O star of wonder, star of light
Week before last, Fred posted a lovely entry on the Magi, who they were, and how these astrologers alone understood the infant Jesus for who he really was and took great pains to honor his birth properly.

star with royal beauty bright

And then Stephen used these quotes:

These Dudes Aren’t Kings
Now “We Three Kings” is a wonderful Christmas song. Perhaps the Beach Boys’ version is best, if that’s not too sacrilegious to say. I’m not eager to play the spoiler here, but these dudes aren’t kings. They are pagan astrologers, not too far from what we’d call sorcerers and wizards.
Gandalf and Dumbledore are coming to worship the baby Jesus.

These magi are not respected kings but pagan specialists in the supernatural, experts in astrology, magic, and divination, blatant violators of Old Testament law — and they are coming to worship Jesus.

We really should beware of having a narrower vision of who can come to Jesus than God does. We can be so prone to write off people like this, but God doesn’t. He draws. He woos. He’s seeking worshipers from among the priestly caste of pagan religion. There will be worshipers from Hogwarts, even from Slytherin.
From We Three Kings of Orient Aren’t, David Mathis, DesiringGod.org, Dec. 24, 2011 (boldface emphases added)

This is astounding — that God is welcoming the magi, and not on the provision that they first abandon their life of astrology and magic. No, he comes to them where they are, in their sin. He goes as far as to exploit the very channel of their deepest idolatry to draw them to Jesus.
From That Crazy Star of Bethlehem, David Mathis, DesiringGod.org, Dec. 25, 2011

It’s this point I really wanted to settle on for a bit.

westward leading, still proceeding
Like it or not, Scripture does have that tendency of knocking our sensibilities right off their feet. A pagan seer-for-hire conversed with God and blessed Israel three times; magicians copied the first few plagues in Egypt; Joseph married the daughter of a pagan high priest; Moses married the daughter of a Moabite priest. A witch conjured the spirit of a prophet of God; and another prophet of God studied magic and astrology. Casting lots in hopes of drawing answers from God was commonplace and occasionally God used the method to rebuke at least one of his own. Pagan kings praised his name; a murderer sought God for protection; pagan seamen from who knows where begged God’s mercy as they frightfully threw a man overboard; ruthless tyrants found mercy in sackcloth and ashes.

But that’s what Christmas is all about, isn’t it? Those dwelling in deep darkness see a great light; the light pierced the darkness, and the darkness didn’t fathom it. He came to his own, but his own didn’t recognize him. Instead the most spiritually bound and oppressed people in the world felt the pull of his hand on their heart strings; the most hopelessly lost among us heard the sound of “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace toward man with whom God has found favor!”

Balaam of Peor was a fool, you know. The God of gods spoke directly to him, and he kept trying to find a way to keep God at his disposal and receive his pay, too. In the NT, Simon the Sorcerer attempted the same thing, and received a sharp rebuke from the apostles – a strange mercy in its own way, and far more so than the beating the seven sons of Sceva took.

No, wisdom came in the form of a few unnamed astrologers from an undisclosed country who made a grueling journey across foreign land and conquering empire to pay homage to a foreign king foretold in foreign prophecy. Not only that, but they heard firsthand from this God they didn’t know who warned them the infant king’s life was in danger – and likely their own, too.

Four hundred years of silence, remember? Four hundred years since a prophet of God opened his mouth.

Then Gentiles crossed country, bringing gifts that themselves became a prophecy.

guide us to thy perfect light
As part of the story-telling world, I’m fascinated when the least-expected character turns out to have the most faith. One of my favorite scenes from the Harry Potter movies involves a scene in which Dumbledore sounds slightly malicious and Snape dresses him down and remains resolute in his defense of Harry. But that’s why I like Snape; he’s complicated, traitor and faithful at the same time, in his own way.

These instances aren’t so much a matter of the unexpected hero as much as the unexpected faithful. I’m a little baffled, for example, at who Scripture calls righteous. King David’s one thing, but then you have Peter calling Lot righteous, a man who was self-serving, willing to offer his daughters to be gang-raped in place of his angelic guests (the angels, take note, chose option three), and got so drunk – twice in a row – that he didn’t know he’d committed incest with both daughters.

But Peter says this about Lot: “…[H]e rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds)…” (II Peter 2.7&8)

Scripture goes on: Naaman the Syrian, the widow in Zarephath, and the Roman centurion whom Jesus said displayed more faith than anyone in Israel.

