Marilynne Robinson Promises Her Reading of Genesis Is Faithful to the Text. Is It?

Marilynne Robinson is a widely acclaimed and award-winning American novelist, once included among Time magazine’s 100 most influential individuals. Robinson is, however, more than a gifted writer of fiction; she is also deeply engaged with broader philosophical and theological ideas, having authored, for example, a book-length defense of consciousness and inwardness against a materialist, reductionist understanding of science.

The personal motivation for this intense and refreshing engagement with foundational issues lies, at least in part, in her religious faith. For Marilynne Robinson is a committed Christian in a Calvinist mode (she has written and spoken about the need to recover the Protestant Reformer John Calvin from what she sees as popular misrepresentations). For Jews, it is particularly important to remember that among Christian groups, the Calvinist tradition has historically both placed greater emphasis on Scripture in general and also been much more focused on the set of books that Christians have long termed the “Old Testament.” In fact, in the 16th and 17th centuries, some Calvinists, including the English Puritans who settled New England, saw themselves as reenacting the history of biblical Israel (which is not the same thing as having a high estimation of contemporary Judaism) and placed emphasis on the study of Hebrew. No wonder the first two presidents of Harvard (founded 1636) were outstanding Hebraists, and no wonder that some of the most insightful scholars of the Hebrew Bible into our own time have been members of Calvinist communions (often Presbyterian).

Given these literary and religious commitments, Marilynne Robinson would seem to be an ideal person to provide a perceptive and theologically probing interpretation of the book of Genesis, and in places in Reading Genesis, she does exactly that.