The Good News of the Return of the King

The Gospel in Middle-earth

Michael T. Jahosky

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725263147
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Although many people today reject Christianity for intellectual reasons, greater numbers of people are rejecting Christianity because it does not engage their imagination. Christians must not only demonstrate that the Christian worldview is true, but that it is also good, beautiful, and relevant. The Good News of the Return of the King: The Gospel in Middle-earth is a book that endeavors to show the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus Christ, the gospel, and the biblical metanarrative by engaging the imagination through J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, as well as The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. In this book, I propose that J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is a story about what Jesus' parables are about: the good news about the return of the king. As a work of imaginative fiction similar to Jesus' parables, The Lord of the Rings can bypass both intellectual and imaginative objections to the gospel and pull back the "veil of familiarity" that obscures the gospel for many.

1

The Lord of the Rings as Parable

Allegory, Parable, and Fairy Story

The word “allegory” comes from the Greek word allegoria which means “to speak of another.” “In this sense,” according to Pearce, “every word we use is an allegory.”153 Every word is a symbol that signifies, or points to, something other. This is also very close to the definition of “metaphor” from the Greek metapherein, meaning “to carry over.” As John Dominic Crossan explains, “metaphors invite us to recognize the human necessity of ‘seeing as,’ the dangerous and vertiginous necessity to create the ground we stand on.”154 This means that there is technically no such thing as purely “literal” language. The Greek words allegoria and metapherein both mean to “speak of something as another,” or to see something as, but as we will learn later, there are slight differences between allegorical speech and metaphorical speech.155 Astoundingly then, all language is intrinsically and inescapably allegorical/metaphorical. Allegories may or may not contain metaphorical language, but they will always contain allegorical language. This means that all discursive language (logos) relies on allegorical/metaphorical language (mythos), for there is no such thing as purely literal language. Yet there is a difference between allegorical composition and allegorical interpretation. Whereas the former is in the hands of the author, the latter is in the hands of the audience. The challenge with any type of allegory is discovering to what extent the author “intends us to trace allegorical correspondence.”156 Importantly, allegorical interpretation ought to be understood “as a result of Platonism with its distinction between the transcendental world of ideas and the earthly reality of shades.”157 In fact, it may be that Tolkien disliked the “conscious and intentional” allegory precisely because it is antithetical to Jesus’s art of the parable. Lewis seems to agree with Kreglinger, for he wrote of allegory as a “composition (whether pictorial or literary) in which immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love.” Allegories separate while parables bring together.158 Might it be possible that there is a spectrum of allegories? As we explore Tolkien’s correspondence, it will become abundantly clear that Tolkien was aware of a spectrum of allegories.

To some degree, allegory is inevitable both in composition and in interpretation. With regards to composition, one key issue is how well allegory is woven into a narrative. Another is the worldview of the author writing the story, for it is the author’s philosophical views which will determine, in part, how allegorical the story will be. How so? Although Platonism and Christianity have much in common, two areas where they differ greatly is in metaphysics and eschatology. According to J. Richard Middleton, “central to the way the New Testament conceives of the final destiny of the world is Jesus’s proclamation in Matthew 19:28 of a ‘regeneration’ that is coming.”159 Despite its ubiquitousness in popular Christianity today, a disembodied heaven is not our final destiny. According to biblical cosmology, “heaven” refers to the transcendent aspect of reality. Moreover, the Bible consistently speaks of heaven and earth coming together one day in the future of human history. Our ultimate destiny is to live in a new heaven and a new earth, rather than our souls “going to heaven” when we die.160 As it is with eschatology, so it is with metaphysics. Orthodox, historical Christianity affirms a holistic metaphysical view of reality and history and does not view heaven as completely independent of the physical universe. It was Plato and his successors who taught—in the Phaedo and Timaeus especially—that after we die, we will go to a disembodied, separate reality.161 If an author tells a story from the Platonic rather than Judeo-Christian point of view, the narrative becomes “an earthly story with heavenly meanings” rather than a holistic, comprehensive story that sees heaven and earth overlapping and interlocking—and one day, coming completely together.162 In the former type of allegory, allegory is on the surface of the narrative; it is explicit and usually quite apparent. In the latter type of allegory, it is latent, implicit, and generally more difficult to detect. This is just one example of how an author’s worldview might influence the composition of a very allegorical story.

Regardless of which type of allegory one has in front of them, one thing is certain: neither allegorical composition nor allegorical interpretation can be completely avoided. As Lewis once wrote of the Christian tradition, while we are free to try and “restate our belief in a form free from metaphor and symbol . . . the reason we don’t is that we can’t.”163 As we said at the beginning of the chapter, allegory is woven into our very speech. The question for an author is not “Can I avoid allegory?” but “Can I avoid writing the kind of allegory that is translucent, explicit, and direct?” The question for the audience is how to interpret a story—for no story is self-interpreting—without turning it into the a type of story the author did not write. The reader’s interpretation of the story is also worldview-dependent. In the Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings Tolkien stated, “I cordially d...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface: My “Road into Jerusalem”
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Lord of the Rings as Parable
• Chapter 2: Parables Are Good News Stories
• Chapter 3: The Lord of the Rings Is Good News
• Chapter 4: The King Beneath the Mountain
• Chapter 5: “Estel”
• Bibliography