Truth Unites - Is The Lord of the Rings a "Christian Book?"

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

In this video Gavin Ortlund argues that a Christian imagination is reflected in the way good and evil are portrayed in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Check out Gregory Koukl's Street Smarts: Using Questions to Answer Christianity's Toughest Objections: https://www.amazon.com/Street-Smarts-Questions-Christianitys-Challenges/dp/0310139139/ Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

If Christianity is true, then good really is as hauntingly beautiful as is portrayed in this book. Evil really is as oppressively terrible, and the joy of the happy ending is really what's going to happen to the world one day. In this video, I want to talk about how good and evil are portrayed in the story of the Lord of the Rings and how that reflects the beauty of Christianity. We'll have three different sections. I'll talk about five characteristics of evil in the book. three about good and then four about the clash between good and evil, all 12 of which reflect the beauty of a Christian outlook, a Christian way of looking at the world. There will be spoilers, and the video kind of assumes that you've either watched the movies or read the book. It might be interesting if you haven't, but you won't really know what's going on because

I'm not going to explain the plot as I go. I love this book. It's an amazing book. It's hard to articulate what makes it so special. To me, it's like the kind of book you can read over and over and keep discovering new things to it because there's so many layers to it. The way I like to put it is that Tolkien didn't just create a story. He created a whole world, complete with its own languages, its own history and genealogies and myths, and even, as we'll talk about, its own metaphysics. One of the points that I've made in my videos on CS Lewis is that fiction has real value. Good fiction is more than just entertainment. It's edifying. It inculcates values. It changes how you look at the world and even I think it can be a pathway to larger questions about Christianity. That's what we'll get into here. So here's the question that'll frame this video. Is the Lord of the Rings a Christian book? And what do we mean by that? On the one hand, it's not an allegory like the Chronicles of Narnia. There was speculation after the book was first published that the one ring was a symbol for the atomic bomb. And in the forward to the second edition of the book, Tolkien said that's not the case.

The book doesn't have any hidden message. He said it's not an allegory. At one point, he basically says that he doesn't like allegory, and he prefers history, whether true history or fictional history. This may be why he was a little bit critical of the Narnia books, and apparently he wasn't a big fan of Pilgrim's Progress either. But the interesting thing, my favorite part of this forward is when he basically says, my only motive was I wanted to write a really good story. And I like that because it's just kind of

clarifying. You know, I think people psychoanalyze authors too much sometimes. So on the one hand, we can say the Lord of the Rings is not a Christian book in the sense of allegory, like the Narnia books. At the same time, I want to argue that a Christian imagination is embedded on every page of the story. As you're reading through, you'll bump into it again and again. You see it, for example, in the songs and the poems. Those are actually really important. There's over 60 poems throughout the book, and they make a contribution. You see it in the philosophy of history. You see it in the delight and transcendence that are conveyed. And what's going to be the focus of this video, I think you see it in how good and evil are portrayed. Let me give a textual basis for seeing

the Lord of the Rings as reflective of Tolkien's Christianity, not just, not allegorically, but more implicitly. In the late 1950s, he wrote a letter responding to a review by W. H. Aoudin, and he just says, The Lord of the Rings is about God. The conflict is about God and God's sole right to divine honor. And Tolkien himself identified death and immortality as the primary theme, but there's lots of other sub-themes, and I think good and evil. And then the nature of good and evil, all the insights of a Christian way of looking at good and evil is what the book does for me the most. So let's walk through this and I'll unpack my thoughts. Before I do that, I want to do a book recommendation.

I read this book recently and thought it was excellent and thought people who watch my videos might be interested in it, especially if you're interested in doing apologetics and being good at evangelism. It's by Greg Kukle. It's called Street Smarts. Using Questions to Answer Christianity's Toughest Challenges. Greg Kukle is the one who wrote a previous book called, tactics, and this is kind of a follow-up book. Both of those books are so helpful for everyday conversation.

He's talking about how to maneuver conversations, how to use questions. He talks in the first book a lot about Detective Colombo. If you remember him, maybe I'm dating myself here. But it's just so helpful practically. You know, when I did an apologetic seminar at our church, I used tactics, and then just reading this the last few days, you know, just a lot of times I think we feel like Adir in headlights when someone says, ah, well, God commanded genocide in the book of Joshua, therefore the Bible is bad. Or God, the Bible is pro-slavery, these kinds of things. And in a conversation, you might not have the time to unpack a really thoughtful, lengthy answer. So this book is really helpful for giving you some just quick questions to ask. Like on page 199, he plays out a

conversation of what to ask if you get the whole God commanded genocide. thing. I found that so helpful for myself. That's a question, as you may know, I've mentioned this before, it's on my docket of things to do to study that more, but already I felt like I was really helped by just the two pages he spends on it. It's really insightful. So anyway, I'll put a link to that in the video description. Check it out. Really helpful book for evangelism. All right. First, five things about evil in the Lord of the Rings. Number one, evil is enticing. Evil is continually tempting the good characters. I've always found it fascinating that at the crucial moment, and here's a big spoiler, if you haven't seen it, you'd definitely want to pause the video and not watch the rest.

