A distant, glorious echo: Tolkien and typology

In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien boldy declares his dislike of allegory and notes that, whatever critics and readers have suggested, the novel is most certainly not an allegory. Nonetheless, Christian readers have insisted on finding parallels to Christian theology throughout his works, to the extent that they commonly consider various characters—Gandalf in particular—to be explicitly Christ-figures.

The Tower of Orthanc, illustrated by Alan Lee

Given Tolkien’s adamant rejection of any sort of allegorical reading of his text, we surely cannot admit of an accidental allegory; such a thing would not make sense. More, when we hold The Lord of the Rings up against works that are explicitly allegorical—C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, for example—we note that there is a real and even profound difference between the two in character and tone. We should therefore grant that Tolkien is not to be argued with here and move on.¹

Still, Christian ideas keep popping up in his works: the death and resurrection of Gandalf, the unambiguously demonic evil that the heroes oppose in its various incarnations of Sauron or the Balrog, the king returning to claim his throne after a long stewardship, the long-awaited marriage of that triumphant king to a radiant bride, and so forth. While these do not have the sorts of explicit allegorical turns that characterize, for example, Lewis’ explicit identification of Aslan with Jesus, clearly there is something going on here. What is more, Tolkien himself would freely admit it.

The answer is simple enough. What many readers have mistaken for allegory is typology instead. Continue reading →

Jackson and Tolkien: Hollywood’s Infatuation With Angst

Matt’s piece on The Lord of the Rings a few weeks ago nicely summed up one of the major ways in which Peter Jackson’s view of the world diverges from Tolkien’s: its profoundly different moral vision. But Jackson’s storytelling sense diverges from Tolkien’s in other, equally profound ways — not least in its approach to conflict.

There are two fundamental types of conflict in literature: external and internal. External conflicts pit the character against forces in the world around them: other men, society, or nature itself. Internal conflicts pit the character against himself. For prototypical examples, one might think of Odysseus and Hamlet. While each faces a variety of conflicts, Odysseus spends of the majority of his time confronting external enemies, and Hamlet spends a great deal of his time wrestling with himself. One of the literary strengths of Tolkien’s works is that they contain just about every sort of conflict imaginable. Continue reading →

With a grin: rejecting the victim’s stance

One of the great follies of our day is that every group’s story has become a tragedy. Our society has increasingly embraced a discourse of victimization, in which every subculture tends to define itself in terms of grievances created by other groups. This is most prominent in queer, feminist, and racial discourses, but it has crept into every corner of our society, to our great harm.

A culture in which the language of victimization is primary is doubly broken. First, it drowns out the cries of real victims in a torrent of illegitimate (or at least, much less legitimate) claims. People who have suffered real abuse find it much harder to get a hearing when others are using “abuse” as merely one more lever to achieve their own ends. To be sure, many of the groups that cry “victim” do so with some legitimacy. Christians in America really never have to worry about being beaten mercilessly for their proclaimed identity; people who come out as gay do in certain parts of the country. Feminists have had legitimate complaints about male abuse of power, and we would do well to listen – which is not to say that we must agree with every such complaint; we shouldn’t, and I don’t.

Even when communities have experienced real hostility and oppression, though,the choice to define themselves entirely in these terms of persecution is to everyone’s detriment: the second pernicious consequence of embracing a pervasive culture of victimization is that the possibility of dialogue between oppressor and victim erodes rapidly. Rational discourse is and must be out the window. All that remains is conflict, lasting until the old grievances have been redressed and the power balance righted – or at least, right from the perspective of the victim. Anyone who has studied the French Revolution knows how that plays out.¹

Christians, then, ought not perpetuate a culture oriented around the language of victimization. Continue reading →

Only One Center: Reorienting Evangelical Theology on Christ

If evangelicals have a singular strength, it is a willingness to disagree over secondary issues while agreeing on the centrality of the gospel, inerrancy, and conversionism. This has given us enormous flexibility to cooperate on missions, charity, social justice, and political belligerency.¹ The space for common effort that Eric Landry once described as the village green – a common space for neighbors to gather – has been one of the great boons to Christianity.

Evangelicals have learned to put the gospel first, to insist on inerrancy, to prioritize evangelism and discipleship. A better set of practical emphases is hard to come by, and we are right to see the salvation of the lost as God’s great mission and thus our most pressing task. We live "between the times"; there is a necessary urgency to proclaiming Christ’s death and resurrection while we await his return. We recognize that the priorities of the young church were essentially threefold: missionary work, the sanctification of believers in the church through mutual edification and the elders’ teaching, and ministries of compassion. It is to evangelicals’ great credit that these have been our emphases as well.

