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

      The Good News of the Return of the King

      The Gospel in Middle-earth

      Copyright © 2020 Michael T. Jahosky. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

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      paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-6316-1

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-6313-0

      ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-6314-7

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/16/20

      Sarah: Your daily sacrifices and loving support over the last five plus years have made this book possible. Your Christlike love and sacrifice has fueled this book and it is dedicated to you and our two beautiful children, Lucas and Annabelle.

      Preface: My “Road into Jerusalem”

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