These magicians, mind you, didn’t have someone in their lives to teach them the ways of God, or ‘be salt and light,’ or anything else. They were, for all practical purposes, the “unreached people groups.” I suppose we might be equally shocked today had our Messiah’s arrival had been heralded by random group of witchdoctors hailing from a jungle that no one even knew existed. We might even do something drastic like dressing them up as righteous kings in order to hide our humiliation.

“But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
Sometimes we forget that Jesus himself had to push against a world that said the faithful should look and behave a certain way, that they came from any particular demographic. Jesus himself had to deal with the question “What good can come from Nazareth?” But history, fiction, and the Scriptures teach us that help comes from the most unlikely sources and that the truest friend is often the one who is least expected. Fiction, as it is, is a safe place, and, again, I maintain that speculative fiction should be the safest place in the world to explore such things. What if a witch conversed with God? What if a medium heralded Christ’s return? The truth is, we don’t actually know who ‘the two prophets’ are going to be. They might be a ‘what’ rather than a ‘who.’ The first coming, we got the angel choir, shepherds, astrologers, and a hyperactive unborn child. I doubt that the second coming will be any less sensational.

There’s a part of us that has grasped much of this, but, primarily, we’ve missed something, something beyond the notion that Jesus hung out with prostitutes, drunks, and dirty IRS guys. And even beyond the idea that sometimes the dude with absolutely no Christian background gets it right, there should be this other concept:

The Spirit moves as pleases.

In other words, sometimes it’s not the church brat who sees Jesus, but the idol-worshiper, the atheist, and the psychic counselor.

Fiction ought to reflect the reality that God takes people where they are. If that means a pack of magicians understand only that they’re coming to worship a new king, so be it. They still came. If that means an idolater hears from God and proclaims his name, then so be it.

The only people Jesus ever told to shut up (besides that one loud-mouthed paralytic) were demons. Not children. Not seekers. Not story-tellers. Rather than focusing on what’s acceptable in “Christian fiction,” it seems more beneficial to stay accurate to the oddities of reality that don’t neatly align with conventional wisdom. In a neat and clean reality, unreached people groups, logically, shouldn’t have any chance at getting the good news right on their own. Nor should someone who is not a believer be able to hear directly from God like many people in Scripture did. If the delicate, potent workings of the Spirit are like fire and wind and water — all going where they please — then the Spirit is going to, by nature, rip apart our neatly packaged math formulas, cosmologies, and systematic theologies. That’s a far cry from whether or not certain words, certain traditions (be they legalistic or liberal), and/or certain creatures (like vampires and aliens) are acceptable in “Christian fiction.” Rather, there is this question which has been asked and answered by the unlikeliest saint:

“Where is the King of Kings and God of Gods, that we might worship him?”

I realized last night that I’m a bigot.

Stephen sent an e-mail to the Speculative Faith columnists with a question that developed into a conversation: Should we list self-published books in the Speculative Faith library?

I didn’t even need to think about it. My answer was no, and my rationale went something like this…

Self-published books are inferior, because:

1.  There’s no trustworthy quality control for self-published books.
2.  If a self-published book was any good, it would have been picked up by a traditional publisher.

I thought about it in more depth later, read a couple of related articles, and came to the conclusion I was reacting to the issue out of simple prejudice. “Self-published” equals “bad.”

I’ve accepted this equation for years. Self-publishing is a vanity operation for people who don’t have the patience for legitimate publishing. People who can’t handle criticism and rejection. People too lazy to walk their manuscripts through agents and editors. People who can’t put two coherent sentences together but still think they’re God’s gift to literature.

Those people.

It’s never been a completely accurate assessment. Many authors of renown have plied the murky waters of self-publishing over the years for a variety of personal and practical reasons, not to mention the many great works of classic and ancient literature that were written before publishers existed. It is, however, a lot easier and less expensive to take a story from manuscript to book and place it in the market than ever before—according to Publisher’s Weekly, 764,448 titles were published in 2009 by “micro niche” and self-publishers, compared to 288,355 from traditional publishers. Some of these books and their authors have jumped into the global spotlight, all without benefit of a traditional publishing house.

Let’s take a look at my two supporting points.

   There’s no trustworthy quality control for self-published books.

This seems obvious at first glance, but it’s a blanket assessment. Just because there’s no structured quality control in self-publishing doesn’t mean quality control isn’t happening at all. A diligent author will ensure their manuscript is professionally edited and formatted, with attractive cover art, before going to press. If they don’t, the market provides its own quality filter, and shoddy products won’t survive long.

