I have loved Marilynne Robinson’s work since I first read her novel Gilead ten years ago. I’ve returned to it many times since; for enjoyment, to be sure, but perhaps more for a sense of consolation it offers—a sense as exquisite as it is rare, born of deep, doctrinal roots. I come to Gilead again and again to drink of Marilynne’s sense of Providence as from a deep and healing well.
The questions addressed by the doctrine of Providence are the questions we all face, questions that burn like embers at the edges of our hearts. Does Mercy order our days? Or are we doomed to live our lives as victims of blind and pitiless Fate?
Such questions are the center of Robinson’s concern across the canon of her work, on full display in her latest, Reading Genesis. “The Bible is a theodicy…a meditation on the problem of evil”—a single, long attempt to square “the darkest aspects of the reality we experience…with the goodness of God and of Being itself against which the darkness stands out so sharply” (p. 3).
For Robinson, Genesis, the book of origins, is nothing if not that—the first movements of a biblical symphony which will crescendo with the defeat of death in the new heavens and the new earth. “The whole great literature of Scripture, unfolding over centuries, will proceed on the terms established in this book. So Genesis is carried forward, in the law, in the psalms, in the prophets, itself a spectacular burst of light without antecedent but with a universe of consequences” (p. 224).
As such, the first book of the canon “is a complex statement about reality” (p. 3) in which the main themes of the biblical story are set before us in nuce: the goodness of the created order, the image of God in humankind, the damage done to both by sin, and the extravagant and mysterious lengths God will go to find us. It’s all there in these primeval tales.
“Providence” (a word I think we are in desperate need of reclaiming) is, at its simplest, the name Christians give to reflection on such matters. At its best (and Robinson’s work is a great example of this), it is a muscular, if nuanced, doctrine—capable of respecting both creaturely integrity and the absolute divine will for the good of creatures, a will as inexorable as it is darkly circuitous in its outworking. Robinson’s strength as a biblical interpreter lies precisely here—in her perception of just that balance of muscle and nuance. At the end of Reading Genesis, summarizing her reflections, she writes:
It must be true that sacred history would have found its way to its ends even if these lives (the lives of the patriarchs) had been cut short, though the story is told in a way that makes every one of these lives seem absolutely consequential…From a literary point of view, the fact that both can be true simultaneously is amazing. (pp. 226-227)
And earlier in the book, commenting on Abram’s visionary encounter with the Lord in Genesis 15, in which the sufferings of Egypt are first glimpsed, Robinson writes:
As an interpretation of his people’s history cast back on patriarchal times, Abram’s dream vision makes authoritative an understanding of the slavery and wandering of the Hebrew tribes as divinely intended and providential…No reason for them is given. On its face the bondage in Egypt is neither a reward nor a punishment. It is a long moment in providential history, not to be explained in other terms…This is an understanding of God and humanity that has no equivalent in other literatures, God both above and within time, His providence reaching across unnumbered generations…When Jesus says of his executioners, “They know not what they do,” we can appreciate how very radically his words understate the case. (pp. 16-17)
And that is because no one knows what they do—not really, since in, with, and under every human intention, without ameliorating or displacing, the absolute divine will for the good of all creatures—what Barth called God’s “fatherly lordship” (CD III/3)—is at work to finally resolve our history “into a future unlike all the misery and happiness that must intervene between now and then” (p. 19).
The ends of God are unfathomable; the paths of God untraceable. The doctrine of Providence calls us to trust that we—all of us—are being led by the hand to bright and glorious ends, even if by dark and inscrutable paths.
All things for good.
Robinson’s convictions about the workings of Providence cash out in at least two ways that I found deeply compelling.
First, in her understanding that if behind the ebb and flow of the cosmos lies the purposeful kindness of the Lord, then our history can no more be reduced to the ironclad logic of action/consequence than the universe can be reduced to the ironclad logic of cause/effect. The good will of God produces outputs far in excess of inputs. The biblical word for this is grace.
