Episode 421: The Gospel In Middle Earth with Michael T. Jahosky

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James.

I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host Rick Lee James, and I'm so glad that you are here with us again for what I know is going to be another great conversation. Conversation. Although many people today reject Christianity for intellectual reasons, greater numbers of people are rejecting Christianity because it does not engage their imagination. Christians must not only demonstrate that the Christian worldview is true, but that it is also good, beautiful, and relevant. The Good News of the Return of the King: The Gospel in Middle-earth is a book that endeavors to show the truth, Goodness, and Beauty of Jesus Christ, the Gospel, and the Biblical Metanarrative by engaging the imagination through J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, as well as The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. In this book, Professor Michael T. Jahosky proposes that J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is a story about what Jesus' parables are about—the good news about the return of the King. As a work of imaginative fiction similar to Jesus' parables, The Lord of the Rings can bypass both intellectual and imaginative objections to the gospel and pull back the veil of familiarity that obscures the gospel for many. Michael T. Jahosky is the author of The Good News of the Return of the King: The Gospel in Middle-earth, and he has stopped by the podcast for a visit today. Michael, welcome to Voices in My Head. Thank you, Rick.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I really appreciate you having me on. Well, I'm so glad to have you here, and I had a great time reading your book over the weekend, and I really enjoyed a lot of the new perspectives that I think that you bring to the story. And in fact, just to give all of the listeners and you a little bit of perspective, my son is 8 years old now, and I started very recently at bedtime at night reading Lord of the Rings to him, and I found that it's good for me, but nothing puts him to sleep faster at 8 years old when the lights go out. And that's not to say it's a bad story, but it's just a different time. And so it's one of those kind of stories that I think it's kind of a rite of passage in some way, you know, when you get into it. Absolutely. And it's something that as we start sharing that book, I think we all come to it at different ages and at different times. Probably my first experience with Tolkien was probably with the cartoons that were, you know, done a long time ago with The Hobbit and things like that. I don't know that I ever saw them all the way through as a kid. I'd catch them on TV here and there, but it really probably wasn't until just before the Samuel Jackson movies came out that I started getting interested in the books and started reading them all for myself. And And I think a lot of us have a similar experience to that, especially in the ministry world, because we started realizing there was a real spiritual and Christian connection to that. So as we start the show today, and before we get too deep into your book, I'd love for you to share with our listeners today, what is your own personal Tolkien story?

Yeah, yeah, no, I just, I can't resist a good joke. I'm sure Samuel Jackson would be very honored to hear that he directed the Lord of the Rings films. Peter Jackson. I'm sorry. I just couldn't get the picture out of my head now because I'm thinking, you know, I'm tired of these Tolkien jokes on this plane or something. I'm trying to think of a quotable—

I can't believe I just said Nick Fury, you know, directive. That's crazy. That's been the kind of— that's the kind of morning I've had all morning long. Oh my goodness. If listeners only knew in the background what kind of morning I had. I usually don't make those kind of mistakes. That's funny.

It's perfect though. I wanted to be able to showcase a little bit of humor because it's a serious subject and it's not a book with a lot of humor that I've written. I know.

And you know what? Listeners everywhere were probably screaming at their phones, "It's Peter Jackson, you moron!" And I would be there listening to it myself doing the same thing. That's funny. No, go right ahead.

Well, I'm sorry about the morning you've had, but it was perfect and I'm glad you've got the same sense of humor. So you wanted me to talk about my coming to kind of of reading Tolkien, and it really happened when I was 15, 16, I think it was, no, 16 years old there. And then the preface of my book, I tell readers, you know, it's kind of a complicated story, but the short version is, and of course you can read the preface to find out more, I didn't realize the connection between me rediscovering Christianity at 16 through my mother and her faith being nurtured again after a bad car accident that she had, that I don't go into in the book, but that was the reason why she came back to Christ, and that kind of drew me into it. And I didn't see that that coincided at the same time as my brother Chris, which I do mention in the preface, started to read me The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, right before the first Peter Jackson movie came out, which was I think December of the end of that year. Now I remember going to the movies with him after, and we kept on reading the books, and then I kind of continued reading The Hobbit and The Silmarillion over the next several years on my own. So, started around my teenage years, high school years, freshman, sophomore in high school, and I didn't recognize until 2011, I think, 2010, '11, looking back that rediscovering Christ, because I'd kind of not really walked away from faith, but my parents got divorced and I had been raised Catholic, and so we didn't really go to church as a youth, but at 16, rediscovering Jesus again and learning about Tolkien for the first time, Later in 2011, I looked back on that and said, "Wow, back in 2001, I didn't realize that these two things end up being related." Tolkien was a Catholic. He was a Christian. He was very emphatic that The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, he says. And that's a direct quote from one of his letters. And it took me a decade, as they say, to really put all that together and then to say how curious that is, that my rediscovery of my own faith and my first impression of Tolkien coincided. And that's how I started reading. I credit it to my brother. I've got two brothers. My oldest— I'm sorry, my older brother. I've got two older brothers. Chris really introduced me to the books and he knows I'm grateful to him for that. So that's how that happened.

