Christianity and Tolkien

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by tumhalad2

I was merely setting a baseline: these are some common Christian doctrines that have been widely believed throughout history. It is only in recent times that moderate Christians have even been able to reinterprete many biblical stories and dogmas less literally.

True also for Islam, Hinduism and other faiths. The turning point may have been Galileo, when a major change in wordview came from scientific investigation. In the 19th century the age of the Earth became a major focus of study. Then Darwin came along.

Yes, there are today those who still believe the medieval Christian worldview. There are even those who believe the world is actually flat rather than spherical. There are Hindus who literally believe the Mahabharata.

But to choose the medieval Christian worldview as a baseline doesn’t fit in a discussion supposedly about Tolkien’s religion. Tolkien didn’t believe in the medieval worldview in reality, any more than he believed in Elves in reality. If you want to talk about Tolkien’s religious beliefs, a supposed baseline that does not represent many of those beliefs is far less useful compared to one which represents those beliefs. But that would mostly be guesswork outside of areas where Tolkien has expressed a particular belief.

One finds oddities, such as Tolkien’s casual treatment of the Sabbath day, which historically apparently derives from a continuous seven-day planetary cycle apparently known both to Hebrews and Phoenicians. Tolkien casually breaks up the cycle and ignores the Biblical connection with creation. Your baseline misses much that should be there, either because Tolkien agrees with the traditions of traditional Christianity or presents a drastic modification of them which should equally be mentioned.

That's rediculous. Do most Christians not believe in an all-powerful, all loving god? Do most Catholics NOT believe in the virginal conception of Jesus?

Possibly.

But most Christian probably don’t believe in a literal Adam and Eve or a creation in approximately 4,000 BCE. If you feel otherwise, I can′t change your feelings, but without firm figures you are not convincing. I can’t find any figures that seem convincing either. I formerly belonged to the United Church of Canada, by far Canada’s largest Protestant Church, which strongly did not and does not believe that everything in the Christian Bible is literally true and very strongly supports same-sex marriage. That may influence my opinions of your attempts to use a baseline that seems to me to be a parody created by ignorance.

But if you want to gratuitously insult your reader, go ahead.

There was formerly a large site on religious toleration which contained all sorts of religious statistics and studies but it seems to be gone.

Yes most Roman Catholics do believe in the virginal conception of Jesus. But Raymond E. Brown, who was arguably the most prestigious Roman Catholic theologian considered it very unlikely. I suspect Tolkien believed, but I don’t know because, so far as I know, he never explicitly said. Either did his friend C. S. Lewis. But Lewis tried to avoid talking about issues that divide Christians.

I'm not talking about reified theologians, I'm talking about the general beliefs of most people who call themselves Christians. Indeed, I don't disagree that Tolkien probably accepted modern geology and science, indeed he was a scientist, but most many Christians do indeed believe in a literalist take on the bible.

That is where you are confusing things, saying that because some or even many Christians have beliefs that your find superstitious and silly and because J. R. R. Tolkien was a Roman Catholic Christian, that you can assume that all the beliefs in your baseline apply to J. R. R. Tolkien. Then you admit that some of them don’t. And there are many other points that don’t fit, like my statistics showing that a majority of Quebec Roman Catholics support same-sex marriage despite the official position of their church. And Tolkien was definitely not a scientist in the normal meaning of the term, other than arguably in the field of linguistics. His friend C. S. Lewis was even less arguably that.

Tolkien apparently did not even believe in the Old Testament Bible sufficiently to even care that his legendarium didn’t fit into Biblical chronology. Tolkien very much did not try to fit his legendarium into Bible history and even put in some clear conflicts. Tolkien did base some of the moral underpinnings of his The Lord of the Rings on traditional Christian moral teaching.

I'm glad you're here to order me about. Did I ever say every Roman Catholic is a Biblical Literalist? No, strawman fallacy. Before you accuse me of ignorance, read my post carefully. In any case, and I'll reiterate, that list was meant as a baseline.

That was a Biblical Literalist baseline, representative of medieval Christianity, not of Tolkien’s faith. Order me to accept it all you want if you are talking about ordering. It still doesn’t fit with much of what Tolkien believed so far as I can tell. It looks like something devised to show how stupid Tolkien’s belief was. Your response seems to me to come down to: “If he didn’t believe it, well other Christians did, so its inaccuracy in respect to Tolkien doesn’t matter.” Accuracy does matter in scholarship, or at least it should.

Throughout history, Christians have believed some or all of these things. Tolkien probably didn't believe all of them, of course not, and that was not the point.

It is very much to the point if you really want to discuss Tolkien’s religion instead of to troll the poor benighted Christies who revere Tolkien by presenting a parody of Fundamentalist Christianity and apply that to Tolkien’s faith.

But writers often talk about "Christianity" in Tolkien's work, so I was keen to make a list of some of the dogmas Christians have believed throughout history and interrogate Tolkien's work in light of them.

Some of them fit, some of them partly fit, and some of them don’t. To take an extreme example I know of no Roman Catholic belief that requires even a belief in Elves. And the war between the Valar and Morgoth obviously represents the war between angels and Satan in Christian tradition, but then is Manwë to be equated with St. Michael, or is Tulkas?

Nor do I know of any Christian belief that the Earth was created flat and was changed into a round world on the fall of Atlantis. Tolkien was largely just having great fun and was fitting in some Christian moral tradition as part of that fun. It was a game, which Tolkien sometimes took very seriously, otherwise it wouldn’t be as much fun. And Tolkien was usually very much offended by literary works which were preaching any religion. Probably because it was too obviously easy to invent anything in a fiction and attribute it to God or to present as a fictional truth that the author’s religious opinion is real.

One finds books now written by Christians which amount to a plea that since the reader likes Tolkien’s fantasy, and Tolkien was a Christian, the reader should become a Christian. But Galadriel is really not much like the traditional Virgin Mary. She was a wife with a daughter named Celebrían and in Tolkien’s later writings a rebel against the Valar. And lembas being Christ in the guise of bread thousands of years before Christ existed doesn’t really make sense either. To begin with the writers forget it is not lawful in the Roman Catholic Church to allow any but Roman Catholics to eat the Holy Bread.

But no matter how often Tolkien would insist that he was not writing allegory, commentators will find it. Not only obviously Christian commentators either.

Perhaps not nowadays in the era of psychology and other social sciences, but it's much more likely that Tolkien would've believed in some variant of it.

Read “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” in Morgth’s Ring (HoME X) which is a story by Tolkien about original sin in Tolkien’s legendarium (without including the words “original sin”). This includes a parallel to the story of the Fall in which early people turn to Morgoth and reject Eru and Eru shortens their lives, although in this tale the early people have apparently always been mortal. You blame me for treating you as ignorant, yet you have apparently not even begun to read much that would answer many of your questions (and provide more questions).