Newest Reading Oldest Story

So, confession, I have never read any of Marilynne Robinson's novels. Probably doesn't make me a good person; may make me a bad person. Perhaps one day I will get around to it. But - and maybe this makes me a strange person - when I saw that this very famous, very much appreciated novelist (and Christian Calvinist) has written a book Reading Genesis, I knew I had to read that book. This is a post en route, as I haven't finished it yet.

Essentially Marilynne sets down her thoughts on reading the Book of Genesis in one long 230 page chapter. The second chapter of the book is a copy of the KJV of Genesis.

Now this is a stone thrown in the literary millpond because it has been noticed. The New Yorker, for instance, has gotten up a review and it is, in the language of North America, a doozey. James Wood flays God (or, at least the God of Genesis, Job and other parts of the OT) alive. That God if real is not a good God; and likely if not certainly is not real because, well, Genesis (and its OT colleagues) is just interesting human thoughts about a human invention of Something which is actually nothing.

John Stackhouse, North American theologian (and, yes, I am aware there is considerable uneasiness about this man), tackles this review and slates it as appallingly bad and essentially a vehicle for "hatred." It is a lovely essay and has a bit of whimsical bite to it as the Chicago v Harvard card is played. (Let's not angst over the state of US universities on ADU just at the moment ...).

What I love about what I have read so far is that Marilynne - I feel like her intimate writing demands a personal response to her first name and not surname - juggles the raw humanity of Genesis (some appalling things are done by human beings to human beings, discreditable people are graced by God, rather than not worthy people rewarded for perfection) and the sublime divinity behind and within Genesis (God is completely God, creating, working out God's divine plan, seeking beneficent outcomes for creation). 

In sum, God works providentially: things happen in our world under and not apart from God's watchful eye; often we cannot make sense of things, but one day we will; God is trustworthy; and definitely not capricious or chaotic (like the gods of Babylon). This is the Calvinism Marilynne admires and it is indeed admirable in her telling as she reads Genesis.

A flavour of her approach - finding God's providentiality at work in the world, understanding that Genesis has its particular character on contradistinction to Bablyonian myths - is found in this paragraph (p. 28):

Humankind are very marginal in Enuma Elish, servants of the gods in the sense that they perform the labor involved in building their temples and feeding them. The second narrative in Genesis with its anthropomorphisms seems meant to invite comparison with such myths, It says no, in fact it is the Lord who has created a habitation for humankind and it is He who provides food for them. Humankind are the center of creation. They have no competitors for God's attention. He is present with them in what must be a desire to share the pleasures that are intrinsic to Creation, for example, the evening and the morning. Their disobedience is a failure of trust in His benevolence toward them.

One reaction I have had reading to date is that Marilynne challenges me to find the grace of God at every turn in the Old Testament - grace understood in a New Testament sense (i.e. that God is actively for us before God activates laws to govern us). Put differently: the Old Testament seems very similar to the New Testament when Marilynne reads the former with the eyes of the latter. I (and - it would seem - other Christians) find that difficult to do.

Of course there are various things going on as this reading of Genesis unfolds: for example, although Marilynne doesn't specifically engage with the "creation v evolution" debate, her consistent reading of the first chapters of Genesis as a reconstitution of Babylonian myths - a wholly new version of how the world began and how disaster (Flood) struck it, renders that debate irrelevant. Genesis is a theology which sets out to set aside another theology (of Babylon): in this theology, Genesis tells us who (the one) God is and what this God offers and seeks in relationship with humanity, and this telling involves depicting this God in respect of his work as Creator, as the one responsible for the inception of the world and the peopling of it. The most important thing we are told about the origin of life is that it is "good". Details about days and domes of water and ribs and what have you are incidental to this disclosure of who God is and what attitude God has in disposition to the world. By all means debate "creation v evolution" but have the debate in the scientific lab, with telescopes and  microscopes, and in reviews of Darwin, Dawkins and co - do not involve the first chapters of Genesis in it.

Incidentally, a wonderful insight of Marilynne's is simply that Genesis is theology. It is not a writing on which theology is based and from which theology proceeds. Genesis is theology. It is (in my words, inspired by hers)) a word (logos) about God (theos); it is a word about God which denies another (Babylonian) word about God/the gods; it is a word about who God is in relation to people thinking about God and seeking to articulate something about God. We may read Genesis as history or story or both, but it is, in fact, a book of theology - theology expressed through stories. And it is a theology of the God who is compassionate, just and merciful (i.e. consistent with the NT God who is love).

Back to James Wood's review: his point, made countless times by countless others through history, is that there is no God, just human creativity imagining who God might be (and then, he asserts that if Genesis and the remainder of the OT is among the best of such creativity, this "God" is not much chops).

That's gotten me thinking - aided by my reading Marilynne's Reading - that the critical consideration we (Jews/Christians) bring to all debate about God is that - respecting the plausibility of the thesis that the OT is simply an extensive rendition of an exclusively human invention - nevertheless we claim that the God we speak about has spoken to us. There is a God and this God is not a figment of human imagination because this God has revealed himself to humanity. To be sure, how we have written down our experience of God is shot through with human reflection, anthropomorphisms, counter-thrusts to the thoughts of other societies (such as Genesis's anti-Babylonianisms), but it is not reducible to mere human thought. Both Testaments are testimonies to the speech of God to humankind. Our bubble of creative thought has been pierced by direct speech from God.

Marilynne Robinson gets this!