Pastor to Pastor

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Joseph Loconte: Think about it. What's Tolkien doing? He's saying, "Alright Lewis, here's my heart, stab me here." Lewis's response is so beautiful. It's "I love what you've done, let me help you make it better." Now that's what a friend does.

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CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien are two of the most beloved authors of the last century. Their works with the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings showed great imagination, but more so than that, they also informed us of truths that go much deeper than the works of fantasy. They weren't just great storytellers; they were men who were forged by faithful resilience.

Our guest today is fascinating. He is a historian. He is an author. Joseph Loconte is also the director of the Rivendell Center in New York City. He's a presidential scholar at New College of Florida, the CS Lewis scholar at Grove City College, and also the senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. If you like the writings of Lewis and Tolkien, you are going to love this conversation. If you're unfamiliar with those authors, you're going to learn a lot today that you can even use in your ministry right now right where you are. So let's welcome Dr. Joseph Loconte.

Joseph Loconte, thank you so much. Those are some impressive credentials that I just shared.

Joseph Loconte: I have been blessed by many friends and family members who've been propping me up along the way. I do work with some good institutions. It's terrific to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dave Stone: You don't have to be around you very long to know that I think you would succeed at anything that you went after. I love what you go after, though. I love the fact that you have this passion. It's been a big part of your life for a number of years of promoting Christian classics. When you talk about Tolkien and you talk about CS Lewis, those are at the top of the heap. When did you really have this love for both of those authors?

Joseph Loconte: Fabulous question. CS Lewis pretty quickly once I became a Christian, a believer myself in my college years. I discovered CS Lewis, and of course, he was confirming my instincts and helping me to understand the faith and the great intellectual foundation for the faith.

JRR Tolkien, my friend, I came to much later in life. I was in my mid-forties. The movies had come out. I was working on my doctoral dissertation on John Locke over there at the King's College London, University of London. I decided I've got to start reading the Lord of the Rings. I'm studying John Locke during the day and I'm reading Lord of the Rings at night in an English pub. It doesn't get any better than that.

Dave Stone: Your head was exploding probably.

Joseph Loconte: Absolutely exploding. The thing about Tolkien is you're morally invigorated for the task at hand. We'll get into that, I'm sure, and how helpful his writings and Lewis's writings are in that regard.

Dave Stone: I've been preaching for 40 years. When I was in high school, my parents had me read the Screwtape Letters. Then my first year of college is when I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and read the whole trilogy there with CS Lewis. That's when I fell in love with him.

Now your book just came out a few months ago, The War for Middle-Earth: JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933 to 1945. It must be a big book to get all of that on the cover is the first thought that goes through my mind. When you decided to write this, what was the impetus? What was it that caused you to say, "This is important"? I'm asking the question because I think for every Christian leader, they're going to find that there's some carryovers and some parallels for the world that we're living in today.

Joseph Loconte: Great question. The first book that I wrote was kind of the sequel to my earlier book about 10 years ago, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War, where I examined the impact of World War I on the lives of both these men. Remember, both of them fought in the First World War as second lieutenants in the British Expeditionary Force. Both survived.

But then think about it. Barely 20 years later, they have to endure a Second World War. We don't have anyone alive right now who can tell us what that experience was like. Their lives were bracketed by two global conflicts. If you think about it, that had to have affected their friendship and their moral imagination.

That's what I'm zeroing in on here in this second book: the cataclysm of the Second World War. Why the story is so encouraging to me and I think will be to your audience as well is that they are getting on with their callings as academics, scholars, writers of imaginative fiction. They're getting on with their Christian callings at a moment of cultural crisis. In doing that, they demonstrate a kind of cultural leadership, Christian cultural leadership, that I think is absolutely astonishing. I think we have a lot to learn from their example.

Dave Stone: I love that phrase. That is exactly what they did. It was in a time when there was a lot of darkness and cynicism. Communism was on the rise, especially on college campuses, which was trying to cause people to say, "Let's look in a different direction for some type of hope." There was so much despair. It's tough for us even to picture what it would have been like.

Thanks so much for taking us back to that. Paint a picture for me of how it is that Tolkien and CS Lewis, through their friendship, began to go after this and how important friendship was in that puzzle.

