Exploring Tolkien's Theology: The Battle for Middle-earth by Fleming Rutledge

Thematically, Fleming Rutledge's The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien's Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings (Eerdmans Publishing, 2004) makes an excellent companion piece to Stratford Caldecott's The Power of the Ring (Crossroad Publishing, 2005) which I read earlier this year and inspired the formation of The Servants of the Secret Fire. Both books unveil Christian themes in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings—Caldecott also explores Tolkien's other writings—what makes Rutledge's work unique from other Christian explorations of Tolkien is that Rutledge follows the narrative as it is written of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to follow a deeper narrative, beneath the surface of the text, of the hidden battle between The Powers of Evil, Sin and Death, and God in the interior spirit and will of the characters.

Rutledge has done more to make real the supernatural drama of LotR, and frankly the Christian life, than I've previously encountered, perhaps because she ably uses specific examples from the novel to demonstrate it in action. What she emphasizes is the active agency of Evil as a Power influencing the interior spiritual lives of the characters, and by extension our own lives. There can be the temptation to reduce the religious life to the primary drama of faith as occurring between God and the individual human soul. Rutledge argues that this leaves out the struggle against "with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens" (Ephesians 6:12). :

There are three actors, not just two: God, humanity, and the demonic Powers. Everyone and everythign in the created world has become subjet to these enslaving Powers of Sin and Death. God in the person of his Son has invaded this occupied territory and is now operating there by means of his elected and empowered agents, typically formed into groups or cells of resistance [churches]. These groups and individuals are endowed by God with the apocalyptic transvision that we have identified as the gift to see beyond this plane of existence to the "deeper and higher" Power that is not only protecting and guarding, as the rangers did the Shire, but also actively intervening through the elect emissaries, whether they know it or not. —Fleming Rutledge, The Battle for Middle-earth

Rutledge also uses Tolkien's narrative to explore this cosmic drama as it pertains to individual human agency and Tolkien's distrust of the human ability to act for good when the will is not directed by grace, which Rutledge also sees as biblical. Tolkien's subtle inclusion of the influence of these evil spirits on his characters becomes downright frightening once it is fully realized. Characters frequently reflect on their actions and decisions using the passive voice, which Rutledge points to as evidence of some higher power, Grace or Evil acting on the person's will, often outside the character's knowledge. The Lord of the Rings, especially at its climax (which I will avoid describing to avoid spoiling it), is a warning then to how much we should trust our own will to choose the good. However the climax is at once also a celebration of God's ability to use Sin and Death's own power over us against themselves in order to accomplish greater good. Rutledge only uses the term once, but the whole of the Lord of the Rings is an exploration of the biblical problem of evil, theodicy, one with a particularly compelling answer.

The weakness of Rutledge's book is her tendency to describe her points as if introducing them for the first time each time they come up. Her point was to explore her themes as they are woven through the plot, and her argument as presented in the introduction is that these themes themselves build in intensity toward the climax in a devastatingly logical conclusion, but when she herself describes the themes themselves redundantly at each instance in the plot, it actually weakens the argument as it is presented in the book. She lost many opportunities to compare previous scenes to later ones that show how only part of the theological concept was presented before to how it is built upon further along. This repetition got even to the point of using the same language of her own over and again, not to mention quoting the same biblical passages at almost every instance.

That being said, the argument itself, the presentation of these ideas, the links to scripture, changed both the way I understand The Lord of the Rings and how I hope to grow as a Servant of the Secret Fire. In making her argument about a Higher Power acting on the characters, she pointed out their repeated references to being "called" to their mission in the narrative. It has made me reflective about my own life of faith as "mission" and to what God is calling me, and the other Servants, as his agent. The "cells of resistance" line in the above quote also makes me desire that others might look at the Servants of the Secret Fire and be able to identify us as exactly that by our actions and our character.