Wow, that's great. That's a great personal story and I loved hearing a bit about that too in the preface of your book and kind of some of the ways that those things interlap. So I want to use sort of my words today to kind of bring about the thesis of your book, and then you can tell me how close I'm getting this, okay? Because it was kind of a whirlwind read this weekend, and it was a great read. But as I told you before, I need to go back because there's just so much to unpack. I was trying— I always want to try to do my best to read the books of the guests I have on this show before I have them on, and this was such an enlightening read. But if I've read you correctly, and you please feel free to correct me if I'm getting this wrong, your thesis is that the story of The Lord of the Rings is really best understood as a parable, and reading it parabolically opens up the world of Tolkien's Middle-earth in such a way as to find the gospel within it. So would you say that's sort of the thesis that you are bringing about in your book?

I would, yes, and of course you've got prepared some topics that go down into the layers of that. There are more layers, but that's exactly what it is. And this is going to probably set off some concerns about some listeners who are Tolkien fans or Christians or both, or secular readers of Tolkien or non-Christian readers, of course. Concerns especially about the word parable and Tolkien's dislike of allegory, and those two things are not the same. So I get into that as well. And it's very important, I think, a lot of people people might dismiss my book immediately hearing the synopsis you just provided in the thesis because they'll think, "Oh, well, Tolkien really hated or strongly disliked," or as he said, "cordially disliked allegory," and the parable is the same thing or it's close to the same thing. This is more of the same of why I don't read books like this. I don't want readers or listeners to think that because it's a very different approach. In fact, I spend a great deal of the introduction, which is a chapter unto itself, and chapter 1 dealing with the history and usage and the multivalent meanings of a term like allegory and how Tolkien used it in various seemingly contradictory ways. He just used the word in its many meanings in different contexts when he mentioned it. And this is very confusing to the uninitiated, so I tried to initiate, you know, my readers. And basically, this is a long-winded way of saying give the book a chance because it's not what you think it is. And if you're a Tolkien fan, you know, you kind of know what I'm getting at. So yeah, definitely.

Well, great. Well, and in the preface of the book, I want to read just a little bit of what you say in the preface, and because I really love the way you say it. You said, although it has taken several years for me to discover this, The Lord of the Rings restored my ability to read scripture properly and to hear it for what it is: good news. And so what I think we're going to do today as we discuss this is hopefully get to hear you elaborate a bit more on kind of what that good news is that you've rediscovered and kind of how really— because I really feel like that's what you're kind of bringing about in the way you wrote the book, is the way that you've rediscovered the gospel, you know. And I think it's brilliant the way that you've been kind of able to unpack that. Thank you so much. Sure, sure, thank you. And there's so much great content in your book, and for the sake of this podcast though, I want to focus in on really 3 areas for us to deal with today. And, and what we don't get to, I'm just gonna say to listeners, I want you to just go read the book, alright? And, and once again, for listeners that may not have caught it on the intro, it's that the book is called The Good News of the Return of the King: The Gospel in Middle-earth. And, and that's what we're going to be discussing a little bit more in depth here. And so the 3 areas that we're going to deal with, I'm just going to name them first, and then we're going to kind of go in and let you unpack them a little bit for us and discuss them a bit today as we kind of unpack this good news that really The Lord of the Rings helped you kind of recapture of the gospel today. So the 3 areas that you deal with in the book is how Tolkien understood fairy stories, first of all. The second is parables as incarnational myths. And then thirdly, I think the one that you probably want to go maybe a little, a little more in depth than some of the others today is the monarchic role of parables throughout The Lord of the Rings. So let's just go ahead and maybe get started with that first one today and let you unpack it a bit. So let's talk about Tolkien and his understanding of fairy stories and maybe what those are, because I think maybe even that word fairy stories might have a different connotation for us. And what maybe if we today hear those words, we might just be thinking pixies with wings if we think of fairies, but fairy stories are actually something different in the mind of Tolkien. That's right.