Joseph Loconte: It's a big question. Let me try to unpack it a bit without being too long-winded. It's hard to overstate the cultural headwinds that they're up against. After the First World War and the cataclysm of that war, there's a storm of disillusionment. That's the word to use: disillusionment with democracy, capitalism, representative government, and of course with Christianity. There was a real kind of moral agnosticism.

Think about the shell-shocked veteran. That was the psychological mood of many Europeans: shell-shocked. That created this vacuum, and these different ideologies rushed in to fill the void: the political ideologies like fascism, nazism, communism, scientism, eugenics, totalitarianism. But then there's also this literary movement that Lewis and Tolkien are very aware of: the modernist movement in literature. Think TS Eliot, The Waste Land. The emphasis is on disintegration, confusion, fragmentation, and there's a moral cynicism in the air.

That's what these guys are up against. So what do they do? Lewis and Tolkien have become friends. Lewis has become a Christian by 1931. In 1936, they decide in this conversation they're having, Lewis turns to Tolkien, and his nickname for Tolkien was Tollers, and he says, "Well Tollers, if they're not going to write the kind of stories that we want to read, we're going to have to write them ourselves."

They make this pact. Tolkien is supposed to write a time travel story. Lewis is supposed to write a space travel story. That's the literary pact, and both stories are supposed to point to the great story, the Christian story, in a profound, deep way. That's the objective. Tolkien will start his time travel story but doesn't finish it. But he publishes The Hobbit in 1937 and then pretty quickly begins writing the Lord of the Rings. CS Lewis writes Out of the Silent Planet, the first of the Space Trilogy. That's where he begins to see the power of fiction, evocative fiction, to communicate deep truths about the Christian faith to a society in Great Britain that has already become very secular and disenchanted with Christianity and the whole idea of religious belief.

Dave Stone: Donald Miller has done a whole lot of work just on the power of story. He passed along a book to me that talks about seven different plot lines that any movie, any book, any story will always have. The interesting fact is that the one that stands out the most is the one that plays off of the gospel. It's just the fact of an antagonist, the fact that there is redemption, there is forgiveness, there is freedom that comes and salvation. It's a powerful story, the gospel. You say that CS Lewis became a Christ follower when he was in his thirties. How about Tolkien? I know Tolkien was just a little bit older than Lewis. When did Tolkien become a Christ follower?

Joseph Loconte: Tolkien was about six years older than Lewis. He lost his father at a very young age. His mother, before she died, converted to Catholicism. Tolkien embraced the Catholic faith of his mother. By the time he's in his twenties, he's a serious Catholic. His Catholic faith, it seems, deepens throughout the 1920s and 30s.

Once he meets CS Lewis and they have that famous conversation on Addison's Walk about myth, the meaning of myth, and the connection of myth to Christianity, that's the breakthrough moment for Lewis. Tolkien and Lewis's relationship and friendship clearly deepens. It's so enriched by Lewis coming into the Christian faith. In many ways, they strengthen one another's Christian faith.

If you think about both men, they realize that at the end of the day, no matter how strong, no matter how determined, no matter how resilient we are, no matter how brave we are in our lives in trying to face evil and battle against evil, we need grace from the outside. In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo doesn't exactly succeed in his task, does he? "The ring is mine," he says. He puts it back on his finger and then Gollum bites it off and falls into the Cracks of Doom. Tolkien explicitly refers to that as the sudden miraculous grace, or the phrase he gives it, eucatastrophe: the undoing of a catastrophe, the need for grace from the outside. Both of these men share that fundamental understanding of human nature, our fallenness, and the need for redemption, the need for God's redemption.

Dave Stone: I'm just an aside, I wish you knew your material a little bit better, okay? I'm telling you what, you could probably burp deeper thoughts than I've ever had in my life. You're amazing.

Joseph Loconte: I'm just channeling people who are much, much smarter than me. I like to quote Isaac Newton: "I'm a midget standing on the shoulders of giants." I love that line from Newton.

Dave Stone: That is a great line. It is a great line, but you know your stuff extremely well, which I love. I want to dig in because we have Christian leaders who, in the midst of a dark culture, tend to pull back and pull away. We separate rather than uniting. Yet all throughout the New Testament, we see "one another, one another." Bear with one another, encourage one another, love one another, bear you one another's burdens.

