“take and read” Good Books to Strengthen Pastoral Ministry, Issue 87

• Marilynne Robinson, The Giveness of Things, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Marilynne Robinson is best known for her fiction, especially the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and the subsequent novels Home and the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila. But she is also a profound essayist. The Givenness of Things follows three previous collections of essays, The Death of Adam, Absence of Mind, and When I Was a Child I Read Books. Each of these books is a feast to be enjoyed dish by dish, savoring every bite. What may entice Presbyterians to sample Robinson's essays is her fondness for Calvin and the Reformed tradition. Her writing on these themes provides an angle of vision that sees beyond the ordinary and may invite readers into her broader examinations of contemporary society.

On the eve of the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, Marilynne Robinson's essay Reformation bypasses standard wisdom about the Reformation's significance. Instead, she meditates on the significance of the Bible's translation into vernacular languages, and the influence these translations had on the development of the languages themselves. The essay Grace cites several of Shakespeare's plays to explore, with the “theologian” Shakespeare, the question, “How do forgiveness and grace not deprive evil of its nature, its gravity?” It is a question that every preacher should grapple with, and Robinson takes us into its depth, never settling for easy answers.

     There is a sense in which all of the 17 essays in The Givenness of Things touch on grace. In Theology Robinson asks, “Does the highest sense of the sacred abide where the Trinity as a concept is disallowed?” She answers, “Well, I think not, for what that is worth,” before going on to note that “Modern religious thought, with notable and distinguished exceptions, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them, has shied away from the unfathomable, as if grace could have other origins and truth another character.” Then comes the indictment of too much academic and preacherly theology: “There has been a marked tendency to treat the commonplace as the standard by which the plausible, the credible, is to be gauged.”

Marilynne Robinson thinks deeply about American culture and society, about matters of Christian faith, and about the relationship between the two, in ways that can provoke us to deeper thought than more straightforward theology fails to do.