Pastor C.R. Wiley and host Joel explore Tom Bombadil as an "unfallen Adam" in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, contrasting his non-dominating stewardship with Saruman's exploitative power. Wiley argues Bombadil typifies Christ and eternal Sabbath rest, offering a theological counter to modern cultural issues like CRT and unethical science. The discussion critiques Peter Jackson's film adaptations for political alterations while promoting Wiley's upcoming book, In the House of Tom Bombadil, suggesting true dominion requires communing with creation rather than breaking it for control. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Theology Applied00:03:09
Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries, and you're listening to another episode of Theology Applied.
In this episode, I was privileged to have as a special guest C.R. Wiley.
He's known for several books.
One of the books that he's written is called The Household and the War for the Cosmos.
But he has an upcoming book, which is all about a peculiar character found in the Lord of the Rings called Tom Bombadil.
And so our conversation today is All Things Tom Bombadil.
From a Christian perspective, seeing things that I know that I didn't see, I was surprised by them, and I'm a big fan of Lord of the Rings.
But I think it was very insightful, very interesting, looking at Tom Bombardier and especially what Christians can take from Tom, lessons and principles, and apply them in our lives and in our culture today.
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All right, without further ado, here's our episode with CR Wiley on Tom Bombadil.
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
As I've already mentioned, I am privileged to have CR Wiley as a guest.
Pastor Chris, would you go ahead and take a moment to introduce yourself to our listeners?
Yeah, Joel, thanks for having me on the show.
I'm a pastor in the PCA, and I'm serving a church in the Pacific Northwest, just outside of Portland, Oregon, on the Washington side of the Columbia River.
But my roots are back in New England.
I wasn't born in New England, but I ministered there for about 35 years and lived and ministered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then down on Cape Cod, and then in Connecticut.
So I have a lot of time in that part of the world, and I've got three kids, they're all grown.
Two of whom are my two boys are married and have, well, my oldest, his wife just had a baby, and my second son, his wife is expecting, and she's due in March.
And then my daughter is a senior at Grove City College.
And so, anyway, she's a bright girl, and prospects look good for her future.
Tom Bombadil and Evil00:15:59
And so, I'm happy about that.
So, I'm married.
I've been married to my wife for over 35 years.
Anyway, it's a little bit about me.
I taught philosophy for about a decade at the college level, and I've been a real estate investor.
I've been involved in commercial real estate investing since the early 90s and still own properties back in New England.
And I'm a writer.
I've written a few books.
I've written a book called Man of the House, another book called Household and the Wharf of the Cosmos.
And I've got a book coming out next month entitled In the House of Tom Bombadil.
And that brings us to our topic at hand.
I've read The Household in the War for the Cosmos.
I thought it was great.
And I like how you just reminded the reader, you know, bringing industry back into the home, you know, that it was detached from the home and bringing it back to the family's mission and that they're all involved in that.
And so I thought that was really insightful.
But Tom Bombadil, as soon as you told me that, when we were, you know, doing our email correspondence and kind of planning the episode and the topic, you said, Hey, well, I'm coming out with a book on Tom Bombadil.
And I just, I'm kind of a sucker for that.
As I told you before we started recording, I love The Lord of the Rings, which, Puts me in millions and millions of people who also love Lord of the Rings.
And man, Tom Bombadil is just one of the most interesting characters.
So let's go ahead and just start off with this.
Who is Tom Bombadil?
And maybe, I don't know, maybe it's better to ask the question, what is Tom Bombadil?
And despite the fact that Peter Jackson and his famous movies left him out, why would you say that Tom Bombadil is significant enough of a character to write a whole book about?
Well, I think he's significant because.
Tolkien said he is in some personal correspondence.
He made the point of saying that there was a point to keeping Bombadil in the book.
And he wasn't willing to kind of divulge what he was thinking, but he gives some hints in different places as to what he was up to.
And if you know anything about Tolkien's interests and his academic sort of expertise as a philologist, There's all sorts of things that are going on, not only with Bombadil, but with the Lord of Rings in general, that reflect these really important interests that Tolkien had.
And the interests that he had were shared by the other inklings, including C.S. Lewis.
And with those other guys, like Charles Williams and Lewis and Owen Barfield, the concerns that they had were really prescient.
They really.
Saw, you know, sort of down the tunnel of time and saw the world that we live in today coming.
And so a lot of the things that they wrote were intended to address the crisis that they felt like was occurring right in the academy in their time.
And they felt like they were kind of like way down the road in terms of the crisis.
They thought they were near the end of the crisis in terms of things falling apart.
