Reading Journal 2024: Reading Genesis

Reading Journal 2024: Reading Genesis
Author: Marilynne Robinson

If there is one word to describe Robinson’s demeanor and approach it would be grace-filled. This word drives her theological commitments. It drives her scholarship. It drives her exploration of ideas and her deeply felt interest in the God-human story.

Perhaps another word might be warranted here- nuanced. Not only in her examination of the text, which in this case is the Biblical book of Genesis, but in her willingness to bring in a multi-faceted discipline and approach. What she is engaging in here is historical criticism, to be sure, but also infusing theological, narrative and textual criticism, along with philosophical approaches. She never wants to hand one element power over the other, choosing instead to see all these disciplines operating in conversation together.

Full disclosure. I am not a calvinist. The sheer fact that she writes as a calvinist was an issue I had to grapple with personally in her previous book, The Givenness of Things. In the case of Robinson, I had to engage a level of humility and a necessary openness in order to recognize that what she was actually advocating for was not the version of Calvinism I had studied and rejected. As I said in that review, if anyone could convince me of its merits, she could, precisely because she is willing to bend its claims to what one could call a generous orthodoxy. There is no version of her belief system that settles for anything less than a God for all people, nor anything less than a God in whom we can properly locate and define the necessary polarities inherent in the Judeo-Christian strory- good and evil, life and death, love and hate. What she believes in is the goodness of God and the goodness of Gods creation, and however we appropriate the text and theology and narrative of Genesis to explain the world and our experience of the world, it must bear witness to this simple truth.

One example of such nuance is the way she traverses portions of the text that are notorious for being applied in support of a hard determinism or compatibalism (which, for me, is a fallacy built and used to suggest the appearance of a loving God by talking around the problem of hate and evil inherent in calvinist theology). I love the way she uses the literary function of the text to tease out a fundamental and critical observation. Yes, on one hand we can say the story is designed to show a series of interconnected events which all lead towards a purposed end. She notes how this is bookended in the text by two parallel stories- Cain and Abel on one end and Joseph and his brothers on the other end. Thus one, assuming a more modernist perspective that uses a sharply drawn literalism to define the text, might be left wondering, well what if this person hadn’t done this or that person hadn’t done that. Would it not have derailed the story and subverted Gods willed for means and ends? Surely this points us to the theological value of determinism. Robinson pushes back on this assertion by leaning into the text in its world, noting how not only would the authors not have been thinking in such terms, but the very fact that we have the story that we have does not suggest determinism but rather providentialism. And there is a difference. In the former, the point is that God needed to determine every movement and every choice in order to be truly sovereign. Here it is the events leading up to the climax of the story that matter as the means to such an end. In the latter, it’s not about the different events so much as it is about a people confronted with Gods faithfulness looking back on their story and writing it in that light. In truth, the same story could have been written in an endless number of ways according to people’s responsiveness and particpation. We have the story that we do at least in part because this is the history that happened. The point of tying that together with a conviction in Gods faithfulness, and in writing it as though all od these differnt events are tied up in its known end, is in order to show that God is always at work to bring about His ends in a chaotic and unpredictable world, which is a huge thematic interest of Genesis, and which is at its heart a work that is for the world.

I love Robinson’s eye too for the smaller details in the text. The way she pulls out different observations of certain narrative flows, and the way she revels in the creaive design of the text, including its poetry. She does not allow herself to get bound either to a heavy set literalism or a direct rejection of the texts historicity. Rather she genuinely wants to look at how the text functions as a creative and theological work, and what that would have meant to the world of its authors and readers. She does an incredible job of showing how Genesis is a book that sits in conversation with the wider ancient world and the reigning mythologies. She is able to show, compellingly and distinctively, the way Genesis is challenging common conceptions of God and humanity and creation, particularly in how these perceptions relate to each other. It had a very real polemical purpose, and understanding why and what this polemic is can help us get behind what the text wants us to understand and why it needs us to understand this. She, along with many others, have found these points to sit at the foundation for why they take this text seriously and why they have allowed it to inform their Christian conviction and faith. The more aware one becomes about the books purpose, the more we are forced to wrestle with it, and wrestling demands a response.

Everything in this book really does boil down to discovering the nuance, and within that nuance finding the concrete expression and truth of grace. This is the driving and motivating force of what I think is an exceptional work on a familiar but often misunderstood book. And it shines through the quiet brilliance of her reflections and observations. Part of the process here is actually jumping from these observations and reflections into actually reading the text itself, thus she builds into the back half of the book the entirety of rhe text so that one can engage with it all in context. And, I think, if her book has its way, it should be an invitation to this end to embrace mystery and wonder and beauty, to be genuinely curious and not beholden to bias’, and to allow the external observations to tease out an inner truth, one in which the spirit is able to truly speak.