Yet that's what Tolkien and Lewis both did. Rather than pulling away in the midst of this dark culture, they formed this group. I'd love for you to speak to the group that they formed, the name, how that came about, and some carryovers for us today.

Joseph Loconte: It's a fabulous question. I don't think we can understand their achievement as authors and their faithfulness as Christians without discussing this fellowship that they created. Tolkien and Lewis become the nucleus of this literary group known as the Inklings. They start meeting in the early 1930s. They're meeting in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College, where he teaches as an instructor of English language and literature.

Tolkien and Lewis are the anchor. Other men will join, Charles Williams, for example, Lewis's brother Warnie, Hugo Dyson. They're all Christian authors, broadly defined in terms of their Christianity, but they're all authors and they're sharing their works with each other in progress: works in progress.

There's a level of vulnerability just with that. I'm not a fiction writer, although some people would accuse Loconte of being a fiction writer. I try to stick to the facts as a historian. But I don't want to share my stuff in progress. I'll share it when I think it's basically perfect like the Mona Lisa and you can't improve on it. That's when I'll share. These guys are sharing their works in progress because they really value that input.

When Lewis is describing the group, the Inklings, to another person on the outside, "What do you guys do over there with your meetings at Magdalen College on Thursday evenings and then at the Eagle and Child pub on the mornings on Tuesday?" He says, "We come together to gather to share our literature, share our works in progress. We talk about literature, but often, most often, we talk about something better."

When I read that line from that letter from Lewis, I thought, "Oh, what's the better? To only have been in that room to be able to hear the conversations and what these men were really discussing and sharing their hearts and sharing their lives." I'm convinced some of that happened during those sessions. Remember, virtually all of the members of the Inklings were World War I veterans. They knew what it was like to be in the trenches in France in 1916, 17, 18. I think that probably helped some of these men not to slip off the edge into darkness, just having that kind of community of like-minded Christian brothers.

Dave Stone: And that's how we make it through the tough seasons of life. We all go through loneliness in leadership, we go through challenges within our church maybe due to a volunteer, maybe due to a church member, maybe a leadership structure. You have to have people that you can let your hair down with. I love the Thursday night idea, being at a restaurant every Tuesday at a pub there in England where they could get together. I know they had a table; that was their spot, that was their place.

It reminds me of two different groups as I hear you talk this. I think of comedians because some of the best comedians are people who, while it's in progress, they will workshop ideas with one another. You get five guys together who are hilarious and they'll just say, "Hey, I want to try this bit out on you." They'll share it and then someone will improve it. Iron sharpens iron.

But for this audience, what I really think of is what happens when we begin to share our sermons or our lessons or best practices with other Christian leaders. We say, "This is something that worked well for us, maybe it could work for your church." We used to be in a study group where we would work on the same sermon series together. It was guys from three different states and we would come together on a Thursday at noon and we would eat lunch together. Then we'd go back to the office and we would share what outline we had for that message, maybe an illustration or two. If we had a manuscript done, we'd pass it out to the other guys; they'd pass out theirs to us.

Then what you're doing is you're saying, "Maybe 60% of the room will use this as their conclusion, maybe 30% will use this introduction, and maybe everyone will use this quote because that quote fits perfectly." We're better together than we are apart or alone. That's what I pick up from what you're saying with Lewis and Tolkien and with these others as well. To think they had this common thread of Christ is pretty cool, too.

Joseph Loconte: Let me give you one really concrete example of that because it was a turning point in their relationship. It's even before Lewis became a Christian; it's 1929. Tolkien is writing this long poem about the story about Beren and Luthien, the immortal elvish princess and the mortal man. It's a love story. It's a work in progress.

He shares it with Lewis. Probably outside of his wife, he hasn't shared this with anyone else. From what we know, this was the story that was closest to Tolkien's heart because it's modeled in some ways on his relationship with his wife, Edith. He sends it to Lewis. He wants Lewis's feedback.

What does Lewis do? This is a pretty vulnerable moment. He reads the manuscript. He sends a letter to Tolkien. I'm paraphrasing, but it's pretty close. He says, "I've not had such an enjoyable evening in many, many days to read this manuscript, and comments and suggestions and quibbles to follow." He sends him like 10 pages of suggestions and comments and quibbles, how he can improve the manuscript. Tolkien will embrace many of those for the final version. That story becomes a huge part of the whole Lord of the Rings story, of his Legendarium.

