Retreat from Scripture

Marilynne Robinson is a theological anomaly. A self-confessed Calvinist, admirer of Calvin and Edwards, defender of original sin and predestination (which, she says right, is not determinism), she is also a self-described liberal Christian who tends to take predictably liberal positions on moral and political question and to use sneering phrases like “the Governor Jindals of the world” (Givenness of Things, 162). 

Liberal though her theology is, she can sock it to liberal theology. She argues that what she calls the “splendid old home of liberal Christian thought . . . once elevated the Hebrew Bible to a prominence unique in Christian history” (171). And she wonders what happened to the biblicism of the left. 

Her answer is that liberal theology sold itself to “very dubious” German criticism, which treated the God of Israel as a deity “patched together out of Baal and El, with a little Marduk thrown in.” She is dismissive of the idea: “No one can read what remains of Canaanite or Babylonian myth – which is all these scholars have to work from – and find this plausible, unless profound intellectual deference intervenes, as it does so often. Intellectual deference is in fact often prevenient. . . . It can set in so instantly that these highly accessible Near Eastern remains are never looked at. A fair sense of them does emerge, however, when the transformation is made of the Hebrew God into this pagan amalgam.” She hears that a biblical Psalm is based on a Canaanite hymn, goes in search of the supposed source, and finds nothing. She concludes, “I suspect this bit of ‘information’ is simply carried along on the tides of intellectual deference” (165).

Higher criticism flirts with Marcionism, again for reasons of intellectual reputation: “Very many people now who want their religion to be intellectually sound consider the Old Testament to have been debunked on the grounds of syncretism, and on the grounds that it primitivism makes it morally unacceptable, incompatible with whatever they choose to retain of Christianity.” Saying that Israel’s God is a version of Baal or Marduk is “to strip away everything beautiful about him, his attention to humankind, first of all.” What, she asks “happens to [the] greatest commandment when God is deconstructed into a set of beings who starve and sleep and cower and threaten to beat each other bloody?” (165-6).

Soft Marcionism “creates a sphere of esoteric learning that lets us keep one foot in and one foot out of a tradition we are uneasy with but not ready to abandon. It excuses us from reading and pondering a difficult old book that looks squarely and at length at the problem of evil, which can seem to comfortable people to be more than a little impolite, and also primitive” (166-7).

Criticism allows liberal Christians to turn Jesus into a source of infinite tolerance. If Christianity is no more than a message of personal forgiveness, then “it is, one must say, almost limitlessly permissive. It virtually invites the flouting of Jesus’ teachings,” since we can ignore Him and still expect to be received back into is good graces. Classic liberalism, she says, takes Christianity as a metaphysics, one that insist that “human beings share [God’s] image and are sanctified by it,” a view that Robinson suggests is the only “secure basis for belief in universal human dignity,” there being “no evidence at all that this is anything we known intuitively” (170).