So they didn't think that they were at the beginning, but they felt like they still were in touch with things in the Western tradition that were sound, that were sane.
And Western civilization was losing touch with those things.
And so they were making arguments for, in obviously their prose, their nonfiction writing, but also in their fiction, to address those things.
Getting back to Tom, who is Tom?
Well, there's been a lot of speculation about that, including Frodo asked the question who is this guy?
He asked Galladria, I mean, Goldberry that.
And he asked her that very question.
Then he asked Tom himself directly.
Who are you, master?
So Tolkien knew that we would wonder who this guy is, you know, what this guy is and who he is.
And Tolkien, in a very coy way, said, you know, sometimes authors are enigmatic on purpose.
And I was enigmatic about Bombadil.
He actually said that in a personal letter.
So there's a point to Bombadil.
He's purposefully enigmatic.
But I have some thoughts on what Tolkien was doing with Bombadil.
And they have to do with his.
Kind of theological, philological interests.
And those interests actually are very relevant for us because we live in a world where Tom Bombadil is kind of Tolkien's argument to postmodernism, to kind of the craziness that's going on with CRT, all that stuff.
So, anyway.
Yeah, I could guess at where you're going to go, but I'll leave it for when we get there.
But one question that I had was this Is Tom Bombadil, is he?
I mean, it seems as though he's a creature.
You know, he says, you know, like almost like an Adam type figure, you know, not the last Adam being Christ, but, you know, the first Adam that he's the eldest, you know, eldest is my name, you know, and the sense of I was here before, you know, the mountains and here before, you know, this and here before that.
And so it seems like he's first, but not eternal, you know, not that he always was, but that he was a creature created, but first.
And it seems as though Gandalf kind of alludes to the fact that, um, If they didn't destroy the ring, then Tom would probably, in the same way that he was first, he would be last, but that he would fall, that even his power, you know, which seems to be kind of bound to the location where he is, it doesn't seem like he could just go anywhere and contain that same measure of power.
So he seems bound to a certain place, and yet he seems not timeless, but a longevity of being first, and that he would be last to fall.
So my question is, is that right?
Is that a right sense?
Is he a creature, or is Tom Bombadil meant to be divine in some sense?
I think you're right.
I don't think he's Luvatar.
In fact, Tolkien was very explicit that there is no incarnation in Lord of the Rings.
So there's no, you know, I think if we take Tolkien at his word, you know, we can't say that he's the creator.
Now, there's reason to think that maybe he could be, you know, when Goldberry says he is, that sounds very, you know, when Frodo asks the question, who is he?
And she says he is.
He is as he seems.
That kind of brings to mind, obviously, that episode in Exodus with Moses in the burning bush and I am.
But I think that that is kind of a false trail.
I think you're right.
I think he's more of an endemic figure, kind of an unfallen creature.
And one of the things that I think is when you get into the legendarium, there are all these loose ends that Tolkien is sort of tying up.
You know, in his sort of notes, and it's great that we have those notes published now by his son Christopher.
You know, one of those books that contains some very fascinating information is entitled Morgoth's Ring.
It's kind of the history of Middle Earth.
You know, it's like the 10th volume.
So it's like, you know, when I think about Tolkien, this guy just like never threw anything away.
I've written books and I throw away the notes, I throw away all my scribbles, I throw away all the napkins I wrote on.
I don't know if this guy threw away anything.
And, you know, Christopher came in along and organized it and went through it and read it all and compiled, you know, books with the stuff.
But one of the things that comes out in Morgoth's Ring is that when Melkor, the original Dark Lord, enters the world, if you remember from the Cimmerian, there's this sort of unexplained sort of decline in Melkor's personal kind of presence and power that goes unexplained.
But in Morgoth's Ring, it's explained.
So, you know, The beginning, you know, Melkor is like totally awesome, the most powerful of the Valar.
You know, everybody is awed by him.
But in the Silmarillion, you find him kind of holed up in his, you know, sort of his underground fortress, afraid to come out.
What happened?
Well, according to Morgoth's Ring, and what Tolkien tells us there is that his power was diffused throughout the physical world, causing it to decay and die.
Tolkien refers to as Morgoth's ring.
And there's this, you know, it's intended to sort of draw a parallel between Saran's ring, where he, you know, invests his power in this little circle of gold so that whoever picks it up has access to his power.
Obviously, it corrupts the wearer, but you still have access to Saran's power.
Likewise, you know, Melkor was far more powerful than Saran.
Saran was in awe of Melkor.
