Читать книгу The Good News of the Return of the King - Michael T. Jahosky - Страница 5

Although I did not know it at the time, this book began to take shape when I was sixteen years old. The year 2001 was an important year for me for two reasons. First, it was the year I decided to seriously reconsider Christianity, and second, it was the first time I read The Lord of the Rings. Although it has taken several years for me to discover this, The Lord of the Rings restored my ability to read Scripture properly and hear it for what it is: good news. The Lord of the Rings re-mythologized and reenchanted the biblical narrative for me when I needed it most. Apparently, I am not the only person who has had this experience. Sandra Richter recounts: “The first gospel I heard was that of a king, exiled from his throne. One who, although the heir of Numenor, had taken the form of a vagabond and, being found in the appearance of a Ranger, lived out his life on the margins of his own lawful inheritance, tirelessly laboring to undermine the enemy that held his citizenry captive.”1 Myths—stories—act on us as concrete experiences and move us in ways propositional argument cannot. Perhaps it will be news to some of my readers to hear that Christianity is good news. I realize many books on this subject already exist, but I believe that I have uncovered something very special and worth reading about: The Lord of the Rings is a parable about what Jesus’s parables are about, which is the very story of reality itself. Myth is so effective because it embodies the very message it seeks to communicate; the myth is the message. Parables are a special type of myth, or story, and in this book, I want to show that this is because they are incarnational stories. When God chose to disclose himself, he chose to do so mythically through parable.

So, who am I, why did I write this book, and what is this book about? I am a college humanities professor who specializes in history, philosophy, religion, mythology, and the fine arts. I currently teach at St. Petersburg College and regularly include J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis in my Introduction to Humanities curriculums. Although I am not a biblical scholar per se, it is an area that I have spent most of my academic career researching, writing, and teaching in. Although I am not a professional Tolkien scholar, I have spent much of my career in higher education researching, writing, and talking about Tolkien and his books. My humanities training allows me to bring an interdisciplinary perspective to what is very much an interdisciplinary subject. Although I am only a “cradle Catholic” and not a lifelong Catholic like Tolkien was, I am familiar enough with Catholic theology and history to bring an “insider” as well as an “outsider” perspective to this subject. After being baptized and receiving first communion in the Catholic Church, I wandered away from it for many years, until recently I decided to return, this time with my wife and two children. Researching and writing about a lifelong Catholic like Tolkien played a significant role in this decision. During the interim, I was a member of a Presbyterian church for many years where I taught classes on apologetics. As such, I believe I bring a unique perspective to the subject of this book.

Why did I write this book? I wrote this book because I wanted to share how The Lord of the Rings, as Christian literature, has helped me understand Christianity better. Let me be clear: this is not because The Lord of the Rings is a carbon copy of the story we can read in the Bible. Instead, it feels like an extension of the biblical story. Somehow, The Lord of the Rings feels like an addition to the biblical epic. It expands the biblical story and can give us new insights. What do I mean by that? In this book, I argue that The Lord of the Rings functions like one of Jesus’s parables, a kind of mythical “what if?” of the gospel. C. S. Lewis called this type of story a “supposal,” which I believe is essentially the same as a parable. What is a parable? From two Greek words that mean “to cast alongside,” parables are comparative narratives that bring together the mundane and the transcendent, the abstract and concrete. They are imaginative stories that re-mythologize and reenchant reality by putting the transcendence back into the world that the modern rational, materialistic worldview has taken out of it. Many of us, you see, have lost the ability to see that reality has a transcendent dimension to it, or we have become jaded about it, so it isn’t as real to our hearts and minds as it ought to be. Parables put the “real” back in reality. Parables, as a form of mythology, show us that truth is not narrowly defined by what human reason, the senses, and science can prove. According to John Piper, parables work by harnessing the power of “likening.” According to Piper, the key of likening is this: “Likening some aspect of reality to what it is not can reveal more of what it is.”2

What is a “supposal”? According to the Christian apologist and C. S. Lewis scholar Alister McGrath, a supposal is “an invitation to try seeing things in another way, and imagine how things would work out if this were true.”3 Lewis himself coined this term and used it to describe the literary genre of The Chronicles of Narnia. A “supposal” draws us into a mythical narrative and then challenges us to view reality sacramentally again. Lewis himself wrote of the “supposal” that the Incarnation of Christ “is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘what might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?”4 This, I learned from Lewis, is not the same as allegory. One way of defining an allegory is a type of story which renders concrete experience into purely abstract terms. Allegoresis, the art of interpreting literature as allegory, is also potentially problematic. Yet no literature is self-interpreting, and we cannot completely avoid doing this. J. R. R. Tolkien indicated this when he wrote, “Any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.”5 Elsewhere in his essay on Beowulf, Tolkien wrote that “myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected.”6 We cannot help but use allegorical language when examining a myth, and yet when we do, the myth dies. What is the solution? Once again, Tolkien provides the answer. Myth, he wrote, “is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it as incarnate in the world of history and geography.”7 This is an incredibly important insight for the present book, so please take note of it. So, what does Tolkien mean? He means that when we let the myth remain what it is—a story—then “we are experiencing a principle concretely.” Myth is a special kind of concrete experience, and we can only enjoy that experience when we let the myth be a myth. According to Charlie W. Starr, “only when we put the experience into words does the principle become abstract.”8 A parable is a special kind of concrete experience which communicates reality to us via the imagination first and then to our rational mind. In other words, parables, as a type of myth, sneak past the rational mind which wants to define truth as only what can be proven rationally and scientifically. The Lord of the Rings is not a fictional version of the biblical story; it is a story about what the biblical story is about: the story of reality itself.

