Heaven (3): An Experiment

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying an experiment – I spend some time each day, or whenever it occurs to me, thinking about heaven, for as long as it takes until doing so makes me happy. I find that its one way of reminding myself of the gospel, because every time it reminds me of how incredibly lavish God’s love is. I go back into my day less likely to complain about things that are hard – doing so would feel like a spoiled kid winning the lottery and then complaining that he has to walk half a block down the street in rainy weather in order to pick up the money.  That metaphor might not be fair to others who are suffering in more profound ways, but for me that is what my difficulties seem like after a few minutes thinking about heaven. There is a great CS Lewis quote in Surprised by Joy (I can’t find it at the moment) about how living at his terrible school forced him to learn how to live by hope, which is excellent preparation for the Christian life. I think that is a pretty amazing idea – that the Christian life is a life lived by hope – that ultimately everything in our lives geared towards our being with Christ in heaven and there is no final resting point until that moment.

One statement that meant particularly a lot to me during our time studying heaven this summer was from Revelation 21:4: “(God) will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” As I was meditating on this passage in sermon preparation, it struck me that it doesn’t say that we won’t weep anymore in heaven (though that is certainly true). It says God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.  In other words, this is not referring merely to the cessation of earthly grief, but to consolation for earthly grief. Just imagine having God, who has infinite compassion and tenderness, speak directly into the most painful experiences of your earthly life, healing the wounds and dissolving the hurt. I think part of living by hope is believing that that is going to happen – and thinking about it regularly, until it makes us happy.

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Thoughts on Adam and Eve

I just read and very much enjoyed Jack Collins’ recent book on Adam and Eve.  One of the things the book did for me is help me reflect more upon attempts to uphold the historicity of Adam and Eve and some form of human evolution.  I used to think about this issue basically in terms of two options: (1) Adam and Eve are de novo creations of God, without any prior ancestry; and (2) human being evolved from primates.  The first of these options is broken down into the young-earth and old-earth subdivision camps, and the second is quite diverse, embracing everyone from Richard Dawkins to Francis Collins.  So, adding in these two subdivisions, you’ve got basically four options: (1) young-earth creationism; (2) old-earth creationism; (3) theistic evolution; (4) non-theistic evolution.

I was and am in the second of these categories, the old-earth creationist camp.  However, over the past several months I’ve realized that boundaries between (2) and (3) are not necessarily non-porous.  What brought this on my radar was reading several months ago Tim Keller’s Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople, which argues that belief in a literal Adam and Even and a historical fall is not necessarily at odds with some versions of human evolution. Though it is not his own preferred view, Collins also leaves room for this possibility: “even if someone is persuaded that humans had ‘ancestors,’ and that the human population has always been more than two, he does not necessarily have to ditch all traditional views of Adam and Eve” (121, italics his).  The great challenges to opting for a Adam and Eve + human evolution view, it seems to me, concern how original sin, human death, and the Imago Dei entered the world.  What would such a scenario look like?

Collins himself sees a high degree of human solidarity as necessary to any Adam and Eve + human evolution view:

“If someone should decide that there were, in fact, more human beings than just Adam and Eve at the beginning of mankind, then, in order to maintain good sense, he should envision these humans as a single tribe. Adam would then be the chieftain of this tribe (preferably produced before the others), and Eve would be his wife. This tribe ‘fell’ under the leadership of Adam and Eve. This follows from the notion of solidarity in a representative. Some may call this a form of ‘polygenesis,’ but this is quite distinct from the more conventional, and unacceptable, kind” (121).

Collins then charts various views in which God miraculously created Adam and Eve somewhere alongside the history of other hominids. In some cases Adam and Eve were the first members of the genus Homo, which may seem initially attractive because such a hypothesis is able to account for Adam and Eve’s parentage of all the human race.  Its great weakness (which Collins sees as fatal, 122) is that the earliest Homo appeared about 2 million years ago, which is too far in the past to be plausible.  Another possibility is that Adam and Eve were de novo creations alongside other hominids in the more recent past, and the descendants of these two individuals formed a small community that eventually eclipsed all other hominids.  So far as I can tell, this is the view, for example, of Fazale Rana of Reasons to Believe (a ministry at my church connected to the apologist Hugh Ross), who dates the creation of Adam and Eve to around 50,000-70,000 B.C. Gavin Basil McGrath has a similar view and dates them around 45,000 B.C., give or take 20,000 years.