And Robinson spies it on nearly every page of Genesis. Where Adam and Eve are told they will die if they eat the forbidden fruit, they are instead merely banished—a form of death, no doubt; but chastened in its severity. Where Cain, hands red with blood, consigns himself to a deathly fate, he is instead marked with the Lord’s protection—an act of astonishing tenderness. Where Noah is told the earth will be destroyed, the narrative “ends with a great relenting, and a changed, harsher world that is nevertheless again the place of seedtime and harvest” (p. 215). The examples could be multiplied at length. In every case where it occurs, promised judgment is attenuated. Robinson remarks:
The text raises the prospect of punishment that would be appropriate to transgression or corruption and then steps away from the execution of it, though not entirely. Grace tempers judgment. In this way the text conceptualizes the justice of God together with His mercy or grace or His loyalty to Creation. (p. 216)
The tempering, the restraint of justice by mercy, is critical, lest the creatures the Lord loves be lost. “If they are to be granted individuality, agency, freedom, meaningful existence as human beings, then God must practice almost limitless restraint. To put aside power,” Robinson writes, “is Godlike” (emphasis mine), and then, in a most remarkable insight into the story of the reunion of Jacob and Esau, a reunion as shocking to readers as it must have been to the conniving patriarch himself:
Jacob says that seeing Esau is like looking on the face of God. Presumably this would not be true if Esau had met him with the vengeance Jacob feared, and of which his troops would have made Esau capable. (p. 217)
Esau greets Jacob with the face of mercy, and Jacob says the experience is like looking upon the face of God, for the face of God is the face of Mercy—a Mercy that governs and guides our time to a good end. A Mercy experienced direct from the heavens; Mercy supersaturating human relationships, even and especially where fissures and fractures have fallen. The book that begins, after all, with God’s mercy to Cain ends with the mercy Joseph extends to the brothers who once sought to stamp out his life. The story of Genesis—as the cornerstone of the biblical story—is not a tale of the grim outworking of cause and effect, action and consequence, sin and judgment, but of the triumph of a higher moral order: the order of grace, which trumps all lesser logic, creating futures impossible without it. “In every instance where it arises, forgiveness is rewarded by consequences that could not have been foreseen or imagined,” Robinson writes. “The application of this doctrine is straightforward” (p. 229).
Would to God that we would believe it. And practice it.
Secondly, in Robinson’s sense that God’s care extends to all creatures—not just the heirs of the covenant—which both permits her a complexified reading of the covenant family and also gives her unusually good eyes to see the favorable light in which Genesis casts “outsiders.”
A paradigmatic example of this occurs in Genesis 12, following the Lord’s calling of Abram. The patriarch and his family head down into Egypt to flee a famine, where they are received by Pharaoh, who takes a shine to lovely Sarai, whom Abram claimed was his sister for fear the Egyptians might kill him—whereupon the Lord promptly plagues Pharaoh's house (a portend of things to come, to be sure). When Pharaoh realizes the error, he scolds Abram, returns Sarai, and sends the holy family on their way. The dynamics of the story are as crucial as they are recurrent.
“Would a man who believes he has a great destiny awaiting him fear for his life? Would a righteous man deceive Pharaoh and put his wife in a deeply compromising situation? This story must be important. The same situation occurs three times, twice involving Abram, once involving his son Isaac. If it tells us anything about Abram, it must be that after God has spoken to him, he is still an ordinary man, liable to fear and deception. About Egyptians it tells us that they honor marriage and that they expect divine punishment if it is violated. In all three recurrences of the story, the patriarchs act badly and the pagans act well…” (pp. 82-83)
It boils down to this—is Yahweh the sovereign and gracious Lord of the nations, at work in all things for the salvation of all, or is he a limited, local deity assigned to one man and his family, the rest of the world be damned?
It matters what we think about this. “In imagining his relationship with God as exclusive, [Abram] denies respect to these strangers whose righteousness God Himself recognizes, values, and protects” (p. 84)—a crime we too are all too often guilty of, not having read the text of Scripture closely enough, not having been sanctified by the Spirit as thoroughly as we ought. “[T]hese stories must be seen as an impressive correction against a narrow conception of God and of humankind as well…the patriarchs are not offered as paragons. And when they err, the generous consequence of the text’s attention to the fact is an assertion of the breadth of God’s loyalty to all the descendants of Adam” (ibid, emphasis mine).
All the descendants of Adam. All.
Now step back for a moment and consider how extraordinary that is as both a literary and historical fact—that the charter documents of a once-oppressed people, coming to rest in the promised land, surrounded by adversaries, should be so adamant in reminding them—you are not as righteous as you suppose. And likewise—your “adversaries” are not as wicked as you suppose. Look, and look again, Genesis says, see how the generous care of your Lord flows out beyond the boundaries of the covenant.
The love of the Lord is not parochial. Providence is never provincial.
The instinct to read Scripture thus permits Robinson a keener insight into the Joseph narratives than one is accustomed to finding in standard Christian interpretation. (This section was one of the real delights of Reading Genesis for me.) For Robinson, Joseph, despite all his virtue (and he is surely a model of certain kinds of virtue), and despite all the ways in which the Lord did indeed use him to bring about a great deliverance, is not unambiguously virtuous. When the famine foreseen in Pharaoh’s dreams finally comes to pass, Joseph the Hebrew’s plans to save the nation in effect enslave the nation. The text is clear on this. “He does not ration out to the Egyptians the grain he has taken from them. He sells it to them. Their utter destitution is the only limit to his demands” (p. 191). And indeed, Joseph’s actions—crucial to the emergence of the Egyptian empire—will set the stage for the enslavement and oppression of his own people later on.
