Narnia, Evangelicals & Catholics

I mentioned in the comments in a recent post the observations some are making these days about how some Catholics are starting to look like evangelicals, and some evangelicals like Catholics. Andrew Greeley expresses a similar thought in a discussion of Narnia in today's Chicago Sun Times:

it seems to me that the evangelicals slip dangerously close to Catholic idolatry when they embrace a wondrous allegory as a summary of the biblical story. Jesus is not and never was a lion like Aslan in the film. To interpret him as a lion is to go light years beyond literal, word-for-word inerrancy. The evangelical enthusiasm about the sufferings of Jesus in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" put them one step away, it seemed to me, from importing crucifixes and Stations of the Cross into their churches. I'm afraid that their enthusiasm for both films shows just how seductive the Catholic temptation is. We delight in pictures and stories and allegories and symbols and signs because they appeal to the whole human person and not just to the rigid, rational mind.

We are a church designed for the media age with its deluge of pictures and stories -- though we usually don't know what to do with the opportunity.

There are certainly risks in this Catholic imagination, superstition and idolatry among others -- though it does make the world a warmer and a more human place.

Gibson's imagination is certainly Catholic, though perhaps with a certain masochistic twist. In his retelling of the Gospel in allegorical form, C.S. Lewis goes back to the miracle and morality plays of the Middle Ages, in a sense as if the Reformation never happened.

However, I think someone should warn the evangelicals that they are playing with, one should excuse the expression, fire. They are drifting into an imaginative world where the Whore of Babylon lives and dominates. They had better beware. They are sliding towards oblivion on the day of the Rapture.

On the other hand, many Catholics ashamed of their imaginative heritage may be drifting in the opposite direction.

Hat tip to Amy Welborn.

Read the rest here.