At times intermingled with such views is the idea that God created Adam and Eve from already existing hominids by sort of refurbishing them and implanting the divine image and a rational soul in them.  John Stott was one of the first to suggest this view in his Romans commentary.  He dated Adam and Eve much more recently, somewhere around 10,000 B.C., but this is a good while after the dispersion of modern humans to Australia and the Americas, which makes it unlikely. Another interesting alternative is the (very tentative) view of Derek Kidner in his Genesis commentary.  Kidner draws attention to Cain’s fear of others in Genesis 4:14 and his finding a wife in 4:17 as suggestive that there were other humans even at the early stages of human history.  He suggests that perhaps God created Adam by refurbishing an already existing hominid, and then miraculously created Eve from Adam, thus establishing these two as God’s vice-regents over creation.  Then God conferred his image from Adam and Eve laterally, to their already existing contemporaries.  Thus when Adam and Eve sinned, their contemporaries were likewise disinherited, as his federal headship extended outwards to them as well as downwards to his descendants.

Denis Alexander’s view advocated recently in this book that Adam and Eve were two neolithic farmers to whom God chose to reveal himself in a special way relatively late in the process of human evolution, around 10,000 B.C.  This view labors under the difficulty of how the image of God and original sin were transmitted to the rest of the human race. C.S. Lewis’ tentative proposal in chapter 5 of his The Problem of Pain is similar to several of these, but he does not consider whether Adam and Eve were historical figures or simply represent early humanity to be important to the issue.  All of these views, it seems to me, must explain the death of the our alleged sub-human ancestors – but then, this is a larger problem in old-earth creationism.

For me, the DNA and fossil evidence in favor of human common ancestry with primates is not conclusive (as I talked about here), so at this point in my thinking I am not compelled to perceive of any of these scenarios as necessary. I nevertheless find it helpful to simply recognize that its possible (with some scenarios perhaps working much better than others) to believe in a historical Adam and Eve, and simultaneously believe in some kind of human continuity with primates. This, it seems to me, puts the entire conversation in a more helpful context. The most basic divide is not between creation and evolution, but rather between teleology and a-teleology. Evolution can either be an all-encompassing philosophy or a limited biological process. The latter is one mechanism of creation, to God be the glory for it, whether it explains little or much. The former is an anti-Christian worldview.  It is between these two worldviews, it seems to me, that the ultimate battle lies.

My final thought after reflecting on these issues over the last few weeks is, what a gift the story of Genesis 1-3 is.  It gives us the true account of our origins that science never could, even if the science about human origins were fully advanced, because it speaks at a deeper level.  God gave us a picture in these chapters that answers the deepest questions in our hearts, that explains the kind of world we live, that provides hope and meaning and context to our existence.  I don’t need to know how literally to take it – I don’t need to know exactly how it all happened. Taking the Genesis on its own terms, according to its own purposes, delighting to submit to it as the arch-explanation, itself ruling over and interpreting all other (valid) points of data, I am liberated from uncertainty and I discover, again and again, the true meaning of my existence in this world.  I’ve quoted before Kidner’s statement in his Genesis commentary:

“The accounts of the world [of science and Scripture] are as distinct (and each as legitimate) as an artist’s portrait and an anatomist’s diagram, of which no composite picture will be satisfactory, for their common ground is only in the total reality to which they both attend…. [Scripture's] bold selectiveness, like that of a great painting, is its power” (31).

To put what I am trying to say in these categories: I don’t need to figure out the anatomist diagram in all its details in order to fully bow before the artist’s portrait.  Whatever that anatomist diagram may or may not say, the artist’s portrait needs no further confirmation than the ring of my own heart and conscience, and already stands sufficient to teach me how to live in the world. Its bold selectiveness is its great power.

