The Last Battle vs. Other Works of "Apocalyptic Fiction"

Sven-El

Sven-El

Well-known member
When I was a child I was scared to death to hear about the end of the world. You see, up untill third grade the subject had not been mentioned in the church my family attended. Then we we changed churches and one month the pastor did a series on the end of the age, and the Olivet Discourse. Something about it to me as a child, was scary. Yes, I knew I'd go to Heaven and all, but I guess the imagery in the prophecies was almost too much to process, especially when I was not only unfamiliar with it, but also had a friend who was older then me by a few years who not only focusedo n the negative aspects, but gave me very bad information on the end times such as:
. we had to start building a fully-functioning USS Enterprise from Star Trek before the Apocolypse came.
. the Antichrist would most definitly be a direct clone of Hitler...or Bruce Wayne AKA Batman.
. Batman's Bat-Symbol and Superman's S-Sheild and any other logo a super hero wore was actually the mark of the devil.
.And showed me a scary end times video where there are metorites hitting the ground and a mother abandons her baby to get to saftey and the kid dies in the middle of the sidewalk as a burning metorite hits it.

Perhaps it's worth mentioning that this is also some one who, told me one time when we were playing in my room when the air vent fell from my ceiling that Satan was coming in, and I ran from my room screaming like the kid in Homa Alone. I couldn't sleep for a month, but that's another story. Needless to say, I learned the hard way as a child to consider the source. As such I was scared to read any end-times fiction untill I was in high school.


However there was one book that stood out. CS Lewis' The Last Battle. What is it about this story that some how, despite the fact it is an "apocolyptic novel" makes it easier for a child to digest the concepts?

One for me that I certainly saw looking back on my first adventure in Narnia is just the fact that Narnia is a land rich in imagery and symbolism. Even a person with the most literal view of scriptures will agree that prophecies do use a lot of symbolic langauge in order to allow them to speak to everyone. The two of them just mesh toegther so well. Instead of feeling like a Michael Bay movie as is the case in other Christian end-times fiction when stars fall to the sky, the image Lewis gave is much more poetic and almost beautiful. I mean he says right there in black and white that "Aslan is calling the stars home". That's beautiful. It doesn't jar you but makes you think.

Then on a personal level, my mom read the Narnia books to me, out loud as bed time stories. This meant I was safe and sound, tucked in my bed as she lovingly took time out of her busy day to read to me and honestly answer questions I may have had. And she did it all with very excellent ( albiet stage)British accent ( and didn't fill my head with nonesense about Batman and Hitler being the Anti-Christ). Something about that setting, and the accent my mom used, is just comforting when dealing with that story.

Does any one else have some insights into this? Now please note, this is not meant to be an end-times debate. I just couldn't figure out a better title for this thread.
 
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That's so sweet about your mom's reading you the stories.

Part of what softens the TLB is that Aslan is right there, and you know that despite Narnia's world ending, he goes on, and whatever comes then will be beautiful because he is in it. At least, this is how I see it.

Sometimes I think churches hit the end times too hard and scare kids -- there was this film popular in churches when I was a kid myself, I think it was ... shoot, can't remember the name, but it portrayed the rapture and tribulation and made at least one friend of mine so terrified that he would be left behind, he wouldn't even leave his mom's side for 6 months, and if they had to be separated, he was terrified until she came back. Crikey.
 
We watched the Left Behind film when I was about 7 and I was terrified and couldn't sleep thinking Jesus was going to take my Mom and Dad, and leave just clothes behind. Silly childhood misunderstanding :D
 
Thanks, Inky. Actually the way my mom read to me not only fostered my own love of reading but when it came to reading out loud in class I did it with a lot of spirit, enthusaism, character inflection and when necissary an accent.

Oh, and coudl the film series have been the "Theif in the Night"?

I think also for me as a reader, the fact that I had followed Peter, Edmund, Lucy, Eusatce, Jill, Diggory and Polly up to that point made me able to accept it. Having them "die" and Narnia end, it reminded me that. well as Gandalf tells Pippin in the return of the King movie, "No, death is not the end. Death is just one part of the journey. One we all must take .The grey rain curtain of this world draws back and then you see it. ( sic)White shores and green fields beneath and ever swift sunrise." In fact Lewis gives us thats ame picture at the end when he our old friend Mr. Tumnus tells us that in Aslan's kingdom "Nothing good is every destroyed." And later Lewis tells us that "all their adventrues had been but the title page of the great Story which none has ever read."

It's so amazing that after loosing their parents, watching so many of their friends die in WWI ( and nearly dying themselves) and even seeing some students never return durring WWII, and nearly seeing the city of London nearly laid to ruins durring the air raids that both Lewis and Tokien ( as the quote from Gandalf actually came from Tolkien in the end of the ROTK book as he describes Frodo sailing away to the Undying Lands) could give us such a beautiful and positive picture of things to come.
 
Yes, Thief in the Night! Hoo-ha, what a ghastly film, as was its sequel, whatever that was.

I think it is wonderful that JRRT and CSL could give us such real and such hopeful portrayals of life to come -- just as CSL said the fantasy stories of George McDonald spoke to him of worlds beyond this one, they're works do the same. Good point!
 
As a child when I was unnerved by tales of apocalypse and the Enemy (does anyone remember The Late Great Planet Earth?), I John 4:4b is one verse that really helped me:

"Greater is He who is within you than he that is in the world."
 