Frodo doesn't destroy the ring. These terrible words, maybe you can remember his face. I'll try to put up a picture of him. He says, I have come, but I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The ring is mine. That's a very dramatic moment because so much suffering has finally gotten them to there. So that decision for him to make that decision at that moment is so tragic. And you might ask the question, I've kind of wondered about this myself of like, why would you write the story like that? You know, why have a story in which the protagonist fails at the crucial moment? Interestingly, in his letters, Tolkien insists that Frodo didn't fail and that his captivity to the ring was inevitable, kind of beyond his control.

To me, there's something really profound in the fact that the good characters are so frail. If you pay attention, all of the good characters are tempted by evil throughout the book, with the only exception being Tom Bombadil. A good example of this is when Frodo offers the ring to Gandalf, and in the book, it says Gandalf leaps to his feet, his face flashes with fire, and he says, don't tempt me. It would gain a terrible hold over me. You also see the same thing with Galadriel later. In other words, no one is good in a kind of static, permanent, effortless way. the good characters can become evil. Anybody can fall away into evil.

Evil is a force that entices us from within as well as attacks us from without. It's something that must be resisted internally as well as opposed externally. And this, of course, is the whole plot structure. The idea that the good characters can't use the ring as Boromir wants to or even hide it, as Denethor wants to hide it. The whole plot is not, there's an evil ring. and whoever gets the ring wins. That's not the plot.

The plot is there's an evil ring, and if the good characters get it, they have to destroy it. They can't use it or else they get pulled into it. It's kind of a counterintuitive way of making the plot of a book, but it's very insightful. When I finished, I wrote a blog post, and I condensed into one sentence

what I learned from this book. The sentence was, good does not need to destroy evil. Good needs only to resist evil. and when it does that, evil destroys itself. Now, don't overthink that or overqualified. That, of course, there's a sense in which we can say good does destroy evil. But it's a very Christian way of looking at things that, you know, basically you have to be ever vigilant to not fall away into evil.

And that you, you know, even the idea, think of Jesus. When Peter strikes off the ear of Malkis and Jesus saying, no, this is not the way, don't you know I could call down 12 legions of angels? Good doesn't win by playing by evil's rules through the assertion of power. Number two, evil is ensnaring. It's not just that the good characters are tempted towards evil. It's that the evil characters are tempted towards good, but they're stuck and they can't get there. At least for some of the evil characters, there's a part of them that desires to become good. It's not like a James Bond movie, in other words, where you have just these really one-dimensional good guys and bad guys.

it's much more true to life and much more dramatic, where you have a character like Gullum with his many rises and falls back and forth, he both loves and hates the ring, you know? He wants to be free of it sometimes. He has some good moments. Or another example is Grima, worm tongue, who's kind of under the oppression of Sauraman,

and at one point he says, How I hate him, I wish I could leave him, but he can't. And I think this ensnaring power of evil is much more true to life, much more consistent with a biblical portrait where you have everybody created in God's image, but everybody fallen. So every person we ever meet has both dignity and depravity. There's good and the worst of us. There's bad in the best of us. Solzhenitsyn said the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart. I think this kind of more realistic portrait is what you get in the Lord of the Rings. Okay. So evil is enticing.

It is ensnaring. Third, it is oppressive. This is, is what you most feel is just how terrible evil is and how seemingly immovable. It's, you know, for most of the book, you're thinking there's no way that the good guys can win. Even Gandalf says at one point, against the power that has now arisen, there is no victory. There's almost, and then there's this idea that it's a fool's hope to hope for victory. Oftentimes when good characters meet evil, they're reduced to total weakness. when Mary meets the witch king of Angmar in battle on the Pelanore fields, it says that such a horror comes over him that he's blind and sick,

and though he longs to fight, his body lies shaking on the ground. When Frodo puts on the ring to escape from Boromir, its power is so strong over him that he loses all self-awareness and says he heard himself crying out, never, never, or was it verily, I come, I come to you. He could not tell. And then for a while, these two different powers are struggling within him. And then finally he comes to be aware of himself and takes the ring off at the last possible moment. It's like, what other story is there that gives you such a vivid sense of just how terrible evil is. Another example is how Sauron is portrayed. When Frodo is looking into the mirror of Galadriel and sees Sauron's eye, it's described as yellow as a cat. watchful and intent. And it talks about it's like a finger probing, looking for him. It's active and relentlessly hunting him down, roving this way and that.

