Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson: one long sermon

Hailing from northern Idaho – the American frontier – Marilynne Robinson is among our most revered living novelists. Her debut, Housekeeping (1980), received critical acclaim, but it was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead (2004) that put her on the literary map. The three novels that followed – Home (2008), Lila (2014) and Jack (2020) – returned to the same story but from different points of view; the quartet has been compared to the Gospels.

In the 24-year gap between her first two novels, in addition to writing nonfiction and teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Robinson immersed herself in theological study. Having grown up in a “pious and Presbyterian” family, she now adheres to Congregationalism, a subsect of Calvinism that she discovered in Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick. Her faith infuses her fiction: Housekeeping is full of Biblical allusions; Gilead is voiced by John Ames, a Congregationalist pastor wrestling with reconciling his faith with real life.

In Reading Genesis, Robinson turns her attention to the source text, with the King James version of Genesis included in the volume. Just as Calvin upheld sola scripture, or the authority of scripture, Robinson has referred to the first book of the Bible as “God’s self-introduction”. She believes that the Bible most likely had multiple authors, collectively guided by the Holy Spirit, and that reading it as literature does not diminish its divinity.

The crux of Robinson’s thesis is that Genesis shows a benevolent God and the goodness of creation. “This world is suited to human enjoyment,” she writes. The reputation of the “Old Testament God” as punitive is unsupported by the text, she argues. The Flood, for example, resulted not from a vengeful God but from the evil brought on by “the thoughts of men’s hearts”. The misinterpretation is partly a translation problem: “vengeance” is a less accurate translation from the Hebrew than “judgment”. God shows “restraint” in Genesis, Robinson believes, with Cain and Joseph’s brothers, for example. If we “are to be granted individuality, agency, freedom, meaningful existence as human beings, then God must practice almost limitless restraint”.

Translated fiction: Memory, history and the question of ‘sampling’ from other novels

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The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain; Ireland 1970-2020; Car Bombs and Barrack Busters

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Former US prosecutor on the justice system: ‘When I see kids come into court in chains, I can’t help thinking of slavery’

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An expert’s secret rules of drinking in an Irish bar

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Righteousness, which has the power to save a city (Sodom) or Creation (Noah), “is a very important word in Scripture, too little considered by interpreters, perhaps”, she writes. Yet God’s expectation of righteousness does not preclude his unwavering forgiveness. The story of Cain, for example, shows that “we are disastrously erring and rebellious, and irreducibly sacred. And God is mindful of us.”

As to the age-old question of why a benevolent God would allow so much suffering, Calvin’s version of providence suggests widening the lens to take “a God’s-eye view” – it is only in the fullness of time that his purpose is revealed. Robinson is less heavy on predestined damnation than Calvin, pitching God’s forgiveness as gentler than judgment based on free will. Yet she still sees the Israelites’ 400-year enslavement in Egypt as providential. God “chose to let us be”, she writes, “to let time yield what it will – within the vast latitude granted by providence”.

Robinson holds a PhD in English; she wrote Housekeeping as a distraction from her dissertation on Shakespeare. Reading Genesis, as such, promises a literary close read in addition to the theological one. Robinson makes a convincing case for the Bible as a kind of ur-novel. In a departure from Babylonian and Assyrian mythology, which foregrounded gods, “the remarkable realism of the Bible, the voices it captures, the characterisation it achieves, are products of an interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature,” she writes. Furthermore, by creating us in God’s image, “the centrality of humankind in the creation myth of Genesis is from the beginning an immeasurable elevation of status”.

[ In praise of older books: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980) ]

[ Bleak and courageous: Lila, by Marilynne Robinson ]

Her literary analysis of Biblical stories tends to get trumped by her theological objective, however, which is to demonstrate God’s grace. Robinson has taught Bible classes and given occasional sermons at her church. Her nonfiction works include a collection of lectures she gave at Yale and four essay collections on her principal preoccupations, which include civics, science, religion and consciousness. She once told Barack Obama in conversation that her essays “are actually lectures”, and Reading Genesis has a similar oratory quality. With no chapter headings or introduction to orient the reader, the book reads like a long sermon, in both senses of the word.

Reading Genesis is not without its pleasures. I enjoyed Robinson’s analysis of narrative techniques, etymology and how translation has affected interpretation. But a beach read, it is not. Her nonfiction is denser and more dogmatic than her fiction: I missed John Ames’s gentle self-questioning. Without the empathy and elegance of the novels, for this lay reader, it felt like sitting on a hard wood pew in itchy Sunday best. There were flashes of inspiration, but I found myself squirming in my seat.