Zadok the Roman found for us this previously unknown letter of C.S. Lewis' where he makes the Aslan-Christ connection explicit. It's interesting if you want to understand what Lewis thought his project was, but I must say I find the discussion of whether the forthcoming movie is or is not explicitly Christian a bit tiresome. Call me crazy, but I don't think it ultimately matters what an author intended --you have to respond to what's actually on the page, which may or may not be what the author wanted.
The mysterious and wonderful thing about art is precisely the interplay between the artist's intent and inspiration and that of his audience. The fact that people can read The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe and utterly miss its Christian theme is testament to its greatness. When you write a gob-smackingly obvious allegory, that's called "propaganda," and may serve a limited didactic purpose, but it won't stand the test of time.
Somewhere this afternoon I was reading a story that mildly disapproved of the actors in Narnia because they didn't seem to want to play up the Christianity of the film in an interview. I can't find that offensive. They want their movie to stand as a great film, not to be pegged before anyone has even seen it as a sugary little allegory that only pious Christians could be interested in.
We already have a cultural problem in the sense that christophobia rules and most people in the industry can't take a film like the Passion and understand its brilliance qua film because they can't get past the Christian theme (with notable exceptions; Quentin Tarantino, a member of the academy, loudly voted for it as best film and Gibson as best director). But it's almost more frustrating to me that Christians seem determined to kill good art that happens also to be Christian by confining it to the same religious ghetto they claim they want to break out of. I think there is little of less interest than so called "Christian art," if what we mean by that is art that self-consciously claims to be Christian first and of any artistic merit second. If Christian art is to be worth anything, it has to be art, not propaganda.
