But at last Lucy noticed 2 other things. One was that the sky on the east side of the hill was a little less dark than it had been an hour ago.

The other was some tiny movement going on in the grass at her feet. At first she took no interest in this. What did it matter? Nothing mattered now! But at last she saw that whatever-it-was had begun to move up the upright stones of the Stone Table. And now whatever-they-were were moving about on Aslan's body. She peered closer. They were little grey things.

"Ugh!" said Susan from the other side of the Table. "How beastly! There are horrid little mice crawling over him. Go away, you little beasts." And she raised her hand to frighten them away.

"Wait!" said Lucy, who had been looking at them more closely still. "Can you see what they're doing?"

Both girls bent down & stared.

"I do believe -" said Susan. "But how queer! They're nibbling away at the cords!"

"That's what I thought," said Lucy. "I think they're friendly mice. Poor little things – they don't realize he's dead. They think it'll do some good untying him."

It was quite definitely lighter by now. Each of the girls noticed for the first time the white face of the other. They could see the mice nibbling away; dozens & dozens, even hundreds, of little field mice. And at last, one by one, the ropes were all gnawed through.

The sky in the east was whitish by now & the stars were getting fainter - all except one very big one low down on the eastern horizon. They felt colder than they had been all night. The mice crept away again.

The girls cleared away the remains of the gnawed ropes. Aslan looked more like himself without them. Every moment his dead face looked nobler, as the light grew & they could see it better. In the wood behind them a bird gave a chuckling sound. It had been so still for hours & hours that it startled them. Then another bird answered it. Soon there were birds singing all over the place. It was quite definitely early morning now, not late night.

"I'm so cold," said Lucy.

"So am I," said Susan. "Let's walk about a bit."

They walked to the eastern edge of the hill & looked down. The one big star had almost disappeared. The country all looked dark grey, but beyond, at the very end of the world, the sea showed pale. The sky began to turn red. They walked to ands fro more times than they could count between the dead Aslan & the eastern ridge, trying to keep warm; & oh, how tired their legs felt. Then at last, as they stood for a moment looking out towards they sea & Cair Paravel (which they could now just make out) the red turned to gold along the line where the sea & the sky met & very slowly up came the edge of the sun. At that moment they heard from behind them a loud noise - a great cracking, deafening noise as if a giant had broken a giant's plate.

"What's that?" said Lucy, clutching Susan's arm.

"I - I feel afraid to turn round," said Susan; "something awful is happening."

"They're doing something worse to Him," said Lucy. "Come on!" And she turned, pulling Susan round with her.

The rising of the sun had made everything look so different - all colours & shadows were changed that for a moment they didn't see the important thing. Then they did. The Stone Table was broken into 2 pieces by a great crack that ran down it from end to end; & there was no Aslan.

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried the 2 girls, rushing back to the Table.

"Oh, it's too bad," sobbed Lucy; "they might have left the body alone."

"Who's done it?" cried Susan. "What does it mean? Is it magic?"

"Yes!" said a great voice behind their backs. "It is more magic." They looked round. There, shining in the sunrise, larger than they had seen him before, shaking his mane (for it had apparently grown again) stood Aslan himself.

"Oh, Aslan!" cried both the children, staring up at him, almost as much frightened as they were glad.

"Aren't you dead then, dear Aslan?" said Lucy.

"Not now," said Aslan.

"You're not - not a - ?" asked Susan in a shaky voice. She couldn't bring herself to say the word ghost. Aslan stooped his golden head & licked her forehead. The warmth of his breath & a rich sort of smell that seemed to hang about his hair came all over her.

"Do I look it?" he said.

"Oh, you're real, you're real! Oh, Aslan!" cried Lucy, & both girls flung themselves upon him & covered him with kisses.

"But what does it all mean?" asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer.

"It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know: her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness & the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack & Death itself would start working backwards. And now-"

"Oh yes. Now?" said Lucy, jumping up & clapping her hands.

