some of the smartest and most creative
Christian writers of the 20th century
realize they had to express the age-old
faith in a new way if they hope to reach
an increasingly secularized audience one
of the most remarkable of his literary
evangelist was the oxford linguistic
specialist j.r.r tolkien starting in the
1930s he composed a series of books in
the genre of fantasy fiction that also
managed powerfully to carry the Gospel
message the Hobbit and The Lord of the
Rings were rollicking adventure tales
but they were also the means by which no
King was subtly evangelizing the
imagination of his millions of readers
I'm in the back room of the eagle and
child pub in Oxford and this room was
the favorite gathering place of a group
of scholars who call themselves the
Inklings and they're mostly literature
professors and they gather here to drink
and to converse and to read their works
to each other so the Lord of the Rings
was read here for the first time by
talking to this rather distinguished
audience Tolkien was a Catholic and he
said in one of his letters that the Lord
of the Rings began implicitly Catholic
ended explicitly so and man you see it
everywhere in this story the principal
problem is a ring of power which they
have to get rid of they say it's the
first great adventure story where the
idea was not to get something but to get
rid of something you know
well there's that there's the biblical
idea of original sin of pride of power
which bedevils us even the best of us
want to put on the ring of power the
idea was now to get rid of it how do you
get rid of it
Frodo so great hero great military
figure great political no no this little
halfling hobbit right so small that no
one would notice him who's able to sneak
behind enemy lines
sneak into the land of dysfunction and
thereby make this great sacrificial act
so he's a Christ figure so by the way is
is Gandalf so Gandalf the wizard Christ
is also prophet he's the Speaker of the
preacher
Gandalf too though goes through a death
and resurrection
remember he falls down the great abyss
they presume he's dead and then he rises
his Gandalf the White Aragorn is the
king crisis the king and Aragorn too has
to go down to the underworld and he
comes back up as the triumphant King
Frodo is the priest makes a sacrifice
Gandalf is the prophet and Aragorn is
the king so Tolkien was in this really
textured way telling the story of Christ
and how he conquers evil evangelize in
the imagination I think one reason why
Tolkien was so successful both as a
writer and as an evangelist is that he
met people through a form that they were
naturally attracted to which was
literature oftentimes we try to reach
people and evangelize them through
theology and philosophy and doctrine and
teaching which is good and is needed but
most people are not naturally attracted
to that mode of teaching so what Tolkien
did was to say people are interested in
stories everybody loves stories what if
I can inject the truth and morals of my
Catholic faith into those and again slip
them unnoticed past people and so I can
get that get those values imbibed in the
people without them even recognizing
what's going on now that everyone's read
them or they all watch the movies I'll
say oh by the way that was a Catholic
story that pill you just swallow that
was a Catholic pill you know and so
maybe if you said right off the bat oh
the Tolkien's trying to make you into a
Catholic
they wouldn't read it but now they've
read it because it's so engaging to the
imagination but then after the fact I
think it's okay to say oh by the way
that's filled with Catholic theme
it's through subtlety and indirection
very often that the message gets in and
you start you know banging the Bible and
just exclusively proselytizing it might
turn a lot of people off but tell them a
story that's a rollicking good adventure
and is also filled with the Christian
thing you're preparing them you might
say they do what we call today pre
evangelization you know it's kind of a
preparation for the explicit
evangelization
[Music]