A Class in Berkeley, Redemptive Literature and J.R.R. Tolkien

I only took one class in Berkeley. It was through New College Berkeley which once was a part of the Graduate Theological Union and this class was a GTU class. Tragedy and Redemption in Literature, was taught by David Batstone, who is now Executive Editor of Sojourners magazine.

I enjoyed the class for several reasons. I traveled there every Thursday by train, often arriving late because trains are often late. But the trip was beautiful as the train traveled through the beautiful California countryside in the spring. Large white egrets could be seen in the wet grasslands and early planted rice fields which are always full of water. New foals ran in the spring green pastures with their mothers. At one point the train tracks hug the San Francisco Bay.

The class was filled with interesting people, writers, lawyers, hopeful Pastors to be, even a Catholic Priest. Batstone was/is a very good teacher and I enjoyed reading most of the books he assigned.

Still, several comments at the end of Bill Crawford’s and my last posting started me thinking again about that class and about redemptive themes in literature. In our comments we were writing about being faithful to Jesus Christ and what that means. Toby Brown brought up J.R.R. Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings Trilogy. And the conversation went on from there with Bayou writing:

“I'm reading The Organic Church right now and one of the great points he makes is that before the battle of Helms Deep Aragorn asks Théoden to ride with him into battle, instead Théoden chooses to go to Helms Deep - which is nearly overwhelmed and at the last moment as the last door is about to be crushed Aragorn asks him again ‘Will you ride with me?’ And as they do the rider in White appears with the Morning Star and rides to their salvation.”

With that last comment, about the rider in white with the Morning Star, I thought how this is a redemptive/transcendent theme piercing like the Incarnation into the world of humanity. But too much of what we read in the GTU class found its redemptive themes in only human experience. Nothing cut in from outside the material universe.

We did read some short stories by Flannery O’Conner, and she is always writing about the Incarnation. We read The Power and the Glory by Graham Green who writes with a sense of God’s redemptive movements. We even read Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai. A book in which the author places the terrible persecution of Christians in Japan in the seventeenth century into story form.

In that story Christ is pictured as the one who comes alongside of us. Yet Jesus Christ as coming King, ending history with his glorified, resurrected presence is not found in that excellent book. Jesus in his humanity without his identity as the One who is begotten of the Father is less than good news.

The other books we read failed in so many ways as far as offering a redemptive/transcendent theme that could truly touch our brokenness. Some were classics like Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, and some were new novels such as House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. But they were either set in a materialistic world, the Hurston book, or set in a materialistic world endued with a naturalistic occultism, the Allende book.

Another writer, Paule Marshall, author of The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, reverses many biblical themes as she under girds her novel with a kind of liberation ideology which is rooted in people. This story offers no transcendent Lord entering the material world in order to redeem humanity. Redemptive stories laced only with human experience give us nothing but unredeemed human experience.

For a Christian redemptive themes need to come from a place outside our reference point, out side of our humanity; they must reach down and take hold of our humanity. Like the Incarnation, God taking on humanity in order to lift us up to Him, the great exchange as Calvin and others have called it.

This is all to write that since I mentioned, in the comments section, Debbie Berkley’s article on The Lord Of the Rings but did not properly link to it, I want to do so now. I will give the reader a taste here:

"The times we live in

Near the beginning of the story, Gandalf, a wise and good wizard, is speaking with Frodo, a hobbit (a human-like creature, but only half our size.) Gandalf has just told Frodo some very distressing news about imminent danger to their world, Middle-earth.
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."I certainly feel the way Frodo does, about our world today! For example, I'm sure we all wish that the events of September 11 had never happened. I wish that the issue of gay marriage were not being pushed in our society. I wish that Christianity were respected in our society the way it used to be, so that, at my very secular workplace, for instance, I didn't have to be constantly on the defensive as a Christian. There are so many things that I wish need not have happened in my time. "

The Article What I Found in The Lord of the Rings by Deborah Milam Berkley