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Lord of the Rings (3): Favorite Scenes, Characters, Quotes

My favorite scenes are the Council of Elrond (239-271); Gandalf at the Bridge of Khazad-Dum (330-331); Frodo looking into the mirror of Galadriel (363-366); Sam and Frodo’s battle with Shelob (720-730); Eowyn’s slaying of the Witch-King of Angmar (841); the dialogue with the Mouth of Sauron before the final battle (888-891); and Frodo’s extreme desperation just before destroying the Ring (937-938).  I also love – and this may seem strange – how Frodo never fully recovers from the Ring.  He says after all is done, “there is no real going back.  Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden.  Where shall I find rest?” (988).  For some reason I love the fact that Frodo’s restlessness at the end of the book.  It gives the story a kind of authenticity, and Frodo’s sacrifice a costliness that is beautiful even while it is sad. It also reminds me that while earthly accomplishments and victories can bring a measure of comfort, only in heaven will we experience the healing of our deepest wounds.

The character that I found most interesting was Tom Bombadil. He calls himself “the Eldest,” and says of himself: “Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn…. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside” (131).  Elrond calls him “oldest and fatherless” (265).  Also interesting is that he puts on the Ring without going invisible (133). And yet, despite all this power, he is presented as an almost silly character, always singing, and strangely absent from the war against Sauron.  I can see how some interpret him as representing pacifism.  More likely he is simply one past his appointed season of action, as indicated by Gandalf’s words at the end of the book: “(Bombadil) is a moss-gatherer, and I have been a stone doomed to rolling. But my rolling days are ending, and now we shall have much to say to one another” (996). I am glad they left him out of the movie – he would have been too difficult to portray. And he’s too mysterious.

Eowyn, Denethor, and the Mouth of Sauron are all characters that I also found more interesting in the books than in the movies. The Mouth of Sauron was a great evil character, and I liked how Tolkien gave a little bit of background to him, which the movie did not do. Denethor, it seems to me, is more powerful in the books, a little less crazy, and not quite so corrupt (especially when first introduced) – all of which makes him a little bit more complex as a character. Eowyn is an interesting character, too – her fear of being caged, her bitterness and restlessness, and finally her healing and romance with Faramir. I love when Tolkien writes, “then the heart of Eowyn changed, or else at last she understood it” (964).

My overall favorite quote from the book comes from Elrond during the Council of Elrond regarding the journey to destroy the Ring:

“This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere” (269).

What a profound statement!  I wonder if the exact same thing could also be truly said of all genuine Christian ministry – that the strong and weak have as much hope of success, for everything depends on God.  I think that is enough to keep us from getting puffed up when ministry goes well, but it also keeps us from despair when we are faced with enormous challenges.

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Lord of the Rings (2): Good and Evil

If I had to condense what I learned from The Lord of the Rings into one sentence, I would say this: good does not need to destroy evil; good needs only to resist evil, and when it does that, evil destroys itself.  Looking at evil, good, and good’s triumph over evil, each in turn, will bear this out.

Evil in The Lord of the Rings

The greatest theme of this book, for me at least, is the seductive, enslaving, oppressive power of evil. I understand fallenness and evil much better from reading this book.

1) Evil is seductive.

Its very telling, for example, that the Ring must be destroyed rather than used (as Boromir thinks it should be) or even hidden (as Denethor thinks it should be).  Of all the plots Tolkien could have chosen, he chose this one, where the great goal toward which all the good characters are working is not the conquering of a powerful evil with even greater power, but the destruction of evil by resisting its power.  Equally significant is the fact that – at what I think is the most dramatic and most powerful moment in the story’s plot – Frodo cannot destroy the ring. “I have come.  But I do not choose now to do what I came to do.  I will do this deed.  The Ring is mine!” (945).  Its interesting that Tolkien in his letters insists that Frodo did not fail – that his captivity to the Ring was inevitable.  All of this points to, I think, the seductive nature of evil – its a force that allures us from within as well as attacks us from without, and thus must be resisted as well as opposed.

