Context
The Gospel Hidden in Narnia
Aslan isn't a metaphor for Jesus. According to Lewis, he's what Jesus might look like in another world.
Almost everyone knows the basic connection: Aslan is . The lion dies and rises again. Narnia is a Christian story.
But C.S. Lewis was very specific about what he was doing, and it's way more interesting than a simple allegory.
Not Allegory — Supposition
Lewis was clear about the distinction. In an allegory, characters represent something else — Aslan would "stand for" Jesus the way a symbol on a map stands for a city. Lewis said nah.
Instead, he described his approach as "supposition": suppose there was a world like Narnia. Suppose it fell into corruption. What might the Son of God look like if he came to save THAT world?
The answer: a lion. Not because lions "represent" Christ, but because in a world of talking animals, the king of beasts would be the natural form for the King of Kings.
This is a huge distinction. Lewis wasn't encoding a message. He was imagining a reality.
The Deep Magic
The theological heart of Narnia is in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and it follows the gospel structure beat for beat:
The Fall. Edmund betrays his siblings and Aslan for Turkish Delight and the White Witch's promises. It's 3 — the original temptation on replay. The appeal to appetite, the promise of power, the immediate shame.
The Law. The Deep Magic — Narnia's equivalent of divine — demands that every traitor belongs to the Witch. There is a legit claim of against Edmund. The debt is real.
The Sacrifice. Aslan offers himself in Edmund's place. He goes to the Stone Table, gets mocked, shaved, and killed by the Witch. He doesn't fight back. He submits voluntarily to a death he doesn't deserve, to pay a debt he didn't owe.
This parallels suffering servant almost exactly: "He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth" ().
The Deeper Magic. But there's a law older and deeper than the Witch's claim — if an innocent victim dies willingly in place of a traitor, the Stone Table cracks and death itself starts to unravel.
This is the . Not just coming back to life, but destroying the power structure that made death necessary. said the same thing in — "Where, O death, is your sting?"
The Whole Series
The gospel pattern runs through all seven books:
The Magician's Nephew is creation — Aslan sings Narnia into existence, echoing 1. The Horse and His Boy is — God working behind the scenes in an ordinary life. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is sanctification — Eustace's dragon skin being painfully peeled away by Aslan mirrors the process of becoming who you're meant to be. The Last Battle is — the end of one world and the beginning of the real one.
Lewis embedded the entire biblical narrative across seven kids' books. Not as a code to be cracked, but as a story to be lived.
Why Story Matters
Lewis believed that story could get past the defenses that arguments couldn't. He wrote: "A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading."
The idea: when you encounter the gospel as an argument, you can build intellectual walls against it. But when you encounter it as a story — when you feel Aslan's sacrifice, when you grieve his death and celebrate his return — it gets past the defenses.
You don't analyze it. You experience it. And then you realize you've experienced something true.
The Bottom Line
Lewis didn't write Narnia to teach theology. He wrote it because the is the kind of story that works in any world — because it's the story the universe is built on.
Aslan's sacrifice hits you for the same reason the hits you: because substitutionary love — someone dying in your place, willingly, for a debt you actually owe — is the deepest truth there is. Lewis just showed it in a different light so you could see it fresh.
"He is not a tame lion. But he is good."