From Dragons to Disciples: What Lewis and Tolkien Teach Us about Making Disciples

Christ’s command to his apostles to go and make disciples (Matt. 28:16–20) is intended for all his followers. Every Christian must think carefully about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and to make a disciple of Jesus. Though the commission remains unchanged since Christ first uttered it, each new generation encounters contexts and challenges for discipleship that are both old and new. This reality becomes clear if we look at the youth in our society and begin to ask how we might best form them into disciples of Christ. There has been an alarming, well-documented rise in loneliness, depression, anxiety, mental health disorders, and suicides among children and adolescents over the last two decades—not to mention “the great dechurching.” For me, as a high school teacher and a parent of young children, these trends are particularly terrifying. How do we make disciples of children who might be struggling with debilitating depression or doubts? How do we make disciples in a context where these increasingly common struggles press on us as parents and teachers alongside all the typical struggles of being sinful human beings making disciples in a fallen world?

Consumer or Contributor?

Recently, I was struck by an interesting observation from counselor and therapist Keith McCurdy. In over three decades of working as a therapist, he has found that a person’s mental health generally correlates to where they fall on a sliding scale from “consumer” to “contributor.” The farther down the consumer side, the less healthy they tend to be. I wondered, could McCurdy’s observation shed light on how we as Christians think about making disciples—especially of our children?

Since we believe we’re creatures made in the image of a creating God, McCurdy’s observation should come as no surprise. But we often forget a fundamental fact about being human: We were created to create. We exist to “glorify God and enjoy him forever,” as the Westminster Shorter Catechism famously puts it; a key part of our calling to bring glory to God is to bless our neighbors, to contribute in productive, valuable, meaningful ways to our communities. Adam was commanded to fill and subdue the earth. He was to be fruitful and multiply, creating a community that would exercise dominion over creation. However, Adam chose a shortcut to knowledge. Instead of learning through experience over a period of time, he sought to gain the knowledge of good and evil through a single bite. He would not earn or create knowledge. He would, literally, consume it. In fact, the Latin root for our word consume, consumere, means “to eat.” God had blessed Adam with all he needed for life, but he chose to reject God’s provision and consume the fruit. By this choice, Adam condemned and corrupted himself and his posterity. Evil entered the world. The image of God was broken and polluted by sin.

For us who live east of Eden, we’re tempted to believe that we exist primarily to consume rather than contribute something good to the world. In believing this lie, we too have become less human than we ought to be. It’s no wonder so many spiritual, mental, and relational maladies have skyrocketed in a culture that not only enables but encourages the acquisition of material wealth and pleasurable experiences more than perhaps any before us in history. In fact, modern society often deems the possession of wealth—whether in the form of money, prestige, a “following,” or experiences—as the ultimate sign of greatness. What we consume may not always be forbidden fruit, but it just as easily tempts us to believe it will make us “like God.”

Becoming a Dragon

These thoughts floated about in my head as I drove to work one morning listening to J. R. R. Tolkien’s much-loved story The Hobbit. I was struck by dwarven king Thorin Oakenshield’s description of dragons:

“Dragons steal gold and jewels, you know, from men and elves and dwarves, wherever they can find them; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically forever, unless they are killed), and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value; and they can’t make a thing for themselves, not even mend a little loose scale of their armour.”

In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, dragons are the ultimate consumers. They hoard their treasure for the sole purpose of possessing it. They don’t offer anything to society; they take all they can and give nothing in return. They don’t enjoy their plunder, either, since they have no ability to discern good from bad or beautiful from ugly. All they seem to care about is more—how much they have and how much it might be worth.

Tolkien’s description of a dragon feels eerily familiar. How often do we approach life and work with the goal (or at least the secret desire) to accumulate wealth far beyond what we realistically need for a stable and enjoyable life? Every time we justify less than honest means of acquiring something, we become more dragon and less human; every time we store up wealth from selfishness or insecurity, we become more like Smaug sprawled jealously over his treasure hoard. The more we’re focused on amassing and consuming, the less we’re able to contribute truth, beauty, and goodness to the lives of those around us.

Tolkien’s friend and fellow Oxford don C. S. Lewis illustrated the dark reality of being consumed with consumption in a poem called “The Dragon Speaks.” In the poem, the dragon tells us his life story. He recalls hatching from his egg, “I came forth shining into the trembling wood,” and reminisces about his “speckled mate” whom he loved. This love, however, did not stop him from eating his lover—one of his great regrets: “Often I wish I had not eaten my wife.” Yet we discover the dark reason for the dragon’s remorse: eating his wife left him with sole responsibility for watching over his gold. He never sleeps; he only leaves his cave three times a year to take a drink of water, terrified someone will steal from him. He becomes a prisoner in his own home, a captive of greed and fear. The poem closes with a dark and malevolent prayer:

They have not pity for the old, lugubrious dragon.
Lord that made the dragon, grant me thy peace,
But say not that I should give up the gold,
Nor move, nor die. Others would have the gold,
Kill rather, Lord, the Men and the other dragons;
Then I can sleep; go when I will to drink.

