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Commentary

When I was a child, I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and it changed my life

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Since I mentioned “The Hobbit” in my biographical page at the top of the blog, I thought it might be worth explaining what I like about it. I still listen to my favorite chapter from it quite often before bed, to put me to sleep. If it doesn’t work, I listen to other chapters. But why choose that book? Well, because The Hobbit had a huge impact on me when I was growing up.

So, the first thing to say is that I didn’t grow up in a home with parents who had any plan for me. They were not involved in engineering me into anything. They just wanted good grades, and their method of getting that was yelling at me on report card day, then forgetting about school entirely, a few days later. As a result, I had to find my own morality and wisdom. The main things I read for that were the Bible, and later on, British literature, like Shakespeare and Spenser. But I’ll always remember the first “big” book that I ever read, and that was the “The Hobbit”.

The Cover

I noticed that there was a new printing of the book with the same cover design as the one that I read when I was small. I managed to get a gift copy of it from Desert Rose for my birthday. What I liked about the cover was the trees. If you look at the cover, there are multiple levels of trees, and you can see that the forest is deep, and you can’t see very far into it. I really liked that as a child. Somehow, that picture on the cover made me think about adventure, and then when I read the book, that really inspired me with the idea of going far away to earn my fortune. I remember that I didn’t read this book for school. I got it from the library.

My favorite chapter

My favorite chapter of “The Hobbit” is “Barrels Out of Bond”. That’s not the most popular chapter. But there is a phrase that appears in that chapter that’s also in the cover blurb from the first edition:

Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who wanted to be left alone in quiet comfort. But the wizard Gandalf came along with a band of homeless dwarves. Soon Bilbo was drawn into their quest, facing evil orcs, savage wolves, giant spiders, and worse unknown dangers. Finally, it was Bilbo, alone and unaided, who had to confront the great dragon Smaug, the terror of an entire countryside

Did you notice that phrase, “alone and unaided”? I have it on my Twitter profile for my location. It comes from the “Barrels out of Bond” chapter.

So, let’s talk about the overall plot of the book. The plot is that a famous wizard named Gandalf asks Bilbo the hobbit to accompany a group of dwarves on an adventure. His job is to be the burglar, because hobbits are small and sneaky. They travel along until they reach a dark forest called Mirkwood. The dwarves are captured by the inhabitants of the forest – a band of wood elves. Bilbo is able to avoid capture, by slipping on his ring of invisibility that he found earlier. He follows the dwarves into the cave of the wood elves, because he doesn’t want to leave them behind. So, he gets stuck in the cave, wandering around, stealing food, and trying to keep from getting discovered and caught. All while trying to think about how to help the dwarves escape, and get on with their journey.

And then we find this passage:

“I am like a burglar that can’t get away, but must go on miserably burgling the same house day after day,” he thought. “This is the dreariest and dullest part of all this wretched, tiresome, uncomfortable adventure! I wish I was back in my hobbithole by my own warm fireside with the lamp shining!” He often wished, too, that he could get a message for help sent to the wizard, but that of course was quite impossible; and he soon realized that if anything was to be done, it would have to be done by Mr. Baggins, alone and unaided.

You can listen to the whole chapter here.

Bilbo isn’t your typical hero. He isn’t tall. He doesn’t have big muscles. He doesn’t beat up monsters because of his martial training. He doesn’t always know what to do. He sometimes makes mistakes. His strength is his character, especially his humility and selflessness. He isn’t motivated by the same selfish desires as many people are these days. He’s not motivated by greed. He’s not trying to impress anyone.

When I was small, it was important for me to be able to not fall into the traps of my environment. Finding out how to be different was important for me, because I was stuck in a home filled with negative talk and neglect, going to government schools, trapped in an socialist country. So, by reading books like the Hobbit, I was able to find virtues that were nowhere else in my environment.

More than the character was the idea of going on an adventure. That was one of the reasons why I left the country where I was born – so that I could come to America on a work permit, and seek my fortune. And keep seeking it, despite a lot of mistakes and setbacks. And not because outside people were leading me or helping me or engineering me to succeed. No family, no friends, no donations.

So the big lesson from the book  is that an adventurous spirit isn’t free – it has to be put into a boy by what he reads. You should make your children read “The Hobbit”. Put into their minds at a young age the idea that life is an adventure, that dangers and hardships are normal, and that character counts. Put into their minds that all goodness requires sacrifice. And to not worry so much about appearing important to other people.

Commentary, Polemics

The importance of fathers for teaching children about Christian worldview

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One thing I wish that Christian parents and pastors emphasized more with young, unmarried Christian women is the need to choose a man who keeps his commitments. It turns out that passing on Christian values and worldview works a lot better when there is a man around to teach the children himself.

Here is some statistical evidence showing the difference that Christian fathers make, from Touchstone magazine.

Excerpt:

In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.

If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.

If the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshippers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church.