And then the movie does Peter Jackson's movies do a great job trying to convey the horror of all this. I wasn't as big a fan of the Hobbit movies as Lord of the Rings. But I thought he did a great job with Lord of the Rings. But still, no movie can capture all of it. You know, you may have seen this scene in the movie where Frodo is like hunched over because he's getting pulled towards Sauron, but in the book it also says, says that the mirror is growing hot and curls of steam are rising from the water.

I mean, it's hard to convey the sense of terror that evil gives you. Another way you see that is in the threats of torture. I don't know if I should read these or not, but like, it's pretty terrible. It's pretty dark, you know. The mouth of Sauron, one of the creepiest characters, talks about Frodo, and, you know, he's basically saying he'll endure torment as long and slow. as our arts in the Great Tower can contrive. It's like basically we're as good at torture as you can imagine. I mean, in other words, there's no limit to how evil some of these evil characters are.

The Witch King of Angmar to Aowen talks about his threat is that she'll be borne away to the houses of lamentation beyond all darkness. I won't even read all these words. It's as terrible as you can imagine. Hard to read without shuddering. I do think it's possible. This is an interesting question. movies or books capable of being scarier? And I think in more visceral ways, horror movies are, and it'll give you nightmares. But I think in a deeper way, books are capable of helping you understand how truly scary evil is. And this is, I think, helpful. Again, inculcating into our imagination, helps us understand the nature of Satan, helps us hate Satan more and understand how truly evil he is because as terrifying as Sauron is, Satan is even worse.

All right, number four, evil is parasitic. I was trying to keep up the alliteration, but I couldn't think of any other word. Sorry to use a big word, but I'll just explain it. It's really simple. It's like a parasite. It feeds off of good. So in other words, think this is St. Augustine, where evil is a privation of good, evil is a corruption of good, rather than manachyism, where good and evil are these two

dual opposites that each exist, independent. So, for example, Elrond, when he's counseling the destruction of the ring, says, as long as the ring is in the world, it'll be a danger even to the wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning, even Sauron was not so. So you have this idea that nothing started out evil. This is the idea of fallenness, which is a Christian way of looking at the world that we tend to maybe take for granted, but lots of other religions in the world haven't understood evil as fallenness or evil as privation of good. A couple other examples of this, when Gandalf is talking about the Palantir and how they were originally used for good purposes, but they became tools of evil when they were used by those who didn't have the art to handle them. He says, there is nothing that Sauram cannot turn to evil purposes. When Sam and Frodo are discussing how even the orcs have to eat, Frodo says, the shadow that bred them can only mock it cannot make, not real new things of its own.

I don't think it gave life to the orcs. it only ruined them and twisted them, and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures. Again, this is a very Augustinian rather than Manichean way of thinking about evil. Number five, evil is self-destructive. This is what you see all throughout. There's little motifs of this, but then, of course, the big picture of the plot as well. Over and over, evil tends to hurt itself more than the good characters hurting it.

Gandalf will say, after a turn of good fortune, often does. hatred hurt itself? Later, when they're hoping that good would come from Gullum's treachery, he says, a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend. I have lots of other examples. I wrote a blog post about this once, but you know, you think of things like Sauraman isn't killed by the hobbits. He's killed by Wormtong. Gullum is destroyed not by Sam and Frodo, but by his own greed. And then, of course, the ring itself is destroyed by Gullum, not the good characters. And this is, you know, similar to a Christian outlook where for all its power, evil is doomed to failure. We know how it's going to go because of the nature of what evil is. It cannot

succeed. I like, there's a great comment by Peter Craft. By the way, or Peter Craft, I always pronounce that wrong. By the way, if you're wanting to learn more about Lord of the Rings, you want to go, the next steps I like to recommend are first read a little bit of the Silmarillion Meridian or just, you know, you don't have to read the whole thing. It's pretty detailed. But you can kind of dip in and out of it and you can learn a little bit more of the history of the world that Tolkien created, some of the backstory. Even just honestly, just read the first five pages. You already get a little bit of a sense of the creation story, which is fascinating. It's also kind of fun to dabble around in Tolkien's letters, because you can just go to the index in the