And Melkor's power suffuses the entirety of Arda, Middle Earth, and corrupts it, which is why we see the graying of the world, why the elves can remember a time when things were brighter, more beautiful, more enduring.
And they live with this kind of nostalgia, this loss, a sense of loss.
But, you know, when you go to Loth Lorraine, you know, of course, there we see Galadriel has a ring that allows her to preserve something for the past to stave off.
That corrupting, graying power.
But what we're told by Bombadil when we're in the house of Tom Bombadil, where they're sitting at the table and, you know, during that rainy day where Tom is just regaling the hobbits with all these marvelous stories about all kinds of things, he says, you know, I can remember not just when the first raindrop fell or when the first acorn was formed, I can remember a time before the coming of the Dark Lord.
So he remembers it.
In other words, he is alive.
And there's something about him that I think was not corrupted.
He's not been tinctured or experienced the kind of corrupting influence of Melkor.
So there's something about him that's original.
That's my thought.
So I think you're right.
I think he's a creature, I think he's an unfallen Adam figure.
Okay.
Like an Adam if he never fell.
Interesting enough.
So different than Adam in the sense that Tom Bombadil would not be like a federal head of Middle Earth because Middle Earth was able to fall without him.
Whereas if Adam never fell, you know, the earth would have never been, you know, Adam didn't just represent his wife and all his posterity, but cursed is the ground because of you.
You know, he's this, he represents all of creation.
And so all of creation is cursed by his willful rebellion.
And so you're saying it's almost the reverse of that, similar to Adam, the first made, but an Adam who did not become corrupt himself, but also, I, Was a steward, maybe, of the grounds and the earth, but not representative of them to where they could be tarnished and corrupted apart from his will.
Here's my question Do you think that there's a sense in which maybe Tom Bombadil didn't personally engage in evil himself in such a way to be fallen?
But do you think that Middle Earth, in some sense, was able to be corrupted by Melkor because of an abdication of Tom Bombadil?
Like, should he have stewarded?
More a larger put, like, did he have more responsibility that he somehow failed to keep?
Because there's this forgetfulness that Gandalf talks about.
Like, if we left the ring with Tom, he'd forget he even had it, you know?
Yeah.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, that's a worthwhile subject to reflect on.
I have not spent any time thinking about that particular matter, but I think that's worth thinking about.
Obviously, he's there with Goldberry, but they're childless.
And I think my sense is that Lewis and Tolkien and a number of other orthodox thinkers. In the history of the West, have been challenged by the question, or at least the proposal, isn't the fall necessary for human beings to grow in wisdom?
So that's the problem, theologically, kind of anthropologically.
And Lewis famously responded with his book, Paralandra, which is the rejoinder no, if the fall wasn't necessary.
In other words, you can't bring It's not as though evil was necessary to bring about good.
Good is powerful enough to bring something good out of evil, but evil is not necessary for something good to be realized.
So that's the challenge.
So, Paralandra is here we have with Paralandra, Ransom, this figure from the earth, a philologist who was modeled on Tolkien.
We know that.
Lewis tells us that.
And so he goes to Venus, and there he meets an unfallen woman and an unfallen man.
And there is a kind of, you could say, naivete there, but it's not as though they lack wisdom.
They have an ability, these characters have an ability to learn quick and to exercise wisdom and to still retain their righteous status.
But I think that Bombadil may be Tolkien's way of addressing the problem.
So when you look at Tom, he's wise.
And he's powerful and he's good, but in a very, I think, curious way, he's also innocent.
Wouldn't you agree?
I mean, yeah, he's not.
And I think that's revealed, you know, really profoundly with that moment where, in that moment where he commands Frodo and he does command, he says, Show me the ring, show me the precious ring.
It's almost, he's kind of like tongue in cheek, you know, he's making fun of Gollum, you know, show me the precious ring.
Right.
And then Frodo just immediately takes it out and hands it to him.
I mean, even Frodo's surprised that he's doing it.
Right.
Because Frodo's been so reluctant to let anybody have it.
And it makes me think, real quick, it just makes me think the innocent factor.
It makes me think of what is the verse that the apostle says, innocent in evil?
Like that we're called to be wise as Christians.
But there is a sense in which, when it comes to those things which are wicked and evil, there should be a befuddledness about, like that we're not well versed in evil.
We're naive almost.
So we're not foolish.
We're commanded to be wise.
We're commanded to be discerning.
We're commanded to be on guard, all those kinds of things.
But there is something to be said for a lack of experience with evil that produces a childlike innocence, but not a childish foolishness.
Wisdom That Seeks Understanding00:13:37
Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Joel.