Think about it. What's Tolkien doing? He's saying, "Alright Lewis, here's my heart, stab me here." Lewis's response is so beautiful. It's "I love what you've done, let me help you make it better." Now that's what a friend does. In our busy lives, that's pretty sobering, isn't it? A lot of us would have thought, "Well, I'll try to get to that when I have time," and then we never get to it. It could have ended the relationship right there. I think instead it becomes this absolute turning point for a friendship that's one of the most important friendships in the 20th century, given their impact.

Dave Stone: There's that proverb that talks about "wounds from a faithful friend are better than flattery from an enemy." That's a perfect picture of it. But the key is that vulnerability. If wherever you are right now—you might be working out, you might be out for a jog, you might be riding in your car as you're listening to this—I want you to think, "Do I have a friend like that? Do I have someone that I could say, 'Alright, here I am, I'm going to give you this manuscript, I'm going to share with you my thoughts that I have on this. Am I missing something? I'm going to present this to our elders or our staff next week. What do you think? Shoot some holes in it. I'm going to take this to my senior pastor next week. Tell me what you would be saying if you were to read this. How can I improve it?'"

That's the beauty that comes from us working together. I love that phrase, "Here's my heart, stab me here."

Joseph Loconte: Think about it, too. The stories that we love that they have written. It's called the Fellowship for a reason in the Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship. These various individuals that come together from different places, different races, coming together in a common goal against a common enemy. Of course, the Chronicles of Narnia: the children and the animals and Aslan. They are working together to defeat a great evil. I think some of this goes back to their experience in the trenches in the First World War: the intense camaraderie that you experience as a soldier in combat. I think they're bringing some of that with them into their imaginative works.

Dave Stone: The closest that I can come to something like that would be a team of people working on a sermon together who are in different churches or a sports team. Friends watch that and you see a team that doesn't have the talent that other teams have, but they gel together because in a sense they are in the trenches.

I'm not comparing that to life or death in the bunker together, but you multiply that sports analogy when you are in a bunker and you're there with your buddy and your own existence depends upon how well you all work together as a team. There must have been an intensity that came out of that. I've got some friends who are in ministry and there's four guys and they formed a group similar to what you're talking about. Instead of calling theirs the Inklings, they called it the Stinklings.

Joseph Loconte: Doesn't sound very promising, I have to tell you that at the top of it.

Dave Stone: It doesn't. But if you knew these guys, they've got a great sense of humor and they played off of Lewis and Tolkien. But for 25 years, they have said to one another, "Look for my flaws, tell me the things that are warning signs that I might not see. Help to make me better as a Christian leader." All four of them have done an incredible job leading for Christ. They would say it's because of the Stinklings; it's because of their friendships that they have with one another.

I've got a question for you. You mentioned World War II. They fought in World War I, and some of this is taking place prior to World War II. There's this spiritual reinforcement that came from their camaraderie that they had having that like experience that they had all been through. What do they walk away with? How does that come out in their writing? I'm intrigued by the fact that you say World War I and World War II really marked these men and then it came out in their writing. Give us some pictures of what that looks like in their writing of how that would be something that would manifest itself in the direction that they might take us in their literary works.

Joseph Loconte: Excellent question. Let me throw out a couple of thoughts here. One of the things that you could not avoid now—and it's a little difficult for us Americans sometimes to put ourselves in the place of an ordinary Brit living in England from 1939 to 1945. Remember, once Hitler begins his rampage, his blitzkrieg in Europe, by 1940, by the summer of 1940, virtually all of central and western Europe is in the hands of the Nazis. Stalin in the Soviet Union are working their mischief. Japan is ravaging China. Mussolini has already invaded Ethiopia. And the United States is in a deeply isolationist mood in 1940. We're not engaged. We're on the sidelines and projecting to the world that we're not getting involved.

So Britain is alone. Britain is alone. And the only thing that really separates Great Britain from the horror of fascism and invasion, well, it's the English Channel and it's Winston Churchill. That's about what's keeping it from collapsing, right? So imagine you're Tolkien or Lewis, you're living in Oxford. Oxford hasn't been bombed, but London now is going to be bombed. The Blitz on London begins in 1940.

