Evil Is Not the Essential Feature of Reality

Russell Moore: I’ll inform you what was surprising to me about Reading Genesis: I expected certain themes to be there—akin to the mystery of human beings and the proven fact that we’re not reducible to causes and effects. But considered one of the things I used to be surprised by is that this can be a book about grace and forgiveness. The Cain and Abel narrative shows up repeatedly in ways I hadn’t considered—from Lamech all the way in which on to Joseph and his brothers.

There is a way of ethical shock within the proven fact that God would protect Cain after killing his brother. And it struck me that, as with so many other things within the Bible, the familiarity that now we have with it reduces that sense of shock that that is meant.

Marilynne Robinson: It was an issue that got here up in a category, nevertheless it shocked me too. And I feel that was the start of my reappraisal of those stories, because the plain importance of Cain and Abel is a master narrative of a lot else. The mark of Cain, which we all know protected him, was something that stigmatized him.

RM: I’ve form of unconsciously seen the story as primarily about Cain and Abel’s rivalry, Abel’s subsequent murder, sacrifice, and so forth, and only secondarily about God’s response to Cain. But now, after reading your book, I’m rethinking that because evidently essentially the most startling thing here will not be only a brother’s blood cries from the bottom, but that God doesn’t execute the murderer—he protects him. And that’s something that you just display repeatedly through Reading Genesis.

MR: It’s such a strongly recurring theme. If one were writing an 800-page novel and any idea recurred several times within the 800 pages, people would say, “This is what that is about!” But here we see it over and another time in a much smaller space, and also you don’t have the reverse. I feel that narrative is structured to be meaningful in the identical way that language is—within the sense that we will see narrative with confidence that it means something. There are ways by which it develops meaning through repetition.

RM: How should we explain to someone who says, “I read the text talking about ‘and it was superb,’ and yet I don’t experience the world that way. I experience the world as very cruel”?

MR: Well, it’s a theodicy. That is the nice query that runs all through the Bible itself. The Crucifixion may be very cruel also, you recognize. I feel of the overwhelming goodness, because it were, of the proven fact that we exist and that we exist on this speck of planet with things which can be simultaneous with our own needs, our own sense of the attractive, our own powerful awe, and so forth. I feel that the essential sense of goodness needs to be implanted in a realization of existence itself. “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:4, KJV throughout).

Many people feel that the issue of evil is unanswerable. Therefore, evil becomes the essential feature of reality, so far as many persons are concerned. I feel that this can be a query of perspective. God knows all of the examples of evil and grief and injury and so forth that we will see every moment of any day.

RM: Social psychologist and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written in regards to the current era, fragmented as we’re by social media and resentment and polarization, as being a Tower of Babel. And I wondered, as I used to be reading your account of Babel, whether you’ll agree with him that we’re uniquely in a situation like that, versus other eras. Or is that this just the way in which the world is and now we have a specific expression of it now?

MR: Well, within the actual story of Babel, it’s God that creates languages, and he doesn’t subordinate any language to every other. It’s a way of disarming people—creating virtual places on the planet by creating different languages. I feel that the Babel story is an act of intervention on the a part of God, whose presence appears to be oddly forgotten much of the time, that sees human possibilities as dangerous to human beings and steps in and precludes that form of development at that moment—but doesn’t disable people, doesn’t punish them, doesn’t create invidious comparisons amongst Babylonians and anyone else. In other words, if there’s an analogy to Babel, I feel that it ought to be that those who live in scattered cultures can take part in something global, which could possibly be wonderful.

RM: Right before I read this book, I used to be teaching on Joseph, and I made the comment that I find him a really unlikable figure—and in some ways, an annoying figure. Someone [in the room] was shocked that I might say that, but I could say the identical thing about Sarah and Jacob and a number of other people. You make the purpose that these people on this narrative should not intended to be heroic figures or examples of ethical instruction. I feel a whole lot of people miss that after they’re reading Genesis devotionally and think, I’m imagined to be these people and learning then act and live.

MR: I don’t know quite what they see. We ought to be very grateful for the imperfections of all these those who God so endlessly loves. If we actually subscribe to the proven fact that we’re all flawed and that God is gracious, then that’s what we’re seeing within the text over and another time.

RM: I also thought as I used to be reading this book that I used to be hearing some echoes or explanations of sermons that Reverend Ames had preached in your various fictional books. I feel this was about Abraham giving up Isaac and this entrusting of each Ishmael and Isaac to the wilderness. I’m wondering if you happen to were bouncing around a number of the ideas that you just would pursue here, even while you were writing the novels.

MR: No doubt. The idea of grace is just surpassingly beautiful, and it makes easy sense to people after they understand what it’s. It seems like the thing called for, and in order that’s been a subject of my pondering for a very long time. Especially in a time when religion tends to be so prohibitive and punitive, which at all times felt to me like an aberration—not at the middle of the faith.

