A Good God, Despite Everything

The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson’s new book about Genesis argues for an unfashionable theology of hope.

Reading Genesis
by Marilynne Robinson
FSG, 352 pp., $29

WHAT WAS OFTEN SAID of her good friend, former President Barack Obama, is much more truly said of the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson: She plays twelve-dimensional chess. Where many essayists move through life content to argue, in each piece, a single main point, perhaps weaving in two or three minor themes if we’re feeling sophisticated, Robinson typically prosecutes many lines of argument at once. A Robinson essay will often begin by noting some error or oversimplification in one of our commonplace notions—the Puritans were joyless bores, say, or neuroscience must change our view of human nature. She will then proceed to attack the position most often taken as the main rival to the position she has just attacked; if a third position has emerged as a potential spoiler to one or the other, she may lob a bomb or two in that direction as well.

She will then quote several authorities on the matter, laying waste to their arguments and assumptions as she goes and lamenting the vast stupefaction that has elevated such voices. She then resuscitates some alternative authority, or other idea, to which both moral and intellectual stigma have been attached, and will take as long as she needs to demonstrate what went wrong in those conversations, rescuing four or five injured reputations and injuring several good ones along the way. She seems to sweep through every line of battle from every angle at once. And at last, she stands alone on the field.

Whether you can follow it all or not, whether you agree with all her claims or not, it’s a riveting spectacle, to watch one of our greatest living novelists, who also happens to be one of our best essayists, summon and then hold off so many foes.

In recent years, she has brought this martial art to bear on the liberal Protestant church, her own tradition. She is already contrarian in bothering to care about mainline Protestant intellectual and devotional life at all, as many of us mainline Protestants don’t even bother to do. Staying true to form, she also eschews the usual critique of this group—that we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by reason and science away from the faith that God demands of us. What we’ve actually been seduced by, she maintains, is often nothing more than scholarly fad and iconoclastic posturing—rejecting our own birthright in the process. As she argues in “Awakening,” an essay from The Givenness of Things (2015), the core problem is “the uncoerced abandonment by the so-called mainline churches of their own origins, theology, culture, and tradition,” and the seminary-led effort to replace those deep sources with “a sort of Esperanto of world religions and transient pieties, a non-language articulate in no vision that anyone can take seriously.”

Harsh words, but they aren’t easy to refute. It is true, and she acknowledges it, that there are many learned and pious people in mainline pulpits. It’s also true that any mainliner could tell you about the sermons they’ve sat through that barely mentioned God, Jesus, or theology. They could probably also tell you about the Christian authors who attack Christianity’s mystical basis on intellectually flimsy pretexts—the late John Shelby Spong is probably the most egregious example—and who are more popular among many of us than, say, Gregory of Nyssa.

What Robinson is describing is an intellectual retreat, and it owes, at least in part, to the way mainline Protestants read the Bible, when we read it at all. “Awakening” continues with a riff on German “higher criticism,” an antique scholarly movement that sought the purely natural origins of biblical texts. Its importation into the American Protestant milieu of the mid-nineteenth century seeded the problem; since then, she writes,

liberal American Christianity has been agonizing over mythic elements in Scripture, taking the crudest interpretations as the ones most liable to be correct, since ‘mythic’ was thought in those days to mean ‘primitive’—if its origins were Hebrew, though certainly not if they were Greek. . . . The deity is assumed to be patched together out of Baal and El, with a little Marduk thrown in. In other words, the ancient Hebrews were simply appropriating local narratives, not pondering a divine self-revelation . . . that was unique to them.

The move she’s describing is not only to deny the Old Testament’s factuality—not that unusual in itself; devout Christians in every epoch have doubted or questioned the literal truth of the creation and flood accounts—but also the distinctiveness of the Old Testament’s theology. In reducing the Bible to the indelible traces of ancient Near Eastern conceptual vocabulary that we find there—language never starts over again from zero, after all—we are left with little more than a set of influences and strategies, with no coherence of its own. She calls this tendency an “inverted literalism.” The baby, the bathwater, and the tub itself are all in the air.

