The Greatest Fairy Story

Reading Tolkien's letters. Here's an arresting bit from a 1944 letter to his son Christopher. It is a window in to what is perhaps the great secret to Tolkien's literary power.

Tolkien has just heard a sermon on the healing of Jairus' daughter and is reflecting on the healing of a young boy Tolkien had witnessed in 1927.

But at the story of the little boy (which is a fully attested fact of course) with its apparent sad ending and then its sudden unhoped-for happy ending, I was deeply moved and had that peculiar emotion we all have--though not often. It is quite unlike any other sensation.

And all of a sudden I realised what it was: the very thing that I have been trying to write about and explain--in that fairy-story essay that I so much wish you had read that I think I shall send it to you. For it I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce).

And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint has suddenly snapped back. It perceives--if the story has literary 'truth'--that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story--and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.

Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. . . . So that in the Primary Miracle (the Resurrection) and the lesser Christian miracles too though less, you have not only that sudden glimpse of truth behind the apparent ananke of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us.

--Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 100-101

I Have Overcome the World

Luther, in a sermon on John 16:33:

It is as though Christ wanted to say: "My dear friend, write the word 'I' with a very large capital letter, in order that you may see it well and take it into your heart. . . . It does not matter that you are small and weak; I am all the larger and stronger. . . ."

Christ declares: I have already overcome the world. Thus the great and the small, the rich and the poor, will join hands and be a match for the great monster behemoth. If he tries to swallow and devour you as if you were a little gnat, I will become a big camel in his throat and tear My way through his belly until he bursts and has to return you in one piece, whether he wants to or not. I am the One who says this to you.

But you must turn your eyes from yourselves and be sure to consider who I am, in order that you may be able to say: "Listen, death, devil, pope, emperor, and world, you are really putting on airs. You are showing your long, sharp teeth and are opening your jaws wide. Compared with you I am a poor little worm. This is true. But what do you think about Him who says: 'I am the One' and 'I have overcome the world'--says this to me and tells me to rely confidently on it?"

--Martin Luther, Luther's Works, Vol. 24: Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapter 14-16, p. 415-17

Often Creeps In

In June 1741 Jonathan Edwards wrote a letter to a recent convert, Deborah Hatheway. She had written Edwards seeking wisdom for how to live the Christian life. Edwards responded with 19 pieces of counsel. The letter became something of a classic—within 150 years, over 300,000 copies had been printed. The eighth piece of counsel is:

Remember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul’s peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was, and lies lowest in the foundation of Satan’s whole building, and is the most difficultly rooted out, and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts, and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility. 

--Works of Jonathan Edwards, Yale edition, 16:93

Justification and Regeneration

Seems to me there are roughly four camps when it comes to the question of how to put together the gospel with our ongoing growth.

Maybe we can put all four in terms of their unification of the objective/legal/pardoning/external side of salvation (which for simplicity's sake we'll call justification [J]) with the subjective/mystical/empowering/internal side (which for simplicity we'll call regeneration [R]).

1. Unbelievers (neither J nor R). No focus on either justification or regeneration. Full-blown functional Pelagianism and Socinianism without knowing it.

2. The Christian Buzz Lightyears (R, not J). A focus on regeneration to the neglect of justification. Overly optimistic. Anthropologically naive. Historically known as 'Neonomian.' Forgets that even the regenerate continue, in many ways, to be hard-wired to self-generate, even a little bit, God's approval. Focuses on the ongoing need for the work of the Spirit to the neglect of the ongoing need for the work of the Son. I think the German Pietists Franke and Spener were probably here. Probably Wesley too.

3. The Christian Eeyores (J, not R). A focus on justification to the neglect of regeneration. Overly pessimistic. Pneumatologically naive. Historically known as 'Antinomian.' Forgets that the regenerate are new creatures with new impulses and new desires who are able to do new things out of new motivations that truly are, for all our fallenness, pleasing to God (as a son pleases a father, not an employee a boss). Focuses on the ongoing need for the work of the Son to the neglect of the ongoing need for the work of the Spirit. I think Berkouwer is here, as I have publicly argued before. Perhaps Luther too, though in my reading of him he talks way more about obeying the Ten Commandments than those who quote him generally do.

4. The New Testament (J + R). Soberly optimistic, injected with realism. Rejoices in both justification-grace and regeneration-grace (which come together nicely when we make union with Christ the soteriological umbrella, as the NT demands). Grace is both pardon (Rom 3:24) and power (1 Cor 15:10). We are, our whole lives long, simul justus et peccator; yet we also are able to actually act differently. A deep appreciation of the depths of sin, even in the regenerate, wedded with a deep appreciation of the new power ignited in the new birth. Believers are given a new power, new impulses, new taste buds; holiness now appears strangely beautiful instead of repulsive; yet one of the main ways that hunger for holiness is fueled is by sustained, repeated reflection on the gospel of grace, the need for which we never outgrow. I see Calvin getting this just right. And Owen. Schlatter too. And Whitefield got both of these together in a wonderfully combustible way.

The point is that we should emphasize neither the objective to the neglect of the subjective nor the subjective to the neglect of the objective. Of course, the four camps above are not neatly divisible. And we all naturally operate on the assumption that we ourselves have the perfect balance, which may or may not be the case.

But honest and humble self-examination would be a salutary check for many of us. Are we emphasizing the full picture of salvation with the rhythm of the New Testament? Or are we emphasizing what appeals to us the most, resisting equal appreciation of all the Bible says about salvation?

The Horror of Self

The last lines of Mary Elizabeth Williams' horrifying pro-choice essay:

I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time—even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.

As my friend Drew Hunter rightly tweeted--the baby's whole life for the mother's convenient one.

This article is the very epitome, it seems to me, of the horror of Self. It is clothed with smiles and sarcasm, but it is quite close to hell itself--the inversion of light and beauty and rest and shalom. It is not simply putting oneself before another's comfort or convenience or feelings or financial stability, but another's life. It is a real-life horror story: the one (a mother) who exists to nurture and protect and love is transformed into its opposite: quietly killing the helpless out of self-nurturing, self-protection, self-love. This is Gollum. It is unmasked ugliness.

It's truly sobering to ponder the fury that will descend on those who publicly call for their children to be passed through the fire and sacrificed to the god of Self. Yet even now all need not be lost for Mary. 'A life worth sacrificing,' she concludes. There she says, honestly and unflinchingly, what abortion is. The heart of abortion is a mother saying to her child, Your life sacrificed for me. The heart of the gospel is the Lord saying to us, My life sacrificed for yours. God's sacrifice of his Son means that her sacrifice of her son need not be the eternal banner over her life. Her repentance will mean God has done for her in his Son, out of love, what she has done for herself to her son, out of hate. And she and I will stand together, equally amazed at the grace lavished upon, and needed equally by, each of us.