I think, you know, you've probably come across this.
I've come across it many times in my life where there's this sort of contempt that sinful people have for innocent people because they think, oh, you are just so.
Sort of inexperienced and naive.
You're an easy mark.
You need to kind of wise up.
And the only way you can possibly wise up is by doing a little bit of, you know, wicked, you know, and participating in some wickedness.
And that's the only way you can become wise.
That's the temptation of the serpent.
You know, if you do what's wrong, you will become wise.
Tom is wise without that.
Without that, he's, and so he can take the ring.
The ring has zero power over him.
He puts it on, he makes fun of it, he puts it up to his eye, kind of, I think.
Making fun of Saran in his eye.
He's kind of looking through it.
And then he puts it on his little finger.
I think that's important because when Tolkien describes the giving of the ring to Tommy, we're told that it's placed in his big brown skinned hand and that he puts it on his little finger, this awesome and powerful ring that Gandalf is afraid to touch, Galadrail is afraid to touch.
Uh, and Tom just puts it on his ring and laughs, and then he doesn't disappear.
That's right, he doesn't disappear, but he makes the ring disappear.
And remember, Frodo is shocked because he makes it like it's like your uncle at the dinner table making a coin disappear, you know, he's just like laughing at you, and then you know, he pulls it out of your ear.
You know, it's so he, you know, Tom kind of does that, he hands it back to Frodo with a smile and says, There you go.
And then Frodo, if you remember, he's kind of put off by this uh flippant treatment of the ring, and so he decides he's going to see if it's the right ring, he puts it on his finger.
And the hobbits can't see him anymore.
And so he tries to sneak away.
And then Tom just looks at him, says, Come on back here.
You know, sit back down, Frodo.
Take that ring off your ear.
Yeah.
So, you know, and then Gallup, I mean, Goldberry, I keep trying, I keep wanting to call her Galladio, but Goldberry, and then she says that Tom is the master and that no one has ever caught Tom.
And so what we see here is that Tom can't be caught even by the ring of power.
That's pretty cool.
Makes me, man, I wish they would do a series on Tom Bombadil.
Oh, I'll ask you this real quick.
So I think Amazon, I've heard that Amazon is going to be doing a Lord of the Rings type series.
Have you heard anything about this?
I have.
And I'm nervous because it's like, I love, man, I'm such a sucker for fantasy.
So it's probably my favorite genre.
So all the time, my friends, like some fantasy movie will come out that's like B movie.
We all know it's B.
And for me, it's like, For me, it's a B movie in the genre of fantasy and dragons and magic and those kinds of things.
I'm like, I'll take what I can get.
There's just not enough movies to go around.
And so I'm excited on one hand, but on the other, I'm just like, man, it's going to probably have gay agendas.
And it's going to, you know, like, what do you think?
Well, I think you're right.
I don't trust it.
I remember when the first Peter Jackson film came out, like, was that 2001?
I mean, it fell into the ring.
I was tremendously excited, like everybody was, to see it.
I walked out halfway through it.
No way, really?
I was in a theater.
I just got up and walked out.
And I said, that's it.
And I didn't see any of the others.
I just was completely put off.
What put you off?
Well, there were a couple of things.
I mean, it was clear that kind of his angle of vision, even then, was to somehow make Tolkien palatable.
To certain, I guess, political and cultural trends.
So, you know, Arwen goes from being, you know, a really important figure to this gal who can sneak up on Aragorn in the woods and he's not, you know, able to know she's, you know, sneaking up on.
This is a guy that even Legolas, you know, is impressed by in terms of his woodcraft.
You know, he's one of the great figures in the world.
I mean, he's, you know, he's the king of men.
He's what really.
You know, the original three houses of men, you know, in the Sumerillion, he's a personification of those first men who, you know, even the elves were impressed by.
But, I mean, he's kind of, you know, outwitted by this gal.
And that put me off a little bit.
But then when they were in the mines of Moria and they had this scene with the orcs kind of climbing up a column as if they were like insects or something, I just said.
I was like, I just kind of just said, that's it.
I'm out.
And I left.
Now, I'm not the sort of person that goes around putting down the films or trying to talk other people out of liking them or anything.
But to me, I just didn't want to have, because The Lord of the Rings had such an important influence on me, or a significant influence on me.
I didn't want to be tinctured, if you know what I mean, or corrupted or polluted.
And so I just said, I'm just going to enjoy the books.
And I walked out.
I get that.
I get that.
For me, I was so young at the time that I didn't have enough knowledge from the books.