Yeah, Rick, that's great. And these are really terrific topics that you've chosen, so thank you. Obviously, there's so much to be said here. Let me first start by saying, you know, the kind of the restoration of the Christian worldview properly, I know, is a slippery slope for a lot of Christians because there are so many different denominations and it's, you know, whose Christianity is it anyway? We're all trying to worship Christ and follow him as best we can and as orthodoxly as we can. So I understand that, you know, I've taken probably more of a Protestant approach, but I've tried to be very ecumenical. There's a lot of Catholicism in the book as well. So I'm really reaching for a historic, robust historic Orthodox understanding of Jesus in his Jewish context. And of course, this brings us to some of the topics like the third topic you've chosen today about the monarchic character of parables and also of the Lord of the Rings. So I want to get into that. And I want to say that, you know, we'll come back to this, but the understanding the good news properly and how The Lord of the Rings did this is it really showed me, and this is just a little bit more biography, in 2011 when I encountered, I think it was around that time, 2011, I think it was the first time I encountered it, it was N.T. Wright's Simply Jesus book, and hearing him talk about the gospel as God becoming king, not as just Jesus being divine, right? And then subsequently in other books where he explores this theme, as an Anglican, as what he is, for listeners who don't know, as a Protestant, taking this approach. I know not everybody agrees with him, but what he really unpacked there was very powerful. And I said, you know, I've heard this somewhere before. And that's what sent me looking back to 2001 to think, I've heard this in The Lord of the Rings. Like, this reminded me of reading that book. How are these two things related? And so that was kind of how that flash of insight happened. And I realized that that's going to be topic 3. So let me stop and come back to that later. When we do hear fairy stories, we think pixies with wings, we think probably dust and rainbow dust or something like that. And I get this picture of my daughter's glittery dresses in my head when I think of that. And that's not what Tolkien meant at all. Now, there may be pixies and faes or fairies in fairy story, but really this is an understanding of the concept of fairy. Which is the story world that the author creates. So a fairy story is a subset of myth. Mythos is a Greek word that is a very, again, very multivalent term, but it can mean a multitude of different things. Probably most simply, mythos in ancient Greek meant an account about the way things are, a story about reality, a narrative about reality. And there are of course many different kinds of mythoi, the plural, you know, there's parables and proverbs and riddles and anecdotes and analogies and allegories and, you know, dark sayings of prophets in the Bible, and there's all sorts of different subgenres. So I would say that Tolkien, you know, of course you need to read his essay on fairy stories from 1939, I believe it was, which outlines what a fairy story is. Well, almost. He really gets into how it affects the reader more so than the history or the definition of fairy story. But what we can gather from that is that it is a sacramental story. That is, it's a story that sees the higher in the lower. It sees, you know, a transcendent dimension present in the physical dimension that we live in. And it brings us to a definition that C.S. Lewis was familiar with and that many scholars have written about, the sacramental approach, which is seeing a transcendent spiritual reality manifest in the created material reality. And Tolkien describes fairy, says fairy story contains trees and mountains, but yet it also contains the sun and the moon, rivers, but also ogres and dragons and men when they're enchanted. So he's describing a more capacious world for us. He's not just describing physical laws of cause and effect. He's not just describing the world as we see it empirically, but implying that, not even just implying, he's outright saying it contains what we would call imaginatively real creatures and things like that. So it has a transcendent dimension, an imaginative dimension. So I would say that's the best definition of fairy story. Fairy story has three functions, recovery, consolation, and escape, not necessarily in that order. Obviously, I focus on, and this comes from Tolkien's essay, I focus on the recovery aspect a great deal because of its ability, as Tolkien says, fairy stories clean our windows. Further on the definition, because they need to be clean because we don't see reality as it ought to be. We see it empirically often, scientifically, and that's it. We stop there. He also says, interestingly, that he dares not to define fairy ultimately. He doesn't want to define fairy story. I'm going to have just a few more words on this and we'll move on, but he doesn't want to define it. It's indescribable, though not imperceptible, was what— and that itself is kind of a parable. You know, it's like, what? And then I would say, if you go to his letters, let's get away from his essay, he describes, and this is going to prick up Samir's, he describes The Lord of the Rings. As an allegory, just not the type he dislikes. But then elsewhere he describes The Lord of the Rings as a fairy story, which he very deliberately created based on the material from his essay. So it's a fairy story and it's an allegory. So how do we make sense of this? Well, as a genre, Lord of the Rings is a fairy story, which is a type of myth, but he's also implying that it's an allegory. So there's so many concepts and readers will get very lost very quickly, but I kind of did a formula in my book whereby I said, okay, look, there's myth, there's this very broad umbrella term. Let's suppose that underneath that we have, let's just decide to call them allegory because we could say we're working with a classification of parables or a classification of allegories. It doesn't matter. It ultimately ends up, I think, being the same thing. Let's say we say there are various kinds of allegories. Well, now let's imagine a spectrum. So for your listeners, kind of imagine myth, then allegory, then a spectrum of allegory. Well, in Tolkien's mind, if we try to keep this as simple as possible, there seemed to be on one end of the spectrum of allegory the fairy story, which we've just described. And this is the ideal story, supremely effective, very indirect, very effective in achieving its goals and delighting and entertaining. But on the other end of that spectrum, we might say, is the one that he really disliked, which he called in his letters, the conscious and intentional allegory. Now, fairy story is an allegory, yes, technically is what he kind of basically says, but it's not that kind of allegory. So clearly for Tolkien, there were different kinds of allegory. And so that I say, you know, The Lord of the Rings is not the kind that people are scared of, that is a very, very transparent, very direct, in-your-face theological sermon sermonizing, and that's a good thing because that would be a very ineffective story. That's the simplest I can put it, but you can read the book for more.

