Today’s guest post was written by Ryan Pemberton, the author of the Walking with C. S. Lewis companion guide.

The wardrobe was foreign to me. As was the image of a faun carrying parcels under a lamppost in the snow, and the golden-maned lion, Aslan. All of those characters and features so central to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe were lost on me when I first read C. S. Lewis. I hadn’t grown up reading The Chronicles of Narnia, unlike so many friends. At 19, my first interaction with C. S. Lewis came in the form of Mere Christianity, a compilation of Lewis’s broadcast talks on Christianity delivered over BBC radio during World War II.
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This post is adapted from the transcript of Dr. Mike Licona’s Mobile Ed course Philosophy of History (CS151).

Toward the end of my graduate work, I started to have questions about my faith. It wasn’t because I’d heard some arguments against Christianity. To be honest with you, at that point I wasn’t even exposed to too many folks who weren’t Christians.

But I wondered, “How do I really know that Christianity is true?” I had been brought up in a Christian family, in a nation that is pretty much Christian, at least by name, and I had only really been exposed to the Christian worldview. I had heard about other worldviews like Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and atheism, but I really just didn’t know too much about them.

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When we think about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we often do so with an image or a set of biblical passages and categories in mind. Much like the score in a movie, those categories help us make sense of Jesus’ death. For that is what doctrine is about—helping us make sense of and understand who God is and what he has done for us, that we might better worship and serve our God.

But let’s think about that image a little more carefully—the image of a film score. Let’s say that you turn on the TV, and find yourself in the middle of a movie, but the sound is muted. Before you is a green valley, with a stand of trees in the background. What is the movie about? If the score is light and airy, a couple might soon stroll into the scene of a romantic comedy. If the score is the driving, intense music of Steve Jablonsky, the Autobots and Decepticons of Michael Bay’s Transformers may soon battle across the valley. The music we hear as we watch a scene dramatically changes our expectations, and how we perceive what is going on.

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Some people will never tire of spreading a transparency of the text of Revelation over today’s newspaper to look for coincidental correlations, or of gazing into it as though it were some window into an as-yet-future (or in-progress) “seven last years,” attempting to “predict” how those events will play out in our world. This post is not for them.

It is for those who are tired of playing games with Revelation; who are ready to approach it in a new way – as Scripture – and to seek out its word to us in line with best practices in listening to the rest of Scripture. Because Scripture ought to be considered first and foremost as a word to those for whom it was written, from the Lord to give them much-needed guidance. I have found this approach lends itself far better to biblical preaching and to the difficult task of discerning the challenges facing Christians in their settings worldwide.

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