Smuggling theology past the dragons of culture

Why fantasy stories still matter in our day and age. C.S. Lewis once wrote about why he told fairy tales instead of preaching sermons. He wondered whether, "by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency. Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could."

Steal past the watchful dragons. I have never forgotten that phrase, because in many ways Christian fantasy stories managed to make their way into my life past the "dragons" that guarded my mind. When I was nineteen years old, I was at Air School, and I was not sure whether Jesus was Lord. I would look around at the people near me, young men getting drunk, trying to talk the women around them into decisions they would almost certainly regret, and something in me knew it was wrong. But if you had asked me to explain why it was wrong, I could not have told you. I had no framework. I had been attending a Methodist church for most of my childhood, but as the saying goes, "going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than sitting in the garage makes you a car".

What I had done was read a few books by C.S. Lewis. I had read The Chronicles of Narnia. I had read The Screwtape Letters. And though I did not realise it at the time, those stories were already shaping the way I saw the world, long before I could put words to any of it. Then the Lord Jesus came and saved me. My whole life began to turn toward Him, from death to life. And it was those very stories, the ones I had picked up either just before or just after I was saved, that had been quietly teaching me all along, teaching me in a way where my defenses were never up.

Stories disarm our defenses. I want to be honest about why my defenses were so high in the first place. When I was five years old, I watched my father be murdered in front of me. You do not walk away from something like that with an easy view of God. For years I struggled to believe that Jesus was good, that God really loved me, that a God who claimed to be all-loving could be trusted at all. If He was so loving, where had He been? Those were not abstract theological puzzles to me. They were wounds. Many of the questions I had were also not merely theological or academic but rather lived out and experienced. Trying to grapple with potential theological issues and apparent inconsistencies is different to a lonely Father's day, or meeting people who knew your dad for longer than you ever did. And yet, here is the strange grace of it, when I picked up The Chronicles of Narnia, I had no trouble at all seeing what an incredible character Aslan was. I could see how deeply he loved. I could see him forced to make the hardest of decisions, decisions that cost him everything. But through all of it, his love was never in question. In the world of that story, Aslan's love was certain. That is what a good story can do. It slipped past every guard I had. Through Narnia, theology began to shape the way I actually lived, and I found myself wondering about God and wrestling with deep truths without ever realising that was what I was doing. Pilgrim's Progress did the same thing to me. I was following a character across a fantasy landscape, and somewhere along the way I was learning to understand the very real Jesus who already loved me. There is a reason for this. An obligation to feel something about God can freeze the very feeling stone cold. But a story asks nothing of you. It simply invites you in. The heart can quietly receive what the intellect, with all its walls up, would have turned away at the door.

Stories Create Theological Muscle Memory. The Screwtape Letters did something different, but no less powerful. Reading those letters (an elder demon coaching his young nephew on how to drag a Christian down) taught me the reality of how Satan actually tempts believers. It was not theory. Once I had read Screwtape, I began to recognise the tactics. I could see, in a dozen different situations, the small nudges and clever lies that were pulling me toward sin. The story had trained my eye. And Narnia showed me something bigger still: that there is a far greater story unfolding all around us, one that most people simply are not aware of. When I was nineteen and had been saved by Jesus for the very first time, it genuinely felt as though I had been one of those children stumbling through the back of a wardrobe into a whole new world — a world with a very real spiritual battlefield waiting for me on the other side. None of this came from memorising theology. I was not learning councils and creeds. I was simply dwelling on the story, and as I did, it taught me to love different aspects of who God is. It taught me to see Him in fresh ways I never would have found in a theology textbook.

I fell in love with Aslan. That is the plain truth of it. Long before I could articulate a single doctrine of the atonement, I loved a lion who laid down his life on a stone table. That is exactly what I have hoped to do in the books I write. My prayer is that I have been able to give readers a Woodsman who is, at times, shrouded in mystery, a figure who can seem distant, even hard to understand, in certain moments. But my deeper hope is this: that when a reader finally comes to know who the Woodsman really is, they walk away completely convinced of his love. And if that is true of the Woodsman, then I pray it points to something truer still, and that is Jesus Christ. Fantasy Is Not an Escape from Faith. It Is a Delivery of It. please don't hear what I am not saying, the Bible is infinitely more powerful than any fantasy story any of our fallen minds will ever conceive. That being said I view fantasy stories as another way to answer life's tough questions while coming into contact with a character who may point them towards Christ. That is what I have come to believe, and it is why I keep writing. My hope in these books is twofold. First, that a Christian who reads them would find their faith in Jesus strengthened, and that if they are struggling with some aspect of what they believe, the story would give them a meaningful place to wrestle it through. And second, that someone who might never in their life pick up a Bible would pick up one of my books instead, and still, somewhere in those pages, encounter the very real Jesus who loves them. Lewis stole past my watchful dragons when I was nineteen and lost. By God's grace, I would love to do the same for someone else.