J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a work of Christian imagination structured and permeated by a biblical worldview that will ensure that series of books endures for many generations as a true classic. Many books and essays have been written over the years discussing the Christian worldview in the Middle Earth trilogy. One of them, Donald William’s An Encouraging Thought, takes its title from Gandalf’s remark to Frodo in Chapter Two of Book I in The Fellowship of the Ring:
“Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.”
Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic and inarguably my second favorite papist next only to Chesterton. If you asked Tolkien whether he was a Calvinist, no doubt he would have scoffed and denied it in an inimitably British sort of way. (I trust that Tolkien, Chesterton, and Calvin have made up their differences by now, and if not, will eventually do so in the dazzling brightness of the beatific vision.) Tolkien, like Chesterton, knew only the desiccated form of joyless puritanism, just as many of the Reformers saw the worst expressions of Roman sacerdotalism and reacted, rightly, against it. But what Calvin, Chesterton, and Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy share is a cheerful vision of divine sovereignty.
Tolkien was not, self-consciously, a Calvinist. He was a Christian, and as such, he could not help but be Calvinistic when he thought of divine providence. Calvin was not self-consciously a Calvinist either, and he would probably be offended, dismayed, and inclined to righteous invective if he saw us using his name in such a sectarian way. What these men had in common, besides a genuine love and reverence for Christ, was a sense of the Maker’s grandeur. They served a God who is not only in charge but actively and irresistibly in control of all that is and ever will be. God’s sovereignty did not preclude Sauron’s wickedness, Saruman’s treachery, Gollum’s sin-induced insanity, Boromir’s idolatry, or Denethor’s despair. Yet over, above, behind, and around all of these actors on the stage stood the Maker, standing in the shadows, guiding the story “by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will… yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established” (WCF 3.1). Tolkien would not have appreciated me citing the Westminster Confession in interpreting the events of Middle Earth — he did not intend it to be an allegory, and it is not — but read Chapter 5 of the Confession on Providence and then try to explain that The Lord of the Rings is not an epic myth about the providence of God. You cannot do it, because that’s exactly what the Ring trilogy is.
It seems to me we need a wee bit less (by which I mean a whole lot less) theological sectarianism and a greater sense of the size, strength, and sovereignty of the God we serve. Reformed Christians have far more in common, in this regard, with traditional Roman Catholics like Tolkien and Chesterton than any of us have with the evangellyfish in our community and their worship leader who paints his fingernails. I say this not as someone who is less committed to the tenets of historic Calvinism but as someone who has become more convinced the longer he has been a self-conscious Calvinist that those tenets of divine sovereignty are simply biblical and christian and are shared, implicitly if not explicitly, to a greater or lesser degree, by all those who love Christ and take the word of God seriously. Tolkien was not a Calvinist, and one day when we all have died, none of us will be either. We will be simply followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, children of God, and brothers and sisters in his household.
The Enemy who forged the ring of power did not intend for it to fall into the hands of a hobbit from the Shire or to come into the possession of his nephew. Readers of the trilogy will remember that it was not the strength or goodness of either Frodo or Bilbo that saved the day in the end. It could not be. Both eventually fell under the ring’s power, but another hand not only guided but determined its destruction. It was the same hand who placed the ring in Bilbo’s palm inside a dark cavern and on a chain around Frodo’s neck on that long, cheerless journey to Mordor. It was One greater than Sauron and Saruman and Gollum and Wormtongue all combined. And it was this same power that led to the denouement, which happens not on Mt. Doom and in the destruction of Mordor but later in Book VI of The Return of the King when Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return to their beloved Shire.
We serve a mighty God, the Maker of heaven and earth, Lord of creation, Master of history, Author of the Future, who holds eternity in his hand. Tolkien was a literary master, but he was only a sub-creator, as he himself admitted. What makes The Lord of the Rings true and timeless is not his creativity but the story’s resonance with biblical revelation. It reflects the glory, power, and wisdom of the true Myth-Maker, the God who wrote the story of cosmological history, and whose breath gave us life as characters on that stage.