So here's Adolf Hitler triumphant. He gives a speech to the Reichstag. It is broadcast over the BBC simultaneously translated into English. Guess who's listening to that speech? CS Lewis is listening to that speech with his doctor friend, Dr. Havard, the family physician. This is what Lewis says. He writes in a letter to his brother the next day. Here's the speech on a Friday. Writes a letter to his brother and says, "I don't know if I'm weaker than other men, but as long as the speech lasted, it's almost impossible not to waver just a little."

Think about that. CS Lewis is not a simpleton, right? And yet the power of Hitler, his magnetism, his confidence, it's powerful, it's attractive. Here's a speech on Friday. On Sunday he's sitting in church. He's listening to the sermon and he starts thinking about the devil. Now, I don't know how bad the sermon was. I'm sure yours were a lot better than that. But he starts thinking about Satan. He starts thinking about a diabolical fantasy with a couple of main characters: one character, a senior demon named Screwtape, and then a junior demon, Wormwood, and their strategies to tempt a young man and to lead him into perdition.

I don't think it's an accident. It can't be an accident. They hear the speech from Hitler, he hears the speech from Hitler on a Friday. On Sunday he's thinking about Hitler, the demonic character that Hitler was, and he thinks of this idea of this incredible satirical, diabolical fantasy. It helps to put CS Lewis on the map as this great Christian fiction writer. Think about the themes in that book. It's not so much about the Second World War, though there are reference to the war. It's about the struggle for a man's soul. It's about the whole issues of heaven and hell played out. Obviously, the war is pressing itself upon their imaginations. That's just one example we can talk about some others. But when I learned that for the first time, I thought, "Wow, there is something here we need to think about and try to appreciate."

Dave Stone: Sometimes the greatest ideas come from people's minds wandering during a sermon. Somehow most of us preachers will take credit for it somehow, right? So there's a preacher somewhere that is saying to his wife, "Wow, I really sparked a powerful movement through the Screwtape Letters and look at all the good that I did all because I was about to put him to sleep."

But I'm glad you brought that up because the Screwtape Letters is all about what it would take to bring down a Christian and to get that soul. If you've never read Screwtape Letters, my friends, check it out because it's a strategy and a plan for how it is that Satan wants to bring us down. I've had mentoring groups of pastors that I lead and sometimes I'll give them an exercise and I'll say, "I want you to write your own page of Screwtape Letters of what would it take for Satan to decimate your ministry. Give us a play-by-play of how that could happen because it's not going to happen tomorrow, but how could that happen in two years from now? And tell us what Satan might do."

The reason that's a healthy exercise for all of us to do is because it causes us to focus on what we know are our blind spots and our weaknesses. What was it that was said that an unguarded strength can become a double weakness if we're not aware of it and if we don't really prepare for it? I love the Screwtape Letters concept and to think that that came out of sitting in a sermon after listening to Hitler.

Let's talk a little bit about Tolkien and Lewis and how they define faithfulness because faithfulness was a core value to them. It's interesting because of all the attention that they have received after their death more so than while they were alive. But there was a faithfulness that was important, there was a consistency that was important to them. How would you say that they would define faithfulness? Is there anything that jumps to mind as you think of both of those writers?

Joseph Loconte: Let me try to answer that. It's a wonderful question. Let me try to answer it by kind of some examples from their lives that I think help illustrate and unpack how these men were faithful in the various spheres in which they operated. We think of them as these great fiction writers, and they were, but they had other responsibilities and other aspects of their calling.

Tolkien is a husband and a father. He is faithful in those relationships in the way he's taking care of his children, taking care of his wife. He is a faithful scholar there at Oxford producing top-rate scholarship that grows out of his own moral Christian vision. He's not shying away from that. His lecture on Beowulf in 1936 identifying that ancient story and the nature of radical evil as a huge theme in that story, which clearly grows out of his Christian faith. He's faithful in his scholarship.

And then think about it: he has to find the time to write the Lord of the Rings. He begins it 1937. He's writing it through the Second World War. He feels very strongly about the story and the need to complete it, but he's also anxious and he struggles and he does for months at a time he can't work on it. He has real periods of gloom and doubt, but he has people coming along to encourage him: his wife and of course his friends. He'll be faithful with that story through the war years.

