Truth Unites - A Female Aslan?!?

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Gavin Ortlund discusses recent plans plans to make Aslan a female character in Netflix's new Narnia series. Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Apparently, an offer has been made to Meryl Streep to portray Aslan, as in the Christ figure in the Narnia stories, in an upcoming Chronicles of Narnia movie and really movies, eight movies, and there are reports that Aslan will be a female character. So we'll see how this unfolds. Nothing is set 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 then, And then 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? Netflix has acquired the rights to produce a new Narnia series.

I think the first movie will come out around late 2006, 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 sometime in December. 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. 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 get a sense of that 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 in 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. 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 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 Aslan. And I actually think that that's not a small matter. 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. They had Liam Neeson do the voice of Aslan in that movie. I thought that I was a great choice. And while it's always hard to make a book into a movie 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 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 Tolkien, not for ourselves. I think that's the honorable way to treat any sort of cultural artifact like the Narnia books or the Lord of the Rings books 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 entrusted with. You know, if you're borrowing your neighbor's Lamborghini, you have a responsibility to not go out joyriding 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, Aslan, is a kind of subversive way to deal with it. Just think how C.S. Lewis would feel about this. Let's explain a little bit why. And let me say the concern here is not with Merrill Str. Streep herself. She's a great actress. Did you know Merrill Streep 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 bless her. It's not with her that the concern here. It's the concern with changing the biological sex of Aslan, 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 Aslan female. Now, one of the the simplest ways to state the concern is just to say, look, Aslan is an 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. Unlike 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 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 critical.

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's certain things that were sort of taken for granted everywhere, whether you're in South America or Asia,

whether you're in 1,000 BC or 1,000 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 Haidt 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, to try to put it 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 creature. So a Christian worldview says, basically there's a creator, and so he calls the shots. You know, he made us, and so he determines how we 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, any area where you see that playing out, it would be, I think, in this area. And I think the tendency to say, no, we want to determine what sexuality is rather than submit 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 re-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 Roman Empire, sexuality had been cheapened, pornography was everywhere. There was

horrific exploitation. 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 as-land 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 each other. Most cultures throughout all of human history have had more of a sense of that, and it's being increasingly forgotten in the modern West, and this isn't a small 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 C.S. Lewis, himself. You know, let's honor, like Peter Jackson said, they wanted to honor Tolkien with their creation. I wish we would do that 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. 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

Perilandra, the middle book. This is this trilogy of adult fiction that he wrote, 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 don't talk about Perilandra here. Here's the quote. This is, 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 C.S. 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 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 angel 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. And this is something that, without commenting on a 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, a couple generations ago to C.S. Lewis, it gives us

perspective on the current moment 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.

The reviewer didn't yet know who the author was. Now, this reviewer had previously criticized C.S. 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 if only he had known that was actually C.S. Lewis. We should have some humility in seeing what we can learn from someone like C.S. Lewis on these matters and pre-modern voices as well. We've got a lot of cultural rebuilding to do. 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.S. Lewis 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 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, even as we do so without anger and rancor, but nonetheless, steadfastly stand against the pressures and hold out a Christian vision, which is what leads to flourishing and joy forevermore. If you're interested in a good study point, 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 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. And now you see just how much of a nerd I am. It's a customizable card game. So they have these for like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and other universes like this. I built one for Narnia, but I've been sitting on it for like 12 years. I have no idea what to do with it. 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 comment if you have any suggestions on that. And in all these other things, 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.