Indeed, because we esteem the twin causes of evangelism and discipleship, we have set them in the center of our movement – to our detriment.² To our detriment, I say, because there can be only one center, and if it is anything but God himself, we will run amok. The gospel is the way to the center, but it is not the center. Having put it there, we have misplaced many other genuine goods that are a necessary part not only of human flourishing but of specifically Christian flourishing.

The solar system provides a useful metaphor here. The earth is essential to human existence. It is not, however, the center of our solar system, and it could not support human existence if it were. Just as the sun is the center of the solar system around which all other bodies revolve, Jesus Christ himself is the center of our faith around which all other aspects revolve. Some of those aspects may be nearer the center, spinning faster (that is, with greater urgency). Others may be like Jupiter: some way removed from the center, but of enormous importance to the health of the whole system. Still others may be like the moons of Pluto: far-out, with little impact on the rest of the system, but still part of it and not to be entirely ignored.

To be sure, all healthy evangelicals implicitly understand that the gospel is here to point us to Jesus, rather than being its own end. We struggle with this practically, though; we often make "ministry" the point around which all other aspects of the Christian life must revolve. Continue reading →

Evangelical Tracts and Real Art: Gungor and Creation’s Goodness

You know music has power when it has you shivering while running in hundred-degree heat.

Güngör’s Ghosts Upon the Earth is like that, though. From the opening track, the album screams its willingness to be and do something terribly different from most Christian music of the last quarter century. For one thing, this is an album, not just a collection of songs. For another, the musical skill on display here combines with a willingness to forge a new sound, rather than retread the same old pop-rock milieu one more time.

Musical and lyrical unity in an album is a rarity today in any genre, but this album tells a story. Indeed, it tells the story.

But back to those shivers.

“Let There Be” is the first and only time to date that any piece of art in any medium has struck me with the same force and intensity as Tolkien’s glorious description of creation in The Silmarillion. One suspects, given some of the commonalities between the two, that Güngör is familiar with “Ainulindalë”, Tolkien’s magnificent chapter of sung creation and sung rebellion and sung divine triumph.

Ghosts Upon the Earth sweeps from this divine moment of joyous creation through an idyllic, Edenic revel in the delight of yet unbroken fellowship with God before plunging through the Fall and into the longing that pierces every heart in this age. But the hope of resurrection comes soon in the proclamation that “when death dies / all things live”, and this theme of hope then undergirds the painful journey that follows. Every joy that follows in this album is tinged with sorrow, but every moment of despair gives way eventually to hope. Again: this is a journey. It is beautiful and broken.

Güngör’s first album, Beautiful Things, had musical interest in spades but sometimes at the cost of musical intelligibility. Much of the album – the titular track the main exception – required repeated listens before I could “get” it, and the recording never entered my regular listening. It was, like many classical pieces I have studied, interesting but not consistently engaging. But here, the band has achieved something remarkable: they have kept the same musical interest and complexity, but in such a way that every song on the album is engaging. You can sing this stuff with them, but you can also dig deep, deep down into the musical guts and find there remains yet more to plumb. That’s hard to pull off.

If you take a look at Güngör’s blog, you’ll note that Michael Güngör has criticized the typical evangelical approach to art, and rightly so. This album isn’t just a piece of music; it’s a salvo in a war against a reductionist understanding of art that typifies so much of evangelicalism. If it has become something of a cliche to attack the evangelical approach to art, there nonetheless remains a need for pieces to fill the gap, and there remains too the need to educate.

One reviewer on iTunes noted that the album confused him. It is not, he said, a typical worship album, and the lyrics were not all perfectly suitable for use in evangelism. You can not simply hand this to an unbeliever and expect them to come away understanding the gospel perfectly. The reviewer seemed particularly confused by the second track, “Brother Moon,” with its references to “Brother Moon” and “Sister Sun” and “Mother Earth.” I was bemused by his concern. Every reference to nature points right back to its Creator. The song points toward an innocent, nearly Edenic delight in unbroken fellowship with God and in all his hands have made. In the end, the album is as gospel-saturated as one could wish. But this was too much lyrical and intellectual complexity for someone looking for an evangelistic tract in the form of an album. Continue reading →

Less Noisome Insistence, More Joyful Exuberance on Heaven

Heaven is a hot topic these days, thanks to N. T. Wright and some of his noisier interpreters.