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You kidding? back in High School I read the Late Great Planet Earth ( though I had to laugh when the author pointed out that the world was suposed to end sometime around 1988... this was Fall of 1999....oops.)

I do sometiems feel that too often the Return of Christ is treated, at least when it comes to children as something to be feared and dreaded. In many ways Christ comes off as a sort of "boogey-man" figure when its' given to kids straight up with all the fire and brim-stone. In some ways while the truth isn't watetred down, when it coems to teh Last Battle, as everyones favorite nanny, Mary Poppins sang, "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." ( lets bare in mind in that context medicine was horrible nasty tasting stuff as they didn't have the kids flavors, like the Grape Dymatap.) So to is it with difficult subejcts like death, dying and the end of the world.
 
I know this is not a thread to discuss end-times theory, but I think evangelicals have made up a terrifying scenario based on semi-literal readings of Revelation and Daniel, and they preach it as a fact -- that whole rapture thing where your parents could disappear while you're left alone in thunder dome and either you deny Christ and go to hell for eternity or you starve, get tortured and beheaded ... I don't think the Bible spells all that out so clearly, and I think it does scare kids. :( As Linda suggests, it's better to focus on Christ's power to save, and I would say, here and now, rather than scaring kids with a lot of end-times speculation that doesn't add to their joy in Jesus here and now. TLB was scary, but it showed overall that Aslan was in control, and what was good in Narnia didn't disappear, but remained forever, better than it was.
 
I often have this odd fear of the end times... but I think the only thing I can do is have faith that whatever happens, whenever, Jesus will be with us and he will be in absolute control.

Notice there wasn't a "rapture" in The Last Battle. All the main characters die (though we don't always realize it), yet there's not any... sadness. Like, we feel sad when Narnia is destroyed, but it's replaced by this enormous joy in a matter of minutes. The characters are still alive and well, in a different place!

No matter what pain, suffering, and heartache we may feel in life (end times or no), there is the hope - no, the knowledge - of a future that makes it all worth it. The Last Battle really showed that to me for the first time, though I wouldn't have put it quite that way.
 
Though, then again, it may also be a theological matter for Lewis in not using a rapture. He was an Anglican. Would any one know what the Angelican church's stance on the rapture may be?

Lewis also didn't get into a whole mark of the beast thing. That when it came to end times chatter still makes me uncomfortable when it comes to end times chatter as I have a severe hatred for needles. ( As a child I was in and out of doctors offices being tested for things like MS and MDA due to poor fine and gross motor skills and difficulties walking. This meant they were drawing blood not from my finer, but from my elbows. I get queezy when I even walk by a tattoo parlor for that very reason.) Come to think of it, I doubt any kid really likes needles.
 
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True, but it's usually insatleld with a needle. Either way makes me queezy.

But yes, rabbit trail... as long as it's not the Killer Rabbit from Monty Python.
 
The Anglican Church does not, and has not, believed in the Rapture. So presumably Lewis didn't either. (Although I think we go too far if we assume that all of Lewis's theological beliefs were transcribed word-for-word into Narnia.)
 
The end of this world is like the end of childhood. You exchange one form of existance for another. And like Clara in The Nutcracker not wanting to be a little girl forever...she wanted to dance in the ballet and meet a young man, fall in love and be a mother...it won't be a sad parting. It will, however, be great to have wonderful memories to look back upon.
 
Honestly? Sometimes I can't wait for the world to end. Between genocides and wars, racism and social injustice, environmental pollution and natural disasters... this world is pretty horrible. I can't turn on Sky News without seeing white-clothed figures in some forest area, scouring for body parts of some missing child or the other. I won't be sad to see it go.
 
Yet, Moonspinner, look at the ruins of Ancient Greece, how we marvel at the crumbling Parthenon because we can still glimpse hints of its creator's skill. The same thing is true of our world. Even in ruins it has beauty. We and we alone have defaced it and filled it with sin. If anyone has a right to complain about the state of things, it certainly is not us.

Look at Psalms...where David who came along after the fall of man still says "When I look on the work of Thy hands, I wonder what is man that Thou art mindful of him?" To hate this world is to break your Daddy's best china plate and then say, "It's no great loss. Who wants a plate that's in all those jaggy little pieces?" No, there is beauty in this world. We should stop our evildoing and pause to admire the flower before we tramp it into the mud.
 
I don't think anyone should hate the world... but can you really blame me or anyone else for being tired of it? Yes, there is beauty in the ruins... but in the end, it's still a ruin. It's not the same as breaking a plate or trampling the flower and condemning it... it's more like mourning that the plate is broken and cannot be fixed. There's never going to be a "paradise on earth" for any of us and it's not unnatural to mourn that.

I don't see the end of this world as the end of childhood: I see it as the end of a very long, very bad dream.
 
To long to be united with Christ I can understand, for that's my dream too.

But too long for the end of the world smacks of bitterness to me ... as if you're saying, "This world was a bad idea and good riddance!"

Surely there is joy in this world which deserves it's time to be ...?
 
For some childhood is a bad dream... but I find it incredible that in all the horrors, and darkness of our world, it's original beauty shines through. It is getting harder to find in both people and nature, but it is still there, and I believe that one day, at the end, beauty will rise from these ashes, born anew.
 
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