"Oh, children," said the Lion, "I feel my strength coming back to me. Oh, children, catch me if you can!" He stood for a second, his eyes very bright, his limbs quivering, lashing himself with his tail. Then he made a leap high over their heads & landed on the other side of the Table. Laughing, though she didn't know why, Lucy scrambled over it to reach him. Aslan leaped again. A mad chase began. Round & round the hill-top he led them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge & beautifully velveted paws & catching them again, & now stopping unexpectedly so that all 3 of them rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur & arms & legs. It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; & whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind. And the funny thing was that when all 3 finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty.

We must not be surprised if we find some nasty Christians.

We must, therefore, not be surprised if we find among the Christians some people who are still nasty. There is even, when you come to think it over, a reason why nasty people might be expected to turn to Christ in

He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive.

greater numbers than nice ones. That was what people objected to about Christ during His life on earth: He seemed to attract "such awful people." That is what people still object to, and always will. Do you not see why? Christ said '"Blessed are the poor" and "How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom," and no doubt He primarily meant the economically rich and economically poor. But do not His words also apply to another kind of riches and poverty? One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realise your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God. Now quite plainly, natural gifts carry with them a similar danger. If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. "Why drag God into it?" you may ask. A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them. You are quite likely to believe dial all this niceness is your own doing: and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness. Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered. In other words, it is hard for those who are "rich" in this sense to enter the Kingdom. 
      It is very different for the nasty people-the little, low, timid, warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people. If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double quick time, that they need help. It is Christ or nothing for them. It is taking up the cross and following-or else despair. They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them. They are (in one very real and terrible sense) the "poor": He blessed diem. They are the "awful set" he goes about with-and of course the Pharisees say still, as they said from the first, "If there were anything in Christianity those people would not be Christians." 
      There is either a warning or an encouragement here for every one of us. If you are a nice person-if virtue comes easily to you beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are really God's gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous. The Devil was an archangel once; his natural gifts were as far above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee. 
      But if you are a poor creature-poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels-saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion-nagged day in and day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends-do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that) he will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all-not least yourself: for you have learned your driving in a hard school. (Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last.) 

The Obstinate Toy Soldiers

The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God. We do not know-anyway, I do not know-how things would have worked if the human race had never rebelled against God and joined the enemy. Perhaps every man would have been "in Christ," would have shared the life of the Son of God, from the moment he was born. Perhaps the Bios or natural life would have been drawn up into the Zoe, the uncreated life, at once and as a matter of course. But that is guesswork. You and I are concerned with the way things work now. 

      And the present state of things is this. The two kinds of life are now not only different (they would always have been that) but actually opposed. The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual world, just as people who have been brought up to be dirty are afraid of a bath. And in a sense it is quite right It knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that 
      Did you ever think, when you were a child, what fun it would be if your toys could come to life? Well suppose you could really have brought them to life. Imagine turning a tin soldier into a real little man. It would involve turning the tin into flesh. And suppose the tin soldier did not like it He is not interested in flesh; all he sees is that the tin is being spoilt He thinks you are killing him. He will do everything he can to prevent you. He will not be made into a man if he can help it. 
      What you would have done about that tin soldier I do not know. But what God did about us was this. The Second Person in God, the Son, became human Himself: was born into the world as an actual man-a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular colour, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone. The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a Woman's body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab. 
      The result of this was that you now had one man who really was what all men were intended to be: one man in whom the created life, derived from his Mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the begotten life. The natural human creature in Him was taken up fully into the divine Son. Thus in one instance humanity had, so to speak, arrived: had passed into the life of Christ. And because the whole difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, "killed," He chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn-poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed-killed every day in a sense-the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point For the first time we saw a real man. One tin soldier-real tin, just like the rest-had come fully and splendidly alive. -- C S Lewis Mere Christianity

A Philosopher’s Journey of Faith

A Philosopher’s  Journey of Faith, from  William Lane Craig's book On Guard

As Jan and I were nearing the completion of my doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of Birmingham in England, our future path was again unclear to us. I had sent out a number of applications for teaching positions in philosophy at American universities but had received no bites. We didn’t know what to do or where to go.

We were sitting one evening at the supper table in our little house in Birmingham, when Jan suddenly said to me, “Well, if money were no object, what would you really like to do next?”

I laughed because I remembered how the Lord had used her question to guide us in the past. I had no trouble responding. “If money were no object, what I’d really like to do is go to Germany and study under Wolfhart Pannenberg.”