Yeah. I found that quite interesting too because I had always been of the mind with things I had read that Tolkien had always been very anti-allegory and that that was even a source of maybe some of the arguments between him and C.S. Lewis actually, that he didn't really care for The Chronicles of Narnia just because it was sort of too in-your-face, you know, with the kind of allegories that Lewis would use. So it was fascinating to find that he actually wasn't completely against allegory. It was just more the type of allegory that he was going for. So that was a brand new thing that you brought out that I had never known before. So very, very interesting to find out for sure. Yeah, for sure. And I love also how you talked about, said, you know, that they the fairy stories, they clean our windows. I thought that was a wonderful way of putting that. There was a couple other things you wrote about that you didn't touch on, but just that fairy stories or these parables, that they don't— they do not encourage an escape from the world, but they encourage an escape to the world as it really is. It was just a wonderful way of putting that in your book. So that's really a great way for you to help us, that you've helped us, I think, understand a little bit more about what these things are.

Well, thank you. And I would just say real quick that Tolkien was the one that made the window comment. So I'm indebted to him for that. I'm also indebted to a great many scholars for pointing out that these kinds of stories really do— I'm not the first to point this out, in other words— bring us to a deeper understanding of reality. But I'm so glad that insight nourished. It was designed to. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Thank you.

Well, then we also wanted to talk about the parables as incarnational myths and then as the monarch— excuse me, the monarchic role of parables. So we'll just go right into parables as incarnational myths and kind of what you mean by that for our listeners today. Sure.

