In recent years, there has been a fair amount of criticism of our cultural institutions. Whether they be political, academic, or ecclesiastical, anyone comfortably in a place of leadership in any institution is in the crosshairs of this criticism. Things have only gotten worse on their watch, after all.
Older pastors and confessional churches have been lumped into this kind of criticism as well, either for not being focused enough on social justice and activism; or, by those sympathetic to Christian Nationalism, for having what seems to be an incredulous posture to politics and culture.
The general mood, even on topics other than culture and politics, is that the church and its gatekeepers have become comfortable, weak, and even corrupt.
This fits within what many commentators have called a Meaning Crisis. Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has created a 50-part course and written multiple books on the Meaning Crisis. “We are in the midst of a mental health crisis,” he writes. “This mental health crisis is itself due to, and engaged with, crises in the environment and the political system. Those in turn are enmeshed within a deeper cultural historical crisis that I call ‘The Meaning Crisis’.… People are feeling disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future.”
Even amongst committed Christians, there is a sense that the scripts and narratives of the previous generation simply are not working. Many are looking for more rebellious and radical alternatives. If current leaders are not offering a viable and foreseeable future, then things need to be torn down, discarded, started anew, etc. And as a younger millennial myself, I sympathize with the more youthful reactionary impulse. Things are not as they should be. But in my own wrestling with these matters, and with the help of J. R. R. Tolkien, I have become more convinced that even in the face of sclerotic ecclesiastical and cultural systems, the strategy of the church and its ministry—and even how we live our lives—should not be burnt to the ground; rather, it should be regrounded in the foolish, ordinary means of grace.
“There are other forces at work in this world”
In light of the institutional decay in late modernity, it is easy to look at any clerics in these institutions as gatekeepers and good ol’ boys in the country club. When a pastor over the age of 60 chides a young congregant to not spend so much time fretting about what he sees online and instead focus on the ministry of the church through the preaching of the law and the gospel, the administration of the sacraments, and observance of the ordinary means of grace, it is easy for the pastor to be dismissed as a “boomer with his head in the sand.”
It seems only natural for younger generations to sneer and roll their eyes at what feels like the superficial slogans and trite narratives they were raised with. And there are kernels of truth to this ironic sentiment. Speaking from experience, while you struggle with the prices at the pump, you can only drive by Southern California’s beachfront properties for so long before the opulence begins to feel gross. You can only be so earnest about defending the church before recurring stories of pastoral abuse wear you down.
The “focus on word and sacrament ministry” response, especially when the world is burning, can feel like pastoral negligence. For those who are struggling with any kind of existential concerns, it seems only fitting to harbor suspicions that everything, even the church, is broken and needs to change, now.
I’m not going to tell folks caught in the middle of that rumination that they simply need to chill out. Decadence, neglect, and acedia are real vices that far too many leaders are far too comfortable with.
And yet I am not going to applaud this cynicism—as some do—describing our world of wars, school shootings, unchecked abuses against the innocent, and various crises as impossibly difficult. After reckoning with the maladies around us, it is still important to say that the pessimistic pathology of younger generations, as reasonable as it feels, is also terribly naive.
It turns out that cynicism is not exactly a clear-eyed assessment of reality. Middle-class millennials will be financially better off than their boomer parents, and there are good reasons to be skeptical of alarmism and the catastrophic reads on the world that are laundered to us online. We can resist naive despair while still taking existential problems seriously.
In the midst of our bereavements, it is important to remember that our default assumption as modern Westerners, especially Americans, is to look for pragmatic solutions to all of life’s problems. We tend to think that the right methods and techniques, if tried with utmost sincerity, will bring about all of our desired outcomes. If things aren’t working, we can scrap whatever practices we are doing and try again. Scott Clark has explained some of this impulse as the “Quest for Illegitimate Religious Certainty (QIRC).” Any talk that plays down triumphal activism and instead encourages Christians to persevere as pilgrims on the way to the heavenly city smells of “amillennialist defeatism.” Instead, we desire for our faith to be manifested, the church to be visibly triumphant, for change and transformation to be measurable and quantifiable.
Whatever righteous anger we might feel, it is important to resist this tendency. This might appear like I am capitulating and toeing the line of the “gatekeepers.” But I am not advocating for a posture of resignation in the Christian life. Far be it.
The pessimism and cynicism that we breathe, day in and day out, keeps us blind to the wonderful works of God that are happening even now. We think that a clear-eyed assessment of reality means taking into account how the wheels of power are turning, which power brokers are part of backdoor conversations, what cabals are plotting, etc. However much those accountings might be helpful to understand, a deeper reckoning with reality—a deeper truth—is needed. It is not found in the structures and systems of the world but in the mystical and mysterious inbreaking of heaven, through prayer, the Lord’s Supper, baptism, and the foolhardy preaching of the word of God.
