The Good News of the Return of the King. Michael T. Jahosky

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СКАЧАТЬ Simply Jesus. Reading this book was like finding the missing piece to the puzzle. Wright’s interpretation of Christianity—that it is the story of “how God became king”—reminded me of a story I had already heard: the story of the return of the king.13 Suddenly, I realized that Tolkien’s mythology was a story about what Jesus’s stories are about: The good news of the return of the king.

      You hold in your hands the story of the journey that led to this understanding. The Lord of the Rings is not “about” Jesus’s parables or the Bible in general, it is about what Jesus’s parables and the larger biblical story is about: the good news! I now realize that this revelation was my “conversion experience.” The sense of adventure I have always felt in reading The Lord of the Rings and my love of Jesus and the Bible have converged in this book. The biggest obstacle has been the issue of allegory, which I will be addressing in the Introduction and chapter 1. My argument in this book is that in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has given us a parable of the gospel that not only can restore our understanding and appreciation of Jesus’s parables and the Bible, but can also show us how parables can reenchant reality.

Who is this book for? Although it does have some academic sections, I have written those sections as clearly as possible so that laypersons can also benefit from them. The book does assume some knowledge of the characters and plot of Tolkien’s three main books: The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. I do not provide detailed plot or character analyses, save a few exceptions. If you have not read any of Tolkien’s books, however, “spoiler alert”! If you want the best experience possible, only read the Preface through chapter 2 of this book, since starting in chapter 3, I begin an analysis of Tolkien’s books. The best stories invite us to read them again and again. We call them classics because they are always relevant and true to reality. My hope is that Christians and non-Christians, laypersons and academics, as well as fans of and newcomers to Tolkien’s books may find this book accessible, interesting, and enriching. I have a special hope that people who are either skeptical of Christianity or religion in general and people who are in spiritual dry periods will give this book a chance, because I truly understand where you are coming from. As a Christian humanities professor, I have studied many different cultures and religions, and this experience has sometimes caused me to doubt and ask questions about my own worldview. If your story resembles mine, then I believe you can benefit from reading this book. Indeed, we can all benefit from what Tolkien called “recovery” and “escape.” Tolkien believes that “We need . . . to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.”14

In this book, I present Tolkien as an apologist, a “defender,” of the Christian worldview. Although this book is not a “how-to” manual of how to use Tolkien’s literature as an apologetic for the gospel, there is plenty of apologetic “mithril” here for Christians to mine. While apologetics is not the same as an evangelism, the former goes together with the latter. Because the two often get confused, I want to offer a brief explanation here. The Greek word apologia means “to give a defense” (see 1 Peter 3:15–16) of the Christian worldview. What is a worldview? A worldview is a “pattern of ideas, beliefs, convictions, and habits” from a specific point of view.15 Of the Christian worldview Dorothy L. Sayers once said that she felt she had “fallen in love with an intellectual pattern.”16 Worldviews are not merely patterns of propositional statements about reality, however. Scholars such as Alister McGrath have explained that worldviews are usually expressed through “myths,” an ancient Greek word which originally meant “true story.” According to McGrath, Tolkien frequently used the term “myth” in his letters and essays. Indeed, Tolkien’s views on myth proved to be the decisive factor in Lewis’s return to Christianity in 1931 (more on this in the Introduction). According to McGrath, the Greek word mythos did not originally mean “false story” but “grand narrative” or “narrated worldview.”17 I will show in this book that Tolkien believed that the most effective apologetic combined mythos and its propositional counterpart logos, and that this belief was rooted in an intimate understanding and appreciation of the apologetic approach of Jesus and his parables. Jesus presented and defended the gospel primarily through parables, a type of mythos. According to Klyne Snodgrass, parables are a form of “indirect communication” that creates “an imaginary world that reflects reality.”18

Although presenting an apologetic for Christianity was not Tolkien’s primary goal in writing The Lord of the Rings, it was a by-product of writing a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work” which he “deliberately” crafted out of certain religious ideas.19 Parables are a type of story wherein one’s worldview is expressed as incarnate in the narrative. Indeed, the Greek word parabole means to “cast alongside” or to “throw from the side.”20 In other words, parables are effective for people who wish to “tell it slant,” in the words of Emily Dickinson.21 For Tolkien, an explicit apologetic of the Christian worldview would have been a violation of what he felt was an effective apologetic of the Christian worldview. Why? Because an explicit, heavy-handed approach to proclaiming the gospel was not Jesus’s way and does not conform to the “art of the parable.”22 Parables are a type of indirect communication that communicates its content through its form. In other words, what a parable says is inseparable from how it is said. Robert Funk has argued that the “gospel tends to make explicit what is only implicit in the parable; and thus violates the intention of what may be the dominant mode of discourse in which Jesus taught.”23 Jesus’s parables, then, may be the closest we can get to authentic Christianity. Jesus primarily relied on parables to communicate the gospel, and so a Christian’s theology should be parable-centric. According to Gisela H. Kreglinger, parables make up approximately one-third of the gospels.24 Tolkien himself had a knack for speaking “parabolically” about The Lord of the Rings, a fact which is clear to anyone who has read his letters. Tolkien’s back and forth about whether The Lord of the Rings is or is not a Christian story and is or is not an allegory is well-known among Tolkien scholars. But what does this mean? At base, parables are a type of metaphorical speech. What is a metaphor? According to Gisela Kreglinger, “metaphor is . . . speaking about one thing in terms that are seen to be suggestive of another.”25 All this will be explained in more detail in the present book. Tolkien was not confused about allegory, but we may be, and so we will take a deep dive into this subject in the Introduction and chapter 1. If we want to understand why Tolkien appeared ambivalent about The Lord of the Rings being a Christian story, we will need to better understand myth, allegory, metaphor, and parable.

Tolkien was very ambivalent when he spoke about the Christianness of his books. Why might that be? I believe there are two reasons. First, because he wanted readers to focus on the story. Second, because as we will learn, this is how Jesus spoke about the gospel and himself. Jesus placed a strong emphasis on stories in coming to belief. According to Gisela Kreglinger, “true revelation only happens when one participates in the meaning of the story.”26 The only way we will be able to discover what the story is “about” is by staying focused on the story itself. Parables show us that something about Christian discipleship can only be imparted through narrative. God revealed himself to Israel primarily through narrative, not proposition. The Lord of the Rings, like Jesus’s parables, is ultimately a story about the importance СКАЧАТЬ