Well, I'm glad I mentioned the spectrum. So let's go back to that kind of mental picture I painted. You know, we have this general broad Greek word of mythos, or mythoi in plural. We have, let's say, let's isolate allegory as a genre and a classification. There's various kinds of allegory. Underneath that, we had a little spectrum. And we had on one end, we had the fairy story. On the other, we had what Tolkien called the conscious and intentional. So where does parable come in? And then the link in this understanding of what do I mean by incarnational story or myth? That's what I mean by myth, as a story about reality. So let's connect parable with fairy stories. So as I do in the book in chapter 1, and the tail end of the introduction, is I explain that when we look at New Testament scholarship, which you can look at my bibliography for more who I cite, who write about parables. I think of Craig Blomberg and Amy-Jo Levine, Brad Young, who's worked with sort of parables in their Jewish setting. When we look at these kinds of scholars, John Crossan, even though I don't adopt a lot of his views, he has some very good things to say about parables. When we look at New Testament scholarship on Jesus's parables, and we look at also, here's the key, one of Tolkien's good friends, Father Robert Murray, who was a Jesuit friend of his, to whom Tolkien directed a lot of letters, I guess because Murray had read portions in the 1940s, if I'm not mistaken, of The Lord of the Rings, to kind of give Tolkien his feedback. And you know, a lot of the comments about The Lord of the Rings being a religious type of story are directed to this Murray character. Well, Father Murray later in 1992, for the 100th, you know, the centenary of Tolkien's birth, Tolkien was born obviously in 1892. He gave this sermon at Thanksgiving that became an essay called Tolkien and the Art of the Parable. And that to me, I said, okay, there's my link. I read this essay and I saw that Murray saw a connection between what we've just said about fairy story and what scholars call a parable. And so there's the connection. And of course, I don't want to get into too much because I want to stay focused here. But the qualities that I've described of fairy story are very much redundant when I describe parables. And of course, that's not what most people's picture of parables. Most people are going to think of parables as substitutionary stories. They're earthly stories with heavenly meanings, which is what they're not. They're allegorical in the starkest sense. That's not what they are. And so for a lot of people, parable, allegory, eh, same thing. No, no, no. Not at all. They're sacramental myths. They're very much close to what I've described about fairy story. And I found a great deal of overlap. So now that brings us— so there's a little bit of a connection. Read chapter 1 for more. What do I mean by incarnational myth? I found a few scholars saying this, especially New Testament scholars. Sally McFague wrote a book that I have right here in front of me, actually, called Speaking in Parables. Kind of an older book. She's not the only person who I've read. Even C.S. Lewis in his Reflection on the Psalms describes poetry as a little linguistic incarnation. I found this recurring comment that parables are incarnational stories. And I found this in my research and I thought, yeah, that just really makes a lot of sense. What do I mean by this? The gist is that parables are designed perfectly, they seem, to be Christian stories, if the central miracle and teaching of Christianity, among many other important things, is that God became like us, he became not like us, he became one of us, he became human. And yet it is like because we're comparing the strangest thing we can never really picture and see God and something we see every day, a person. What could be more strange than the wedding of God and man? And yet God did it. And this is the incarnation, God become flesh. And when we think of what poetry or story at base really does, this really makes a lot of sense. And when we think deeper about what a parable is, it's a story that works through the power of metaphor. And I want to just offer a definition on this. Again, most people think of metaphor and they think, here's another redundant word that means the same thing as allegory. Again, wrong. Metaphor is not this for that. It's this is suggestive of that. It's not a, this equals that sort of equation. That's what allegory is. This speaking of one thing in terms that are suggestive of another is what metaphor is. And so when we look at the parables and we look at them suggesting and teasing out these things about what the reign of God would look like and what would it look like if God was really here and Jesus is trying to like, you know, really say, hey, guess what? I am here. But he's saying it indirectly. And he's trying to get people, he's trying to bring them to belief through narrative. He's being gentle with us, and yet very challenging. And people, as you know, you read the Gospels, a lot of people still didn't get it. But that's because of this very suggestive way of speaking about it. And so the story itself, I guess is what I'm getting to, is is the content it's trying to communicate. I actually learned this too from N.T. Wright, who has a great chapter on parables in his book, Simply Jesus. The form is the content. And so if we look at it, the story is a key to understanding who is speaking, is the author of the story of reality itself. And so, you know, the comparison, the God and man is the biggest metaphor there is. And so when we think of what poetry does, well, it's trying to unite and suggest implications of comparison between abstract and concrete. Well, that's like God and man. So we start to think about what this means and we realize, wow, this is a very indirect, very suggestive, careful plotting way of trying to say God is here, God is among us. And Jesus didn't come out and just say, hey everybody, I'm God. You know, he told stories. That took the long way around in saying that. And it gets even weirder from there when we look at your third topic about the monarchic character. But let me just pause there to say again, the key insight here is thinking about how language works, the definition of metaphor that I gave, but then the form is the content it's trying to communicate. There's more to say there too, but anyway, that's it.

Well, and I love that too because the metaphorical aspect of parables is something that I think is very Jewish too in its roots. I've become friends with our local rabbi of our Jewish temple down the road here in the city where I live in, and he's taught me quite a bit over the years just of the different ways of the Jewish people of interpreting Scripture. And I think in Christianity oftentimes we often have this misnomer that Scripture is only to be looked at one way and that's it, you can't have any other way. And the Jewish way of reading Scripture is very much that it's given to us as a way to look— to be looked at from many perspectives and to be grappled with and argued over. And maybe the character in this parable is not supposed to be seen the same way every time, you know. And I love that if we can break free from some of the strict allegory that we sometimes want to come to with parables— like, I was just thinking as you were talking and as I was reading some out of your book of a parable, for instance, like that Jesus tells of the persistent widow that keeps coming to the judge, you know, and banging on his door and, you know, wake up, you know, and the judge finally says, you know, all right, oh, you know, if you'll just go away and leave me alone, I'll grant you what you want. And, and so often, because he's the judge, we always want to put God in the spot of the judge, you know. And most of my life, I think I've been taught to look at the parable in that way, but then to look at it in a different way. Well, maybe God is widow when we're the judge and we're the, we're the unjust judge, you know. Maybe, maybe God's the one that keeps coming to us and banging on our door and we're the one that's been unjust again and again, you know. Brilliant. Yes. And so if we can look at things like, like you're talking about here, not as strict allegory that has to be looked at the same way every time, but, but maybe we're supposed to grapple with this in different ways and maybe we are supposed to see the divine in different ways. And I, I love the way you're seeing that also That's why you can't maybe necessarily come at the Lord of the Rings in the same way every time and say like, okay, this person represents this and this person represents God because maybe we're supposed to look at it in a different way each time.