back, look up a favorite scene, favorite character. It's amazing how intentional Tolkien was about everything. How much he thought everything through. He's debating with people in letters. It's really interesting about things. And then the book, I'm about to quote from, Peter Craft wrote this fascinating book called The Philosophy of Tolkien, The World View Behind the Lord of the Rings. Such a great read. Craft is such a great writer. The sentences are just a joy to go through. He's just so honest and clear in his writing, and it's so insightful. You can tell, this is the kind of book that's like, you can tell he's been thinking about this for decades before he wrote the book. It's really well written. I like his

comment about this. He says, evil is limited to power. It cannot use weakness. It is limited to pride. It cannot use humility. It is limited to inflicting suffering and death. It cannot use suffering and death. It is limited to selfishness. It cannot use selflessness. This is starting to get into where we're going to end up at this video of the counterintuitive

way that good overcomes evil, which is, of course, very Christian. All right, let's talk about good really briefly. One brief thing to say is, number one, good is objective. So for all the history in Tolkien's world, all the different kinds of creatures that exist, amidst all the changes and evolution that goes on throughout Middle Earth, good and evil are portrayed as predating everything, even the oldest characters, and as unchanging and universally binding. For example, there's one scene where Aeomer is kind of questioning,

how do we know what to do in these crazy times in which we live? and Aragorn says, good and ill have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among elves and dwarves and another thing among men. Number two, good is indestructible. While traveling through Mordor, one of my favorite scenes is when Sam, you might remember this, Sam looks up into the mountains and above them rises a star. And it says the beauty of it smote his heart as he looked up out of the forsaken land and hope returned to him for like a shaft clear and cold the thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach this is kind of a counterpoint to what we said earlier about the oppressive power of

evil evil is this kind of paradoxical thing because on the one hand it looks so powerful on the other hand it has no power whatsoever it doesn't even have real being and it's doomed to failure and we know how the story is going to go, you know. It has all of the apparent power, but none of the real power. Third, good is hauntingly beautiful. This is my favorite aspect of the book, the sense of transcendence and beauty and glory that is conveyed. You see it in characters, you see it in the poems,

but you even see it in little things like the Forest of Lothlorean. If you haven't read the book, I know this, well, this is going to feel super nerdy, regardless. But especially if you're not already into Lord of the Rings, oh man, you know, you could, my delight overwhelms my fear of coming across in a nerdy way because I just think it's so fun anyway, so let's just talk about it. But there's this forest. And when the good characters visit there, it's hard to describe how transcendent and beautiful it is. One way of getting at it is the way Gimli describes it to Legolas as they're sailing away. He basically says, why did I come on this quest? Little did I know where they're

the chief peril lay. Torment in the darkness was the danger that I feared and it did not hold me back, but I would not have come had I known the danger of light and joy. And he says, basically, this is worse than even if I were to go to Sauron himself right now. Now, that is an amazing paragraph. If you really think about it, I can understand how people are converted out of a nihilistic worldview from reading this book, because there's a sense of glory that comes through, even in how a forest is described. There's this immensity and richness that is coming at you and you're thinking, you're suddenly feeling that goodness is this massive, blinding thing that might crush you, but it's not going to bore you. And it's hard to come to terms with something that enchanting

within a nihilistic frame of reference. It kind of punctures that. It makes you wonder, maybe there's something more out there. We'll come back to that at the end. All right, four things to note about how good and evil clash. We've described evil a little bit. We've described good a little bit. Now let's describe what happens when they struggle and how good overcomes evil. Four things to note. First, the difficulty of good triumping over evil. Again and again throughout the story, victory comes after despair. Sam and Frodo are constantly thinking there's no way we're going to succeed. Others seem to slip into that at times. At one, point when Sam is in despair at ever reaching Mount Doom, it says, even as hope died in Sam

or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. During the last debate, Legolas says, oft hope is born when all is forlorn. I think there is something that is so true to life about this. There will be moments where it feels like despair. There's moments where it feels like evil has decisively won. Of course, this makes us think about the gospel. the fact that Jesus didn't resurrect on Friday night, right? The drama of Christianity that there's Saturday. What were the disciples feeling then? Well, despair, you know?