Think about a similar thing for Lewis. He has taken to live with him into his home Mrs. Moore and her daughter. He had made a promise to his war World War I buddy, Paddy Moore. They went off to war together and they promised to each other, "If one of us dies, we'll care for the surviving parent." Paddy Moore gets killed at the Battle of the Somme. Lewis takes in Mrs. Moore and her daughter and is caring for her, providing for her for decades. So he's faithful in that relationship.

He's also faithful, of course, in his scholarship. Think about this: both men are faithful during the Second World War in doing their bit for king and country. Tolkien is part of the Home Guard. He's helping to guard the UK against invasion. I think there are more than a million men who are trained that way. They were expecting a Nazi invasion at any moment. Once 1939 rolls around, Lewis is also part of that Home Guard protective force.

And when he's asked by the Chaplain of the Royal Air Force to come and speak to these young men before they go off to fight, before they get into those Spitfires and go face down the Nazis, "Come and talk to those men." So what does he do? He gets on a train and he travels throughout the English countryside two or more days a week every week through much of the war to talk to these men, to talk about things that matter with all of his other responsibilities and obligations. That is faithfulness in a crisis. Remember, these guys are living through hell, right? It's the Blitz on London, it's the Battle for England, and they don't know if Great Britain is going to survive. In the midst of that, they're faithful. If that doesn't get us out of bed in the morning, I don't know what will.

Dave Stone: Amen. Amen. I love your passion, Joe Loconte. You would make coffee nervous, you really would. I love it. I feel like I'm getting a history lesson because I was never good in history. The majority of my history for World War I and World War II came from watching Hogan's Heroes episodes. And so to hear you just unpack this is spellbinding to me.

I can't wait to get your book, The War for Middle-Earth, because I know there's takeaways in that that are going to be really helpful to me. There was something about you talked about all those different areas of faithfulness. Compare and contrast that with Christian leadership today. I feel like, and this is a self-indictment at times, pastors we can measure success based on numbers or facilities or whether it's a season of growth or not.

Here were two professors who were spread incredibly thin during war times, taking on people and helping to house them and to care for them, pay for them, all of these different things that they're doing that I was unaware of until a few minutes ago. And yet when it comes to ordinary faithfulness, that's a picture of what Christ asks of each of us. Whether our church is big or small, God probably really isn't that concerned with it, you know? It's like I said once in a sermon: I hate to say it, but when the Olympics come on, I don't think that God is up in heaven with a red, white, and blue flag saying, "Go USA," you know? Instead there's a bigger picture. What Tolkien and Lewis are doing is they're fleshing out Christianity day in and day out and they're using their gifts, they're using their gifts for the Lord.

Talk to me a little bit about their ordinary faithfulness and how you saw God use that even after they were done on this earth and passed away.

Joseph Loconte: Think about this. Let me read you a few lines from one of the students of Tolkien and Lewis during the Second World War. This is Helen Tyrrell Wheeler. She's exposed to their teaching. Both of these men are firmly grounded in the classical Christian literary tradition. So think Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton. They are grounded in these great literary works. They are trying to recover those works for their age, that age of cynicism, because of the wonderful values and virtues that are embedded in those works.

Here's what Helen Tyrrell says: the impact that these men had on her as teachers, as instructors. "What it meant for my generation of English language and literature undergraduates was that what happened in the great books was of equal significance to what happened in life. Indeed, that they were the same."

Think about what this young woman is saying. What happened in the great books: the stories of heroism, sacrifice in face of a great evil. It's like what's happening in real life. That was World War II in Britain from 1939 to 1945. This incredibly perceptive woman sees what Tolkien and Lewis have done through their faithfulness: faithfulness in the classroom as scholars. They're helping her to see that these truths that are embedded in these ancient works—classical, medieval, Christian works—it speaks to us now. It's a resource for us now. It's a source of strength and inspiration and grace and wisdom and beauty right now. But we have to have open hearts, open minds, open eyes. That young woman did. The question for us is: do we have open hearts and minds to those truths embedded in those great works?