This revelation took well over a decade for me to fully discover, but when it became clear how The Lord of the Rings helped me understand Christianity better, I decided that I wanted to share this with others. While researching this book, I was very surprised—and comforted—to learn that I was not the only person to come to this conclusion. However, I gradually felt that the books that explained how The Lord of the Rings does what I suspect it was doing to me were incomplete, unsatisfactory, or both. In 2015, I had the honor of being part of a Tolkien studies panel at a conference in New Orleans where I presented an early form of what is now one of the chapters of this book. I was galvanized by the responses I received from people about my paper and presentation and decided to approach a publisher’s booth at the conference and pitch my idea. A few weeks later, this pitch turned into an offer and a request for a proposal and the adventure began. Then, after a peer review process at my first publisher, it became clear that the book had taken on a life of its own and gone in a direction that was, it seems, too Christian for that publishing house. The last few months of 2019 were very stressful and discouraging as I eagerly sought a Christian publisher who would be interested in publishing this book.

Then, a few weeks before Christmas 2019, I received an offer from Wipf and Stock. I know it may sound cliché, but I truly believe God wants this book to reach people, and I am certain that without his knowledge of people’s hearts and gracious assistance, this book would have never seen publication. Early in the writing process, I decided not to take an exclusively Catholic approach to writing the book, despite my background. Neither did I feel knowledgeable enough to write from a specific Protestant point of view. The perspective I try very hard to take in this book is closest in spirit to C. S. Lewis’s “mere Christianity,” which is historical and interdenominational.9 The difficulty with this is, of course, that not everyone agrees on what “historic” Christianity or “interdenominational” Christianity looks like. I have worked very hard to write in the same vein as today’s leading Christian scholars such as N. T. Wright, Timothy Keller, Paul Gould, and Alister McGrath, just to name a few. All these scholars argue that in order to write from the perspective of “mere Christianity” one must write about Jesus and Christianity in its original Jewish context, so that is what I have done in this book. My hope is that the book appeals to Christians of all denominations and to those seekers outside the church desiring an approximation of “mere Christianity.” Nevertheless, I want to disclose to my readers that the Catholic tradition has shaped my understanding of Christianity the most significantly.

One of the most exciting influences on my academic career and this book has been the two study abroad trips which I have led in Israel. When I returned from my second trip in the Summer of 2016, I discovered an essay written by Lewis entitled “Christianity and Culture.” In it, he talks about the role that culture may or may not play in a person’s conversion to Christianity. Throughout the essay, he discusses the various views that Christian theologians have held about culture over the last two millennia. Many Christians—for good reason—have mixed feelings about culture outside the church. A Christian’s relationship with culture is an important topic and there are many pitfalls to avoid. For example, Christians ought not to be strictly against culture, because there is much within culture outside the church that is worth reading, watching, and listening to. Fragments of Christ exist everywhere truth is discovered. On the other hand, indiscriminately embracing every cultural trend or movement, for example, is unwise. It seems a Christian’s relationship with culture is much more nuanced and paradoxical than I think many Christians believe. While reading Lewis’s essay, I came across a passage where he states: “Imitation may pass into initiation. For some it is a good beginning. For others it is not; culture is not everyone’s road into Jerusalem, and for some it is a road out.”10 What Lewis is trying to say is this: Christians believe that after God created everything, he blessed it as tov meod (Hebrew for “exceedingly good”) which—importantly—includes what Christians sometimes derisively call “the world.” “Culture,” or “the world,” contains many pointers which, when discovered, may subsequently lead someone on the “road into Jerusalem” toward Christ. And sometimes it may not. Sometimes, culture (or the church!) provides people with opportunities that may pave a road away from Jerusalem. By “road into Jerusalem” Lewis meant one’s journey to—or away from—Christ and Christianity. Reading this essay after walking the Via Dolorosa really impacted my faith. Now, as I contemplate Lewis’s essay and my memory of walking the Via Dolorosa, I realize that The Lord of the Rings has been my “road into Jerusalem.”11