Well, that's exactly it. Yeah, Rick, that's great. That's what part of unlearning what the traditional metaphorical definition of metaphor is. It's a substitutionary speech, a figurative way of saying something that can really otherwise be stated literally. No, the metaphor is the message. It's the suggestive nature of metaphor is why we keep coming back to the parables. And I love what you did in pointing that out to me about the widow and the judge parable, because I hadn't thought of it that way, believe it or not. And that's exactly it. In The Lord of the Rings, we come to it and think, well, Aragorn's definitely Jesus. Well, hold on a second. Don't forget about Sam. Don't forget about Frodo, Merry, Pippin. Don't forget about Gandalf. And this was, of course, purposeful. And it's, again, because it's not a strict allegory. So I think you nailed it. And that's exactly what I'm trying to do. And the incarnational thing, what this really does is it tells us the way that the truth is being communicated. It's indirect. It's suggestive and therefore metaphorical. It's also powerfully rooted in imagery, right? It's appealing not just to our imagination, which our imagination's role partly is to picture things, but it's also appealing to our rational mind, and it's doing it simultaneously. And that's the form is the content, right? That kind of jingle that I repeat throughout the book is very important. The more you think about it, the more you realize, well, if this is the solution, then the problem is that since the fall of Adam and Eve, and scholars have pointed this out, there's been a split between subjective and objective, between abstract and concrete. Our words don't actually mean what they say. Our words point away from themselves to something else. And so you really start thinking about how language works and you realize none of our language provides us direct access to reality, but the incarnation does. And so any story that resembles that is gonna be supremely effective because it's almost reminding us of pre-fall, how the human mind might have seen things. More in a unitive sense. And that's a very— I know that's a very technical point, but it's very important. And I don't think that a lot of readers are going to get that probably on the first go-through. This book is over a decade plus of my heart and soul poured into it. So as you said, you got to go back and reread it and kind of marinate in it. But yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, well, well, there's so much to think about already. And really, we're only getting into almost the the very, very just scratching the surface of what you're writing about here. So there's so much good content that you've written about. But let's, let's go on to the third point that we're going to talk about today. The monarchic role of parables is something that I know that you said you had prepared quite a bit about today, and I'd love to hear more about this. And I want you to go as in-depth as you want to with this today because I think that maybe this is probably, of all you've written about, this might be one of the things you're most passionate about writing about throughout this whole story. And I think it really probably is where the title of the book even has come from, The Good News of the Return of the King. So tell us more about this, the monarchic role of the parables.