I'm pretty sure I had read The Hobbit because I went to grade school like everyone else.
So I read The Hobbit because I'm pretty sure it was assigned and I loved it.
I mean, it was wonderful.
But I hadn't read The Lord of the Rings.
And so I was familiar with goblins in The Hobbit.
And there are a little bit of orcs, but I just wasn't that familiar.
So when I went and watched the movies, not having read the books at the time, You know, everything that I was watching, I was like, whoa.
I didn't notice any contradiction, you know, so.
Sure, yeah.
But that makes sense.
All right, so let's maybe shift gears a little bit now and just.
So, what is the relevance for Christians?
What's something that Christians, I mean, I feel like we've already addressed some of it, but what are some of the things that Tom Bombadil has to say for Christians and Tolkien?
As you mentioned earlier, you said, you know, he was putting his finger almost prophetically on some of the things.
You know, that he was seeing down the corridor of time and some of the cultural problems that we're experiencing.
What are some of those things and what can we learn?
Yeah, I think one of those things is an old problem, and that's the way we understand dominion.
So, if you think about The Lord of the Rings, The Lord of the Rings is a book about domination, which we see with Saran, and we see, you know, an aspiring dominator in Saruman.
He wants to dominate.
So, we have those figures.
And then we have on the other side, you know, some other very noble characters, obviously Gandalf and Aragorn and Galadrail.
And they use power in a way that is, I mean, praiseworthy.
But I think, in terms of a pure type, Bombadil presents us with a pure type of what dominion looks like without domination.
So, you know, what you have there is, I mean, he may be the most powerful creature in Middle Earth.
I mean, when you think about it, you know, first we have the episode with.
Old Man Willow.
And then we have the episode with the Barrow White.
The episode with the Barrow White is now what's one fun thing to think about first episode or first point or first deliverance is at a tree.
Think about that.
Second deliverance is at a tomb.
Think about that.
The tree in the sepulcher.
It makes me, you know, Pilgrim's Progress.
Yeah.
So we see in the second deliverance kind of a resurrection scene.
So there they are in the tomb.
And, you know, Bombadil comes to the rescue.
We're told that the stones are rolled away, literally, you know, you hear stones rolling away.
And then Tom's head appears with the sun rising in the east behind him.
Now, all of that stuff is just so profoundly, you know, last days, you know, kind of stuff.
And then what does he do?
He casts the barrel white into the outer darkness.
So, with just a word, he says, you know, go.
And then in the course, you know, in the, in the, In the statement where in the condemnation or the judgment that he renders, he talks about until the world is mended.
So there we have an allusion to an eschaton.
So there are all these things going on in that scene that remind us of resurrection, mourning, and the last resurrection, the final resurrection, all that stuff's going on.
So am I saying that he is a Christ figure?
Well, he's a type.
I'm not saying that he's like Aslan or something, but he's like a type like we see in the Old Testament.
And, you know, with all these things, he's demonstrating what true dominion looks like.
He frees the hobbits twice.
He has communion with the hobbits.
One of the things that comes through with regard to.
So I think that if you take and you put Saruman and Bombadil alongside each other, there's almost a perfect kind of inversion of types.
Saruman wants power.
And he's willing to break things to get it.
There's that scene where Gandalf is in Orthanc, right?
He's been captured by Saruman.
And Saruman says, I am the Saruman, the ringmaker, Saruman, the wise, Saruman of many colors, right?
And then Gandalf says, I like white better.
And then Saruman says, well, white's good for a start.
You can dye the white cloth, you can overwrite the white page, you can break the white light.
And then Gandalf says, Well, if you break something to know it, you have departed from the path of wisdom, something to that effect.
So you've got two contrasting visions of wisdom.
One, wisdom personified by Saruman, which is, I think, I think that that particular episode with the robe and the white light and all that kind of stuff, that's a very subtle allusion to Newton's experiments with optics and the whole sort of like.
Well, sort of the aspiration to acquire knowledge for the sake of power.
So, you break things so that you can isolate power.
So, Bacon, Francis Bacon, with the idea that knowledge is power.
So, you've got that quest for power, power in the raw, power that's been distilled from the natural ends toward which it's been directed by the Creator.
And then you have another kind of wisdom personified by Gandalf, which is the wisdom that seeks, and I think even more profoundly personified by Bombadil, the wisdom that seeks to understand the ends for which various creatures have been made and is interested in communing with those.
So, Saruman, there's this sort of snippet of dialogue.
Between, you know, Marian Pippin and Treebeard.
And Treebeard is describing his interactions with Saruman.
