An Encouraging Thought: The Christian Worldview in the Writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, Paperback

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.

About the Author:

Donald T. Williams (BA, Taylor University; MDiv, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; Ph.D., University of Georgia) is R. A. Forrest Scholar and Professor of English at Toccoa Falls College. An ordained minister in the Evangelical Free Church of America with many years of pastoral experience, he has spent several summers doing pastoral training in East Africa and India for Church Planting International. A past president of the International Society of Christian Apologetics and an internationally known Inklings scholar, he is the author of ten other books, most recently Deeper Magic: The Theology behind the Writings of C. S. Lewis (Baltimore: Square Halo Books, 2016), and of numerous articles, poems, and reviews in publications such as Christianity Today, National Review, Touchstone, Modern Reformation, Christian Research Journal, The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Societ y, Philosophia Christi, Christian Scholar's Review, SEVEN: An Anglo-American Review, etc.