Dave Stone: You said that so well. Thank you for sharing that quote as well. You talk in your book and you describe the works of Tolkien and Lewis as—you have a phrase—blueprints for resilience. I love that phrase: blueprints for resilience when you think about Tolkien and Lewis. How can pastors apply some of these lessons that you've shared to the challenges that they face in ministry in 2026?

Joseph Loconte: Let me offer a thought on this, which might seem a little bit off-topic, but I think is on-topic because I don't think you can understand their capacity for resilience without understanding this particular truth, which I know your audience agrees with. These men, they have a ringside seat to the greatest evils not just of the 20th century, but probably in all of human civilization: the rise of these totalitarian states, fascism, communism, nazism, etc. So the existence of radical evil, this is a reality for them. It shows up in their writings as well in some profound ways. Mordor, Sauron, the White Witch. We see radical evil. Radical evil is at their doorstep in Great Britain from 1939 to 1945.

So what does that have to do with resilience? They start with the fact that the world is fallen. Created good, created beautiful, but profoundly fallen. Evil will always be a part of this human condition as long as we live on this earth until we pass through the veil. It will always be with us. There's a line from the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, he's discussing the elves, and the line is from Gandalf: "And the elves thought that evil was ended forever, but it was not so. It showed up again."

Resilience, I don't think you can have a good theory of resilience or a good theology for resilience unless we understand that we live in this fallen world. As Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, his radio broadcast that became Mere Christianity, "We live in enemy-occupied territory." Remember one of the chapters in Mere Christianity, the radio broadcast in 1942? It's called The Invasion. Jesus invades. The rightful king has invaded. He comes incognito. We're in enemy territory.

Developing resilience, I think you have to have that as part of your intellectual foundation, a bedrock. Don't be surprised by radical evil; be prepared. What does the scripture tell us? Your enemy Satan, the lion, is out and about trying to destroy, ready to destroy. So be vigilant, be ready. How many times does Jesus say, "Be ready, be dressed and ready for service"? Always aware of the world that we live in, not the world as we want it to be, but the world as it really is. I think that helped these two men profoundly and it clearly informs their writing because their fantasies are not just fantastical dreams of worlds that have nothing to do with reality. Their worlds speak to our world because they really represent the human condition in all of its beauty and ugliness at the same time.

Dave Stone: I think that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so clearly lays out the gospel for us and it gives us a visual. As you're reading it, you're picturing these people. Even long before the movie came out, when you read the book, you could see it happening. As Aslan is brought on the scene, you begin to see this Jesus prototype. You begin to see, "Oh my gosh, we've got the White Witch, we've got the Lion." This is a picture that comes straight from scripture and it's beautiful.

My last question for you: you, Tolkien, and CS Lewis are sitting in a room and it is filled with Christian leaders and they're living today, they're serving today, it's 2026. The question is posed to Tolkien and CS Lewis: "What would you say to challenge American pastors and Christian leaders right now today?" What do you think either of those guys would say in that moment to us today?

Joseph Loconte: Some of this, thank you for that question. It's a beautiful question. I can only give you a partial answer. It's such an important, powerful question. Think about the achievements that these men made, what they were able to accomplish during one of the darkest times in human history. It's a civilizational crisis. They remain faithful through the darkest years of the Second World War. Not just to endure it, but they bring out of that something profoundly beautiful and inspiring in their stories.

I want to quote you if I could, because I think maybe this is the kind of line you'd want to leave these pastors with in terms of what these men achieved and what we can achieve if we're faithful. This is what Lewis writes to JRR Tolkien in a letter after he reads the Lord of the Rings in manuscript now for the first time. He says, "So much of your whole life," Lewis to Tolkien, "so much of your whole life, so much of our joint life, so much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away without a trace into the past is now in a sort made permanent."

It takes your breath away. He's saying, I think, that Tolkien has somehow captured something of their common journey, their life's journey together in friendship, in Christian friendship. He's hidden an aspect of that story with all of its joys and its sorrows. He's hidden it in the pages of the Lord of the Rings. Now that is what Christian friendship can do when it reaches for a high purpose and it's watered by the streams of loyalty and sacrifice and love. What an achievement.