And he says there came a point in time where Saruman was like a wall with windows that were shuttered from the inside.
He was only interested in knowledge that he could use to get what he wanted, but he was not interested in communing with anyone.
He never told, Treebeard says this I told him many things he wouldn't know if I hadn't told him, but he never told me a single thing.
He wanted, he was hoarding knowledge because he wanted knowledge for the sake of power.
Whereas Tom, you know, he sits down at the table, tells the, you know, the hobbits all kinds of stuff, you know, about, you know, the hearts of trees and the ways of badgers and just all these different things, you know, good things and bad things.
So he knows about the bad things, but he's, he knows them as an observer, not as a participant.
And so, you know, I contrast those two visions of wisdom.
And I think, Tom is very much in the spirit of the wisdom that Gandalf is talking about when he talks about departing from the way of wisdom if we break something.
And you know that Saruman was trying to break Gandalf in Orthanc.
He was going to torture him.
And if he had ever gotten a hold of Mary and Pippin, you know that he would have tortured them to get what he wanted to know.
Saruman's Broken Dominion00:03:34
Breaking things down.
Were you saying, it sounded like you were saying for a moment, like the illustration of light?
Like refraction, like almost like a prism when white light goes through and it refracts into all the different colors.
And that Saruman was making a reference to the white, but like broken down into many, you know, the one of many colors kind of thing.
Is that what you were saying?
It makes me think of like today, just one tangible example.
You're putting your finger on the larger principle, the general principle, which is very helpful.
But just one, you know, case example, I think of, you know, there's, One group of people in our culture today that look at babies in the womb and think that they can be physically, literally broken down like parts, like a computer.
And used for power to fix this, to do that.
You know, like right now, I'm sure you're aware, you know, I thank God in his mercy, you know, whatever it takes, but you know, Fauci, you know, finally under fire because, you know, you can take the scalps of babies from their mother's womb and, um, And infuse them on the top of rats.
And Americans don't care.
But you better not mess with puppies, right?
So Fauci is under fire right now because he went too far.
He messed with puppies.
But my point is to say that, like, with the fetal cell line and all these different things, and a lot of us are becoming aware of things that have gone on for a long time, but the public didn't know about the fetal cell line and this and that.
And I just think of babies as just one.
You're looking at the principle, and you're absolutely right.
And I'm just trying to make a practical example.
That principle of the, you know, because God has given us dominion over everything, you know, and, but there's a way of using what God has given it.
He's given us the plants, you know, and then we have kind of this, you know, covenant 2.0, a common grace covenant in the way that I see it in my covenant theology with Noah, that it's really just a reestablishing of the cultural mandate.
But now, as the orcs would say, meat is on the menu, you know, and God gives the animals, you know, to mankind and introduces, you know, and not just the fruit.
And so all these things are given to us for our enjoyment.
But there's a way of seeing the resources that God has made, the creatures of this world, right?
The Psalms say he has compassion on all he has made.
There's a sense of like God loves butterflies.
He loves rabbits.
He loves, you know, not just people.
Certainly, He loves man in a particular way, as His image bears.
But God is compassionate on all He has made, all these creatures, and He's given us dominion over them.
And there is a sense in which we exercise that dominion in some cases with animals to eat.
And we kill them, we take their life, we eat them.
But even I think of, you know, the Old Testament and, you know, you shall not boil a baby goat in its mother's milk.
Why?
Because the metaphor, the mother's milk is meant to.
Only be a source of nourishment and life, not a source of destruction.
And there's so there's a proper order and a proper purpose and an end to all that God has made.
And sometimes that means killing something and eating it, but to break things apart, especially human beings created in the image of God and the most precious and vulnerable among us in their mother's womb, to break them apart and infuse them with rats and to do that.
Like, and and I just think of that as kind of like a like Saruman would be on Team Fauci.
I just thought it, oh, yeah, yeah.
Caring for God's Creation00:10:17
Well, you remember, you remember, uh, there's In the course of the story, in the two towers in particular, there's this kind of hint that orcs have been crossbred with humans.
And that's why Saruman's orcs are not afraid of being, you know, fighting in the daylight.
That's right.
I forgot about that.
Yeah.
So there are all these different things.
And Tree Bear says that would be black evil if that's what he's done.
But I think you're right.
I think when we think about Bombadil, He wants to commune with the hobbits.
He wants to spend time with them.
He wants to free them so that he can enjoy company with them.
There's this moment with Treebeard where Mary and Pippin are there, and one of the hobbits asks, Do you mind if we ask you what you intend to do with us?