This is the larger intellectual context for Robinson’s new book, Reading Genesis. It is above all an attempt to restore that sense of meaning unique to the first book of the Bible, freeing it from her community’s own faddish tendencies, and to recover something of the distinctive worldview that has provided so many figures, plots, and settings to the storehouse of the human imagination.

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THE FIRST CURIOUS THING about Reading Genesis is that Robinson’s longer effort has softened her approach: Its style, while direct, is not quite as pugnacious as I had expected (or perhaps hoped: Robinson can be very funny when she’s indignant). And I also find it notable, given her contrarian habits of mind, that the assumptions she makes, in setting out to reread and comment upon the first book of the world’s three major monotheisms and the fountainhead of many literatures, aren’t that controversial.

She concedes that the Pentateuch—the five Books of Moses that open the Hebrew Bible—was probably “the product of reflection and refinement that took place over the course of generations or centuries.” Her view differs from the Documentary Hypothesis—the famous argument that the Bible consists of writings by four broadly opposed factions—in that she emphasizes the coherence of the text that resulted from this process of authorship; she does not deny, as (for example) fundamentalists generally do, that there was such a lengthy process.

Robinson’s opening paragraph, stately in its simplicity, asserts that “The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil.” We can’t simply read it as a source text from which we synthesize a theology; it’s already doing theology. The theological claim it makes is that “God’s perfect Creation passes through a series of changes, declensions that permit the anomaly of a flawed and alienated creature at the center of it all, ourselves, still sacred, still beloved of God.” Those declensions—Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the first murder, God wiping out the world in a great flood, the confusion of languages at Babel—are sequenced so as to make “a complex statement about reality,” which is not necessarily a statement about literal history.

What is that statement about reality? That we are fallen, with awful consequences, and that our sacredness is nevertheless “undiminished.” Whatever God first established has failed, but God has a “greater, embracing intention that cannot fail.” This is, in a nutshell, the whole book—Robinson’s, and also that ancient authorial cohort’s. The rest of Robinson’s book is elaboration of this point and, to borrow James Wood’s lovely definition of criticism, “passionate re-description” of Genesis. Robinson’s own text is then followed by the text of Genesis itself, as rendered in the King James Version. (Perhaps this last detail is a concession to popular preconceptions. Robinson has often said that she prefers the Tyndale and Geneva translations.)

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A PERSON CAN AGREE with Robinson’s arrangement of the issues or not, but what she offers certainly doesn’t seem crazy as a reading of Genesis. To further establish it, she references the Babylonian epics of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish extensively, but she focuses on the ways the Bible’s narrative of creation and its account of God is different from these:

The gods of the Enuma Elish suffer hunger, terror, and loss of sleep. There are generations of them, born of one another, the great mother of them all being Tiamat, a serpent monster, who, provoked by the noise the younger gods make, determines to kill them. She is so terrifying that the young god Marduk alone is able to defeat her. He splits her corpse like a fish, uses half to make the sky, the other half the earth, makes her two weeping eyes into the Tigris and the Euphrates, and so on. This could hardly be more remote from the infinite serenity of “let there be . . . and there was.”

She imagines an ancient Babylonian, living in this mythological universe, “a cup of water might taste of the tears of a vast serpent forever alive in death.” This worldview, she concedes, has a certain beauty in its toughness: “It is not difficult to imagine how the rigors of ancient life might have yielded this alarming view of things. It can smack of realism down to the present day.”

Set against this background, the great accomplishment of the authors of Genesis—an accomplishment simultaneously literary, conceptual, and theological—is to recognize evil thoroughly, while maintaining the beauty, sacredness, and original goodness of life itself. A cup of water may have past tears mixed into it; we may make new tears from it. A great flood might destroy us past the point of any tears at all. But water is not, itself, the same as tears.

