The Lord of the Rings (Imagination part II)

I grew up in a time when two great occult scares gripped the evangelical christian community. One was rock music and occult back masking. The other was fantasy role playing games, and by extension anything fantasy related.



I've been interested to see the degree to which things have changed. I remember a time when even Keith Green was viewed as dangerously upbeat music and anything resembling "rock" be it christian or not was satanic to the core.

While you occasionally still run into a few people who think Christian music is too worldly, or even someone who believes that certain beats are inherently evil, for the most part Christian music of all types is accepted.



Likewise, fantasy literature has experienced a great increase of acceptance in the Christian community. The popularity of books like Eragon are an example of this. Granted Harry Potter has drawn the ire of many in the Christian community, and admittedly its promotion of 'witchcraft' is problematic given that witchcraft is an actual real religion.



The works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis have long been accepted in the christian community, despite the fantasy scare of the 80's. Lewis has always been more accepted and more popular because his works are more blatantly and obviously christian. It is nearly impossible to miss the connections between the gospel and the stories set in Narnia.



In the evangelical community, Tolkien has not been well known until recently. He was usually accepted to some degree, though more often questioned and challenged. It was only with the advent of the Peter Jackson movies based on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings that he began to rival Lewis for widespread exposure in the Christian community.

There are several issues with Tolkien's work that are the source of the questions and opposition it has faced in the Christian community. The most commonly raised objection with Tolkien is his use of magic in various forms throughout his stories, and his world.

The real issue, in my opinion, is that Tolkien's stories do not blatantly, or even clearly represent the themes present in the stories. Particularly themes like God, and Christ, etc. Lewis makes use of magic, and mythological creatures, just as Tolkien does, but he gets more of a pass on that score because of the fact that his stories more blatantly portray the gospel and have clear representations of Christ.

The question usually raised with the Lord of the Rings is "if its really Christian, why isn't it more obvious?"

The first, and most basic answer is that it isn't more obvious because Tolkien himself disliked obvious stories. He thought them unimaginative and boring to read. This is a matter of personal taste. For example, I recently went to the movie Spiderman 3. I enjoyed the movie. My friend thought it was terrible. The primary reason he disliked the movie was because the plot was not subtle, it left nothing to mind of the audience. It explained everything in obvious narrative detail. To me, this was ok because I was just looking for something to be entertained by. It totally ruined the movie for my friend because it didn't engage his mind. He felt like he was being beaten over the head with the director's views, rather than allowed to find the message himself.

This is why Tolkien really didn't like the Chronicles of Narnia, and he actually thought that Lewis was going to embarass himself by having the stories published. Not because they were Christian, but because they were, in Tolkien's opinion, the literary equivalent of a club to the head. It turns out that Tolkien was wrong about the reception of the Narnia stories. They have become loved classics. Yet they are distinctly childish stories, as Lewis intended, and don't get much attention or 'play' among adult audiences.

While the hobbit was primarily a Children's story, and the Lord of the Rings began with the intent to be a children's story, Tolkien's world and his ideas about literature were never intended to be for children.

This phenomenon is seen in other forms of writing as well. Most of the great works of political philosophy down through the ages have been very subtle in that they are hard to figure out. The author deliberately cloaks his ideas. This serves two purposes.
Often such authors sought to hide their ideas for the purpose of protecting themselves from persecution. Yet, another very crucial aspect was that the process of thinking about the issues, and trying to understand what was being said, was half the point. Getting people to ask the right questions, and have the right thought process was often times more the point than presenting people with a set of answers. A big reason for this is that when you tell people answers, they may accept them, but they don't really "own" them usually. In order for people to really make an idea their own, they have to think about it and come to understand it on their own.
This is one of the great problems with out current education system as well. Just telling people facts doesn't make them intelligent. In order to truly educate people, you have to make them question and think, not just accept a laundry list of facts.

Now, Tolkien's primary purpose was to tell a story. It must be remembered that the animosity towards mythology and 'magic' is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Christian community. There have obviously been witch hunts and scares before, and the occult has always been opposed in practice. However, mythology was never until recently recognized as occult, and folklore (which is essentially what fantasy is) was never thought of as occult until recently.

Thus the fact that Tolkien, Lewis, and their lesser known friends made liberal use of mythology and folklore (which includes 'magic') is not surprising when put in context. They did not consider such things to be occult. In their minds they were just writing fairy tales the same as Hans Christian Anderson, or the brothers Grimm, except better.

One illustration of this is somewhat ironic. Tolkien and Lewis had another friend who was a christian as well, but he had a tendancy to write mystery stories that involved elements of spiritism (demonic activity, seances etc). Tolkien was very concerned by this and considered it to be a dangerous preoccupation with the occult.

The major issue of contention is thus that the more modern evanglical community considers mythology and folklore to be inherently demonic. People before our time, for the most part, did not. Even going back to the early church, false gods have always been recognized as false, yet it was recognized by many that even 'pagan' mythology contained a great deal of truth. If you remove the worship of false gods, what remains for the most part are stories about the nature of man, the question of fate, the purpose of life, the desire for freedom, and for redemption. All things that people need to think about, and ask questions about. If you begin to look in depth at mythology you can find a shocking amount of insight and observations of life and the world.

It is intriguing that almost every element of both Christianity and Judaism can be found paralleled in mythology and folklore. Many people use this to try and attack christianity as a 'copy cat'. Tolkien and Lewis, and many christians down through the ages recognized a powerful truth in this fact. This fact is actually a powerful testament to the truth of Christianity.