“Who’s he?”

“Oh, he’s this famous German theologian who’s defended the resurrection of Christ historically,”

I explained. “If I could study with him, I could develop a historical apologetic for the resurrection of Jesus.”

Well, that just lit a fire under her. The next day while I was away at the university, she slipped off to the library and began to research grants-in-aid for study at German universities. Most of the leads proved to be defunct or otherwise inapplicable to our situation. But she found two grants that were possibilities. You can imagine my surprise when she laid them out before me!

One was from a government agency called the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), which offered scholarships to study at German universities. Unfortunately, the grant amounts were small and not intended to cover all your expenses. The other was from a foundation called the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. This foundation was evidently an effort at Kulturpolitik (cultural politics) aimed at refurbishing Germany’s image in the postwar era. It provided very generous fellowships to bring foreign scientists and other scholars to do research for a year or two at German laboratories and universities.

Reading the literature from the Humboldt-Stiftung just made my mouth water. They would pay for four months of a German refresher course at the Goethe Institute for the scholar and his spouse prior to beginning research, they would help find housing, they would pay for visits to another university if your research required it, they would pay for conferences, they would send pocket money from time to time, they would send you on a cruise down the Rhine—it was unbelievable! They even permitted recipients to submit the results of their research as a doctoral dissertation toward a degree from the German university at which they were working.

The literature sent by the Humboldt-Stiftung made it evident that the vast majority of their fellows were natural scientists—physicists, chemists, biologists, and so on. But it did say that applicants in any field were welcome.

So we decided to apply in the field of theology and to propose as my research topic an examination of the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus!

We decided to go for the doctoral degree in theology at the same time.

We then began to pray morning and night that God would give us this fellowship. Sometimes I could believe God for such a thing; but then I would think of this panel of eighty German scientists in Bonn evaluating the applications and coming to this proposal on the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, and my heart would just sink!

It would take about nine months for the Humboldt-Stiftung to evaluate the applications, and in the meantime our lease was expiring, so we needed to move out of our house in Birmingham. So I said to Jan, “Honey, you’ve sacrificed a lot for me during my studies. Let’s do something that you’d like to do. What would you really like to do?”

She said, “I’ve always wanted to learn French. I had to drop my French class in college because I got sick, and I’ve always felt bad I didn’t get to learn French.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s go to France and enroll in a French language school!”

So we began to look into the possibilities. The obvious one was the Alliance Française, which is the official language school in France. But the far more interesting option was the Centre Missionnaire in Albertville, a Christian language school nestled in the French Alps for training foreign missionaries to French-speaking countries. They emphasized learning to really speak French, with as little foreign accent as possible, as well as to read and write it, along with all the biblical and theological vocabulary only a Christian school would provide.

So we wrote to the Centre Missionnaire, asking if we could study there.

To our dismay, they wrote back informing us that applicants have to be missionaries officially with a mission board and, moreover, the course would cost several thousand dollars. Well, we didn’t have that kind of money. We had spent just about all of the money given to us by the businessman to do our doctoral studies in Birmingham.

So I wrote back to the Centre Missionnaire explaining our financial situation. I also explained that while we weren’t officially missionaries, we did want to serve the Lord, and I included a letter of commendation from one of the elders at the Brethren church we were attending in Birmingham. Then I basically forgot about it.

Time passed, and none of my other efforts to find a job had materialized. We had shipped all of our belongings back to my parents’ home in Illinois. In one week we had to move out of our house in Birmingham, and we had nowhere to go.

I remember walking despondently out to the mailbox that day and finding there a letter from the Centre Missionnaire. I opened it halfheartedly and began to read. And then—my eyes suddenly grew wide, as I read the words: “It doesn’t really matter to us whether you are missionaries as long as you want to serve the Lord. And as for the money, you just pay what you can, and we’ll trust God for the rest.” Unbelievable!

Once again we felt as though God had just miraculously plucked us up and transported us to another country to do His will. We later learned that the Centre had actually turned down paying missionaries and accepted us instead. We went to France with a deep sense of divine commissioning and so threw ourselves into our language studies. It was unbelievably rigorous, with drills and constant repetition and not a few tears, but by the end of our six months I was preaching in French at our small church, and Jan had the joy of leading our French neighbors to faith in Christ.