We also have to be careful about how we define “quality,” because it doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it does when we’re talking about publishing. There are a plethora of impeccably proofread and typeset books produced each year by conventional publishers, and many are pure dreck, from a literary point of view. They’re published because they’re marketable—people will buy them, and publishers are in business to sell books. From that perspective, a quality book is one that provides a good reward-to-risk ratio—a book that will sell, written by an author with a proven track record and audience. Quality in terms of literary merit is a secondary issue.

   If a self-published book was any good, it would have been picked up by a traditional publisher.

If a self-published book develops enough of a following, chances are, a conventional publisher will pick it up. In a recent USA Today article, publisher Andrew Martin observes that the pool of self-published e-books is becoming the 21^st Century slush pile, one that outsources the labor of slush reading to the market. Books sell, or don’t sell, “…with the cream rising to the top,” and the publishers skim it off.

So, are self-published books inferior? They’re certainly a mixed bag, but I can’t simply say they’re inferior or illegitimate by definition. They emerge from a different publishing model that wasn’t practical until recently. They’re different, but not necessarily of poor craftsmanship. If anything, the ascendance of self-published fiction puts more burden on me to be aware of a larger universe of stories and not to rely entirely on the judgment of the traditional publishing community to determine what is and isn’t worthy of my reading time.

If I’m looking for something different, for the next big thing in speculative fiction, it probably won’t be sitting on the shelves at my local bookstore, where the established writers and their endless sequels reside. It’ll turn up in the electronic marketplace, written by somebody I’ve never heard of before. The big publishers are looking there already—and why should I wait for them to find it?

My recent series based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s lengthy essay “On Fairy-Stories” has renewed my interest in the group of scholars and writers known as the Inklings who famously met in the Oxford pub The Eagle and Child. Hence I’d like to do a bit more investigation about the group, the individuals, their writing, and the legacy of their work. Consider this a sort of introduction to this new series.

News

This blog, officially part of HarperOne’s CSLewis.com, offers original work on and about C. S. Lewis from scholars who have written far and wide about his stories, his theology, and his world. We are in line to add new entries every few weeks and we encourage your comments and feedback as we develop this resource.

Also put out by HarperOne is the Official C. S. Lewis Facebook page and (believe it or not) Twitter account.

From the blog I learned more about something I recently heard on the radio — there is a stage play of The Screwtape Letters that will be produced throughout the country this year, starting in Los Angeles (Jan. 14-15). For more details and the dates of the production nearest you, visit the Screwtape Letters theater site.

I also learned about a scholarly journal published by the Wade Center at Wheaton College entitled Seven in honor of the seven writers and thinkers often referred to as the Inklings. In the latest volume, you’ll find two essays, accessible online, about George MacDonald by G. K. Chesterton — “George Macdonald and His work” and “George Macdonald”:

Perhaps because George MacDonald rapidly lost popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century, these two essays by Chesterton were never reprinted and have been somewhat forgotten.

From the Facebook page, I learned about special sales prices of two well-loved C. S. Lewis titles:

Throughout January the e-book versions of The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce are being offered at special promotional prices.

Tidbits

This section enumerates odds and ends, primarily about Owen Barfield, I learned in my exploration for this introduction to the series on the Inklings. Perhaps I’m the only one who didn’t already know these items.

Barfield wrote very little fiction, though his first book was a children’s fantasy, The Silver Trumpet.

His first name was Arthur.

He lived to be 100, passing away in 1997. He has thus received the tag as the first and last Inkling.

He and his wife adopted three children, Alexander, Lucy, and Geoffrey, and it was to Lucy that C. S. Lewis dedicated The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He also dedicated The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to Geoffrey.

Barfield had a huge impact on C. S. Lewis who called him “the best and wisest of my unofficial teachers”.

His grandson, Owen A. Barfield, heads up the Owen Barfield Literary Estate which owns the copyright to all his works.

He wrote some poetry and fiction under the pseudonym G. A. L. Burgeon.

C. S. Lewis also used a pseudonym, in fact more than one. He wrote on occasion as Clive Hamilton and as N. W. Clerk.

So what are your thoughts or questions about the Inklings? Which one do you know the least? Have you read works by any of them besides Lewis and Tolkien? Who is your favorite Inkling and why? I anticipate learning a lot more about this group than I’ve known before.