What this means is that all mankind has essentially known from the very beginning the truth of God's plan for redemption. Moreover, it is the hope that all mankind has held out, the desire they have looked for.
Mythology is the expression of man's hopes, dreams, his longings, his fears, and his sorrows. It communicates with people on a powerful level because its themes are drawn from our very soul. Tolkien and Lewis recognized this and they saw in it an amazing thing about Christianity, a powerful truth about Christianity. Christianity is the myth that is fact.

Christianity has all the power of myth. It has everything that every other myth has, and on top of that, it is literally, historically true.

However, we live in an age when myth has died. It has been killed by sterile reason. Not only the myths of ancient cultures etc, but the mythic aspects of Christianity as well. Even the ability to be touched by the power of myth has been blunted because 'scientific rationalism' has crippled that part of us which functions in the realm of imagination and myth.

The philosophy of modernism has made far more insidious incursions into all of us than we realize. Consider for a moment the efforts of creation researchers to prove the flood, and the creation, or the efforts of various books and TV shows to defend how various miracles could have happened.
What most never realize is that even we, as Christians, have been bound into playing the game of the 'rationalists'. It is not enough to point to evidence that these events may have actually happened. Almost invariably the Christian groups feel compelled to suggest natural processes which could account for the events in question. The miracles could have happened by this natural process, or that natural process. The flood could have followed this natural process or that.

The simple truth, which we can not accept in our modern rationalism, is that things don't have to have happened by natural process. There simply is no logical reason why everything has to be naturally explainable. This is one of the KEY differences between post-modernism, and the ancient/medieval model. The ancient/medieval thought process fully accepts logic, but it recognizes that the world has more dimensions than just physical nature. Modernism rejected the idea that there was anything other than the 'natural' or 'material' world. We as Christians are supposed to believe in the supernatural, yet all our efforts are spent trying to explain how the supernatural could naturally have happened. We do not need to reject logic, we need to reject a rationalism which is based on the idea that something must be seen to be believed. It must be observed, to be real. Ironically, the core of modernistic philosophy is a self contradiction. It is the idea that it is wrong to believe that which can not be proven. Yet that idea itself can not be proven. Post-modernism is, in its 'main-stream' form, a rejection not of materialism, or naturalism, but of reason and logic. Reason and logic, however, were never the real problem. It is reason founded upon materialism which is the real problem.

Granted there may be varient elements of post-modernism which are divergent from that, especially within Christian circles. Yet the forms of post-modernism which have taken the academic world by storm and which are making the greatest in roads into society are the forms which are founded upon the rejection of logic, and the rejection of external, objective meaning.

One of the results of this rationalistic straight jacket is that it has stripped our faith of all mystical and mythical aspects.

Now, in response to some of my recent comments Jonathan made a point about the danger of replacing solid theology with ambiguous subjective imaginations etc. This is a valid point. There is a great deal of danger along the path when we begin to seek experience and meaning that is essentially 'mystical' in nature. In my studies on contemplative Christianity this was very clear. Many who try to embrace this aspect of Christianity end up with all sorts of problems because they are leaving the secure forms of theology and delving into the shifting current of subjective experience. This is also evident in the history of Christianity. Christian mystics have often enough gone off into error and deception.

The word mystic, or mysticism means internal experience. Something which is known, or experienced internally rather than in an objective external way.
The problem is that we face a catch 22. On the one hand, it is easy to get caught up in subjectivity and decieve yourself. On the other hand, knowledge ABOUT God, no matter how accurate, is a very poor substitute for knowledge OF God.

It is often said that Christianity is not a religion, its a relationship. The second half of the comment is absolutely correct. Christianity is primarily about relationship. Evangelicals, of course, all know this mantra. Yet few enough of us actually live it when push comes to shove. I've had a "personal relationship" which Jesus as long as I can remember, yet I can count the times in my life, without running out of fingers, when I have truly experienced God. I suspect that the same is true of many others.
Relationship is by nature subjective. Relationship with God, is necessarily mystical.

I can not stress this enough, but the above statement CAN NOT be misunderstood to mean that God is within us, or that we must seek God within ourselves, or any such humanistic, new age blather. It does mean that we can only truely experience God, or relate to God through spirit, and spirit is mystical. Its not allegorical, its not symbolic, its very real, but it is ultimately subjective and internal.
Jesus said that he and his Father would come and abide in us. That is a mystical truth. All of this is essential to our relationship with God and our knowledge of God... and all of it is laid waste by the materialistic rationalism of the modern worldview.

So we must seek that deeply personal, internal experience of God. Yet at the same time we must keep ourselves within the bounds of orthodox theology. It isn't one or the other, both are necessary.

In the end this situation is directly analogous to the relationship between love and truth. Love is the most important, but it is impossible to have love without truth. Likewise it is impossible to really have the truth without love.

We can not have true theology if our experience of God is sterile and impersonal. We also can not really know God and truly experience Him if we believe all sorts of falsehoods about him. If we believe wrong things about God, it very quickly becomes idolatry because we begin to worship our own image of God, rather than God as he really is.

In order to keep my posts of at least somewhat reasonable length, I'm going to split this one up. The next section will deal primarily with a more indepth analysis of the Lord of the Rings. It should be forth coming with in the next day or two.