Where, then, did evil come from, in scripture’s project of theodicy? If it can’t be named as an attribute of God, nor blamed on some sub-deity, how can it exist at all? The authors of Genesis—no more than the author of Job, who famously punts on the question—don’t have a satisfactory answer for this. But they do, with a realism unparalleled in any ancient literature I’ve read, create a narrative model of a world that is both good and fallen.

A fascinating part of that model of the fallen world, one that Robinson repeatedly draws our attention to, is its agnosticism about the very idea of causality itself. “To assign causes to events,” Robinson writes, “is clearly not the method or intention of biblical narrative. . . . Causality is changed, more or less disabled, when events are predestined.” In thinking in different terms than those of natural causation, the authors of the Bible also open the possibility of gratuitous grace and goodness. They suggest that creation itself is such a gratuitous act—emerging at a particular moment, not existing from necessity forever. And such moments of grace, or the refusal to enact them, becomes the subject of Genesis’s many and intricate plots.

The book ends with Joseph, in an act of supreme forgiveness, separating his brothers from the great evil they’ve inflicted on him. Joseph sets aside the “measured revenge” by which human beings generally punish such responsibility. What they meant for evil, God meant for good. Joseph knows, and the authors of Genesis know, and the reader of Scripture knows through his story, “what could be lost if small earthly dramas of action and reaction foreclosed whatever might come in the fullness of time.”

On Robinson’s reading, this makes Joseph a foil for several Biblical characters, among whom, surprisingly, she places Noah. Her reading of the Curse of Ham incident—when Noah, after the flood, plants a vineyard and gets drunk, then is found naked by his son Ham, who alerts his brothers and is cursed for his discovery by his father—is, as she once said of her own lodestar, John Calvin, “grandly, systematically heterodox.” In cursing Ham for no clear reason, Noah behaves, she writes, like Lamech. Lamech is the name of a descendant of Cain who boasts that, when injured, he returns upon his injurers seventy-plus-seven-fold vengeance. He is often taken as a sort of symbol for the unmeasured violence—always justified by some preexisting offense that, as the body count mounts, comes to seem less important—that is supposed to have engulfed the earth after Adam’s fall into sin. (I have thought often of Lamech in the months since the 10/7 atrocities.)

Lamech also happens to be the name of Noah’s father. While scholars often consider the two Lamechs as separate figures, Robinson departs from the consensus view in taking this violent character and Noah’s father to be the same man. It’s partly for reasons of thematic similarity between the violent Lamech and the builder of the ark. Both Noah and Lamech, on Robinson’s reading, “are attempting to imitate God and getting it wrong.” God refuses to take mortal revenge upon Cain, the first murderer, but Cain’s descendant takes God’s indulgence as an excuse to revenge himself upon both the guilty and the innocent. And God, thus far in the story, does not directly curse people—even in response to Cain, he says, “now art thou cursed from the earth,” from which Abel’s spilled blood cried out. Noah, that exemplary man, overreaches here. He curses what not even God will curse, a human being, and further, a human being who has done him no harm. Robinson’s reading of this much-analyzed tale, a reading I cannot recall ever encountering before, is proof that her deep respect for this text does not preclude a bold originality in interpretation.

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WHAT WILL READERS OF THIS BOOK chafe against the most? Robinson’s love of Calvin, a notorious sticking point for many fans, is hardly the issue here. His name is never mentioned, although his influence is discernible. Is it the assumption that any divinity at all shapes our ends, let alone a good one? To read Genesis at all is to entertain, at least within the cinematic universe, the possibility of a God. A lot of our intelligentsia is happy enough to proceed as though there were a God, but an evil one, or as though there were fate, but a malign fate. Apocalypticism is very much in vogue, as are little determinisms of various sorts. We don’t have trouble believing in a bad God, though many of us would avoid calling it that.

