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Michael T. Jahosky. The Good News of the Return of the King
The Good News of the Return of the King
Table of Contents
Preface: My “Road into Jerusalem”
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Introduction
The Lord of the Rings as Parable
Parables Are Good News Stories
The Lord of the Rings Is Good News
The King Beneath the Mountain
“Estel”
Bibliography
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The Gospel in Middle-earth
Michael T. Jahosky
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When I first started reading Tolkien’s books as a sixteen-year-old, I only wanted to understand and appreciate the story itself. I did not think there was any meaning beyond the story. Later, throughout my college years, I began a tradition where I would read The Lord of the Rings every fall semester, which continues to be a tradition for me to this day. With each new annual reading, I began to feel that the story lingered with me in an indescribable way, but I could not put my finger on why. I realize now why it is: I truly heard the gospel first in Middle-earth. The story of Aragorn in particular affected me profoundly. He seemed familiar, but I did not know how or why. Years later when I began research for this book, I came across one of Peter Kreeft’s books entitled The Philosophy of Tolkien where he says, “Though we do not have kings in America, or want them, our unconscious mind both has them and wants them. We all know what a true king is, a real king, an ideal king, an archetypal king . . . something in us longs to give him our loyalty and fealty and service and obedience. He is lost but longed for and will someday return.”12 After reading this, I began to feel slightly less crazy. Kreeft’s insight brought me comfort and helped me make sense of why Aragorn’s story specifically affected me so profoundly. And then I discovered N. T. Wright’s book 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.
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