shades of tolkien flipping out at lewis because aslan is in fact distinct from jesus
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Replying to @perdricof
Well... The ending of the Narnia books does make it super painfully clear he's Jesus ("he no long appeared as a lion to them")
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
Yeah, I mean, he's dang close, but I don't think Tolkien liked having any daylight there (or having Jesus spending time in Narnia)
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Replying to @mssilverstein @perdricof
Tolkien wasn't really comfortable with Fantasy Jesus appearing onstage in a fantasy setting at all, that's why he personally never did it, even though Middle-Earth obviously exists in a Christian universe
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein
well that's the thing, right? tolkien didn't believe there was such a thing as "fantasy jesus." there's jesus and there are false idols, that's it. lewis otoh had the much more woo-woo view that all his fantasy christs are just christ in different guises--many paths to one end
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Replying to @perdricof @mssilverstein
I mean maybe They were both unabashedly fascinated with classical mythology and pagan gods and goddesses I guess Tolkien was just much more careful and literal about it (the Valar are explicitly mushing together the Greek pantheon and Catholic lore about saints and angels)
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Well, yeah, but everything in Tolkien's Arda is supposed to be the prehistory of our own world -- there are people in Middle-Earth who prefigure Jesus but none of them ARE Jesus.
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Sure, and that was a choice, just like CS Lewis inventing a wacky kitchen sink fantasy world and justifying it by saying it's just in a different dimension was a different choice, which Tolkien greatly disliked
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
The theology behind saying that Christ's crucifixion in our world *only* was an act of substitutionary atonement for the sins of all sapient beings in this world, and that Jesus-as-Aslan had to die again in Narnia, is veeeeery iffy
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
Lewis basically addressed it by saying it was just for the sake of the story, that no two things are meant to be *completely* equivalent between Narnia and Earth (Aslan's death is *like* the Crucifixion but it isn't actually the Crucifixion) and otherwise avoiding the topic
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(It's especially iffy because of Lewis doubling down on the idea that humans in Narnia are and always have been descendants of humans from Earth because Adam and Eve were only created once, and the various implications of that he doesn't get into)
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