Yeah, I would say maybe— I love the way you phrased it. That's one way of looking at it. But as I've been thinking about it, I think there's kind of a monarchic quality or character, but never mind. It's really the same kind of point I'm trying to make is that there's a few things to kind of clear away here first to get to this. And I think the first thing is to understand kind of where we have a hard time imagining this is we're Americans. N.T. Wright was one that kind of pointed this out to me and said, hey, look at your Constitution, look at your history. Americans are uncomfortable with monarchy, and nobody needs a history lesson here as to why. But you think of the English, they've got a constitutional monarchy. It's not like the old days, but it's different. It's different. And so the British mind might be more at home with this kind of idea, and that's why N.T. Wright, I think, has been very popular. But then there's another reason. I think you've got an American Catholic author like Peter Kreeft who has written, and this is what really kind of set me off on this path to writing is he said there's something in us, and I'm paraphrasing what he says in his own book on Tolkien called The Philosophy of Tolkien. He says there's something in us, and I quote it in the book, that wants a king, that desires a king. And what it is about the stories of knights and kings, and I'm not just talking about the painfully archetypal stories, but something in us wants to follow an Arthur. Something in us wants to bow down to an Aragorn because he's, not because we're weak doormats, but because because we're strong and we recognize the strength in him and we want to follow him and we'd do anything for him. And I thought, wow, that really psychologically explained to me why The Lord of the Rings affected me so much. And so I started stringing these, as the Jews say, stringing these pearls together, taking these almost pseudo-scriptural insights together and putting them on a string and thinking, wow, they all connect beautifully. They all make perfect sense. And stringing pearls in Judaism is taking various scriptural passages, for listeners who don't know what I just said, you know, and seeing the connection between very different passages in scripture. And I kind of assembled N.T. Wright and Peter Kreeft and Tolkien, and I thought, wow, this all just started to set off fireworks in my mind. And then I did research, and what I realized is that the Greek word parabole, which is the word for parable, comes from the Hebrew word mashal, and I talk about this in the book. Mashal is a Hebrew word that has a lot of different meanings, but its most immediate dictionary meaning— again, it's M-A-S-H-A-L— means something like resemblance, comparison. And then I read Brad Young's book where he does a lot of connections in Jesus and his Jewish context, and, you know, how we can understand Jesus the Jew better. And he talks about in his book on parables that neshal has an old root word behind it that means shadow, but also, and this is strange, to rule, to reign as if a king. And so here's— I started putting this together and started doing research, started realizing, okay, parables are incarnational stories. N.T. Wright has pointed out that, you know, the language in the Gospels kind of show Jesus becoming king, and he has a lot of kings in his parables. And I started thinking, wow, okay, let me do some research. And then I said, wow, meshal means reign, rule. And then I saw another insight that, you know, even in Assyrian culture back in ancient Iraq, you know, that there was this notion in the ancient Near East that the king is the shadow, the inexact representation of God, and the people, the subjects of the king, are the image of the king. So there's kind of this cascade, you know, cascading down from heaven. Effect. The king is the image of God and we are the image of the king. And that the word for parable in Hebrew has this old meaning behind it. And I thought, wow, this is really powerful stuff. And then I thought it had an additional insight, which brings us back to your second point about parables as incarnational myths, that it also makes sense of point number two, that there's this comparison being made between God and the king. And so if I told a story about the wedding banquet, as the Gospel of Matthew does, you know, hosting a banquet and the king, it would kind of be in form what it's trying to say in content. And so you start stringing all these insights together, but basically what this is supposed to kind of impress readers is that, again, parables seem to be perfectly suited vehicles for communicating the content of the Christian worldview. Call it a divine conspiracy if you want. Maybe it's confirmation bias. I found it to be a tantalizing connection that this word that means parable also implies rule and that we should understand God as King. And we look at the Bible, God is described as King and Bridegroom and King frequently in the Bible. And it just starts to set off all of these different thoughts in one's mind. And then you look at The Lord of the Rings as a story that's all about the return of the king, among other things, but about the king setting things right. And Tolkien says that himself in his letters. And as you can see, as I'm linking all these insights together, it started to just kind of make sense that parables are naturally monarchic stories. That is, they're stories about God's rule. God created a world. He meant it for good. He created us as his just stewards. We messed up, but he's still committed to ruling. He came in the form of a person, Jesus Christ, and in the guise and claim of the Messiah, although not the way that people expected. Messiah meaning king. You can start seeing how this is all working. And he told stories about a king coming from a distant country or a father losing one of his sons, you know, or a shepherd, who's also a metaphor, by the way, for a king, searching for that one lost sheep. And what is he trying to say? Well, he's trying to say, look around, doofus. The king has returned. I'm here, and I'm trying to tell you in a way that goes through the back door, as it were. And as C.S. Lewis put it, sneak around the watchful dragons, or sneak past the watchful dragons of our rational mind. And you're still not getting it. You know, and this just all started to really make sense to me. And then I looked at, you know, of course, the parables of Jesus, and they have a lot of monarchic figures. New Testament scholars have pointed this out over and over again. And it just kind of leads to this conclusion that parables are perfectly suited to be stories about God becoming king. The king is the shadow or resemblance of God. The common person is the likeness of the royal ruler. In our case as Christians, the king is also God himself. And so this makes sense of even one such interaction in the Gospels when Jesus is asked about paying taxes. And people always get this wrong. Render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. It's not about paying taxes. It's not about church versus state. It has nothing to do with those things. It's about, look, give to Caesar what is Caesar's. Give him his coins with his face on it. But you're made in the image of God. You're made in the image of the King. Give to God what belongs to God. Give yourself to God. Pledge your allegiance. Bow the knee and follow me. And that's what Jesus was saying. And I don't think people got it. And that's— some people did, but a lot of people didn't. So it just— all from a word that just has this natural proclivity that is this natural form that accommodates stories about a king ruling. And so it's just— to me, again, it's more evidence that the form of the story is the content it's trying to say, it's trying to communicate.

So yeah, well, and I'm still not sure we get it, to be honest with you. I'm still not sure that we understand that Jesus is that, that King, you know, that we are to be following here on earth as Christians. That I love the way that you brought out the, the word mishal and the whole idea that the king is the shadow of God here on earth. And it really makes a lot of sense in the context when you're reading that in the story of The Lord of the Rings and the full story altogether. Yep. And I just cannot get over every time I start reading again or rereading, it tends to be when I go to Tolkien anymore because I have read the whole all of his works that I can find and reread them a couple of times. I tend to go back now and find my favorite excerpts and read them, you know, because I've underlined so much throughout the books that I keep going back. And I am always just stunned by his mind, and I can't believe the way that he could have written all this, you know. And there's so much depth in what he's writing. Oh yeah. And just the way that he was able to think out. So it makes so much sense in the way that you're talking about in this parabolic writing. And it helps us to be able to think in these metaphorical terms and the way he's writing. So I really appreciate the way that you have helped us, I think, even just in today's conversation, understand a bit more getting into the mind of what I think he was trying to do a bit more. Because he talked about just an amazing mind and an amazing life at work and trying to put his faith into action in the way that he wrote. I don't think that we have quite that understanding today, at least not maybe in where we live. It seems like today because Christianity has become maybe so commercialized that we can't seem to think about writing a Christian story in any other way than like, okay, well, it has to be like overtly Christian and allegorical and has to explicitly say it in this way. Exactly. You know, it's got to be the latest God's Not Dead film or else it's not Christian, you know. Right. And the fact is because it's so bland and dry by the time it comes out. It's something that's so forgettable, I'm afraid, that the message is lost and it's only preaching to the choir. You take something that's so vast and searching like Lord of the Rings that I'm not even sure everyone who reads it understands that they're reading something that is so inspired by a work of faith. But it truly is transformative, you know.

