The Christian Life and Hope: A Guide for Study and Devotion (The Heart of Christian Faith) by McGrath Alister E

Author:McGrath, Alister E. [McGrath, Alister E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Published: 2016-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

J. R. R. Tolkien on hope in a dark world

I was asked to preach at a special service at Merton College, Oxford, to mark its 750th anniversary in 2014. I was a Senior Scholar at Merton from 1976 to 1978, and was delighted to be asked back to my old college for this landmark event. It’s always good to mark special occasions and think more deeply about their importance. In its long and distinguished history, Merton College has passed through times of light and darkness. The year 2014 also marked the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, an event that called into question the all too easy assumption that human beings were essentially rational and good. Those four years of brutal conflict were a dark time for this Oxford college, as they were for the British nation and far beyond. How, many asked, could we keep going in such dark times? What hope is there that we can hold on to?

That need for hope remains important to all of us. At Christmas, many Christians return to a reading from the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 40.1–8): ‘Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.’ They are words familiar to many of us, not least because they open Handel’s great oratorio Messiah , widely performed at this time of year. Those words speak to us today just as they spoke deeply to their original audience – the people of Jerusalem in exile in Babylon, far from their homeland. Would they ever return home? Those too were dark times. And in the midst of that darkness, Isaiah spoke words of comfort and hope. God had not forgotten his people – they would return home! That hope sustained them as they waited for their liberation. Yes, they were still in exile, but they had hope for the future.

We still need hope: not a naive and shallow optimism but a robust and secure confidence that there is something good – there is someone good – who will triumph over despair and hopelessness. Many felt the need for that hope during the First World War – including J. R. R. Tolkien, a Second Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, who took part in the Battle of the Somme and went on to become a fellow of Merton College in 1945. Tolkien’s epic work The Lord of the Rings was written and published during his time as Merton Professor of English at Oxford University.

The Lord of the Rings is now widely regarded as one of the great works of English literature. One of its most distinctive themes is the reality of evil. Tolkien names evil, thus giving us permission to challenge the bland and inadequate moral outlook of our age, which insists we respect everything. Like his close friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien was convinced that we had lost the moral vocabulary that enabled us to speak of evil and thus to fight it.

But that is not the only theme we find so powerfully explored in Tolkien’s epic work.

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