We are all familiar with the image of Christ as the lamb of God led passively to the slaughter. Having just left behind the Christmas season, we’re also intimately familiar with Jesus come in the flesh. We recognize Jesus the preacher, wandering through Judea and speaking to people about the coming of the Kingdom. Yet there is one image that is less familiar to us, which is Christ the warrior.

This lack in our visual vocabulary is most unfortunate, because it balances out the other pictures. Jesus the conqueror riding forth to do battle with His enemies in Revelation is the description of what Christ is like after the Ascension, seated on the right hand of Heaven, bearing a sword and riding out on the clouds to throw down his enemies. (I’ve often thought a great title for a commentary on the book of Revelation would be The Return of the King.)

This picture of Jesus as warrior-King is particularly relevant for the speculative fiction genres and their Christian readers because it gives us a window into understanding these genres in a Christian way. To this effect, I want to look at one specific passage in the New Testament that speaks of Christ in fantasy-esque terms.

Hebrews 2:10 (ESV) reads: ”For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.” The passage is speaking about Christ and the ESV refers to Him as the “founder” of salvation. The Greek word for is archegos, of which “founder” is a poor translation. The word actually means “captain” or “prince” of salvation. In its fullest sense, the word means champion, and actually refers to the ancient war tradition in the ancient near east. When two armies met on the battlefield, before they would charge they would send out their greatest warriors to fight one another. The side whose champion lost would be forced by their code of honor to surrender (though this often didn’t happen either).

Thus Christ pictured as the lamb led to slaughter is not the only image we’re given by the Bible about His work on the cross. Christ was sent out as our champion, to do battle with the champion of the forces of sin and darkness, namely, the Devil. And, as Hebrews 2:15-16 goes on to say, Christ defeats the Devil in hand-to-hand combat: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”

William Lane, in his Word Biblical Commentary on Hebrews, writes,

The language of Heb 2:10, 18 displays a close affinity with the descriptions and manegyrics of some of the most popular cult [religious – ATR] figures of the hellenistic world, the “divine hero” who descends from heaven to earth in order to rescue humankind. Although Jesus is of divine origin, he accepts a human nature, in which he can serve humanity, experience testing, and ultimately suffer death. Through his death and resurrection he attains to his perfection, wins his exaltation to heaven, and recieves a new name or title to mark his achievement in the sphere of redemption. This description, Knox observed, represented Jesus in much the same light as the divine hero figures of the pagan world, of whom Hercules was the most prominent. (p. 56)

By using the term “champion,” the author of Hebrews argues that Christ is the fulfillment, not merely of Jewish archetypes and shadows, but also of pagan ones as well. The earthly tabernacle and sacrifices in the Old Testament were “types and shadows” of Christ – and not them alone, because even pagan stories serve as “types and shadows” of Christ’s work as well. Christ fulfills not merely the Messianic figure in the Jewish worldview, but the Herculean figure of the Gentile worldview as well. Lane goes on, writing that “Hearers familiar with the common stock of ideas in the hellenistic world knew that the legendary Hercules was designated ‘champion’ and ‘savior,’ (p. 56-57).

Readers of Hebrews would

almost certainly interpret the term archegos in v 10 in the light of the allusion to Jesus as the protegonist who came to the aid of the oppressed people of God in vv 14-16. Locked in mortal combat with the one who held the power of death, he overthrew him in order to release all those who had been enslaved by this evil tyrant. This representation of the achievement of Jesus was calculated to recall one of the more famous labors of Hercules, his wrestling with Death, ‘the dark-robed lord of the dead’,” (p. 57).

Jesus as Hercules, descending from a Kingdom long-lost to mankind to do battle with a “dark-robed lord of the dead” in order to set the captives free and restore justice to the realm by being crowned and taking the throne? If you’re anything like me, you just got chills. If that reminds you of your favorite fantasy series, it is because fantasy is the descendant of the ancient myth, as interpreted through the lens of Medieval romance. In short, fantasy presents the gospel in “types and shadows” in the same way that the myth of Hercules did.