It is. And can I just say one brief word on the difference again? In my book, I also point out that the term metaphor and allegory cannot just refer to composition or genre, but also type of speech. And so when you use this in this way, metaphorical versus allegorical language has a distinction that I learned from one scholar. She put it this way. She said that metaphor opens up new possibilities for understanding old information in new ways. It's a flash of insight, a familiar word is used in an unfamiliar way or context. Allegory just reminds us of what we already know. And that's exactly what you just said, that you've got the latest God's Not Dead film or the typical way we look at the Narnia books. I'm sure I think we're a little hard on Lewis, and that's a story for another time, but some of his passages are, yes, to explicitly allegorical. And so when we look at that, we think, well, you know, that just tells me what I already know. But, you know, Christopher Tolkien once said of his father's work that it's like an extension of Christian theology. What Tolkien has done is he's opened up new understandings of old information, or as Jesus said, new wine in old wineskins. But I think where he says ultimately, right, we put new wine into new wineskins. So he says not to put it into old wineskins, that's right, actually, because it would burst. The whole point is that we're refreshing through metaphor, whereas in allegory we're kind of just staying stagnant. So that's an interesting difference.

Very interesting, yeah. Well, this has been a really great conversation. I've enjoyed hearing what you had to say, and I've enjoyed your book. And once again, for everyone listening, the book is called The Good News of the Return of the King: The Gospel in Middle-earth., and my guest today has been Michael T. Jayhawsky. And I want you, if you could, because you have a website and you also have a podcast, and I want to make sure we are going to put these in the show notes here of my podcast on, on our Substack page and on voicesinmyheadpodcast.com. But would you take a moment before we close out our time together today, just tell people about your website and about your podcast as well, where they can find out more about you?

Thank you, Rick. Again, this has been great, and I do realize, you know, in a limited time for podcasts, because I, you know, being a podcaster myself, and there's only so much we can say, but this has been a great opportunity. So again, thank you, uh, I really appreciate it. So Mythic Mission is my podcast. It's also the name of the website. Uh, it just comes from my deep conviction that stories are a way, probably the best way, of appealing to people with the gospel. That if we really want to get people to pay attention, we've got to learn to tell better stories, and this is what Jesus models for us. So Mythic Mission is a podcast I'm sponsoring on Anchor. It's available on all the other stations, iTunes, etc. The website, I'm working on updating the URL. I'm new to this. I've kind of learned to do this in the last 6 months, but it's a WordPress, so it's lastdunadan.com. Dunadan is a Tolkien word, but it's lastdunadan.com.wordpress.com. But as you said, you're going to put the link up. There's information about interviews I've done, book reviews, episodes from my own podcast, my academic background, links to buy the book. That's all on that website, the WordPress site I just described. And you can also learn more about the podcast there as well.

And also through your website, you also have links to Twitter and Facebook and other social media pages. Just real quick, what's your Twitter handle for people that follow you there?

Yeah, I think it's just @MichaelJohosky. So let me just double-check that. I don't know if I put the T in there or not. I'm looking. No problem.

Well, and while you're doing that, I'm just going to one more time let everybody know the name of the book. Real quick. It's— and again, this is from— I never know quite how to pronounce it. It's WIPF and Stock is the publisher. WIPF. I always want to say WIPF, but I'm never sure if I'm pronouncing it right. But The Good News of the Return of the King: The Gospel in Middle-earth from WIPF and Stock. And that's WIPF and Stock. And you can find it on their website, or you can go to Amazon, and we will make sure and have links to the book. We'll have links to, to Michael's website and all of his web links online, including his podcast and his website, at our voicesinmyheadpodcast.com and on our Substack page. So no worries, you'll be able to click right through and find it. And so, were you able to find your Twitter handle?

Yeah, it's just @MichaelJahosky. Yep, that's it. All right, @MichaelJahosky.

And so that's a quick way for you to be able to send him a quick message message to and say, hey, thanks for the book and thanks for the podcast and all the things like that. And I'm sure if you had any questions about any of his research, you'd be able to reach out to him there as well. So this has been a real pleasure. So, Michael T. Jahosky, thank you for being one of the Voices in My Head this week. Thank you.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews The more reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.