The dragon’s obsession with his gold turns him into a murderous, lonely, pathetic character. His speech leaves us not in terror but full of pity for his sad existence. His obsession with treasure, his consumerism, has left him nothing but selfish anxiety. While our children’s frequent anxiety, loneliness, fear, and cynicism may not be directly caused by a personal dragon-like consumer mentality, they are certainly indirectly suffering the effects of such a mentality in the culture all around them.

This has important implications for discipling them. At the very least, we must teach and train our children to hold loosely to the things of this world. They must see them rightly: as good gifts from God, but not as ends in themselves. God is the ultimate good. Communion with him is the true goal. God’s kingdom is greater than ours. And, of course, forming our children into disciples that seek God’s kingdom, first and foremost, starts with our personal example. We will struggle to make disciples of Christ if we ourselves are more dragon than disciple.

Jesus and Dragons

Jesus warned us about the danger of becoming dragons. He told a story about a rich man who was a wildly successful farmer (Luke 12:16–21). The man had no place to store the enormous harvests he was enjoying year after year; so each time his barns got full, he decided to level them and build bigger ones in their place. Afterward, the rich man, feeling safe and secure, congratulated himself: “Soul, you have ample good laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” Yet as soon as the words come out of his mouth,“God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’” Jesus concludes his parable with this pithy moral: “So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

A truly rich life is one lived each day to the glory of God by loving him and our neighbor—not only with our hearts, words, and actions but also with our possessions. It’s foolish—dragonish—to live for material consumption amid spiritual poverty.

C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, part of The Chronicles of Narnia series, also contains a parable about a dragon—but one whose story doesn’t end so hopelessly.

The Parable of Eustace Clarence Scrubb

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has, in my estimation, one of the best opening lines in all fiction: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” Eustace is an insufferable brat. He has no friends; he only likes books that contain information (not stories); he enjoys bossing and bullying. In the story, Eustace enters the world of Narnia through a painting of the title boat, the Dawn Treader, along with two of his cousins (Edmund and Lucy). The three children board the ship and embark on a series of adventures.

During one adventure, Eustace encounters a dragon in its final moment of life. A sudden storm forces Eustace into the dragon’s lair, where he discovers its hoard (all of this is very much to his surprise because he never read the “right books,” which would have taught him all about dragons). Upon discovering the treasure, Eustace begins to imagine “the use it would be in this new world [Narnia]. . . . With some of this stuff I could have quite a decent time here.” Notice how Eustace thinks of his newfound wealth: not as something to enjoy with others or even something intrinsically beautiful. It is merely a means to be used for selfish pleasure. Eustace sounds like a dragon. In fact, after sliding a bracelet from the dragon’s hoard onto his bicep and falling asleep, he slowly awakens to the horrible realization that he has become a dragon himself!

For Lewis, this is both Eustace’s low point and his turning point: “He began to see that the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had been such a nice person as he had always supposed.” For Eustace, to know he is a dragon and to become self-aware of his own true character are one and the same. This newfound self-awareness leads Eustace to find ways to contribute to the crew of the Dawn Treader. One lesson we can take from this is that in order to form children into disciples of Christ, we should proactively seek to make them into people who see and respond to the needs that are in front of them, to emulate Christ by loving their neighbors as themselves.

It is interesting that the biblical command to love our neighbor as ourselves rests on an assumption that we love ourselves in the first place. As we think about making disciples of the younger generation, this presents a unique challenge. To youth prone to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation, self-loathing is often a more familiar experience than self-love. In discipling children, we must help them to love themselves. We don’t do this by boosting their self-esteem through unearned trophies or telling them they aren’t sinful. Since we’re all dragons by nature, let’s not pretend otherwise—and let’s not pretend self-centered consumption is praiseworthy rather than destructive for disciples of Christ. Rather, let’s help our children form a stable identity in Christ, the ultimate contributor.

In his lecture, Keith McCurdy also argued that to know our identity, we must be able to answer three questions: Am I valuable? Am I capable? Am I part of something bigger than myself? We must help our children identify their abilities, develop their skills, and discern their gifts. The more we find ways to help our children see themselves as servants of Christ, lovingly serving their community as a response to his love with the gifts and resources he has given them, the more they will be able to love themselves. But not because they’re narcissists and not because they think they’re perfect. The heart of discipling our children is teaching them that God loves them despite their sin and rebellion—that Christ has slain the Dragon and is transforming them from dragons to disciples. Again, the story of Eustace illustrates this well.