Our French language training was to end in August, and as of July we still hadn’t heard a decision from the Humboldt-Stiftung. We were getting nervous. (Jan has since formulated a saying that aptly describes our lives:

(“The Lord is always almost late!”) Then one day we received a letter from the Humboldt-Stiftung. The only problem was: It was in German, and my rusty high school German wasn’t up to the task of figuring it out!

So we grabbed the letter and rushed into the village to a small bookstore, where we found a French-German dictionary. As we stood there slowly translating the letter into French, hoping against hope, we could scarcely contain our excitement. “We are pleased to inform you that you have been granted a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to study the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus under the direction of Professor Dr. Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich.” So for the next two years the German government paid me to study the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus! Incredible! Absolutely incredible!

Jan and I arrived in Germany on a cold January day to begin our language studies at the Goethe Institute in Göttingen, a small university town near the East German border. We had chosen Göttingen because “high German” is spoken by the ordinary people in that region, as opposed to a local dialect.

It’s amazing how much you can learn in four months when you’re immersed in the language. With my postdoctoral studies in Munich looming, we were supermotivated to learn German. We hired a university student named Heidi to help us with our pronunciation. After a couple of months we determined to speak only German with each other until 8:00 p.m., when we’d revert to English. It’s funny, but even when you know the meaning of the words, “Ich liebe dich” just doesn’t convey the same feeling as “I love you” to a native English speaker!

By the end of our four months I had finished the advanced class with the highest grade of “1,” and Jan, whose knowledge of German when we started didn’t extend beyond “eins, zwei, drei,” was able to converse freely with the shopkeepers and people in our town. One evening during dinner at the Goethe Institute she astonished me. There’s a German proverb, “Ohne Fleiss, kein Preis!” (“Without effort, no reward!”) So during the meal Jan asked the Turkish fellow next to her (in German) to pass the meat. But he showed her the empty serving dish and offered her the bowl of rice instead. To which she instantly retorted, “Danke, nein! Ohne Fleisch, kein Reis!” (“No thanks! Without meat, no rice!”) I about split! Here she was already punning in German!

I must confess that it had seemed a little nutty to spend nine months learning French just before going off to do postdoctoral studies in Germany. But the Lord’s providence is amazing. The first day I showed up at the theology department at the University of Munich to confer with Prof. Dr. Pannenberg, he took me into the departmental library and pulled three books off the shelf and said, “Why don’t you get started with these?” To my amazement, two of the three were in French! I thought to myself, Praise You, Lord! I could never have said to Pannenberg that I didn’t read French. That would have been equivalent to saying that I wasn’t qualified to do the research! God knew what He was doing.

Doing my doctorate in theology under Prof. Dr. Pannenberg was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. I even had to pass a Latin qualifying exam to get the degree, which necessitated my taking Latin in German! But by the end of our time in Munich I’d learned so much about the resurrection of Jesus that I was worlds away from where I’d been when we first came. As a Christian, I of course believed in Jesus’ resurrection, and I was familiar with popular apologetics for it, but I was quite surprised to discover as a result of my research how solid a historical case can be made for the resurrection. Three books came out of that research, one of which served as the dissertation for my second doctorate, this time in theology from the University of Munich.

Since that time I’ve had the opportunity to debate some of the world’s leading skeptical New Testament scholars, like John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Gerd Lüdemann, and Bart Ehrman, as well as best-selling popularizers like John Shelby Spong, on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection.

In all objectivity, I have to say I’ve been shocked at how impotent these eminent scholars are when it comes to refuting the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. (You can read or listen to these debates yourself and form your own opinion—just go to www.reasonablefaith.org.)

Very often, and I mean, very often, it will be philosophical considerations, not historical considerations, that lie at the root of their skepticism. But, of course, these men aren’t trained in philosophy and so make amateurish blunders which a trained philosopher can easily spot. I’m so thankful that the Lord in His providence led us first to do doctoral work in philosophy before turning to a study of Jesus’ resurrection, for it is really philosophy and not history that undergirds the skepticism of radical critics.