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Aslan as a FEMALE in the New Narnia Movies?
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apparently an offer has been made to Merill Streep to portray Alan as in the Christ figure in the Narnia stories in an upcoming Chronicles of Narnia movie and really movies eight movies uh and there are reports that aan will be a female character so we'll see how this unfolds nothing is said in stone as of my recording of this but this is not looking good and I think thinking about this can help us think about our culture right now so let's do two things in this video real quick laying out the facts what do we know at this point and and second of all why is why would this be a disastrous idea and why should we care about this I actually think this is not a small matter something like this it reflects something of the times so this is worth thinking about so what do we know uh Netflix has acquired the rights to produce a new Narnia series uh I think the first movie will come out around late 2026 sometime in the Thanksgiving I think Thanksgiving weekend in the theaters it's kind of an interesting release because it'll be a kind of a streaming theatrical hybrid I'm not aware that there's been a movie quite like this where you have four weeks in the theaters only in IMAX and then it'll come to Netflix uh sometime in December um it's a reboot it's not a sequel to the previous Disney films if you remember those from 2005 to 2010 first three and they're planning on doing eight of them the first two of which will be directed by Greta Gerwig she's the same person who directed the Barbie movie uh apparently they're going to start with the Magician's Nephew first this is another whole thing you know do you go with the chronology or the publication order I'm very partial I love the Narnia books you'll you'll get the sense of that uh watching this video I think they're great stories and I think it's best to go in the order of publication starting with the line the Witch and the Wardrobe but that's kind of a separate issue that's not as serious as what we're talking about here there's also talk of Daniel Craig playing Uncle Andrew if you remember that character from the book The Magician's Nephew this has really got my wires crossed because when I think of Daniel Craig I think of him playing James Bond so these are Uncle Andrew and James Bond are about as different as you can imagine uh here's a picture of Uncle Andrew in one of the books but you know that's just a challenge for Daniel Craig I think uh you can go from a young James Bond type person to an older eccentric character if you're a good enough actor so that's not the issue the issue with this that I am having is the female asant and I actually think that that's not a small matter and it invites some reflection about what is going on in our culture where this kind of thing can happen and let me just start by saying in terms of the concern here it's not because I'm a snob about books you know there are some people where you're a fan of the books and granted I love the Narnia books but you're a fan of the books to the point where nothing would satisfy you no matter any kind of movie would make you upset that's not really where I'm coming from to give some comparison I loved the 2005 movie I thought it was pretty good that they had Liam niss do the voice of Alan in that movie I thought that that was a great choice and while it's always hard to make a book into a movie and and to capture the spirit of it and you can criticize various things I never got the impression in that movie that there was an agenda being forced into the story I felt the same way about the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy I thought they did a great job you can critique various aspects of it you know you can say they took too much creative license here and there and that kind of thing I'm not saying it's perfect but I didn't get the sense from those movies that they were there was a kind of subversive agenda being forced into the narrative in fact Peter Jackson talked about this in interviews and he said we made a promise to ourselves at the beginning of the process that we weren't going to put out any of our own politics our own messages or our own themes into these movies in a way we were trying to make these films for him that's tolken not for ourselves I think that's the honorable way to treat any sort of C cultural artifact like uh the Narnia books or the Lord of the Rings books or or anything if you have the responsibility of taking A Book Like The Chronicles of Narnia books or Lord of the Rings and putting them into any kind of production whether it's through film or anything else that is a sacred privilege it's kind of a form of inherited wealth in a way you know you're getting to benefit from the incredible genius that went into the original production and it's very easy to misuse the power that you've been in trusted with you know if you're borrowing your neighbor Lamborghini um you have a responsibility to not go out joy riding recklessly because it's a Lamborghini right well when we have the sacred privilege of taking something like the Narnia stories and turning them into a movie we need to take that very seriously and a female Alan is uh a kind of subversive way to deal with it just think how CS Lewis would feel about this let's explain a little bit why and let me say the concern here is not with Merill stre herself she's a great actress okay did you know Merl stre holds the record for the most nominations for winning an Oscar she has 21 nominations incredible acting career she's an amazing actress so God L her it's not with her that the concern here it's the concern with changing the biological sex of aan which if I understand it from reading a bunch of websites today that's the plan again we're very early on we'll see how it unfolds from here I'm recording this