Let us look at the figures the other way round. What happens if the father is regular but the mother irregular or non-practicing? Extraordinarily, the percentage of children becoming regular goesupfrom 33 percent to 38 percent with the irregular mother and to 44 percent with the non-practicing, as if loyalty to father’s commitment grows in proportion to mother’s laxity, indifference, or hostility.

[…]In short, if a father does not go to church, no matter how faithful his wife’s devotions, only one child in 50 will become a regular worshipper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will become churchgoers (regular and irregular). If a father goes but irregularly to church, regardless of his wife’s devotion, between a half and two-thirds of their offspring will find themselves coming to church regularly or occasionally.

A non-practicing mother with a regular father will see a minimum of two-thirds of her children ending up at church. In contrast, a non-practicing father with a regular mother will see two-thirds of his children never darken the church door. If his wife is similarly negligent that figure rises to 80 percent!

The results are shocking, but they should not be surprising. They are about as politically incorrect as it is possible to be; but they simply confirm what psychologists, criminologists, educationalists, and traditional Christians know. You cannot buck the biology of the created order. Father’s influence, from the determination of a child’s sex by the implantation of his seed to the funerary rites surrounding his passing, is out of all proportion to his allotted, and severely diminished role, in Western liberal society.

Basically, a child who doesn’t have a benevolent, involved father is going to have an more difficult time believing that moral boundaries set by an authority are for the benefit of the person who is being bounded. The best way to make moral boundaries stick is to see that they apply to the person making the boundaries as well – and that these moral boundaries are rational, evidentially-grounded and not arbitrary. It is therefore very important to children to be shepherded by a man who studied moral issues (including evidence from outside the Bible) in order to know how to be persuasive to others.

If a woman wants her child to be religious and moral, then she has to pick a man who is religious and moral. And it can’t just be a faith commitment that he claims with words, because he can just lie about that. Women ought to check whether men are bound to what they believe by checking what they’ve read. A man usually acts consistently with what he believes, and beliefs only get formed when a man informs himself through things like reading. It would be good to see how he puts those beliefs into practice, too.

My advice to Christian women is this. When you are picking a man, be sure and choose one who is already invested in Christian things and producing results. It’s very unlikely that he’s going to be interested in developing that capacity from scratch if he’s not already doing it. If you want your kids to be taught Christianity by their father, then make spiritual leadership a priority when you’re choosing a husband.

Commentary

J. P. Moreland explains the meaning of happiness in the Christian worldview

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From happiness expert and Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland.

Excerpt:

According to ancient thought, happiness is a life well lived, a life that manifests wisdom, kindness and goodness. For the ancients, the happy life — the life we should dream about — is a life of virtue and character. Not only did Plato, Aristotle, the Church Fathers and medieval theologians embrace this definition, but Moses, Solomon and (most importantly) Jesus did, too. Sadly their understanding is widely displaced by the contemporary understanding of happiness defined as pleasure and satisfaction, a subjective emotional state associated with fleeting, egocentric feelings.

Consider the differences:

Contemporary Understanding Classical Understanding
Happiness is: Happiness is:
1. Pleasure and satisfaction 1. Virtue and character
2. An intense feeling 2. A settled tone
3. Dependent on external circumstances 3. Depends on internal state; springs from within
4. Transitory and fleeting 4. Fixed and stable
5. Addictive and enslaving 5. Empowering and liberating
6. Irrelevant to one’s identity, doesn’t color the rest of life and creates false/empty self 6. Integrated with one’s identity, colors rest of life and creates true/fulfilled self
7. Achieved by self-absorbed narcissism; success produces a celebrity 7. Achieved by self-denying apprenticeship to Jesus; success produces a hero

How can we be certain Jesus is inviting us to a classical understanding of happiness in Matthew 16:24-26? He isn’t talking about going to heaven rather than hell, nor is He telling his followers how to avoid premature death. Where Matthew writes, “what will a man be profited, if he gains the whole world, and forfeits his soul” (emphasis added), Luke clarifies Jesus’ teaching by replacing “his soul” with the word “himself” (Luke 9:25). The issue is finding one’s self vs. losing one’s self. More specifically, to find one’s self is to find out how life ought to look like and learn to live that way; it’s to become like Jesus, with character that manifests the fruit of the Spirit and the radical nature of Kingdom living; it’s to find out God’s purposes for one’s life and to fulfill those purposes in a Christ-honoring way.

I like that “success produces a hero”. Who doesn’t want to be a hero? I certainly do.

In one of his lectures, Dr. Moreland says, and I quote: “Happiness is the freedom to do what we ought to do”. That’s right. When a person is free to comply with God’s design for human flourishing, then he/she is happy. My biggest source of unhappiness is the feeling that I cannot be who I want to be as a Christian. It’s getting even worse when I think about how the government is now using force to prevent me from spending what I earn the way I want, and saying what I want about the issues of the day, regardless of who is offended. I am becoming increasingly thankful for the time I spend with other dedicated Christians. That’s when I can be myself and not worry about what anyone is going to think of me. This is no small source of happiness.