Narnia 7 - The Last Battle Order Printed Copy

Author: C. S. Lewis
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About the Book

"The Last Battle" is the final novel in C.S. Lewis's beloved Chronicles of Narnia series. The story follows the last days of Narnia as it faces an epic battle between good and evil, bringing together familiar characters from the series in a climactic showdown. Aslan, the great lion and creator of Narnia, plays a central role in the ultimate fate of the land as the characters are forced to confront their beliefs and values in the face of the end of their world. Ultimately, the novel explores themes of faith, redemption, and the enduring power of love in the face of darkness.

John A. Broadus

John Broadus, Southern’s second president, was born on January 24, 1827 in Culpeper County, Virginia. After undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Virginia, he joined the university’s faculty as an assistant professor of classics. There, he displayed unusual facility in his post. He served simultaneously as pastor of the Charlottesville Baptist Church. In this period, Broadus won the heart of Maria Harrison, daughter of renowned classics professor Gessner Harrison. Married on November 18, 1850, the Broaduses had three daughters (Eliza, Annie, and Maria) together before Maria passed away on October 21, 1857 at twenty-six years of age. On January 4, 1859, Broadus married Charlotte Eleanor Sinclair, who gave birth to several additional children. The 1858 Education Convention elected Broadus to the seminary’s first faculty. Broadus declined the position because he had close ties to school and family in Charlottesville. For months, Boyce and Manly doggedly urged him to reconsider. After much thought, and not a little anguish, Broadus accepted. From the time he began teaching, Broadus showed a lifelong affection for instructing and mentoring students. Prior to the seminary’s closing in the Civil War period, Broadus drew a single student to his homiletics class. Rather than canceling the class, Broadus lectured to his lone pupil week after week, honing the content that later became the book The Preparation and Delivery of Sermons. The text’s durability was remarkable. Over half a century later, several seminaries used it in homiletics classes. When Southern suspended courses in 1862, Broadus served as a chaplain to Confederate soldiers. He returned to Southern at the war’s end and resumed his teaching post. His talents gained renown. Over Broadus’s career, the University of Chicago, Vassar University, Brown University, Georgetown College, and Crozer Theological Seminary each wooed the professor as a potential president. Large and wealthy churches invited him to be their pastor. Broadus declined these overtures. The greatest need and his greatest influence were at the seminary he loved. In 1889 trustees elected Broadus president of the seminary to succeed Boyce. He guided the school for six peaceful years. Broadus contributed much to the fields in which he taught. In addition to his landmark text on preaching, the scholar labored over his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew for twenty years before publishing it. With such depth of thought, he excelled at preaching. University of Chicago professor W. C. Wilkinson once remarked of Broadus that he had “every natural endowment, every acquired accomplishment to have become, had he been only a preacher, a preacher hardly second to any in the world.” (1) By his plain exposition and conversational delivery, Broadus changed the character of SBC preaching, a shift seen in the current day. Broadus’s life is notable on a variety of fronts. While a pastor in Virginia, Broadus baptized Lottie Moon, who became Southern Baptist’s most famous overseas missionary. In the Civil War, Broadus preached before Confederate general Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals, earning a standing invitation from Lee to preach for him. J. D. Rockefeller went further than Lee—he offered Broadus a hefty salary to become his pastor in New York City, an offer Broadus turned down. In 1886, on the 250th anniversary of Harvard University, the school conferred an honorary degree on Broadus due to his national academic reputation. In 1889, Yale University invited the professor to New Haven to deliver the Lyman Beecher Lectures on preaching. Broadus was the only Southern Baptist to address the Ivy League school in a series of talks. Together with Basil Manly, Jr., he founded the monthly Sunday School newspaper, Kind Words in 1866, a title that was eventually adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Home Mission Board. As a preacher, professor, and leader, Broadus looms large in Southern’s history and in the history of the SBC. He was an active churchman at Louisville’s Walnut Street Baptist Church. Broadus passed away on March 16, 1895. (1) William Mueller, A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 67. Sources: William Mueller, A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Nashville, TN: Broadman, 1959.

Meeting Christ in Aslan

Over the next five years, the seven installments of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narniaseries will turn seventy. Generations of children have found delight in stepping through the wardrobe door to this mythical world, filled with magic, meaning, and a whole cast of fantastic characters. Still, in the end, the appeal of The Chronicles comes back to a single character. Aslan, the Great Lion, who calls the children into Narnia, plays the central role in each adventure. It’s not exactly correct to call Aslan an “allegory” of Jesus. Lewis might prefer that we instead think of Aslan as Christ transposed into a Narnian key, a Creator and Lord fit for a world primarily inhabited by talking animals. Throughout The Chronicles, Aslan often emphasizes that he really is a lion and not an illusion or symbol. “Touch me,” he tells one character in “The Horse and His Boy”. “Smell me. Here are my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers. I am a true Beast.” True to Lewis’s genius and his love of myth, Aslan’s purpose in calling children from our world into Narnia is the same as Lewis’s purpose in writing The Chronicles. Through the Great Lion, Lewis gives us a glimpse of the character of the Savior and King he called “myth become fact,” and whom Scripture calls “the Lion of Judah.” Two moments in the Narnia series are particular favorites of my colleague Shane Morris, and illustrate Aslan’s mission with particular clarity. One takes place during the third Chronicle (the fifth in publication order), “The Horse and His Boy.” Shasta, the main character, has ridden through the night and is lost in the mountains. Having grown up in a foreign country and just returned to Narnia, he doesn’t realize he is royalty. After running and riding for his life for so long, he’s tired and discouraged, and concludes that he must be the unluckiest boy alive. Suddenly, a great Voice confronts him out of the darkness, and asks to know his sorrows. A very frightened Shasta, not knowing what else to do, relays how he and his companions fled from their captors across the desert, how fear and danger have stalked them at every turn, and how he’s been threatened by at least four lions. “There was only one lion,” replies the Voice. “But he was swift of foot.” Aslan reveals that he was the lion, and that his intervention at these crucial moments saved the boy’s life, as well as the lives of his fellow travelers and his native kingdom. What Shasta saw as bad luck was Aslan’s providential paw guiding him through danger toward his rightful throne, and even introducing him to his future wife. The second scene takes place at the end of “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace have just come to the edge of the world after months at sea. The rest of the characters have gone home or paddled into Aslan’s Country, and the three children are left alone. They encounter Aslan on a grassy shore, who’s taken the form of a lamb and invites them to breakfast. There, he tells the children that it’s time for them to go home and, for Edmund and Lucy, there will be no returning to Narnia. They don’t take the news well. “It isn’t Narnia, you know,” cries Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how are we to live, never meeting you?” “But you shall meet me, dear one,” Aslan replies. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” Like Jesus revealing Himself to His disciples at the breaking of bread, here Lewis has Aslan shed the disguise to allow readers to fully recognize him. When Aslan reveals his role in Shasta’s story, it brings to mind how Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, revealed to His disciples everything concerning Himself in the Law and Prophets. It’s no wonder that, like those disciples, many who have met Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia have also felt their hearts burning within them. Seventy years on, C.S. Lewis’s stories deserve every bit of their status as classics, filled as they are with spiritual treasures for young and old alike. But the lion’s share of the credit goes to Aslan. In him we meet a character too good to be just a story. And, like Lucy, we long to know his true name—not in spite of the mane and tail, but because of them. Publication date: October 20, 2021 John Stonestreet