This startling fact is helpful when we start thinking about “Christian elements” in fiction and what we should do with “secular” stories. Christian readers often wonder if an author “intended” for this or that to reflect the Christian story. Well, do we imagine the original pagans who told the Hercules myth intended for it to be read as a type or shadow of Jesus Christ? Obviously not. Does this matter to the author of Hebrews? No. Jesus as Messiah is the intentional fulfillment of an unintentional type and shadow written down and told by pagans. The creation and everything in it (including pagan stories) was made by Christ, “for whom and by whom all things exist.” The universe was made for Christ, by Christ, which means that all meaning in the universe (in order for it to be true meaning) was made by Christ, for Christ. Now, obviously we need to be clear that some reflections are better than others, some shadows are more difficult to see than others, some reflections more distorted than others, but they all make Christ plain.

The implication here is that instead of running from some kinds of stories or viewing them with suspicion, we must read and interpret them Christianly  (since, according to Hebrews, the Christian interpretation is the correct interpretation). So when we’re reading a story (any story), the ultimate meaning of that story must point to Christ, even if the author’s heart is in total rebellion. All stories reflect Christ because all meaning has its beginning and its end point in the person of Jesus. This means that Aragorn is a type of Christ, as is Beowulf and Harry Potter and (sigh) Eragon. All stories are types and shadows of the world’s great champion, Jesus Christ, their meanings are all drawn up together into His being.

A. T. Ross is an aspiring speculative novelist with four unpublished novels under his belt, a committed Christian, amateur theologian, and avid reader. He is a Reviews editor for Fermentations magazine and writes occasionally for Fantasy Book Review. When he’s not working on one of his writing projects, he can be found reading at the public library or getting into mischief on his blog. He lives and churches in Ohio.

“What if I promised you that you would be able to see clearly all the way to where the earth and heaven meet?”
I peered up at it. When I looked at it, I saw clearly. When I looked away, all was dark again. But I had not lived my life as an orphan for nothing. I did not give my trust easily. “Why should I want to see that?”

“Why should you want to miss it?” The creature scolded me with a hiss. “You are asking the wrong questions, Wen Ming. You have not asked who I am or why I call to you.”

“I think you are an evil spirit.”

“Or I might just be your imagination. Since your world is so small, I suppose you don’t have much else to do other than create monsters in your mind.”

— Lucky Baby, by Meredith Efken (Howard Books, 2010)

Is perception a pipe dream? We must in some sense say yes. Sensory input and memory are both subject to the vagaries of a brain originally designed for accurate perception, but subject to the corruption of sin—in a purely spiritual sense, and in the corruption of a universe that groans under the weight of entropy.

Christians are taught in no uncertain terms that the two options are to rely firmly on a clear doctrinal framework, or discard it for the morass of experientialism. Neither is entirely reliable, and it’s for this reason, I’d suggest, that we walk by faith—not by sight.

There probably could not be a title better matched to its story than Athol Dickson’s Lost Mission. Part of the novel’s fantasia is its incredible voice. With zero contortion or contrivance, we encounter a Hispanic-accented narrator who begins a forgotten story. Over and over, as the smoke of fires drifts mysteriously upstream, against the wind, the scene shifts between time and place as if the universe’s continuum were a fluid fog.

Over and over again, the questionable power of broken faith seeks to build the kingdom of God. And suffers the plague that besets mankind—in literal and figurative form. We come face to face with a world that turns onward in relentless oblivion to the spiritual, seen through a curtain where time does not matter. The best-laid plans of mice and men go aft agley; yet lostness and aloneness have a witness.

No name or persona is credited to the narrator, though he is unquestionably there. No need is felt to attribute his existence to the personage of an angel, a demon or the voice of God—the three stock choices of Christian fiction. The narrator is so very real, however, that the standard advice to avoid author intrusion is inapplicable. He is a character, an undefined one. He simply exists, and his presence is truthful in the vein of I think, therefore I am.

This concept of a witness to the mystical is far from the American evangelical testimonial pattern—another breach with standard practices in Christian fiction. Not only does it defy the tidy cookie-cutter, it challenges our ingrained need to establish an authoritative source in connection to the work’s argumentation. God stuff, good. Agree with God, unless the writer runs afoul of one’s personal image of God, in which case label as suspect. Angels, good unless a deceiving angel. Angels, controversial. Demons, bad. Oh, okay, easy. This approach to categorizing all spiritual fantasia by a personal hit list of good and evil is less real than we think.

Moreover, it’s a truly flawed approach to fiction. The imposition of analysis is both a cause of the complaint that Christian writing is inferior, and an open door to false doctrine, because we cannot structure a book with much for spiritual specifics at all if it’s going to be analyzed and discarded according to the tyranny of postmodern personal preferences. If the biblical fantasium—which is in fact more real than we want—need be invoked, might it not be better to allow it to stand on its own two feet?