And Treebeard says, If you by that you mean what I intend to do to you, nothing.
But we can do some things together.
That kind of thing.
And all of the powerful characters, Elrod, Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, they all honor the choices of the hobbits, these little creatures.
You know, Pippin wants to go on the journey with everybody, you know, back at Rivendell.
And Elrod just kind of throws up his hands and says, All right, all right.
You know, I don't think you should go.
I think you should go back to the Shire.
But anyway, whatever.
So, you know, that doesn't mean that good characters can't, you know, be strong and sort of act.
I mean, think about what Bombadil does in both of those episodes where he saves the hobbits.
He puts the tree in its place, you know, old man willow, and he puts the barrow weight in its place.
He's able to act decisively and powerfully for the good of the hobbits because these other creatures were trying to use them for wicked ends.
So I think that that's huge.
And I also think it, you know, one of the things that we're dealing with in our society today is the problem of language.
You know, postmodern literary theory has completely.
You know, divorced language from the things that it refers to.
And so now everything is interpretation all the way down.
It's just, you know, an expression of your own personal preferences or will to power.
That's all language is.
It's like a tool to get what you want from other people and from the world.
And that's why everybody's on the defense.
You know, everybody's defensive because they're sort of we get microaggressions and all this kind of stuff.
It's not as though our language binds us together, it's actually the thing that we use to exploit each other.
That's all postmodern literary theory.
Can say about language.
Whereas, you know, in Lord of the Rings, you know, you've got a whole different approach to sort of thinking about language.
With Treebeard, if you remember, he says that, you know, it takes a really long time to say anything in Entish because every word is the history of that thing.
You know, so it's actually describing the thing that's its own history.
But with Tom, this is where the singing comes in.
So there's a very, I think, you know, large role that singing plays in.
You know, Middle Earth, you know, there are all these songs throughout, you know, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and Sumerillion.
But the first song is what?
It's the song of creation in the Sumerillion.
So the creation itself is a kind of living song, it's the kind of expression of the song of the Valar.
And, you know, when we see Tom with his nonsense songs, it's always kind of this, he's got this lyrical quality, even when he's just talking.
You can kind of see the cadence or feel the cadence in his speech.
And he delivers the hobbits with songs.
And I think that what that's intended to say to us is that Tom knows the language of creation and that he can actually call things back to their purposes and to their natures.
So that means that he exercises dominion in a pretty significant way as a regent, as a steward.
Of the creation that has been brought into being, that he's just simply sort of caring for and making sure is being what it was intended to be.
That makes a lot of sense.
It seems as though the only tragedy with Tom, and maybe this isn't his fault, I'm going to pose it as a question here in just a moment because maybe it's part of his, the way that he's composited and his particular nature and just biologically being incapable of it.
I don't know.
And I'm assuming that you'll know the answer.
But assuming that he can procreate.
It seems like the only failure of Tom, it seems like he's exercising perfect dominion and he himself unfallen.
It's just too small.
It seems like the only failure is that he isn't fruitful and multiplying.
He's lending towards the fruitfulness of anything and everything and anyone else, but that him and Goldberry are childless.
Can you speak to that?
Yeah, I think that every kind of image falls short.
Of what we'd like it to be.
And I think that he serves a particular purpose in the story.
Even at the Council of Elrod, there was this question maybe we should just give him the ring and he could take care of it.
I thought, well, maybe they could just give him the ring and say, hey, would you mind just taking it to Mordor and throwing it in Mount Doom for us?
Because if anyone could do it, you could.
And couldn't he call one of the eagles or 20 of them?
It's like, let's get this done.
That's right.
But that's not what happens.
And in our world, that's not what happens too, because it makes a better story for the hobbits to take the job.
And in a way, it makes for a better story for you and me to do things that we've been given to do.
But I also think, though, that Tom is a kind of picture of the end of the world because, yes, he's kind of an endemic figure, but he's also kind of a figure that shows you what rest looks like.
So, you know, when the daring do is done and the wickedness has been finally.
Defeated and death is no more.
What do we do?
You know, are we just like a bunch of high school jocks that just sit around and talk about the good old days when we, you know, scored the touchdown and this kind of thing?
Or do we really enjoy the blessedness of, you know, the good things that we can enjoy in God?
And that's kind of what we see with Tom.
I mean, he's just always in a good mood.
You know, he's in Goldberry and him are just, they've got this beautiful harmony.
And there are a couple of things that helped me to kind of associate Tom with the end.
One was what I said earlier about the bear white, but the other is the dream that Frodo has in Tom's house.
