Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I feel like a traitor to the cause for expressing this: the Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the most disappointing movie I recall. The movie does less with more. I understood that Prince Caspian was not the best story for a movie, but I enjoyed the movie in the theater nonetheless and was excited when I could buy the DVD and watch it again. Moreover, I agreed with the writer who said that the most important thing about the PC movie was that it made it possible for VDT-the-movie. VDT is a story that cries out for a visual representation, an overloading of the senses with the mysteries of the sea quest and the heroes' movement toward the supernatural.

Unfortunately the VDT movie had none of this. Its makers exchanged the classic plot for cute movie story lines: a lost mother, a child stowaway and the martial mouse's tutelage and befriending of an unpleasant boy. What I expected was a visual feast of ingenious special effects imagining the sacramental; what I experienced was a sea with white flowers rather than a sea of white flowers, and a boundary to Aslan's country that would have excited me when I was a surfer -- a six-foot face that never closed -- but in no way represented the wonder expressed in C.S. Lewis's description.

Honestly, other than the fact that the movie is about C.S. Lewis's wonderful story, in many ways the most appealing of the Chronicles, there is nothing to commend this movie.

I love Silver Chair, but except for the characterization of Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, I have no anticipation of another Narnia movie. Unless, of course, Peter Jackson is enlisted.

The Gospels and the Church

In his Everlasting Man (1925), GK Chesterton gave expression to something that I have observed in my students, but have not until now had the words to express: the Church makes Jesus palatable (part II, chapter 2).

Often students take my Jesus and the Gospels course because they adore Jesus spiritually, but then find that the Gospels are a problem -- and the problem is canonized in the New Testament!

I have been troubled by this, thinking perhaps this is my fault, that I have veiled the allure of the man who saved the world. Since I am obligated to expose students to the Quest for the Historical Jesus, perhaps this ruins things for the student.

But I am not convinced. The naked Jesus of the Gospels is "a trouble" -- a far cry from the Jesus-is-just-alright world of my '70s youth. The Church clothes him with mercy, compassion and decency -- for better or worse.

Something Odd in the Truth

In Mere Christianity CS Lewis likens Theology and Physics: both are difficult because they are about reality. And reality is odd -- as is Christianity: both have those "queer twists" that one could not have anticipated. Lewis himself was anticipated here by GK Chesterton's chapter, "The Paradoxes of Christianity":

"It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything. It seems a sort of secret treason in the universe. An apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all. The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some simple astronomer into calling it a globe. A blade of grass is called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point; but it doesn't. Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable. It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment. From the grand curve of our earth it could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved. It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides, he should have a heart on both sides....

If our mathematician from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain. But if he guessed that the man's heart was in the right place, then I should call him something more than a mathematician. Now, this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. It is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth. It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit...the obvious deduction that he has two hearts. It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth." (Orthodoxy)