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CT April 23, 2001 Issue

Our culture has a deep hunger for mythology. In the midst of mythical films like Star Wars, mythically inspired card games like Magic: The Gathering, and mythically based video games like Diablo 2, we as Christians have a responsibility to respond to this cultural desire on a mythic level. Lewis knew this. Particularly, he and J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, recognized the deep impact of myth. It was the shared love of Norse mythology that sparked a friendship between Tolkien and Lewis and was perhaps one of the most important steps on Lewis's path to Christianity.

I hope that Christians no longer shun the myriad mythologies throughout history and current culture, but embrace them as the human search for the ultimate factual historical mythology—Christ's life, death, resurrection.

But let's enjoy the stories, the heroic journeys, the "subcreation" (as Tolkien put it), without making them Christian allegories.
Jonathan A. Watson
Arcadia, California

In "Myth Matters," Louis Markos claims that the central goal of New Age thought is to restore "a spiritual focus to a society that generally resists any serious consideration of the supernatural."

Basing an analysis of Lewis's mythos on this assumption leaves out another very spiritual dimension of his program—that is, what he called "macrobes," or demons, whose program is to transform the human race into the "un-Man."

To assume that New Ageism merely reflects a hunger for spirituality in a materially obsessed culture is to overlook that it may really be a demonic attempt to chain us to a bondage begun in the Garden of Eden. In Perelandra, Lewis gives a philologist (a wordsmith, no less!) the job of crushing the head of the serpent in the Garden, showing that Christians are commissioned not merely to engage the culture but also to save it from the most dangerous deceptions.
Randy Beeler
Pastor, Chriesman, Liberty, & Milano
United Methodist Churches
Caldwell, Texas

As Louis Markos says, C. S. Lewis helps us, children of a modernist world, to imagine a world far different from the one given us by modernity; a different world that is alive with its Father's presence.

Having imagined such a world, which (even if devoid of fauns and witches and talking horses) is still populated by amazing creatures (puffins, humpback whales, red efts!), we can realize this world is much closer to the God-created one that really exists than the reductionistic model presented to us by modernity.

I applaud Markos for challenging contemporary writers and other artists to follow the example Lewis set, pursuing an authentic expression of Christian faith in terms beyond simple, prepackaged meaning and thinly veiled sermon. The revival of our capacity for wonder ("dangerous wonder," as Mike Yaconelli calls it), is every bit as essential as Markos claims—not only for effective communication of the gospel, but also for our own engagement with the gospel as mere Christians.
Brian D. McLaren
Pastor, Cedar Ridge Community Church
Laurel, Maryland

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June 11 2001, Vol. 45, No. 8