“Let folly be our cloak”
My fellow pessimists will find a fellow traveler in Tolkien. While his contemporaries were confident that the arc of history would be limitless progress, Tolkien vehemently opposed such modernist notions. And while Tolkien had a bleak view of history, he surely wasn’t a postmodernist, the likes of which, especially after WWI and WWII, radically deconstructed Western society’s modern optimism.
While our cultural moods ebb and flow between modern optimism and postmodern cynicism, Tolkien stood outside this pendulum. Tolkien was a committed Catholic. He saw the bleak effects of industrialization on his boyhood home and witnessed the horrors of trench warfare and the spread of authoritarianism. And like his friend C. S. Lewis, he was a medievalist.
Instead of seeing history as linear, evolving from the arcane and mundane to a progressive utopia, he saw history as cyclical. Each age deals with the same perennial problems but gets further away from its mythic grandeur, gradually succumbing to entropy with each passing cycle. More can be said about this, but Tolkien’s assessment of history isn’t just the musings of some dour and curmudgeonly professor. His views never amounted to despair or cynicism; as is his read on history, they are tethered and illumined by hope.
This is alluded to throughout The Lord of the Rings. In the film adaptation, while Frodo and Gandalf are in the Mines of Moria, Frodo laments,
“It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance.” Notice how Gandalf’s answer isn’t merely a reprimand or a lecture on providence.
Gandalf: “Pity? It's pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.”
Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”
Gandalf: “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 to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”
There are other forces at work, indeed. And this is why, at the Council of Elrond in Rivendell, they decided not to strike back at the Dark Lord with his own ring. In the midst of the council’s deliberation, a chief counselor of Elrond's household says in Tolkien's work:
“What strength have we for the finding of the Fire in which [the Ring] was made? That is the path of despair. Of folly I would say, if the long wisdom of Elrond did not forbid me.”
“Despair, or folly?” said Gandalf. “It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.”
“At least for a while,” said Elrond. “The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is off 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.”
In the epic of Tolkien’s literary masterpiece, he does in fantasy and fairy tale what few theologians and professors can do in lectures. In his characters, we see despair assuaged, courage enlivened, contempt tempered. Ultimately, Tolkien reminds us that God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise (1 Cor. 1:27). Precisely because this is what God does, we can trust that the best strategy for the church and for us individually in the Christian life is not to relent to our reactionary impulses but to “Let folly be our cloak!”
We might think hanging on to the ordinary means of grace is an act of despair, but it's not. We can’t fathom that in these plain practices, by faith, we are participating in the most powerful things in the world. Not in a methodological, technical, or pragmatic sense; the rituals of the church do not coax God as if he’s a feral animal. God’s mystical and mysterious work is beyond all of that. Rather, they are the very inbreaking of the New Creation in our lives.
You see, in a world where God has revealed himself, become incarnate, died for our sins, and risen for our justification, who promises to come again to judge the living and the dead, there is no room for cultural moods to dictate our life and ministry.
“With as much hope as the strong”
Around New Year’s, I finished reading The Fellowship of the Ring to my nine- and seven-year-old children. I was their age when I listened to the Fellowship on cassette tapes I rented from my town’s local library. Aside from this being a monumental moment in parenting, as I read these sections to my own children, I was moved to tears. I remembered bleak seasons in my life and church, where tears seemed to be my food day and night. Where harbored resentment and despair not only got the better of me, they consumed me. When I looked at my life, it felt as if I could only see the forces of darkness. It felt as though I could do nothing. I could only pray, I could only receive the Lord’s Supper, I could only hear my pastor preach the word of God—I could do nothing but attend to these foolish means of grace. As I read the Fellowship, it almost felt as if Gandalf were helping me with my burdens!
I can’t tell you when exactly light started to break through in life, but it did. I can’t say exactly when I grew in love for my wife and children, but I know that I have. I don’t remember the date on the calendar when my prayers went from lamentation to praise. I couldn’t precisely explain how so many desperate prayers over the years were answered, but when I look back, so many of them were. I can’t pinpoint how the Lord continued to guard and consecrate his church, but I know that he has.
In the faithful attendance to the ordinary means of grace, we are communing with the one true God where he promised to commune with us. We are tasting the morsels and hearing the words and declarations of heaven itself. If our attention and imagination is caught up with the malice and strategies of the enemy and the scales of power in the world, or even with our own sin and shortcomings, we will be utterly blind to it. Worse than that, it will be of no use to us, just as humble hobbits were deemed of no use by the “wise and powerful” in Middle Earth.
And yet, these foolish means are part of God’s strategy to save the world. They’re part of his plan to save and redeem you, to sustain you.
I say all this not to temper righteous zeal. As I said, things are not as they should be, and we shouldn’t be comfortable with that harsh reality. But the most powerful ways God is working to make all things new this side of the last judgment are not through our most cunning strategies or tactics or iconoclastic fantasies. As Elrond said, “Neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far. …This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is off 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.”