April 2nd 2025 but it sounds like they're going to make aan female now one of the simplest ways to State the concern is just to say look aan is a allegorical representation of Jesus Christ Jesus Christ was a man so don't make the allegorical representation of a man female and because the masculinity of Christ is a very serious matter those of us who are followers of Jesus believe that the Eternal Son of God chose to be incarnate in that particular way and we don't want to mess with that but there's maybe even a deeper way to put this is this feeling of the misuse of a particular cultural item in this case The Chronicles of Narnia to push an agenda uh unlike what you what I mentioned with the earlier Narnia story at least the original movie and the Lord of the Rings movies and let me say that my motive in talking about this is not just to stir people up into anger and reactionism um because we get enough of that but it's just to encourage reflection about our culture right now because for those of us who are followers of Jesus we're often quick to criticize the surrounding culture but we have to actually be Discerning to see it it actually takes a lot of wisdom to look around and see what is happening and how eccentric the modern West is remember that culture is not the landscape that we see it's the glasses we see through we often don't notice how much the culture has gotten into US it has to do with how we see things less what we see and what we're consciously aware of and the fact is that modern Western culture has become different in various ways from every other culture in human history and that those differences are actually growing and expanding with time and we need to be aware of this there are certain things that were sort of taken for granted everywhere whether you're in South America or Asia whether you're in 1000 BC or 1000 ad certain things that are relatively static and then the modern West is deviating from one of them is secularization there's some materialist people in the ancient world there's some people who don't believe in the gods but societies as a whole were always religious another difference is the tendency to reduce morality to harm Jonathan height talks about this in his book The Righteous Mind which is an amazing and helpful book everybody should read it and he's saying most cultures have had a bigger set of intuitions that inform our sense of morality we've really reduced it down it's very thin in the modern West and another is our more fluid and libertine views about sexuality and gender I'll just say you know at a basic street level when I'm trying to disciple young people just the way this plays out in pastoral Ministry one of the basic issues that comes up again and again is just I I to try to put it at its at its nerve center we've lost our sense of sexuality as a sacred and holy gift from the Creator God that's the simplest way I can put it so if we were to say as followers of Jesus we believe in such a thing called sin so what is sin well one way to get at the essence of sin is reversing the categories of Creator and creat and creature so uh a Christian world viw says basically there's a Creator and so he calls the shots you know he he made us and so he determines how ought to live and happiness and flourishing comes when you follow the way he set things up to go and sin is saying no we know better than the Creator now if there is any way where you see like that just playing out in such a tangible destructive way uh any area where you see that playing out it would be I think in in this area and I think the tendency to say no we want to determine what sexuality is rather than submit to to how the Creator designed it I think it's actually a huge cause of some of the issues we have with depression and anxiety in our culture and I think if we those of you who pray with me for the rech christianization of the West we have to recognize this is an area where we're going to have to do a lot of cultural rebuilding just like the early church did in the in the Roman Empire sexuality had been cheapened pornography was everywhere there was horrific exploitation uh and Christianity changed a lot of that for the good even though it wasn't perfect we can learn a lot from the early church because we've got some rebuilding to do in our society in this area as well so that's kind of the broader cultural backdrop but on the specific issue of making Alan female why is this so problematic the concern here is that masculinity and femininity have a robust and particular and definite meaning and you can't just swap them in and out for for each other most cultures throughout all of human history have had more of a sense of that uh and it's being increasingly forgotten in the modern West and this isn't a all matter so one simple way to point this out and this will be a short video right on the nose just to draw attention to this is to just look at CS Lewis himself you know let's honor like like Peter Jackson said they wanted to honor tolken with their creation I wish we would do that with with Narnia movies by the standards of today Lewis would be viewed as an arch traditionalist on questions of sexuality and gender and marriage even of course as some people would view him as a liberal for other things he believed in uh I've talked about that elsewhere but nonetheless you can read his article priestesses in the church to see some of his views on the meaning of masculinity and femininity but I think one clear way to put it and I want to read you this amazing quote and it comes from the ransom Trilogy and this is in particular from paralandra the middle book this is this Trilogy of adult fiction that he wrote uh very different from Narnia but one of the themes in them is gender especially in the third book That Hideous Strength I have an article written about this where I talk all about this it's online you can read it if you want but I want to