Scribe or Prophet?

Marilynne Robinson’s gift must be the ability to think about the life of a pastor though she is neither a pastor nor the daughter of a pastor. But somehow she gets to the heart of so much of what pastoring is in her deft conversations between Ames and Boughton, especially in Gilead (p. 142 below [image]). This is one of my favorite scenes/paragraphs in her many about the pastoral life, and this paragraph, which I will break up a bit, probes into the easy-criticism of many today of the church:

That article was very interesting. It was in Ladies’ Home Journal, an old issue Glory found in her father’s study and brought over for me to look at. There was a note on it. Show Ames. But it ended up at the bottom of a stack of things, I guess, because it’s from 1948.

She manages to get us all curious about what’s in the article, so here’s the scoop:

The article is called “God and the American People,” and it says 95 percent of us say we believe in God.

The journalist/writer thinks that percentage is a sham and damns the American public.

But our religion doesn’t meet the writer’s standards, not at all. To his mind, all those people in all those churches are the scribes and the Pharisees.

Now good old pastor John Ames turns against the author of the article:

He seems to me to be a bit of a scribe himself, scorning and rebuking the way he does.

Now the powerful question from John Ames:

How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself to be?

His answer brilliant.

The prophets love the people they chastise, a thing this writer does not appear to me to do.

No need to criticize the church if you don’t love the church enough to participate in a way to make it “better.” You can’t call yourself a prophet if the only kind of church you can stomach is one that is just like you. John Ames could be made to say that there are many more scribes than prophets. The prophet hangs with those who need God’s grace.