2) Evil is ensnaring

The character Gollum and his moral ambivalence speaks volumes about a realistic view of evil.  James Bond movies have a basically two-dimensional view of evil – you have the good guys, and the bad guys, and its all pretty superficial.  Much more true to life, and more dramatic in a movie, is a character like Gollum, with his many rises and falls, his two sides, his internal battles – his wretchedness, pitiable state, his final inability to break away from evil. Gollum both loves and hates the Ring – and is consumed by it. Evil is thus portrayed as ensnaring – a force that can capture the will, a power to which one may lose control, a trap from which what half-longs to be released, but half-desires to retain.  Just as Grima says of Saruman, “how I hate him! I wish I could leave him!” (983) – but he cannot.

3) Evil is oppressive

You get a sense of how powerful and oppressive Evil is from this story – how seemingly immovable, how unlikely to ever be overthrown. When characters in the book are confronted with evil, its effect on them is terrible.  For example, when Merry meets the Witch-King of Angmar in battle on the Pelennor Fields, such a horror comes on him that he is blind and sick, and though he longs to fight, his body lies shaking on the ground.  Or when Frodo puts on the Ring, and its alluring power is so strong over him that he loses self-awareness and almost loses self-control: “he heard himself crying out: Never, never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell….  The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented.  Suddenly he was aware of himself again, Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger” (401).

What other story gives you such a vivid sense of evil – such a sense of its power, its terror?

Or take the threats of the evil characters – the Mouth of Sauron about Frodo: “he shall endure the slow torment of years, as long and slow as our arts in the Great Tower can contrive, and never be released, unless maybe when he is changed and broken, so that he may come to you, and you shall see what you have done” (890). Or the Witch-King of Angmar to Eowyn: “come not between the Nazgul and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye” (841).

Its hard to read them without shuddering!

The worst character, of course, is Sauron, and the descriptions of him are sickening.  But as terrifying as Sauron is, Evil is bigger than Sauron: “Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary” (879).

4) Evil is corrupting

Yet for all its power, Evil is not portrayed in The Lord of the Rings as a static, given reality, eternally opposite of good.  As in Augustine, and his friend C.S. Lewis, evil is portrayed as corruption, the corrosive spoiling of good.  So when counseling the destruction of the Ring, Elrond reasons, “as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise.  For nothing is evil in the beginning.  Even Sauron was not so” (267).  Similarly, when speaking of how the Palantir were originally created for good purposes, Gandalf explains that they became tools of evil when used by those without the art to handle them, and adds, “there is nothing that Sauron cannot turn to evil purposes (597).  Also, when Sam and Frodo are discussing how orcs must still eat food, Frodo says, “the Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make; not real new things of its own.  I don’t think it gave life to the orcs; it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures” (914).

5) Evil destroys itself

This is born out through numerous events in the story. So Saruman is killed by Wormtongue, not the Hobbits; Gollum is destroyed by his own greed, not Sam and Frodo; the Ring is destroyed by Gollum, not by the good characters; the Orcs at Cirith Ungol are not slayed by Sam but by each other in their greed for Frodo’s mithril coat; and so forth.  As Gandfalf says after a turn of good fortune, “often does hatred hurt itself!” (585); or later in hoping that good would come of Gollum’s treachery, “a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend” (815).  When they are able to travel undetected, Eomer observes, “our enemies devices oft serve us in his despite. The accursed darkness itself has been a cloak to us” (834).  Or in commenting on how the Dead fought against the armies of Sauron, Aragorn says, “strange and wonderful I thought it that the designs of Mordor should be overthrown by such wraiths of fear and darkness. With its own weapons was it worsted!” (876).

Good in The Lord of the Rings

1) Good is beautiful

One of my favorite quotes in the whole book is Gimli to Legolas while they are sailing away from Lothlorien: “Tell me, Legolas, why did I come on this Quest? Little did I know where the chief peril lay! Truly Elrond spoke, saying that we could not foresee what we might meet upon our road. Torment in the darkness was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of light and joy. Now I have taken my worst wound in this parting, even if I were to go this night straight to the Dark Lord.”