As a young boy, I not only lost touch with my Catholic upbringing, but with Christianity in general. Then, at sixteen years old, I began to seriously reconsider Christianity again. Why? One reason was due to watching how my mother’s life was profoundly transformed by Jesus. The second reason was because of The Lord of the Rings. At that time, I did not consciously realize there was a providential connection between these two things. Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring arrived in theaters in 2001. I began to read The Fellowship with my brother before the film came out and then soon found myself reading Tolkien’s entire mythology. Around this time, I also began to read the Bible daily, but I did not attend church or engage in any serious academic study of Christianity. As a matter of fact, I often felt lost and struggled with what it meant to be Christian. A lot of converts feel this way today; after baptism, many wonder what the next step is. Over the years, I have realized that learning to be a disciple of Jesus is much more important than having a conversion moment and story. I do not want this to sound the wrong way, but I enjoyed spending more time in Middle-earth than in my Bible. Eventually I realized, many years later, that I was hearing the gospel in Middle-earth, even though I did not know it at the time. Tolkien’s story made me feel like I had somewhere I belonged and that I was part of an epic story; at first, I did not think this was something the Bible could provide. Everything in Middle-earth felt incredibly real and urgent, and I wanted my “real life” as a Christian to feel like that. Everywhere I went, something in life reminded me of something in The Lord of the Rings. Little did I know, I was experiencing the power of parable.

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.

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 of stories in coming to belief in Jesus Christ.

As stated above, I believe Tolkien often spoke ambivalently because Jesus himself spoke this way. The way of the parable is to “tell it slant,” and a good metaphor—regardless of its brevity or length—“will emphasize one aspect of a thing while hiding others.”27 I believe that Tolkien’s proclivity for paradox was due to his love of and devotion to Jesus and his parables. He was not confused about whether The Lord of the Rings was a Christian story; we have failed to understand how it is a Christian story. Although a bit more complicated, neither was Tolkien confused about whether The Lord of the Rings was an allegory or not. In a letter to Joanna de Bortadano in 1956 Tolkien wrote, “Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination).”28 On the other hand, Tolkien also said, “I cordially dislike allegory in all of its manifestations.”29 Is The Lord of the Rings an allegory in one sense but not in another? There has been an incredible amount of confusion about this issue in Tolkien studies. One of the main goals of this book is to demonstrate that this apparent contradiction can be resolved through a proper understanding of parables. Tolkien’s letters also reveal an intense reverence for the miracle of the incarnation, which will be crucially relevant to our discussion about parables. I am indebted to Holly Ordway’s book Apologetics and the Christian Imagination specifically for the connection between the incarnation, story, and apologetics. Many Tolkien scholars have taken some of the comments he made about the incarnation in his letters to mean that either The Lord of the Rings is not a Christian story or that it is, but it contains no incarnation.30 Neither theory is correct because both stem from a theology that is not rooted in the parables.

Jesus spoke in parables to challenge and gently lure his audience into discipleship, not to coerce them into a conversion. Jesus relied on metaphorical language not because it was another way of saying what could have been said literally, or to deceive people, or to make an emotional impact, but because what he wanted to say was inseparable from the way he was saying it.31 Any understanding of the Christian worldview which fails to keep parables at its center must, I am convinced, be revised. According to Sallie McFague, “if the parable (and its close cousins, story and confession) are seen as primary forms for theology, then the content of theology might well be different than it has been in the past.”32 Since Jesus spent the greater part of his ministry speaking in parables, a non-parabolic theology will miss too much. As we will see, this is a topic that not only Tolkien himself understood and took seriously, but a subject which Father Robert Murray—one of Tolkien’s close friends—delivered a sermon about during the Tolkien Centenary in 1992.

If our understanding of Christian theology is grounded in Jesus’s parables three things become clear not only about Tolkien and his mythology, but about Christianity as well. First, as his 1939 lecture “On Fairy Stories” and his friend Murray’s sermon “J. R. R. Tolkien and the Art of the Parable” will both make clear, Tolkien’s theology was indeed grounded in Jesus’s parables, an important fact which subsequently shaped the way he understood “fairy stories.” Second, we will see that Tolkien’s reverence for the miracle of the Incarnation stemmed from his parabolic theology. In other words, Tolkien recognized that there is a relationship between the incarnation and Jesus’s parables. Parables are, in short, incarnational myths. Parables are the best means of communicating the reality of the incarnation because their form is incarnational. Thirdly and finally, as we will learn in the Introduction, Jewish parables are monarchic. The root word for “parable” in Hebrew, which is mashal, originally meant “shadow” or “rule.” This is a reflection of the way Semitic kingship was understood in the ancient world. God’s “shadow” on earth was the king, who was also his “son” or “image.” The king also ruled on earth as God’s steward.33 As N. T. Wright has said, “the very form of the parable thus embodies the content it is trying to communicate: heaven appearing on earth.”34 As a corollary of this, I hope to show that Tolkien was a very profound and effective Christian apologist because of his intimate understanding of parables. Once again, I realize calling Tolkien an apologist may take some Tolkien scholars by surprise since Tolkien was quiet and guarded in his witness, but as we will see, there is abundant evidence to suggest that he was as great an apologist as Lewis was. My hope is that this book will reveal that Tolkien’s books, especially The Lord of the Rings, comprise a beautiful literary apologetic for Jesus Christ and the gospel. In the words of C. S. Lewis, I hope this book is like “red beef and strong beer” for your “road into Jerusalem.”35