Marilynne Robinson. <i>Reading Genesis</i>

Marilynne Robinson is among America’s finest and best-known novelists. She has authored several award-winning books (Housekeeping, Gilead quartet) and important essays of literary criticism. Her storytelling is deeply Christian, deliberately so I think, but edgy and worldly-wise with a keen sense of human frailty and the importance of forgiveness. She is a wonderful wordsmith: her prose is arresting and elegant and these are characteristics that mark out her Reading Genesis. This is a storyteller’s commentary of Scripture’s programmatic story; it is Robinson’s talent as a storyteller that provides real insight into this biblical book that often alludes the academic reader, not only because the scholar’s interests and audience are different but because the “writer understands the methods of storytellers” better (p. 138).Although her reading covers a familiar terrain, Robinson’s reading of Genesis is distinctly her own. She shows little interest in rival interpretations or modern and postmodern criticisms, although sometimes she discloses an introductory knowledge of comparative ANE sources and the compositional history of Genesis when it suits her. She affirms that Genesis is the work of humans, reverent and collaborative, but shaped in due time into a coherent whole that is divinely authorized to tell the Tale. Her reading of Genesis is self-enclosed without the standard paratextual elements (e.g., chapters, bibliography, indexes) or a critical apparatus that is a convention of modern commentary. Robinson’s reading is much like the rabbis’ haggadic midrash that expands the biblical story in ways that fill out portraits of its central characters and that contemporize the story’s importance for its current readers. She appends to her book only the KJV of Genesis—her favorite English translation—to provide the only index for her reading of the biblical text. I take it that her point is to remind her readers, as she often does, that the whole story must be read as a whole and not piecemeal (in part because she reads Genesis as always circling back to recall earlier episodes that explain the present one). Genesis also has its own history, and the text has its own point of view that controls what the reader can and must know about Genesis’s view of the world and of the One who made it.As a modern storyteller, Robinson’s reading of Genesis pays special attention to expanding the emotional range or interior cast of its central figures, especially those characteristics that explain their frailty, broken relationships, sibling rivalries, and other marks of their sinful misdeeds. In doing so, there is a sense in which she reads Genesis as though it is a modern novel. This mark is a strength of her reading because it helps move the action forward. After all, Genesis plots a dramatic irony: these characters are members of dysfunctional families whom God has chosen to covenant with and treasure. Of course, the mystery lingers on beyond Genesis to how God’s promised blessings extend to all families of earth, to be realized in spite of such awful (but perhaps recognizable) families.But Robinson opens her book with the qualification that she reads the church’s Scripture from front to back as a “meditation on the problem of evil.” Scripture’s narrative world, she affirms, is “a work of theology” so that any resolution to the problem of evil in Genesis is a theodicy that envisages the conflict of a righteous God with the dysfunctional families, born of Adam, reborn of Noah, and again by Abraham. That God chooses and treasures the human agent through whom a very good (but hardly perfect) creation, busted apart by human sin, is reclaimed and restored according to the Creator’s pleasure.It is in her reading of how this peculiar theodicy, so full of irony, is settled that Robinson’s Reading Genesis reflects more the theology of the reader than of the read text. The disagreements Reading Genesis will provoke among its many readers will not be over methodology or the issues often paraded in the introductions of modern critical commentaries of Genesis. Hers are the theological intuitions shaped by a lifetime of worship in congregations that sing, preach, teach, worship, receive the sacraments, and confess the creeds forged by the grammar of the magisterial Reformation. At this religious address, a sovereign God’s providence matters. God’s covenant keeping and the realization of a family’s promised blessings and a creation’s healing does not finally depend upon human agency; the forward movement of “sacred history” as she calls it is propelled, sometimes much to her own frustration, by God’s mercies, which are powerful and irrepressible. At day’s end, it might seem that the outworking of righteous Providence generation to generation in a sacred history populated by the unrighteous human carriers of the covenant overrides the expected consequences of their awful choices and the unhealthy relationships they forge.I recommend reading and using Robinson’s book for study, for classes, and for devotions. It is a wonderfully written and evocative exposition of Genesis; most pages of mine are marked with notes. But two other reasons underscore my recommendation. First, despite the theological apprehension of a particular Calvinist’s reading of Genesis with which my own Wesleyan slant disagrees—certainly her downplay of the nasty results of human agency in the working out of God’s covenantal way of salvation bothers me—I would recommend it as an excellent example of the influence that a confessional orientation has on reading Scripture. The very lack of methodological explanations for her reading of Genesis—other than admitting that she reads biblical texts in light of how she writes literary texts—only surface confessional differences between readers, quite apart from their methodological differences but who affirm Scripture’s holiness in common. Second, Bible scholars of and for the church should celebrate and take confidence in the work of a serious layperson who brings her reverence and a literati’s skillset to produce a fresh reading of one of Scripture’s signal books that may well benefit the academy’s reception of Genesis as well as the church’s.