Some readers resent Robinson’s freedom in departing from scholarly consensus in various fields, and her occasionally dismissive attitude toward the vast majority of her colleagues in the humanities. As one of those co-laborers, I too can find this hurtful. I also find it incredibly liberating, because I agree—does anyone, in their heart, not agree?—that members of our profession, broadly conceived, are often pent up by assumptions and reputations that we have not really examined. Compared to the figure she strikes with the seriousness and intentness of her reading, most of us are jokes. Reading Marilynne Robinson encourages me to at least try to be a better joke.

But what I found most jarring about Reading Genesis is an assumption that every remotely orthodox Christian is supposed to have made long ago: the idea that God’s intentions are both good and finally all-determining. I’m not so worried that such a teaching will—as people sometimes allege—make me, or anyone, lazy. Calvinists notoriously don’t have that problem. Neither, for that matter, did the American Communists of the old school, or the militant Progressives of the early twentieth century. It’s probably easier to show up for fifty interminable meetings if you believe that History is going somewhere nicer than here, with or without you.

Rather, I worry that, in truly adopting such a belief, I am letting myself off a hook of some kind. Gaza suggests that the world is predetermined to brutal chaos, as did the COVID pandemic, the financial crisis, the war in Yemen, the Iraq War, the ravaging of East Timor, Cambodia, Vietnam; as did the Holocaust and the slave trade. As did the Lisbon earthquake, for that matter, and the tower of Siloam, and the Babylonian captivity, and the sojourn in Egypt, the flood, the first murder. It’s rough out here. We moderns sometimes act as though we invented suffering. I feel sometimes that the truest Christianity would deny itself everything, even Christian hope, would grieve “as those who have no hope” in solidarity with a world that looks and feels so lost and comfortless. If it sometimes seems to me, and to Robinson, that mainline Protestants avoid reading the Bible in a way that allows us metaphysical hope, it is because, as liberals, we can be terribly responsible people, Puritans with much better sexual politics but less joy, and perhaps we think it sober and mature to grieve in the bleakest way we can.

I suspect Simone Weil was moved by a similar impulse when she starved herself to death. I believe God honors what Simone Weil did, if there is a God, for the love that was in it. But there is perversity in such a stance, too. Jesus, the Gospels tell us, died in the feeling that God had forsaken him, but also in the certainty that God received his spirit into His hands. A Christian (which Weil pointedly refused to become) cannot outdo Jesus, and probably should not try. Certainly, I do not have the intestinal fortitude to follow my own intuition to its upshot. When I do, I end up wanting simply to “respectfully return my ticket,” and importantly, this is not at all the same thing as grieving with those who grieve. It is leaving the scene and creating more grief. We are creatures. We need hope.

It may be, too, that if we gave ourselves permission to believe that there is a good providence at work in things—that God will wipe away every tear, and that this will be, as Robinson’s character John Ames says in her 2004 novel Gilead, “exactly what will be required”—we might grieve this awful world with more fullness, might address its evils with more energy, might rectify it with more fury. It might increase our capacity for everything.

George MacDonald, the Scottish novelist and pastor, was one of the most influential, certainly one of the most eloquent of moderns to argue that God in Christ had truly redeemed the whole world to himself—had accomplished a universal salvation, albeit one that might need eons to take effect. As far as I can tell, Robinson is agnostic about this doctrine, although she clearly believes in the salvation of many who are not Christian, and perhaps in the damnation of many who are.

It has always struck me that in the last chapters of George MacDonald and His Wife, a loving and thorough biography written by this scandalously hopeful man’s son, MacDonald is said to have fallen silent and nearly motionless for the last several years of his life. This silence dates from the death of his beloved wife, Louisa. If anyone entered MacDonald’s room, he would look up hopefully, as a masterless dog might do, and then, registering the presence of any face besides Louisa’s, he would look down again, keeping his silence. Clearly, the assurance that this man had of the most benign cosmic outcome that any Christian, or any person, has ever conceived, did not make him register the awfulness of death any less keenly. Maybe hope enlarges our capacity to love, even to mourn. We could at least try it. We have little to lose.