Robinson thinks the whole Bible a meditation on theodicy, the problem of evil: how do we reconcile a loving, good God with the existence of so much evil and suffering? Because the culture has moved against metaphysics – reasoning from first principles – we’ve stopped making any serious effort to read and interpret scripture, especially Genesis. This is a spectacular impoverishment. For, Robinson argues, Genesis is completely unique in the literature of the ancient world.
Babylon was a huge and powerful culture, its myths and legends widely and well known. Yet it could hardly be possible for Genesis to be more different from the Babylonian epics. In the Enuma Elish, the gods are many, horrible and warring. They suffer hunger, fear, etc. Tiamat, the gods’ mother, a ferocious serpent, decides to kill all her offspring. Marduk, with his four ears, four eyes and fire-breathing mouth, ultimately defeats her and uses her body parts to make the Earth and sky. Robinson observes: this could hardly be less like the majestic, rational, serene creation in Genesis: “God said let there be light, and there was light.” Genesis radically asserts that creation is good.
Is the Genesis claim that humanity is made in the image of God also unique? Robinson: “Yes, that’s true. It is unique, dazzlingly so, I would say.” Robinson argues the episode where God instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, but then stops him at the last, supports: “A reading that sees in the dramatising of child sacrifice something shocking and transgressive, rejected by God …” Child sacrifice was practised in numerous ancient cultures, including Carthage: “I think it’s fascinating that Carthage is never mentioned by name in the Bible. Carthage would have been a very large, very influential culture, and a Semitic language culture.” When it came to certain pagan customs and personalities they regarded as beyond the pale, the OT writers: “ … would not speak the actual names of pagan gods. They had names like Beelzebub instead. It seems to me the exclusion of them (Carthage) altogether is probably an extension of that same impulse.”
Genesis is crucial in human history: “It’s the self-definition of God. That makes it unique, distinctive in itself. The fact that God cares to make himself known to human beings and cares what they think about him – that’s all very remarkable. I think it’s probably had more impact on thought and literature than we can really quite understand. It creates a very powerful impetus towards thinking, and thinking very seriously. A lot of Christian writers assume that by attending, by praying, by meditating, they are capable of the most profound sort of insight human beings can have, that human beings can be in a relationship with God.”
Robinson is describing what could be called scriptural humanism, when she writes: “ … these divine likenesses (ie, human beings, images of God) among whom we live are of the highest interest to God.” She tells me: “The Old Testament prepares the idea that what happens in human history is central, cosmic, absolutely meaningful. This is the context in which the figure of Jesus can arise.” Her insights into religion are inherently literary, which puts them on the highest plane, for the proper subject of literature is the truths of the human heart. Naturally, in excavating the human heart, the artist encounters God. She believes it a great mistake that a knowledge of Genesis or, say, the writings of Paul, is absent in the experience of students in Western education: “The always more rigorous exclusion of religion from education that’s gone on in recent decades has been simultaneous with a kind of stepping away from scripture and theology in a lot of mainstream churches. There’s a tendency to make them good people societies. They’re losing the literary roots of their own denominations, not only the Bible but a lot of beautiful things written by people inspired by the Bible.”
This reflects trends across the academy: “I’m no philosophy specialist but to the extent that I read modern philosophy it seems a very depleted thing.” Some of the greatest philosophers of the past, she argues, would find no purchase today, the language of big concepts is no longer accepted: “I think the walls close in at the period where people become cynical about religion. They don’t accept the meaningfulness of thought that claims that scale for itself. There’s a cosmic scale from the very first words of the Bible.”
In Gilead, Ames speculates about heaven. Does Robinson look forward to heaven? “Something I have in common with Ames, I like this world very well. I’m very grateful to be a part of it. I don’t know what to expect (about heaven). I think it probably would be naive to try to know what to expect. If you’re persuaded of God’s ultimate benevolence, you could look forward to heaven on those terms.”
Reading Robinson helps persuade me of God’s benevolence. Happy Christmas to all.
Greg Sheridan