But hope comes after despair sometimes. And boy, remember that. It'll help you never give up. Secondly, not just the difficulty of good triumphing over evil, but the improbability of it. So, in other words, it's not just that it's really hard to do, it's that it doesn't look likely to succeed. And you see this in the plot structure again,

the fact that it's hobbits, not the wizards or the elves or the kings or the warriors who take the ring to Mordor. I mean, the whole plot looks like it's just, as we've said, a fool's errand, you know. This is what Boromir cannot understand and why he opposes Frodo. And he says, if any mortals have claimed to the ring,

it is the men of Numenor and not halflings. And he can't understand this strategy of strength through weakness. Even Gandalf tells Pippen that the hope that Frodo and Sam have of succeeding is a fool's hope. It's like the ultimate David versus Goliath scenario. My favorite quote from the whole book is at the Council of Elrond when Elrond says, this quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world.

Small hands do them because they must while the eyes of the great lie elsewhere. Profoundly insightful about life and profoundly Christian. You think of Jesus saying, oh, John the Baptist is the greatest, but he who is least in the kingdom is greater than him. If there's any religion that dignifies weakness and humility, it's Christianity. Third, the uncertainty of good, triumphing over evil. It's not just that it's difficult and improbable, but actually during the story you actually don't know if you're going to succeed. This is something that comes up when Sam and Frodo are talking and they're describing their adventure in comparison to the stories they've read.

And Frodo says to Sam, Sam, that's the way of a real tale. Take anyone you're fond of. You may know or guess what kind of a tale it is, happy ending or sad ending, but the people in it don't know and you don't want them to. I love this. This is true to life. Very insightful. It's not a real adventure if there's not real risk. If you're not uncertain at moments how it's going to turn out, if there's not the possibility of sadness and loss. And from within the context of life, we don't always know how things are going to unroll. And so the need in this book is for incredible courage. There's incredible courage. You get a sense of the courage at the end when they're having their last debate about what to do.

And Gandalf says, we must walk open-eyed into Sauron's trap with courage, but small hope for ourselves. And Aragorn responds, we have come now to the very brink where hope and despair are akin. I love this because I think it's true to life. You have moments where you say it's going to take all my courage. You know, you're at the very brink. You're leaning into something and saying, I have small hope that I'm going to say, I'm going to succeed, but I've got to give it everything that I've got. And I just love that, and I think it's true to life and true to what the gospel calls us to. Lastly, the joy of good, triumphing over evil.

I think because evil is so terrible all throughout the book, when you finally do get to the happy ending, it is just all the more powerful. And so many of my sermons and talks, I've referenced this scene where Sam wakes up and he sees Gandalf, he sees the others. And it says the joy later he sees the others. It says the joy that fills him is so powerful that for a moment he's unable to speak. And then they break into laughter. And it says the laughter is like water on a parched land. And it says, it falls upon his ears like an echo of all the joys he had ever known. And then he says, I feel like spring after winter and sun on the leaves and like trumpets and harps and all of the songs I have ever heard, is everything sad going to come untrue. Now that's it right there.

that's Christianity leaking through. That's a Christian imagination that can puncture nihilism. That question, is everything sad going to come untrue? Is a reflection of Christian hope? And, you know, as much as the last 80 pages of this book is my favorite part, I'll never forget reading it on a plane from Missouri to California in August of 2011. The joy and the sense of crescendo kind of rumbles on as you're finishing. Long ending, which I kind of like.

There's the scouring of the shire and all. this stuff. But the emotions of that, in a nihilistic worldview, let's say atheism, okay, there's no God, let's say naturalism, okay? There's nothing beyond nature. I know it's not the same thing, but let's just say naturalism. The reason a happy ending affects us the way it does is because of evolutionary psychology. It helped our animal ancestors survive. That's the sum total explanation. But in a Christian worldview, the way, the reason a story like this affects you the way it does. The reason that question is so alluring, is everything sad going to come untrue is because it's a reflection of what's actually going to happen one day. If Christianity

is true, then good really is as hauntingly beautiful as is portrayed in this book. Evil really is as oppressively terrible as portrayed in this book or more. And the joy of the happy ending is really what's going to happen to the world one day. Stories like this. are a little window into the story and the happy ending. And they give us a little foretaste of the explosion of joy that one day will erupt like a volcano and never end. And if that's true, that changes everything. So that's why I love Lord of the Rings and other great stories like this. They're valuable.

They teach us about the deep things of life. One last quote. This book makes me long for heaven. and one of the descriptions of Lothlorian that Sam gives captures that feeling. It describes it as being at home and on a holiday at the same time. That is a great way to capture the joy of the longing for heaven and what heaven will be like. So what do you think I missed? There's so much to the Lord of the Rings.

We could talk about a lot more. Did I miss things? I probably did. There's so much to good and evil in them. What would you have said? What other things about Lord of the Rings do you want to talk about if we do other videos on this topic. So anyway, thanks for watching. Let me know what you think in the comments. We'll see you next time.