LOTR nerdery: Gandalf and his power level

I've always been under the impression that Tolkien preferred to leave massive power—at least among the good characters in his universe—understated. Let evil express itself as loudly and as strongly as it wants: good operates in more subtle ways. It's a different take for sure, and not universally accepted: think of the demon(s) in "The Exorcist" telling Father Karras that it/they will not perform a telekinetic miracle because "That's much too vulgar a display of power, Karras." Even demons have limits, apparently. While Tolkien, in some famous exchanges with CS Lewis, strenuously denied that his fantasy universe was meant to be some sort of Christian allegory (something Lewis, in his own stories, freely embraced), I do think the contrast between subtle good and unsubtle evil does at least find an analogue in the arc of the character of God that we see in the Hebrew Bible. Jack Miles's Pulitzer-winning God: A Biography makes this point, painting the God of Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible*) as a character who starts off as a prominent, powerful, and guiding figure in the ancient days who eventually fades from view if you read the Scriptures sequentially.

So perhaps Tolkeinian characters like Gandalf and Tom Bombadil can be seen in this vaguely Christian light—maybe not as reflections per se, but as parallels** to the portrayal of God in the Hebrew Bible, a power that moves increasingly behind the scenes as the story proceeds. A similar arc can be seen in Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever: in the first trilogy, Covenant fights the Despiser in what is essentially a violent, Earth-shaking wizards' battle; in the second trilogy, Covenant wins by refusing to fight the Despiser, instead walking straight into his trap and defeating the Despiser from "inside" the trap; in the final tetralogy, Covenant ends up merging with the Despiser, finally accepting that the Despiser has always been a part of himself. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make isn't particularly deep; it's merely that the notion of a subtle, or increasingly subtle, good force is a common (but not universal) trope found in biblical and (some) fantasy literature. Even in something like the Matrix trilogy (from Morpheus's point of view) or "Battlestar Galactica," the operation of God is subtle, hinted at, implied, not seen directly as a Cecil B. DeMille special effect. So maybe characters like Gandalf and Tom Bombadil can be appreciated in that spirit: they're extremely powerful beings, but their power is generally expressed in subtle ways—although, as the video below argues about Gandalf, there can be frequent manifestations of Cecil B. DeMille-style power, albeit not at the cosmos-altering level.

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*Tanakh comes from the Hebrew letters TNK (read right to left: תָּנָ״ךְ‎), standing for Torah (the Law, the Five Books of Moses—what Christians call the Pentateuch), Nevi'im (the Prophets), and Ketuvim (the Writings). In the Christian Bible, this is technically the Takanh because the last two sections are flipped.

**By saying "parallels," I leave open the question of whether Tolkien was consciously riffing off this theme of goodness being (increasingly) subtler. I'm not making a declaration about Tolkien's actual intent; I'm merely speculating as to whether a parallel might exist.