In the ultimate Christian narrative, it’s far from strange to diverge from the modern and postmodern schizophrenic blend of experientially rationalistic foci:

“How then were your eyes opened?” they asked.

He replied, “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to g to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.”

“Where is this man?” they asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man’s eyes was a Sabbath. Therefore the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. “He put mud on my eyes,” the man replied, “and I washed, and now I see.”

Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.”

But others asked, “How can a sinner perform such signs?” So they were divided…

A second time they summoned the man who had been blind. “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” they said. “We know this man is a sinner.”

He replied, “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”

John 9: 10-16, 24-25

The moral point of the incident, the medical reasoning behind the Saviour’s treatment, and the relative position of the blind man in symbolic relation to the generic American saved soul have been treated and mistreated with great fortitude. Since the recipient of this magically real act was unwilling to give a full and proper testimonial, we are only doing our duty by filling in the missing pieces.

But that’s much too easy. As we struggle and fail to build a kingdom that can only be built without hands, or at least a pleasant substitute thereof, we forget—we long to forget—that sometimes, there is a thing that happens. That in the redeeming hands of God, entropy can be as much magical and as much real as miracle.

There—in the presence of God’s touch—is the lost edge of magic realism. When perception and truth meet, we accept the risk that we’ll be blind; or that, perhaps, we’ll see as never before.

I gave the creature the most obscene hand gesture I knew. “My sight is only the size of a fen coin. Everything else has been taken from me. Why do you want my sight?”

“I don’t want it. I’m only here to take it.”

Stay on the ground where it was safe, or climb the trees and take my chances? If the beast did not lie, I could at least taste the independence of climbing a tree before losing my sight entirely.

I would take the chance.

Cathi-Lyn Dyck has been a published writer and poet since 2004, and a freelance editor since 2006.

She can be found online at ScitaScienda.com.

With all the J.R.R. Tolkien fandom recently renewed, I wish I could say it was the professor’s written creation of Middle-earth that first drew me in. If I were a better man, I could say that I was given The Hobbit and/or The Lord of the Rings as a child, or else found the books at a library, or perhaps stumbled upon a copy in a dusty attic.

I can’t even credit Peter Jackson, director of the original three The Lord of the Rings films and now the forthcoming The Hobbit two-part, for introducing me to Middle-earth.

Rather, Rings film soundtrack composer Howard Shore receives that credit.

Plus a guy named Daniel, in college. That was in fall 2001, mere months before the first of the films released on Dec. 19, 2001. With him, and my brother Dave, I saw the first film, on Jan. 5, 2002.

First, I wish to stress that I did read the first book before seeing the film. My brother, alas! finished Fellowship literally as we pulled into the theater parking lot. So why my “alas”? Well, fans know: the Fellowship film’s ending has a significant plot development that was only included in The Two Towers book!

So, yes, the d____ of B______ took him just a bit by surprise.

Also, it so happens that this date, Jan. 5, was exactly ten years ago, from this column’s release date. Needless to say, I’ve gotten caught up on my fandom, and can recite dates and places, critique people who call the books a “trilogy,” and speak minimal Elvish like the rest of them (at least, enough Elvish not to starve or miss the restrooms if ever my plane was detained in their fair country). In fact, I share a birthday with Aragorn (March 1) and my wife and I happened to first meet on Frodo’s and Bilbo’s birthday (Sept. 22).

Still, I started late in my Middle-earth questings. And now, ten years after seeing the first LotR film, I’m trying to remember how come I waited so long.

Myths about Middle-earth

I grew up homeschooled, but not in the kind of homeschool culture that either dislikes all fantasy or, perhaps worse, simply sees no use for it. Thus I became a Narnia fan fairly early, at age 10. Maybe it was the “these are sort-of secret Christian books” concept (partially true!) that allowed C.S. Lewis entrance. But as for his colleague, Tolkien? I’d never heard of him, Middle-earth, or brave Hobbits and an evil volcano of destruction.

One memory comes to mind. I was visiting the house of homeschooling friends. Like most homeschoolers, they had shelves full of books. Three of them were The Lord of the Rings paperbacks. On the first’s cover, I believe, was a picture of a long-bearded wizard and a little man. They seemed to be in a cave (Bilbo’s house, I’m sure), and in the dark.