RM: The other thing I feel that’s unique here is your view of the “Old Testament God.” When I used to be reading, I ended to look up a quote that was somewhere in my mind that you had said: “An incredible a lot of us feel an emphatic moral superiority to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

MR: We’re conditioned to think the Old Testament God is brutish and that, you recognize, here [people] are [speaking] in one other language and so forth. I feel that more of it than we would love to acknowledge comes from a desperation that has occurred in especially European culture over centuries to make a distinction between Christianity and Judaism.

RM: I feel there are a whole lot of people—even committed Christians and committed Bible readers—who ascribe a form of primitivity, form of a wrathful picture of God within the Old Testament. Where will we get that concept? Why does that persist?

MR: The tendency has been to say that this primary impulse behind Christ-
ianity will not be shared by Judaism. But things like “Love thy neighbor as thyself”come from Leviticus (19:18). As in so many cases, Jesus quotes from the Old Testament. An amazing number of individuals don’t realize he’s quoting, despite the fact that there are footnotes, and so they act as if it’s diminishing the authority of Jesus to say that, as a pious Jewish man in the primary century, he’s quoting what he calls the Scriptures.

RM: One of the things that tends to be a scandal to people is the sacrifice—well, attempted sacrifice—of Isaac. And normally after I see a treatment of that, there’s a whole lot of moral handwringing. I used to be struck that what you pictured here didn’t appear to be “Well, let’s discuss why it was moral or immoral for God to inform Abraham to sacrifice Isaac,” but as an alternative, this was a pictorial demonstration that God doesn’t demand sacrifice and doesn’t demand child sacrifice. It was almost a revelation of God’s kindness and style, not something to be explained about God’s cruelty or arbitrary nature. I discovered that striking.

MR: I discovered in the middle of mulling things over that Carthage was all over the place within the Mediterranean, all up the coast of the Atlantic, and that it was a Semitic-language culture. There’s no solution to consider it except as an enormous influence. It could threaten Rome. Archaeology seems to verify they’ve at all times had the popularity of kid sacrifice as a giant form of state ritual. [There are] pathetic signs that individuals tried to smuggle a sheep or something rather than the kid, after which repenting and destroying a complete bunch of kids.

The name Carthage is rarely spoken, never appears, within the Bible. And we all know they did things that were unspeakable. But we all know also that the prophets tell us that this concept of kid sacrifice crept in and that it was felt to be a difficulty, whether this could possibly be practiced or not.

But the meaning of God’s asking for the sacrifice of Isaac and letting Abraham prove that he would make that radical a sacrifice—that he could be that faithful to what he took to be God’s command—that is something that Abraham learns about himself. But God says, A sheep shall be high-quality. Don’t do this. It’s a potently instructive narrative, and I think urgent. There was this instance of great, powerful, wealthy Carthage—that was all destroyed.

I feel that we don’t teach enough background to make people understand that it’s not only between Abraham and God; it’s like coping with a phenomenon that was essential throughout the entire culture, the entire region.

RM: Why, as a novelist, as someone who plots—and I’m not treating this as only a literary text here—why does God in his windfall have these themes show up repeatedly in Genesis of a lady who’s barren, who’s given children in a rare way? And also this theme of the eldest son being displaced by
the younger?

MR: I feel that the barrenness of girls makes an enormous point of the preciousness of a baby. Primogeniture, the favoring of the eldest, which the Bible overturns repeatedly, implies that there’s something external to the circumstances of the birth. The ability to be useful to God is at God’s discretion. It’s not something that’s institutionally created. And I feel that overturning things goes clear into the Magnificat. It means exactly that amongst people, who’s enabled? That is at God’s discretion.

RM: When I said that Sarah will not be a likable figure, a whole lot of that has to do along with her treatment of Hagar. I loved the section where you discuss Hagar quite a bit and about a number of the themes of the newborn crying echoed back later with Moses, and God seeing her. Did you set out to provide this special place to Hagar, or did she just resonate with you as you were writing?

MR: I feel Genesis gives a really special place to Hagar. She is paired with Abraham. There is the scene of her annunciation that happens. These scenes are inclined to be back to back, where Hagar is given massive assurances by an angel that her progeny shall be uncountably quite a few. And then you’ve the identical thing said to Abraham. You have Abraham threatened with the lack of his child, and you’ve Hagar threatened with the lack of her child. Hagar gets an incredible deal of ink, and all the things is finished to underline her importance

Marilynne Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize–winning creator of 12 books, including the novels Housekeeping, Gilead, and Jack. Her latest book release is Reading Genesis.

Russell Moore is CT’s editor in chief and host of The Russell Moore Show.

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