“I can put it no plainer than than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by it’s maker. And that may be an encouraging thought.” — Gandalf

What is encouraging about this thought? Only persons can mean things. If Gandalf is right, someone more powerful than Sauron is at work behind the scenes. And therefore Frodo is not on his own. If sending two hobbits alone into Mordor is all we’ve got, we’re doomed. That plan has no chance of success. But if Gandalf has genuine insight into a greater Power at work, then we have hope. That is an encouraging thought indeed.

From one of my lectures a year ago for a conference sponsored by C. S. Lewis Institute Atlanta and Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. It was expanded to become part of my new book AN ENCOURAGING THOUGHT: THE CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW IN THE WRITINGS OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN (Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House, 2018).

Donald T. Williams learned a lot about the Christian worldview from Francis Schaeffer and CS Lewis, but it was actually Tolkien who first showed him that such a thing exists and is an essential component of maturing faith. Not only do explicitly Christian themes underlie the plot structure of The Lord of the Rings, but in essays such as “On Fairie Stories” Tolkien shows that he did not only believe the Gospel on Sunday but treated it as true of the rest of the week and used his commitment to that truth as the key to further insights in his work as a student of literature.

“You can do that?” Williams thought as a young man not yet exposed to any Christian who was a serious thinker. “I want to do that!”

His hope is that his readers will catch that same vision from this book. An Encouraging Thought elucidates the ways in which Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are informed by and communicate to a biblical worldview. This book will help readers appreciate the ways in which a biblical worldview reports Tolkien’s work, to the end that their faith may be confirmed in strength, focused in understanding, deepened in joy, and honed in its ability to communicate the Gospel.

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