Evil Is Not the Essential Feature of Reality

This article is an excerpt of a conversation on CT’s podcast The Russell Moore Show. Listen to the full conversation here.

Image: Illustration by Ronan Lynam

Marilynne Robinson and Russell Moore

Russell Moore: I’ll tell you what was surprising to me about Reading Genesis: I expected certain themes to be there—such as the mystery of human beings and the fact that we’re not reducible to causes and effects. But one of the things I was surprised by is that this is 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 on to Joseph and his brothers.

There is a sense of moral shock in the fact that God would protect Cain after killing his brother. And it struck me that, as with so many other things in the Bible, the familiarity that we have with it reduces that sense of shock that that is intended.

Marilynne Robinson: It was a question that came up in a class, but it shocked me too. And I think that was the beginning of my reappraisal of these stories, because the obvious importance of Cain and Abel is a master narrative of so much else. The mark of Cain, which we know protected him, was something that stigmatized him.

RM: I’ve kind 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 it seems that the most startling thing here is not just a brother’s blood cries from the ground, but that God doesn’t execute the murderer—he protects him. And that’s something that you demonstrate 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 in the 800 pages, people would say, “This is what this is about!” But here we see it over and over again in a much smaller space, and you don’t have the reverse. I think that narrative is structured to be meaningful in the same way that language is—in the sense that we can see a good narrative with confidence that it means something. There are ways in which it develops meaning through repetition.

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

MR: Well, it is a theodicy. That is the great question that runs right through the Bible itself. The Crucifixion is very cruel also, you know. I think of the overwhelming goodness, as it were, of the fact that we exist and that we exist on this speck of planet with things that are simultaneous with our own needs, our own sense of the beautiful, our own powerful awe, and so on. I think that the essential sense of goodness has 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 problem of evil is unanswerable. Therefore, evil becomes the essential feature of reality, as far as many people are concerned. I think that this is a question of perspective. God knows all the examples of evil and grief and injury and so on that we can see every moment of any day.

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

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

RM: Right before I read this book, I was teaching on Joseph, and I made the comment that I find him a very unlikable figure—and in many ways, an annoying figure. Someone [in the room] was shocked that I would say that, but I could say the same thing about Sarah and Jacob and a few other people. You make the point that these people in this narrative are not intended to be heroic figures or examples of moral instruction. I think a lot of people miss that when they’re reading Genesis devotionally and think, I’m supposed to be looking at these people and learning then how to act and how to live.

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

RM: I also thought as I was reading this book that I was hearing some echoes or explanations of sermons that Reverend Ames had preached in your various fictional books. I think this was about Abraham giving up Isaac and this entrusting of both Ishmael and Isaac to the wilderness. I wonder if you were bouncing around some of the ideas that you would pursue here, even when you were writing the novels.

MR: No doubt. The idea of grace is just surpassingly beautiful, and it makes instant sense to people when they understand what it is. It feels like the thing called for, and so that’s been a subject of my thinking for a long time. Especially in a time when religion tends to be so prohibitive and punitive, which always felt to me like an aberration—not at the center of the religion.

RM: The other thing I think that’s unique here is your view of the “Old Testament God.” When I was reading, I stopped to look up a quote that was somewhere in my mind that you had said: “A great many 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 know, here [people] are [speaking] in another language and so on. I think that more of it than we would like 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 think there are a lot of people—even committed Christians and committed Bible readers—who ascribe a kind of primitivity, sort of a wrathful picture of God in the Old Testament. Where do we get that idea? Why does that persist?

MR: The tendency has been to say that this primary impulse behind Christ-
ianity is not 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 people don’t realize he’s quoting, even though there are footnotes, and they act as if it’s diminishing the authority of Jesus to say that, as a pious Jewish man in the first 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 usually when I see a treatment of that, there’s a lot of moral handwringing. I was struck that what you pictured here did not seem to be “Well, let’s talk about why it was moral or immoral for God to tell Abraham to sacrifice Isaac,” but instead, this was a pictorial demonstration that God does not demand sacrifice and does not demand child sacrifice. It was almost a revelation of God’s kindness and grace, not something to be explained about God’s cruelty or arbitrary nature. I found that striking.

MR: I found out in the course of mulling things over that Carthage was everywhere in the Mediterranean, all up the coast of the Atlantic, and that it was a Semitic-language culture. There’s no way to think of it except as a huge influence. It could threaten Rome. Archaeology seems to confirm they’ve always had the reputation of child sacrifice as a big kind of state ritual. [There are] pathetic signs that people tried to smuggle a sheep or something in place of the child, and then repenting and destroying a whole bunch of children.

The name Carthage is never spoken, never appears, in the Bible. And we know they did things that were unspeakable. But we know also that the prophets tell us that this idea of child sacrifice crept in and that it was felt to be an issue, whether this could 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 would be that faithful to what he took to be God’s command—this is something that Abraham learns about himself. But God says, A sheep will be fine. Don’t do that. It’s a potently instructive narrative, and I believe urgent. There was this example of great, powerful, rich Carthage—that was all destroyed.

I think that we don’t teach enough background to make people understand that it’s not just between Abraham and God; it’s like dealing with a phenomenon that was important throughout the whole culture, the whole region.

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

MR: I think that the barrenness of women makes a huge point of the preciousness of a child. Primogeniture, the favoring of the eldest, which the Bible overturns repeatedly, implies that there is 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 is institutionally created. And I think that overturning things goes clear into the Magnificat. It means exactly that among people, who is enabled? That is at God’s discretion.

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

MR: I think Genesis gives a very special place to Hagar. She is paired with Abraham. There is the scene of her annunciation that occurs. These scenes tend to be back to back, where Hagar is given massive assurances by an angel that her progeny will be uncountably numerous. And then you have the same thing said to Abraham. You have Abraham threatened with the loss of his child, and you have Hagar threatened with the loss of her child. Hagar gets a great deal of ink, and everything is done to underline her importance

Marilynne Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author 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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