Here’s where it — and by it, I mean I — gets very silly. Based on that single cover photo, and the back cover’s description of some perilous threat and quest in a place called Middle-earth, I made a brilliant deduction worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself:

Ah. Must be set at the center of the earth, with weirdness and dark tunnels. Sounds dull.

And despite my friends’ lauding of this series, I paid it no attention for years after.

My next memory of Middle-earth mentions comes from summer 2001, when I saw, in the Parade magazine with a Sunday newspaper, a brief paragraph about how ambitious the films would be. Some director in New Zealand was making them, all three of them, at once. Financers were pouring their money, and artists their hearts, into the project.

Somehow that impressed me, enough to remain in my mind until now …

The legend comes to life

Then I never heard about the films until later that year. Daniel, from the same college as I (though not in the same classes or direction), was a huge fan. Yet a friend’s enthusiasm hadn’t sold me before, and this one’s excitement only partially aroused my interest. It still sounded too “classical” to me, even if I now knew the story was not all underground in the literal middle of our Earth. I had my Narnia. Why add another fantasy world?

Now I’m not sure what happened. I didn’t get ahold of the books. At this point, I don’t think I had even seen the first film’s teaser. But somehow, I did wind up on the internet — a groundbreaking new kind, called “high speed,” available only at school — and at a site called FilmTracks. I’d hung out there because I had just gotten into film scores, such as The Prince of Egypt music, and a few others. The Fellowship of the Ring score was here also (and believe it or not, this is very nearly the exact same page, with few text updates and almost no changes to the web design itself). Clips were available, in a primitive and strange format that you old-timers may remember as “RealAudio.” I listened.

That clip, “The Prophecy,” is no longer listed there. It was from the first score release, and for a prologue that isn’t even in the film. Yet I listened. Only thirty seconds.

It took me.

I’m not sure how else to explain it, even after I’ve since heard that track, and the complete score by Howard Shore, multiple times. At first I almost didn’t like it. It was … classical. Dark, ancient, and mysterious. … Then it was transcendent. And magnificent.

Soon I not only let my dislike fade. I loved this music.

And the scent of it. Yes, that’s what I remember. A deep, rich, woodsy scent. Maybe it came from some opening into this majestic world.

There in that college computer room, I first entered Middle-earth.

How were you introduced to this world? How did you first journey to Middle-earth, either by the original book series, films, or film soundtracks?

So last time, we sat at the foot of the master, C. S. Lewis, and discussed the theological underpinnings of his Space Trilogy. For those of you just joining us now (or who don’t feel like going back and reading the article for yourself), Lewis basically operated under the assumption that each planet was “spiritually” independent of each other, meaning that each planet would have its own Edenic period of testing and, depending on how they dealt with temptation, their own salvation history as well, meaning that for every fallen race, there could potentially be their own incarnation and salvation.

Full disclosure time: I didn’t come up with that list of underpinnings on my own. Back in 1999, when I was attending seminary, I took an elective course called “The Gospel and C. S. Lewis.” I signed up for it on a lark. At that point, the only Lewis I had read was The Screwtape Letters (don’t hurt me!), and I liked it well enough. As part of the course, we read four of the Narnia books, two of the Space trilogy, and Til We Have Faces. During our discussion of the Space trilogy, the professor elucidated the points I shared in my last post. But as we had the discussion, my mind started wandering and I asked myself a fateful question:

What if Lewis got it backwards? What if all the sentient races fell with Adam and Eve at the same time?

I was stunned. Could that be the way it worked? Since the Bible doesn’t speak of aliens, we couldn’t say with any certainty, but one passage in particular seemed to point in that direction. I’m speaking of Romans 8:19-23, which states that all of creation fell with Adam and Eve and now waits for salvation to come to them. I wondered if maybe that would include sentient alien life as well.

That got me to thinking about electricity. I don’t know much about it, but I do remember this from my time in 4H that when you’re wiring up two light bulbs to the same power source, there are two ways to do it, either in a parallel or a series circuit. To wit:

The circuit on the left is a series circuit, the one on the right a parallel circuit. They behave differently. For example, in the parallel circuit, if one light bulb burns out, the other one will still remain lit because they have independent paths to the battery. But in the series circuit, if one bulb blows, they both go dark. Think Christmas tree lights.