Dave Stone: Yeah, that's a beautiful picture. If you have a Christian friendship that's deep like that, you can understand exactly what it is that you just shared because I'm thinking of different people. I've got a friend who leads a conference around the country on leadership. It's been going on for five or six years and it started the year before COVID. Then we got hit after that with another calamity of a hurricane in the city where the conference was going to be.

I'll never forget, Joe, the next year and the very first song, the opening song, he and I looked at each other. We just exchanged a glance with each other and we both had a lump in our throat because there were very few people that knew how hard he had worked to get this thing off the ground. COVID had knocked it out one year, hurricane the next year, and now all of a sudden he didn't give up, he kept plodding along, and here were hundreds and thousands of Christian leaders together being encouraged. But no one would ever know the price that they paid except for a close friend.

Joseph Loconte: Beautiful, beautiful example.

Dave Stone: Thank you so much for your time. I know people are going to want to get The War for Middle-Earth. You have been an exciting guest. You really have whetted my appetite to even learn more and more about Tolkien and Lewis and to go back and read some of their stuff and to read your stuff as well. So thanks so much, Joe.

Joseph Loconte: Great to be with you. Thanks so much.

Dave Stone: I don't know about you, but my vocabulary increased I think by four or five words. There's some words that he said that I'm not even certain what they mean, but I'm going to look them up. I promise you that. What an incredible conversation that was with Joe.

I loved how he talked through how it is that the world was shattered after they had returned from World War I. Yet how it is that they faithfully resisted the urge to join in with so many other people and instead they chose to lead people to Christ through their imagination and also through just that practical time of iron sharpening iron with one another. That's one of the greatest parts that I'll take away from this conversation: the story of the Inklings and those guys getting together regularly. I hope you have some guys like that. I hope you have some girls like that, ladies, that you can just get together with, you can be yourself, they can speak into your life.

My son was over at our house the other night and he said, "You mind if I invite some friends over?" He's in an accountability group with two other guys. We heard them laughing, having a blast downstairs, and then we just heard it get quiet for about 30 minutes. That's when as a dad you're like, "Wow, good things are happening right now" because we knew what was taking place. We knew the fact that they were pouring into each other's life and they were holding each other accountable.

I loved Joseph also talking about the idea of ordinary faithfulness. That's something that we can't let slip away from us. Then toward the end of the conversation when he talked about Tolkien's idea of eucatastrophe—there's another word that's a little bit bigger than what I'm used to saying. By the way, that word means "joy beyond the walls of the world." It's another phrase for the overturning of grace. I liked how he talked about that idea of grace breaking in suddenly even when darkness seems to be winning. So no matter what's happening in your life or the lives of your church members, remember that grace that can always break in. Preach it, redemption is real, share that news, let people know that God is always at work even when you're in a dark season in your world.

Our story today is a very brief one. It's a short one but it's a powerful one. CS Lewis had an understanding of those kinds of things in his Chronicles of Narnia series, the children's books that have touched millions of people. Aslan, the lion, is the hero of the books. Aslan is obviously a type of Christ, a representative of Jesus. The children are quite taken with him and at the same time they're rather frightened of him. I mean, after all, he is a lion. If he wanted to, he could tear them limb from limb.

As Lewis was always fond of saying throughout his books, Aslan was not a tame lion. At one point, one of the children asks, "Is he safe?" I love the response. He says, "Oh no, he's not safe. But he's good." Sometimes this concept of fearing God is confusing to Christians. Is this saying that we should be terrified of him? "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." No, it's not saying that.

So how do you balance this concept that God is our father and yet that God is not safe? Well, the word "fear" there doesn't mean to be scared or terrified of God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom really is talking about a healthy fear. It's talking about a respect. It's an acknowledgment of who God was, who God is, and what God can do. And an all-powerful God isn't safe, but rest assured, he is good. So take comfort in that truth.

Check out Joseph Loconte, check him out on YouTube. He's got a YouTube channel. Just type in the words Joe Loconte. He's got a lot of great material on there that I think you'll enjoy checking out alongside of his book as well.

Thanks so much for joining with us. As you know, we drop a brand new episode every single Tuesday and it's designed to do just this: encourage and to challenge and to inspire. That's our hope that every time that you listen, that that's what's going to take place because we know that leadership can be lonely. We call this Pastor to Pastor for a reason. It's to remind you: you're not alone. Until next time, I'm Dave Stone, saying God bless.