions, and at a great distance one from another, and all conspiring to one common issue. After their very diverse and contrary courses which they hold for a while, yet all gathering more and more together the nearer they come to their common end, and all at length discharging themselves at one mouth into the same ocean.

The different streams of this river are ready to look like mere jumble and confusion to us because of the limitedness of our sight, whereby we can’t see from one branch to another and can’t see the whole at once, so as to see how all …

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Many Christian readers, upon discovering additional layers of meaning in the Narnian stories, immediately jump to the conclusion that the Chronicles are allegories. These same readers would be surprised to learn that C. S. Lewis denied multiple times that the stories are allegories.

The Narnian Stories Are Not Allegories

But it is not, as some people think, an allegory (“Letter to Sophia Storr,” in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, vol 3, 1113).

You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books ‘represents’ something in this world. Things do that in The Pilgrim’s Progress but I’m not writing in that way (Walter Hooper, Literary Criticism, 426).

Lewis defined allegory …

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One of the great challenges for those of us who love and embrace “the supremacy of God in all things” is to push this glorious truth into the corners. We must get specific. The supremacy of God in science. The supremacy of God in technology. The supremacy of God in literature. And, in light of our reflections on Jonathan Edwards’s “A History of the Work of Redemption,” the supremacy of God in history.

In addition to what we’ve seen so far, Edwards also helpfully highlights two recurring motifs that appear throughout history; for simplicity’s sake, let’s call them the cyclical motif and the progressive motif (see the obscenely-expensive-but-good book, Encounters with God: An Approach to the…

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C.S. Lewis loved fairy stories. He thoroughly believed that “sometimes fairy stories say best what needs to be said” (the title of one of his essays). And, as we’ve seen, Lewis rejected the modern association of fairy tales with children. Adults can and should enjoy fairy stories.

But Lewis was aware that many regarded fairy stories as unsuitable even for children. In “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” he sets out to defend the fairy tale against three objections.

Objection 1: Fairy tales give children a false impression of the world.

Lewis: On the contrary, fairy stories give them a realistic impression of the world. In fact, it’s the realistic stories that are more likely to de…

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The final portion of Jonathan Edwards’ first sermon on “A History of the Work of Redemption” relates five designs of God in the great work that he carries on from the fall to the end of the world.

1. According to 1 Corinthians 15:25 and 1 John 3:8, “one great design of God in the affair of redemption was to reduce and subdue those enemies of God till they should all be put under God's feet.”
2. God’s design was “perfectly to restore all the ruins of the fall,” including both souls and body of elect men, and the physical world, so that there is a new heavens and a new earth (Isaiah 65:17).
3. God aims “to bring all elect creatures in heaven and earth to an union one to another, in one body under one…

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The central thrust of this recurring column is that learning to live like a Narnian is something worth pursuing. Indeed, I want to commend it as a crucial component of Christian discipleship. In other words, I want to make a case for Narnian discipleship, not merely as a coincidental byproduct of reading the Narnian stories, but as one of Lewis’s (and God’s!) chief goals in the Narniad itself.

Beware of Two Traps

But our tendency is to fall into one of two traps. Either we accept the idea of discipleship through Narnia and rush to the moral or allegorical meaning of the stories prematurely, short-circuiting the actual breathing of Narnian air, or we dispense with the notion that the stor…

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In a previous post, I lamented the fact that Jonathan Edwards died prior to writing his unfinished masterwork, a God-centered biblical theology and world history, integrated by Christ’s work of redemption. But God, despite removing Edwards from this world, did not leave us without a witness.

Almost 20 years before his death, Edwards preached a 30-part sermon series on A History of the Work of Redemption, which was published after his death by his friend John Erskine and his son Jonathan Edwards Jr. While most Edwards’s scholars believe that the unfinished masterwork would have been in some ways different from the earlier sermon series, I think we are warranted in viewing the sermon series …

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In 1956, after completing the last book in The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis wrote a short article in the New York Times Book Review explaining how a childless professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature came to write fairy tales.

Dismissing the idea that he had some master plan to “say something about Christianity to children” which led him to choose the fairy tale genre, researched the reading habits of children, selected some Christian doctrines, and then wrote allegories, Lewis writes,

Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its o…

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Historical counterfactuals fascinate me. What if the British had won the Revolutionary War? What if Constantine had lost the Battle of Milan? What if Hitler had never been born?

As an amateur scholar of Jonathan Edwards, one of the most intriguing counterfactuals to me centers around Edwards’s untimely death in 1758. After accepting the position of president of the College of New Jersey, Edwards died of a small pox vaccination. He was 54 years old.

The reason that Edwards’s early death is particularly vexing for church historians and theologians is that we know what Edwards was working on before his death. In a letter to the Trustees of the College of New Jersey, in which Edwards respond…

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They say that nothing is certain except death and taxes. In America, at least, we can add one more thing to the list: Every four years politicians and pundits will wax eloquent about the “difficult” and “controversial” issue of abortion.

Debates about “a woman’s right to choose” and “a baby’s right to life” will quickly degenerate into shouting matches that obscure rather than clarify the issues.

As Christians, we don’t have the luxury of speaking with vagueness, ambiguity, and cliché. When we open our mouths, we must speak clearly (Ephesians 6:19-20; Colossians 4:3-4).

But if we are to speak clearly, we must first think and feel clearly about difficult and controversial moral…

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