So I got to wondering, if there are multiple “light bulbs” in the universe and since humanity has gone dark, what happened to the other races (assuming there are other races out there)? Did God create us all as a parallel circuit or a series circuit? In Lewis’s trilogy, he operated under the assumption that we would exist in parallel with each other. In my thought exercise, influenced by the Romans passage, I wondered if maybe it was the other way around. When one race fell, did we all fall?

If that’s the case, then the redemptive work of Christ is not just for human beings but happened to “replace our burnt out bulb,” so to speak, and allow the other races to find the one true Light as well. In the same way that Christ died for all sinful humanity (and not just the Jews and the Romans who were involved with His crucifixion), Christ died for all living and sentient races.

I further asked myself what would happen with those other races. One moment, they’re living in idyllic paradises specific to their races. The next, sin and death and darkness would break upon them, just as it did for humanity. What would they think? What would they do? What would they . . .

And suddenly, I had a book idea brewing. But that’s another story for another time. Maybe I’ll tell it when we’re done with this series.

Now I realize what some of you might be thinking. “How is that fair? The alien races didn’t sin! They didn’t do anything wrong! How could God let them fall?” But, if you think about it, a lot that we see about sinful humanity isn’t “fair” from our perspective. Think about it this way: is it fair that original sin afflicts all of us, so many millennia later, when we weren’t the ones in the Garden?

So is this the way it works? I have no idea. Maybe. Could be. The only way we’ll find out is if we ever do encounter alien life out there. But in the meantime, it’s good for us to remember that there are plenty of people in this world who Christ definitely died for, people who need to hear that message still to this day.

You know, maybe that’s the take-away for this series. It’s a lot of fun to dance on the end of tree branches, but what’s really important is how our theological rubber hits the road. Before we get too wrapped up in the hypotheticals, let’s keep in mind the actual people around us who are, at this time, aliens to God, lost and foreign. Let’s focus on bringing God’s grace to them.

Now that would be a great way to cap this series, right? That’s exactly why I’m not doing that yet. Instead, I want to spend at least one more week talking about a two book series that kind of/sort of tackles this very issue. So stay tuned, folks.

The turn of a new year is always a time of forecasts and prognostications. Prophets literally come crawling out of the woodwork, on a scale not seen since the Showdown at Mount Carmel. I’m certainly not a prophet, and I have no desire to add to the predictive glut of the season, but this blog isn’t called Speculative Faith for nothing. So, today I’m offering a list of speculations for the coming year.

I claim no divine inspiration or authority for these statements. Don’t rearrange your travel plans or restructure your 401K based on anything I say here. Whatever you do, don’t repeat them at the office, quote them at church, or share them with friends on your social network of choice. People might think you’re as disordered as I am.

I do, however, reserve the right to say, “I told you so,” when they come true.

1. The world will not end in 2012. I favor 2020, if only because it would be so cool to be able to say for eternity, “In hindsight, it was always 2020.”
2. Scientists will discover at least three planets capable of supporting life as we know it. The short list of potential names submitted by the public will include Vulcan, Tatooine, Gallifrey, and Pizza Planet.
3. On March 9, a human being will walk on the surface of Mars, encounter a thriving humanoid civilization, and fall in love with a smokin’ hot alien princess who has the proper number of arms and legs. Mark your calendars.
4. The writers of Doctor Who will leak a memo confirming that Doctor #12 will be female. The Internet will crash for one week, and screams of horror will be audible on Ganymede.
5. The Christian Booksellers Association will issue a formal statement apologizing for their years of snubbing speculative fiction writers. They will direct their membership to stock a more balanced proportion of Christian science fiction and fantasy, relative to historical romances.
6. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien will be mentioned at least once a week at Speculative Faith. As you may note, I’ve already taken care of this week.
7. Frustrated critics of Rob Bell’s Love Wins will attempt a more nuanced and aesthetically-sensitive strategy, beginning with an essay posted on Facebook, titled, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Hell.”
8. Oops, I forgot to mention that prediction #5 will come true only on an alternate Earth where pigs can fly and Skittles grow on trees for the nourishment of rainbow-colored unicorns.
9. The winner of the 2012 United States Presidential election will announce his first official act upon taking office: “Save the cheerleader…save the world.”
10. Bilbo Baggins’ memoirs will appear on the big screen in November to much rejoicing and the public wearing of pointy ears and hairy feet. Only the first half of the story will be presented. This is another reason the world will not end in 2012.

Due to the New Year’s Day holiday, there will be no post today. We here at Spec Faith wish each of you a blessed 2012.

Our regular schedule of posts will resume tomorrow.