I took last week off because I was planning a dinner for stragglers and questioners and those who know God and those who might like to know God- I’ll tell you more about this, perhaps, another time. For the most part, I write these quickly on Thursday mornings, and aim to post by noon the same day. Thanks for reading- KHS
I didn’t tell you the truth about what I thought of Tom Bombadil- or at least not the whole truth. Call it a failure of nerve. (We are calling everything that these days).
It just seemed a little silly to me to confess that I thought Tom was a picture of God. This is because I am a theologian by profession, and we are Very Serious About God.
The thing you need to know is that God is not everything, and that everything is not God. I once said in an interview for an academic job that my work focused on “transcendence”. (I did not get the job). Transcendence is theologian-speak for the means whereby God differs from all that is not-God. (This language gets a bit bendy, I know). Transcendence may seem to be a narrow concern, but I’ve come to believe that it is at the core of understanding anything about Christian doctrine.
This is because all of our speech about God depends on “how our words apply.”
We do not think about this in ordinary language for the most part; when I speak of an apple, I mean an apple. There is a correlation between a word and object, or a word and concept, that goes unquestioned in everyday speech. This is how words mean anything.
The rules change a bit, however, when we speak about God.
God is a Rock, but of course God is not actually a piece of granite. God is a shepherd, but not by occupation. We can accept this poetic language without too much trouble. It gets harder when we try to think about what God does, but forget that we are thinking about God’s acts in similarly impressionistic phrase. When we say God “does” something, there is the same approximation that occurs as when we say that God “is” a rock. God’s acts are not the same as ours.
One of the clearest examples is when we think about God’s “sovereignty” or power. God is mighty; this is simply who God is. But what does it mean to say that God is mighty, or that God is powerful? Do we simply Xerox our versions of human power and apply them to God?
We should not- but of course, we do. Much of modern American theology is its own question generator, positing narrow questions that have been generated by faulty assumptions. We then spin our wheels and attempt to answer these questions when we could have spent our time and learned more profitably about God from looking at, oh I don’t know, maybe a duck.
We generate our own theological questions when we begin with a picture of how human power works, and then apply it to God.
God would indeed be cruel to not stop a roaring train from crushing a child. If God can control nature, too, then God is terrible not to intervene in every improper division of cell, every premature birth or disease of aging. Such events clearly evidence either a limitation of God’s power, or a failure of God’s kindness.
This is terribly obvious if God is only a human, enlarged. But God is something else entirely. God meets Israel with rage as often as kindness, with weal and woe as often as restoration and wealth. God makes our best intentions recoil. God looks on as the Satan visits good and evil both on Job; he does not intervene when the firstborns of Egypt are taken by plague. He sees, but does not act.
I once almost left a doctoral program because I could not write about God. It was not a weakness of technique or ability; I simply could not figure out what my teachers meant by God, and I could not figure out how to write an essay that they would deem truthful.
I was smart enough; I had read what was required; I was always cheerful. One of my teachers once compared me to a junkyard dog. But I could not figure out how to write theological essays because I could not figure out what we were talking about when we said God.
I had left a narrow religious upbringing for a broader one. I went from evangelical spaces, to evangelical adjacent spaces, to spaces where I wouldn’t dare think like an evangelical. I did this in part because I have always chased interesting questions, and in part because I am a contrarian (this, if you are wondering, is why I’ve never read the Lord of the Rings).
I did find interesting questions, but I was surprised by what were extremely lame answers (God is whatever you hope for! The Trinity is our social program! All shall be well but without ever really reading Julian!).
It offended me to see God studied and found to be so boring. Theology was distilled down to our best political utopias and social programs. The best we could hope for was to be united with God in a kind of incorporeal androgynous interreligious mush. I had hoped for something much more particular than this, with boundaries that took the shape of the life I’d lived. I’d hoped to see myself remade.
The God who saw to this, whose power saw to it, was more than a gentle hand who’d carried me, Footprints style, along the framed lithograph that was this life. He was Jesus. (If you cringed, just then, you may have also spent time in such mainline spaces). He was a person who had entered the physical world, who’d made a body his own, whose taking-shape narrated the problem and opportunity of transcendence. The shape of this created body marked the shape of the Creator God.
And yet theologians treat this reality as a puzzle to be solved and every day Christians ignore it as merely a Christmas story. And yet in the manger sleeps the Seer, the one who was with the Word in the beginning.
Tom Bombadil is the Seer. He is a decent approximation of what it might look like to think about divine power apart from human terms. Tom is not an answer to the problem of divine power generated by a faulty assumption.
How do I know this? Because he sings. And because they sleep.
For those just joining us (hello, thanks for reading); last week I phoned it in on the question of who is Tom Bombadil. I did this because I did not want to enter what I have been told is a noisy fray over the question (I prefer questions no one is asking). But Tom is a Seer, and I loved him, and I am told I will hardly meet him again- and I wanted to think about why I loved him.
As I wrote in my last post, the trouble started with the Trees. The Old Willow has the Hobbits in his grip, casting them into a stupor that portends danger (a bad sleep!). Tom comes to the Hobbit’s rescue and invites them to his home, where he feeds them and offers them care.
Tom clearly has power over the natural world. The Willow shirks back at his presence, and his home is a peaceful habitat in the midst of the dangerous wood. But Tom’s authority is not sheer power or ownership. He is not a miserly king or a bragging oligarch. His power is more like an abiding presence, a restful sense of belonging. The woods are his, and he can enjoy them, without fear of harm. Goldberry tells us this explicitly when she explains that “Master” does not mean “owner”:
‘No indeed!’ she answered, and her smile faded. ‘That would indeed be a burden,’ she added in a low voice, as if to herself. ‘The trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves. Tom Bombadil is the Master… He has no fear” (122).
Tom can wade in the water and walk in the forest and leap on the hilltops without concern. He has a kind of mirthful disregard for danger, because indeed there is for him no danger at all.
Tom is not Master of the woods because he is their owner. Rather he simply “is”. Tom was there in the old ages. He is older than the forest, older than the Trees- he saw the Sea before it was bent.
We must find a way to think about the sovereignty of God beyond the actualization of individual possibilities. God’s power is not human power extended into space. Instead, God shows grieving Job an ostrich. God brings a teenage girl to Moses, the Savior of Israel, hidden in a basket. God brings salvation to Israel through the scarlet cord of a woman of questionable origin.
God can use such uncommon means with the world because it is his. These are not chances that God takes, because God knows the outcome; Old Willow will obey him, so he can laugh.
As the one who was there in the beginning, He can move amidst the world without any fear of a danger, without any dread, but it is not his property as much as his delight.
Tom Bombadil sings, in his yellow boots, stomping around in the dangerous forest. Hs presence alone ensures the Hobbits safety: “Nothing passes doors or windows save moonlight and starlight and the wind off the hill-top” (125). Their nightmares are immediately interrupted when they wake and remember where they are. (And what are nightmares, but the fears of what might be?) It is not only their present safety, but their future that is secured in Tom’s presence.
This is a deep restful sleep where nightmares are stilled, where fear is calmed, where hunger is fed. The Hobbits are in the house of the Seer. The Seer does not tell them what will come, what they might face, but they experience for a time the rest that comes from dwelling in safety. They are in the house of the Seer, and so they sleep. Such is God’s power; providing not answers or reasons or even consolation, but simply rest, and delight, in the presence of the one who Is.