In the richness and immensity of the world Tolkien created, one gets a sense of the beauty of good – it emerges as a massive, solid, real entity, perhaps crushing and blinding us, but never boring us. I could see how people could be converted from a nihilist or existentialist worldview to Christianity through the influence of this book.

2) Good is objective

Amidst all the history and change of Middle-earth, good (and evil) are portrayed as pre-dating everything (even the oldest characters), and as unchanging and universally binding.  Thus Aragorn says to Eomer, when Eomer questions how one can judge what to do in the strange and changing times: “good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men” (438).

3) Good is indestructable

While traveling through Mordor, Sam looks up into the mountains and above them sees a star.  Tolkien writes: “the beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach” (922).  This is something of a foil to point (3) above – as terrible as evil is throughout the story, at certain key points its revealed that, in the end, evil is really nothing.  It can do no real damage to good.  It has all the apparent power, but none of the real power.

The Triumph of Good over Evil in The Lord of the Rings

1) The difficulty of good triumphing after evil

Again and again during the story, victory comes only after despair.  Frodo and Sam despair a thousand times of ever destroying the Ring before they succeed.  The others, even Gandalf, often seem to despair of defeating Mordor in battle before they actually do so.  But despair is not the end, but merely a pathway to new strength, new hope.  For example, when Sam is in the midst of despairing of reaching Mount Doom, Tolkien writes, “even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength” (934). Or as Legolas says during the last debate: “oft hope is born, when all is forlorn” (877).

2) The uncertainty of good triumphing over evil

One of my favorite conversations is between Sam and Frodo on pp. 711-712.  They are discussing their own adventure in relation to other stories they have heard, and Frodo says to Sam: “that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to” (712). I love this. For me it articulates something very profound about life – that a true adventure must, by definition, be unsafe. If it is not risky, it is not really an adventure. For a true adventure, there must be the possibility of despair, of loss, of a sad ending. From outside the story (or from the end) you can look in (or back) and see the certainty of good’s triumph all along. But from within the story, there are moments of true despair before the end – moments where it seems like all is lost. Recognizing this actually gives us hope, I think – for it gives us a reason to never give up, no matter what appearances may be. There is something after despair.

3) The improbability of good triumphing over evil

The fact that it is Hobbits, and not wizards or elves or kings who bear the Ring into Morder, is very significant. This is what Boromir can never understand, and why he opposes Frodo, claiming that “if any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the men of Numenor, and not Halflings” (399).  Even Gandalf tells Pippin that the hope that Frodo and Sam had of succeeding in their quest is really a “fool’s hope” (815), and that the war they are conducting against Mordor is “without final hope” when it comes to strength of arms (878). The only hope that exists is the fool’s hope – that two Hobbits from the Shire can best Sauron the Great. Its a true David vs. Goliath scenario.

4) The courage required required for good to triumph over evil

In order to achieve victory the good characters must exhibit courage to the point of total self-sacrifice. As Gandalf counsels during the last debate, “we must walk open-eyed into [Sauron's] trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves” (880). And so Aragorn responds: “we come now to the very brink, where hope and despair are akin. To waver is to fall” (880). For me one of the best instances of courage in the book is Eowyn’s resistance to the Witch-king of Angmar. After his threat to her (quoted above), she replies: “begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him” (841).

5) The joy of good triumphing over evil

“Is everything sad going to come untrue?” (951) ask Sam after the Ring is destroyed.  And then: “I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!” (952).  At the end of the everything, after all the smoke has settled, there is joy and redemption, all the greater for the difficulty and anguish that preceded it. The last 80 pages is my favorite part of the book. It makes me long for heaven.