talk about paralandra here here's this here's the quote this is uh just hang with me and read this quote for the last bit of this video this it's the quote itself you know that's the one thing that's hard about quoting CS Lewis is there's almost nothing to say because he's so clear himself this is happening where the main character named Ransom sees two uh Angels basically one of them is the angel of Mars the other is the angel of Venus and he notices that one is masculine and one is feminine now right there the thought of a masculine Ang or a feminine angel that already gets you thinking that already makes you wonder well what does that mean exactly you know here's what he writes what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine what is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon depending on the form of the word still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them the real process is the reverse gender is a reality a more fundamental reality than sex sex is in fact merely the organic adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created things female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender there are many others and masculine and feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless masculine is not attenuated male nor feminine attenuated female on the contrary the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine their reproductive functions their differences in strength and size partly exhibit but partly also confuse and misrepresent the real polarity this this is something that without commenting on at Great length I would just love to encourage people to think about this is one of those things you know reading the past even going back now 75 years it's been 75 years since the first Narnia book was published if you can believe that 75 years but even just going back you know to a couple Generations ago to CS Lewis it it gives us perspective on the current moment uh so that we can understand a little bit of just how eccentric some things are going and Lewis's basic Point here is that masculine and feminine are greater categories that lie at the heart of reality itself and their reflection in biology is just one instantiation of that deeper reality now for a fuller picture of that read That Hideous Strength where that's actually a motif of the whole book people often accuse Lewis of being a sexist for his views on these things here's a funny anecdote about that to finish off one of the early reviewers of his book till we have faces another one of my favorites of his it's the red book right over there right there if you can see that red book um the reviewer didn't yet know who the author was now this reviewer had previously criticized CS Lewis of male chauvinism and yet he didn't know that Lewis wrote this book this book is written from the point of view of a woman and so the reviewer insisted the author of this book must be a woman because no male author could ever have possibly understood the world from a woman's point of view so well it's kind of funny to think that uh if only he had know and that was actually CS Lewis we should have some humility in seeing what we can learn from someone like CS Lewis on these matters and pre-modern voices as well we've got a lot of cultural rebuilding to do uh one of the things that we need is cultural humility the insights of the modern West that can feel so natural to us we have to have some mechanism of getting perspective on them and reading church history reading other broader history even reading people from 100 years ago even reading people like C Le us from a few Generations ago can give a lot of perspective as we're doing the work of cultural rebuilding I would say there are two things we can say the first is we need to tell people how much Jesus loves them that he will forgive them what for everything they've ever done they need to feel the love of Christ from us but secondly and with that we need to teach them what it means to be a human being and then if people come to know Jesus what it means to be a Christian and that means teaching in this area about gender and sexuality and we're going to have to have courage to stand against the pressures um even as we do so without anger and ranker but nonetheless steadfastly stand against the pressures and hold out a Christian Vision which is what leads to flourishing and joy forever more uh if you're interested in a good study study point a good starting point to study I would say just start with Ephesians 5 and just give some consideration read some church history voices on that text and and give some consideration to why it is that marriage portrays the gospel the relationship between marriage between one man and one woman and the gospel the love of Jesus for his bride study that that's a great starting point all right one final thing this is kind of selfish to mention but I have built speaking of Narnia things and trying to Steward it well I have built a card game based upon the Narnia Universe I know you thought I was a nerd already now you see just how much of a nerd I am uh it's a customizable card game uh so they have these for like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and other universes like like this I built one for Narnia but I I've been sitting on it for like 12 years I have no idea what to do with it I does anybody out there know a gaming company or what would be the next point of contact for if I wanted to try to share this with others I have no idea what to do with it I built it and I don't know what to do so I thought I mentioned that leave me a a comment if you have any suggestions on that and in all these other things uh let's be mindful of the world around us and not angry not reactionary but nonetheless Discerning and then we want to bring Jesus and hope to people in the midst of it thanks for watching everybody
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