The Good News of the Return of the King. Michael T. Jahosky
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_0ca1cba1-c1bd-5ab0-a56f-86c3bff84efb">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