There’s a clip from 1968 of J. R. R. Tolkien talking about how The Lord of the Rings came together. He’s dismissing the suggestion that it’s an allegory of the nuclear bomb.
‘One reviewer once said,’ he recalls, ‘“Well this is a jolly, jolly book, isn’t it? All the right boys come home and everybody is happy and glad. It isn’t true of course!”’
Tolkien’s response: ‘He can’t have read the story!’
‘Stories, human stories, are frankly always about one thing, aren’t they?’
What Every Big Story Is Actually About
Then he puts it more broadly. ‘If you really come down to any large story, that interests people and can hold their attention for considerable time, stories, human stories, are frankly always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death. I don’t know whether you would agree with that.’
And then he reaches into a pocket, pulls a note from his wallet, and reads out words from Simone de Beauvoir. ‘They seem to me to put it in a nutshell: “There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, and for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”’
His comment: ‘Well, you may agree with these words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord of the Rings.’1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rre7zQGcldI [accessed 21 October 2022]. Thanks to Gregory B. Dean for drawing my attention to this.
In this world nothing is forever, and death is terrible. Yet the denial of death and dying — subtle or blatant — is commonplace.2See the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973). It has probably been so ever since sin and evil emerged. Because from that point on, ‘the human race stood grievously burdened by great misery and in deep need of mercy.’3Augustine, Enchiridion, 2.7; ed. and trans. Albert C. Outler (The Westminster Press, 1955 / 2006), 339. The Latin word Enchiridion means ‘handbook’ or ‘manual,’ and the work is a kind of commentary on the Apostles’ Creed.
Given all that, the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news because it provides cast-iron comfort, genuine hope, and real solutions to everything, always, forever — including mortality.
It isn’t morbidity to say so.
Your Real Problem Isn’t What You Think
‘[T]he universal reality of misery evokes in all people a need for deliverance, a deliverance from above.’4Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Baker Academic, 2011), 393. No argument there. But the Christian gospel diagnoses our fate more exactly than we would ourselves.
Human unhappiness, it claims, is not fundamentally physical — accident, addiction, calamity, hunger, disease, death. Nor is it fundamentally psychological — negative emotions, aimlessness, addition, anxiety, confusion, resentment, disappointment, sexual frustration, grief, bereavement.
Nor are our worst problems essentially social (isolation, friendlessness, marital and family breakdown), political (civil unrest, poor governance, tyranny, war), economic (poverty), or environmental (climate change and loss of natural habitat).
Our plight is greater than poverty.
The first, worst, deepest and most intractable problems are God-related. They’re moral, relational, spiritual. They concern what comes on the back of sin, and all its consequences — which include the whole breadth of unhappiness listed above.
Here’s why that ordering makes sense. God, who is both infinitely holy and loving, is the source of all being and meaning — that is, the source of all that is good. So in our passive and active rebellion against him we don’t merely dishonour and despise him. We’re in flight from everything that is truly good, into blindness and misery.5My heartfelt thanks, as always, to Robert Doyle for comments and improvements on an earlier version of this work.
The Biggest Problem of All
Ultimately the Christian gospel is the best and most significant good news because it deals with the greatest threat any of us faces: a final Divine judgment after death.
Because he is holy, just and loving, God will not let our rebellion and hatred of him be the last word for the good creation he brought into existence to live beside him in loving and dependent fellowship. Our rebellion must be overthrown, and will be.
And the message of Jesus doesn’t merely assert that human beings have to face God’s final verdict on their lives. It also includes powerful warnings about it — warnings designed to help us avoid condemnation at the Day of Judgment, and so escape, as Christ memorably put it, being ‘thrown into hell’ (Matt 5:29; 18:9; Mark 9:45, 47).
So the gospel is most essential good news because it solves humanity’s worst problems. Yes, dying — but more severely and seriously, the judgment of God that follows death. In our self-willed hostility, with the devil and the rest of the rebel angels, we will otherwise be consigned to eternal banishment from God’s presence and from all that is good: a banishment which is deserved, a punishment.
The reality of this is crystal clear wherever you look in the New Testament: ‘For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. … Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him’ (John 3:17-18, 36).
What the Good News Actually Offers
The salvation in Christ we’re setting out to discover here is deliverance — from sin, Satan, death, wrath and curse — bringing acceptance and peace with God, reconciliation, relationship and glory.
The gospel of grace is the greatest and most important good news because it contains promises from God about the forgiveness of sins and, by contrast with endless punishment, the creation of a new relationship with him. It establishes endless new spiritual life in personal loving fellowship with God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit — and therefore together with each other and all the other creatures.
Instead of irreversible condemnation, the good news of Jesus promises new birth, acquittal, a declaration of innocence, absolute individual vindication, and consequent personal renewal to everlasting perfection ‘in the paradise of God’ (Rev 2:7; cf. Luke 23:43). The reconciliation Christ brings reaches to the very depths of our being, and thus out to each other and our loving Creator.
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- 1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rre7zQGcldI [accessed 21 October 2022]. Thanks to Gregory B. Dean for drawing my attention to this. ↩︎
- 2See the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973). ↩︎
- 3Augustine, Enchiridion, 2.7; ed. and trans. Albert C. Outler (The Westminster Press, 1955 / 2006), 339. The Latin word Enchiridion means ‘handbook’ or ‘manual,’ and the work is a kind of commentary on the Apostles’ Creed. ↩︎
- 4Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Baker Academic, 2011), 393. ↩︎
- 5My heartfelt thanks, as always, to Robert Doyle for comments and improvements on an earlier version of this work. ↩︎