The irony is impossible to miss. Israel’s beloved son Joseph presides over a deeply ambiguous “salvation.” What might it mean for a people recently delivered from Egypt to tell and retell just this story, in just this way?
Surely the backwards glance Moses casts upon the life of Joseph is meant—at least in part—to help the people see precisely the way in which the mercy of God was (and is) at work in and through the spiritual and moral ambiguity of the covenant people. Torah, after all, is clear—Joseph’s actions do not fall into any kind of category God is pleased with. “[The Law] forbids just the kind of thing Joseph will do in his unhesitating determination to enrich quite possibly the richest man on earth…Joseph is made rich as the populace is made poor” (pp. 191-193).
One thinks about Torah’s many admonitions against the unbridled acquisition of people, property, and wealth. God is not pleased with the dispossession that results from avarice. Just so, he reveals himself as the God of the dispossessed—not only the dispossessed of the covenant, but also the dispossessed who fall outside of the covenant.
The memory of Joseph’s actions are enshrined forever not only in the story itself, but also, Robinson suggests, in the Law’s requirement to care for the alien, orphan, and widow; to provide generously for the liberation of the enslaved; to ensure that land once given up due to hardship is regularly and finally given back to its original owners. “Moses…clearly wished to create a property system antithetical to the one thought to prevail in Egypt”—a system created by a Hebrew! No wonder then that the Law stipulates, “Thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian,” since, Robinson writes, “[t]he Egyptian has grievances, too” (p. 219).
God, it seems, walks both sides of the street, determined to bring good to all of Adam’s heirs.
“Genesis can hardly be said to end” (p. 224), Robinson concludes.
Indeed. The book that begins with a flash of creative light cascading down through the dark corridors of history continues to this day, its questions and concerns remaining as vital and contemporary as ever. Does Mercy order our days? Or are we doomed to live our lives as victims of blind and pitiless Fate?
And more—how far and to whom does Mercy run? To the covenant people alone? Or to others? And what then might it mean to be the covenant people? What account can we give of our own presence in the world?
I write this with the ambiguities and stresses of our moment in history on my mind, in my heart. Like you, I’m keeping up with the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, praying and pondering. I’m troubled by the social and political fissures of our country. And the demise of the credibility of the local church in the face of schism and scandal deeply discourages me. It is all so much.
And to add to it all—the growing atmosphere of helplessness that is sometimes so thick it is nearly suffocating. No one has a master solution. No plan to fix it all is or can be forthcoming, for there is none to be had—not, at least, on the human side of the equation. “To God belong wisdom and power; counsel and understanding are his” (Job 12:13).
To God; not us. His; not ours. What can we do, then?
Perhaps just this: to tell and keep telling these stories, in all their buoyant hope and moral ambiguity. To notice and savor their intricate detail—which, after all, is the detail of the working of God. If we do, we might find several things happening in us…
First, we may find our impulse to self-righteousness powerfully checked. And this would be a good thing. So much of what animates the antagonisms of our day is the assumption that we—whoever “we” are—are right and good, and that they—whoever “they” may be—are wrong and bad.
This is not just unbiblical and theologically untenable (it flies directly in the face of a robust doctrine of original sin); it is existentially dangerous, a species of the pride that makes a hell of our world. A people committed to the biblical story will repent of it as quickly and as often as they can.
Second, we may find a new warmth and openness to outsiders stealing into our hearts. And this also would be a good thing. God walks both sides of the street, after all. The Spirit is at work among all people. Those are biblical claims. And if we believe them, then we will likewise follow the biblical call to hospitality—a posture of generous welcome and even curiosity that cuts the nerve of fear and makes peace possible.
In a time of such great social and political polarization, it seems to me that this is one of the profoundest and most prophetic and indeed urgent gifts the church can give the world.
Finally, reading and re-reading, telling and retelling these stories, we may look up one day and find that we no longer despair. Anxious? Yes, sometimes. We are human, after all. Never more or less. But because we have come to know the God who knows the end from the beginning and is who working all things for good, despair has lost its foothold in us. Or is losing, perhaps. The Spirit’s work of sanctifying us by the promises is a long and winding one.
The Reverend John Ames, hero of Robinson’s Gilead, reflecting on a sermon he preached to his congregation on the book of Genesis wrote:
An old pastor’s anxiety for his church is likewise a forgetfulness of the fact that Christ is Himself the pastor of His people and a faithful presence among them through all generations… (p. 129)
And in truth—all anxiety is born of a forgetfulness of the generous care of Jesus Christ, God’s universal Providence made flesh.
May we remember him in all things.
Amen.