On Thursday, Matt pushed back a little on some of the more sweeping criticisms of the evangelical view of “heaven,” arguing that most evangelicals really do have a pretty healthy view of it. We believe in our future resurrection, and we see heaven in personal and communal terms. That far, I think he’s right, and I’ll even grant that many of Wright’s followers have gotten a bit pushy on the issue of the “new heavens and the new earth.” When every use of the word “heaven” seems to invite an immediate correction, we’ve missed the point.

So I think Matt’s push back here is warranted – but I also think we could advance the conversation by asking why so many people are so pushy about the new heavens and new earth.

I was in a Sunday school class a month or so ago in which we were discussing “heaven,” and people were struggling to reconcile a sort of dualism (seeing earth and bodies as bad and spirits as good) with our right and natural affection for this glorious home and these marvelous bodies. The reminder that we are destined not just for some ethereal, floating existence but for resurrection cut right through that knot.

The people in my class all knew that we are headed for resurrection, but it didn’t shape the rest of their theology. The reminder still surprised them.

I doubt, then, that most evangelicals have a particularly robust view of resurrection. That is not to say that we are unorthodox – just that we don’t necessarily expend much mental energy on this point. The hope of resurrection is central to Christianity (else, why is it on the resurrection that Paul hangs his argument in 1 Corinthians 15?), but not so much to the ways we evangelical talk or think about life.

This should sound familiar; Matt sounded much the same note about the evangelical view of the body in Earthen Vessels. As he put it there:

The evangelical legacy with respect to the body seems to be more one of inattention than outright rejection or even a conscious ambivalence. If we are uncomfortable with the body, we are so tacitly. When we go on the record about the body, we do so in an orthodox fashion: God created the body as good, it is currently tainted by the presence of sin (but it is not the source of sin per se), and God is going to raise it up again on the last day. In our understanding of heaven and our theological anthropology, we have emphasized the presence of God, which is the right thing to emphasize….

If we do not cultivate a strong and thoughtful evangelical understanding of the body and enact practices that integrate this understanding into every part of our lives, then we will end up incorporating ideas and beliefs into our systems that are contrary to what we would consciously affirm.

Substitute “heaven” for “the body” in this passage and I think you’ve got an equally accurate picture of evangelical views of the resurrection (indeed, Matt touched on the point in that passage). Is it possible that we are orthodox, but not careful? I suspect we evangelicals do not so much think wrongly about the new heavens and the new earth as not think of them at all.

Matt may be correct that “heaven” is often shorthand for “resurrection bodies in new heavens and a new earth when we dwell in the presence of God and all tears are wiped away.” But shorthand, left too long as shorthand and without ongoing careful reflection, can become the extent of our thought about a subject. That’s been all too common in my own experience with other believers in the last few years – and we can’t afford to miss out on the hope God has given us here.

Now, this does not excuse the noisome insistence on the part of those making this point. Perhaps we can chalk it up to the same sort of thing that gives rise to the “cage phase Calvinism”: not (necessarily) a defect in the theology, but rather a mix of delight at having discovered truth more clearly and frustration at never having heard it taught. (Note: I’m not getting into the question of Calvinism’s veracity here; I’m explaining why people respond this way.) I suspect that for many, Wright’s work is their first exposure to a more full-throated declaration of the heavens-and-earth promises of God.[1] Feeling the importance of the point, many suddenly feel the need to shoehorn it into every conversation, however awkwardly or inappropriately.

Exuberance is one thing; rudeness another. Like Matt, I could do with less of the latter, but let’s not toss the baby out with the bathwater. I want more hope in our coming resurrection, not less. I simply want that hopeful joy communicated kindly and judiciously. We don’t need to become eschatological language police, but we can and should encourage each other to be careful and joyful in our thinking about resurrection.

——

¹Randy Alcorn has also provided a good introduction the new heavens and new earth for many evangelicals, and I like Alcorn’s approach better than Wright’s. Though it’s been a few years since I read it, I recall that he spends Heaven almost entirely on hopeful description. This approach is more effective and sets the tone of ensuing conversation better than Wright’s critical stance. In fact, if Wright has a major rhetorical weakness, it is that critique is his default position. He is at his best when he forgets to attack other positions and simply revels in the glorious work of God. In any case, Alcorn makes Matt’s point about shorthand admirably in a book that does a great job on resurrection and the new earth he titled simply Heaven.

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