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Whitefield on Suffering

I read Dallimore’s shorter biography of Whitefield while in Chicago the last few days.  I learned a lot from Whitefield’s courage, his work ethic, and his emphasis in his preaching on the importance of the New Birth.  It was also interesting to learn about the origins of Methodism and Whitefield’s relationship with the Wesley brothers.  Here is Whitefield reflecting in a letter on some of his most painful difficulties with other Christians, reminding us how God can use evil for good in our lives:

“It is good for me that I have been supplanted, despised, censured, maligned, judged by and separated from my nearest dearest friends.  By this I have found the faithfulness of Him who is the friend of friends … and to be content that He to whom all hearts are open … now sees … the uprightness of my intentions to all mankind” (101).

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Lord of the Rings (1): 10 Differences with the Movies

Two summers ago I started reading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and a few days ago, on a plane ride from Tulsa to Las Vegas, I finished it, right as the plane was setting down on the ground.  Wow.  What a book!  Tolkien didn’t merely write a story – he created a world, complete with its own languages, histories, genealogies, myths, and even metaphysics.  Its a book that doesn’t fit on a spectrum, but it creates new spectrums of its own.  It doesn’t fall into the orbit of some already existent genre or category, but it creates its own orbit.  Its depth, beauty, and richness are difficult to describe.  I definitely will be re-reading it throughout my life, and don’t expect to ever hit bottom.

One of the things I did while reading was note some of the most prominent differences with the movies, which I will list in this post.  Because I think that Peter Jackson did about as good a job as could have been done in faithfully taking this story to the screen, I think exploring what he did change is interesting, and illuminates some of the more general challenges in making books into movies.

1) The greatest differences are structural: the movies grind off parts of the beginning and the end of the story, presumably for greater flow.  Towards the beginning, Tom Bombadi, the Old Forest, and the Barrow-Downs are cut; at the end, the scouring of the Shire is eliminated and the death of Saruman is relocated to right after the battle of Isengard.  You also have much of the traveling (on which Tolkien spends much time throughout) reduced in the movies.  The result is that the book, like a huge boulder, takes longer to get moving, and longer to slow down.  I think the changes here were understandable in light of the time constraints a film must have, and the practical impossibility of portraying a character like Tom Bombadil on screen – but nevertheless I liked the book so much more.  It feels more authentic, less Hollywoodized and marketed.

2) The book is fuller, richer – it has more detail, more history, more songs, more life and energy.  At times I found the amount of detail difficult to absorb, and it took discipline to keep going.  But at the end of the day, again, you have a story that feels so more authentic than a 21st century action movie, filled with soundbites and rapid plot changes and action scenes.  I think I can understand why Tolkien fans would be purists or snobs.

3) The movies obviously cannot capture Tolkien’s idiosyncratic use of language, especially spelling, grammar, and diction.  Some of his elevated style (“thou” and “thy” in dialogue, frequently inverted subject and verb, use of words like “yestereve” and “mayhap,” etc.), is captured in the movies, through the dialogue and narration.  But its more pronounced in the book.  (Plus only in reading the book could you know how many colons [:] he uses – its crazy.)

4) The general number of character is reduced.  From the movies you learn little or nothing of Fatty Bolger, Farmer Maggot, and a host of other hobbits; Glorfindel and Gildor the elves; Ugluck, Shagrat, Gorbag, and Lubgurz the orcs; Gwaihir the eagle; Widfara, Elfhelm, and Grimbold, leaders in the Rohirrim; Beregond of Gondor; Halbarad and the other Dunedain; Bregalad the Ent; Ghan-buri-Ghan the wild man; and many others.  The roles these characters play are either given to others in the movies (so Gandalf saves Faramir rather than Beregond, Elrond brings Aragorn the reforged sword instead of Halbarad, etc.) or eliminated altogether (so Ghan-buri-Ghan never helps the Rohirrim find an un-watched path to Minas Tirith, etc.).

Of all the character omissions, I think that of Imrahil, Prince of Gondor, is the most noticeable.  He is a significant character in The Return of the King.  Maybe Peter Jackson thought it was too difficult to introduce a major character that late in the series?