So, if you remember, Frodo has this dream, and in the dream, there's this like curtain of rain that parts, and he sees a sunrise and he sees a land in the distance across some water.
And then at the very end of the Lord of the Rings, when Frodo is at the Grey Havens and is now on the ship and is sailing into the West, we're told for the last time something about Bombadil.
When Frodo sees the curtain of rain and it parts and he sees the undying lands, he remembers that he dreamed about it in Bombadil's house.
That's the dream actually foresaw or foretold what he was going to experience when he went into the uttermost West.
So when we think about eternal rest, You know, the eternal Sabbath.
I think Bombadil, in a way, is a kind of picture of that Sabbath rest.
Yeah, it's good.
It makes me think of Pilgrim's Progress.
That's like, so Tom Bombadil, it's like a almost like a stopping place on the way.
You know, it's not there, but it's a place from which you can get a glimpse of the ultimate end.
It makes me think of the Delectable Hills, the shepherds.
You know, it's like from here, you know, the weary pilgrims able to be nourished and the shepherds, you know, nourish and teach and, you know, and, um, You know, relinquish their wisdom upon the weary pilgrims.
They rest, their safety, their security, and they're not there yet.
They're going to have to ultimately leave Tom Bombadil's house.
They're going to have to leave the Delectable Mountains and the Shepherds.
But from that place, you know, there's a strategic vantage point where you can see the eternal Sabbath rest.
And it makes me just think of, you know, the church, the Lord's Day.
You know, Spurgeon said, the sweetest place I know, the sweetest place on earth, despite all of its faults, you know, or Calvin, you know, wherever the word is rightly preached and the sacrament rightly ministered, there a church of God exists.
Despite its many faults.
And when we gather together on the Lord's Day, Christ is uniquely present with us in the sacrament, present with the Lord's Supper, and present also in authority for binding and loosing and the keys of the kingdom and all these things.
And the Lord even is pleased to condescend and inhabit the very praises of his people, which I think has a corporate nature.
And so I think of Tom Bombadil's house, kind of likened to the Delectable Mountains with Pilgrim's Progress.
And for our purposes here in this life, for the Christian, I think of.
The Sabbath day, the Lord's day, the first day of the week, you know, and even that makes me think, you know, that Tom Bombadil being kind of further towards the beginning of their journey.
Where to Buy the Book00:03:06
Oh, yeah.
They weren't even halfway there.
It almost has that kind of first day of the week kind of symbol, you know, that it's not the midway point, which would seem to make logical sense, but rather, as the Puritans said, it's the first day of the week because it's the marketplace for the soul, it's the place where we gather all these goods, you know.
Right.
And I know there's a lot of symbolism with that.
Rivendell would be another, maybe, example.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have a friend named Rachel Fulton Brown, and she teaches at the University of Chicago.
And we were talking about this very thing, and she does a lot of thinking and writing about Tolkien.
She's a medievalist.
So her thought was very much along the lines of what you just expressed or laid out.
And her thought was that this was a kind of catechesis at the very beginning, almost kind of a baptism, particularly with that rain day.
Yeah.
You know, kind of preparing to set out as they do, kind of on this pilgrim trek.
Yeah, definitely.
That's cool.
That's really cool.
All right.
Well, any final words?
Well, I don't really.
I mean, apart from the fact that the book will be out in November, and if folks would like to read it, that'd be great.
Where can people buy it?
Well, it'll be, you know, available in all the online stores that people buy things at.
But if they want to go directly to the publisher, it's Canon Press.
Okay, you can say it, Chris, at Amazon.
I know it hurts.
It's available on Amazon, but it is.
Yeah, you can actually pre order it on Amazon right now.
It's available.
It's actually up.
They don't have the cover image there, but you can pre order it.
Okay, so available on Amazon, all the other places, but Canon Press would be the source.
And so, any of our listeners who aren't familiar, Canon Press is in Moscow, Idaho.
Doug Wilson is the publishing company that he started.
Lots of great material.
Will it also be available on the Canon app for anybody who gets the Canon app?
I think so.
I think so.
I'm going to be actually talking to some folks there being interviewed about this very thing in a couple of days.
And I'll be up there in Moscow to do some video stuff related to the book.
So I'm pretty sure there'll be a bunch of stuff there.
And I don't know what the plan is with regard to an audio book or something, but I suppose that there will be one.
And either I'll be the reader or somebody else that they use regularly will do it.
Great.
Okay.
Well, thank you, Pastor Chris.
I appreciate you coming on the show.
Well, thank you very much.
It's been great to be with you, Joel.
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