The “Un-Dragoning” of Eustace

One night, while in dragon form, Eustace is visited by a lion (Aslan, though Eustace did not know him yet). The lion leads him to a well deep in the mountains and tells Eustace he must undress before he can bathe. Eustace is puzzled at first, but then realizes that the lion is telling him to shed his skin. So Eustace scrapes off a layer of scales as a snake would shed its skin. This only reveals another layer of scales that needs to be scraped off. After three times of trying to get his dragon-skin off, Eustace realizes he cannot undress himself. At this moment, the lion intervenes and says, “You will have to let me undress you.” With his claws, the lion tears deep into Eustace, inflicting horrible pain but fully removing the dragon skin. Then, without warning, the lion grabs Eustace and tosses him into the water. As he swims about, Eustace becomes a boy once again. This part of Eustace’s story illustrates the final and most important piece to making disciples: Following Christ means we repent, we kill sin, we place our faith in Christ, and we live as a new creation.

To be rich toward God (and, by extension, the communities he places us in), we must become dragon slayers by putting to death the sinful inclinations in our hearts to love and hoard the things of this world over God and his kingdom. In place of our old dragons, we must put on the mantle of Christ, the ultimate contributor who gave all he had to offer, indeed his very life, that we might be called into the family of God. Ultimately our children, like us, need the gospel. We make disciples by modeling, teaching, and giving opportunity for our children to apply the gospel in their lives.

Christ the Consumed

Our relationship with God is broken by our sin. We are a good creation of God, but by our choices we corrupt ourselves. Like Eustace, we have become dragons and, while we can be better and worse dragons, we cannot “un-dragon” ourselves. For that, we need divine intervention. As Eustace needed Aslan, we need Christ.

The fallen state of humanity is far worse than we might initially imagine. Not only are we consumers who use and twist the good creation of God for our own selfish purposes, but we also attempt to contribute in all the wrong ways. The apostle Paul described this reality well: “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Rom. 7:18–19). This is where Christ comes in. He is the perfect contributor on our behalf. Christ succeeded where Adam failed. He obeyed God and his law perfectly. This obedience meant that Jesus deserved God’s love and blessing, but instead Christ bore the wrath of God and the curse for sin. On the cross, Christ was consumed in our place. This becomes clear in one of John’s visions from the book of Revelation.

John writes, “And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne” (Rev. 12:4–5). The child who is to rule the nations with an iron rod is Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Messiah (see Ps. 2:7–9). Satan is pictured here as a dragon waiting to consume Christ—and in a sense, he does. On the cross, the Son of God dies. The one who is life is swallowed up by death, and it looks like Satan has won. Yet, in his death, Christ defeats Satan. The dragon does not win. Christ is not held captive by the grave. He comes back to life and ascends to the right hand of God.

This turn of events is what Tolkien described as an eucatastrophe—that is, a good catastrophe. It may seem odd to call a catastrophe good, but Tolkien argues that “the eucatasrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.” In the Gospels, Tolkien writes, we find “the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.” There is no greater tragedy than the unjust execution of the Son of God and no greater good than the salvation that came about as a result of Christ’s death. The staggering thing about the Gospels, however, is that “this story has entered History.” In other words, it really happened!

Making Disciples

This has staggering implications for what it means to be and to make disciples of Christ. Because Christ conquered Satan, sin, and death, we can as well. Not in our own strength, of course, but in his: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom. 8:11). The indwelling Holy Spirit ensures that Christ’s disciples will be conformed to the image of God. The Spirit takes dragons and makes us disciples who seek to kill the sin that dwells within us and live as a new creation freely sharing our treasure with others. Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight. One last time, let us consider post-dragon Eustace:

It would be nice, and fairly near true, to say that “from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.” To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.

Christ is the cure, but he does not cure us in a moment. We must take the long view with our children. Their faith, mental health, or sense of identity will never be perfect or impervious. However, God will use us to finish the good work he has begun (Phil. 1:3). God could make disciples without us, but he chooses to work through our efforts. To make disciples, we must first be disciples. Furthermore, to feed Christ’s sheep, we must first be fed. It is no wonder that Christ invites us to consume his body and blood at the Lord’s Supper. Through this meal, the Spirit channels the grace of God to us. When we feed on Christ, and only then, will we have the love necessary to make disciples of others. That is, after all, what discipleship is at its core. It is an act of love, an involvement in another person’s life in which we desire to contribute wholly to their good rather than view them as an object to be used, exploited, or consumed.

In short, the more we encourage and provide opportunities for our children to contribute to the community God has placed them in, the more we teach them to seek the kingdom of God (by our word and deed); and the more we help them to form their identity in Christ, the better their spiritual and mental health will be. By God’s grace, they will transform from dragon to human, from consumer to contributor, “rich toward God” and neighbor through the generosity of the one who not only slays dragons but gives them true life.