5) The romance of Aragorn-Arwen is increased in the movies, and the romance of Faramir-Eowyn is decreased.

6) Sam is much younger than Frodo in the book. He both uses the Ring and looks into the mirror of Galadriel.  He never leaves Frodo, but goes into Shelob’s lair with him.  Even more so than in the movies, I think Sam is an unsung hero.

7) There is more “back and forth” in the movies.  In The Two Towers, for example, you have nothing of Sam and Frodo until the second half of the book.  It stays with certain characters for long stretches of time.

8) There are lots of minor plot changes – the details of Frodo getting stabbed on Weathertop, the flood at the Ford soon after, the attack of wolves in The Fellowship of the Ring, Faramir never hindering Frodo and Sam, etc.  Many events and lines are kept, but chronologically displaced.

9) The battle at the end of The Two Towers is hugely enhanced.  In the movies its a massive part of the story.  In the book, the battle at the end of The Return of the King seems much more significant.

10) Pippin and Merry seem more mature and less comedic.  Merry rides to battle and meets no resistance from Eomer about it, only a little from Theoden; Pippin is not scorned by Gandalf for offering his service to Denethor.  Both characters play important roles in battle.  By contrast, Legolas and Gimli seem a bit less important – they seem to get overshadowed by other characters, especially Aragorn.

Lets hope The Hobbit movie does as good a job at capturing the book as The Lord of the Rings movies did.

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Lessons on Preaching from Lloyd-Jones (4)

Some final quotes, which I find liberating and inspiring:

“The primary task of the Church and of the Christian minister is the preaching of the Word of God” (19).

“The work of preaching is the highest and the greatest and the most glorious calling to which any­one can ever be called” (9).

“The most urgent need in the Christian Church today is true preaching; it is the greatest and most urgent need in the Church, it is obviously the greatest need of the world also” (9).

Preaching must always come first, and it must not be replaced by anything else” (37).

“There is a man standing in a pulpit and speaking, and there are people sitting in pews or seats listening. What is happening? What is this? What is his object? Why does the church put him there to do this? . . . Any true definition of preaching must say that that man is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people. If you prefer the language of Paul, he is an ambassador for Christ. That is what he is. He has been sent, he is a commissioned person. In other words he is not there merely to talk to them, he is not there to entertain them. He is there — and I want to emphasis this — to do something to those people; he is there to produce results of various kinds; he is there to influence people. He is not merely to influence a part of them; he is not only to influence their minds, or only their emotions, or merely to bring pressure to bear on their wills and to induce them to some kind of activity. He is there to deal with the whole person; and his preaching is meant to affect the whole person at the very centre of life. Preaching should make such a difference to a man who is listening that he is never the same again. Preaching, in other words, is a transaction between the preacher and the listener. It does something for the  soul of man, for the whole of the person, the entire man; it deals with him in a vital and radical manner” (p. 53).

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Lessons on Preaching from Lloyd-Jones (3)

The greatest benefit I received from this book is what I would call the aliveness of preaching – by that I mean the vivid sense that preaching is, in the very moment in which it is happening, a living address from God to his people.  It is the platform for a divine-human encounter – the occasion for God coming down among his people in a unique and powerful way.  Hence his language of “the element of attack” in a sermon (71), his assertion that the ultimate goal of preaching is to “give men and women a sense of God” (97), his statements about how preaching is an “exchange” between the preacher and the audience (84) during which you never really know where the sermon is going to end up (80), and so forth.  I think this is also at the root of his concerns against note-taking, sermon recording, technique practicing, etc. (18, 119, elsewhere) – as well as his warning against “light entertainment, easy familiarity, and jocularity” (140).  Even if we don’t draw the lines in exactly the same places as Lloyd-Jones on all of these specific matters, I think we can learn a lot from his concerns.  Preaching is holy.  In preaching a divine-human encounter is created.  We must handle this sacred task with sobriety and humility and earnestness.

This book helps remind me of what a sacred matter it is to preach, and makes me long to do it better. My final quote: “preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire” (97).  Oh, that one day I could do that!

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