TRUE POWER

'To refrain, to put aside power is Godlike.'
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.217.

GRACE MAKES US SUSPICIOUS

'Grace, being apart from the calculus of deserving, is often suspect.'
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.215.

GOD'S EMOTIONS

'There is a long tradition in theology of divine "impassibility," which teaches that God has no emotions, since if He were capable of anger or pleasure that would mean He was capable of change, including change caused by something outside Himself. The Hebrew Flood narrative is interesting as a meditation on this question. It tells that God can be grieved and angered, and at the same time that God is and will be faithful, to earth and to Adam. He can change and not change. Immutability is not an inevitable consequence of His nature, as if options were denied Him by philosophical consistency. Rather, as the Psalmist says, His steadfast love endures forever.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.65.

GOD'S GRACE

'God's great constancy lies not in any one covenant but in the unshakeable will to be in covenant with willful, small-minded, homicidal humankind.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.53.

THE REALITY OF THE BIBLE

'...the Bible does not exists to explain away mysteries and complexities but to reveal and explore them with respect and restraint that resists conclusion.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.19.

THE HUMAN AUTHORS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

'...the Bible itself indicates no anxiety about association with human minds, words. lives, and passions. This is a notable instance of our having a lower opinion of ourselves than the Bible justifies.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.5.

THE BIBLE AS THEODICY

'The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil. This being true, it must take account of things as they are. It must acknowledge in a meaningful way the darkest aspects of the reality we experience, and it must reconcile them with the goodness of God and of Being itself against which this darkness stands out so sharply. This is to say the Bible is a work of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology is based.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.3.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

'"All right, I'll tell you. I'm a gifted thief. I lie fluently, often for no reason. I'm a bad but confirmed drunk. I have no talent for friendship. What talents I do have I make no use of . I am aware instantly and almost obsessively of anything fragile, with the thought that I must and will break it. This has been true of me my whole life. I isolate myself as a way of limiting the harm I can do. And here I am with a wife! Of whom I know more than you have any hint of, to whom I could do a thousand kinds of harm, never meaning to...'"

Marilynne Robinson, Jack, p.228.

HOPING FOR THE MIRACULOUS TO BREAK IN PERMANENTLY

'Miracles leave no trace. He had decided, hearing his father preach on the subject, that they happened once as a sort of commentary on the blandness and inadequacy of the realty they break in on, and then vanish, leaving a world behind that refutes the very idea that such a thing could have happened...he sat down on a bench with his hat beside him and thought what it might be like if the miraculous became the natural order of things. Loaves and fishes in inexhaustible supply. Troops of Lazaruses putting off their cerements. Infinite hours where Della was always waiting for him, and he was always somehow not a disappointment.' 

Marilynne Robinson, Jack, p.219.

PREDESTINATION IS JUST GRACE BEGINNING EARLIER

'"Salvation by grace alone. It just begins earlier for us than other people. In the deep womb of time, in fact. By his secret will and purpose."'
Marilynne Robinson, Jack, p.39.

WHY THE REFORMERS STRESSED PREDESTINATION

'The reason that all the Reformers foregrounded predestination in the way that they do is because they're arguing against the idea, prevalent then, that the church had the means of salvation - that if you do thus and so, you will be saved. The Reformers believed that the church had put a certain ritualized idea of salvation in the place of God. And to move people back toward the idea of omnipotence, divine omnipotence, the Reformers sought to end what they saw as perhaps a corrupt cycle of spending money, doing things that were intended as acts which would insure your salvation. And so, the doctrine of predestination really is a way of making the argument that it is God that determines these issues and not any human institution.' 

Marilynne Robinson in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, p.210.

HUMANITIES HUMANIZE

'The humanities humanize. They are well named.'

Marilynne Robinson in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, p.208.

THE IMPORTANCE OF IMAGINATION IN PASTORAL CARE

'I think one of the most important things for people to do is to develop imagination in the sense of a sympathetic imagination. There are some people who can comfort you and some people who can't. And to be the good comforter, you have to be somebody who has a felt imagination for the circumstance of the person being comforted. 

Marilynne Robinson in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, p.204.

THE CALVINIST BELIEF IN THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD

'This apparent fatalism is actually confidence that life is shaped by divine intention, which will express itself in ways that can be baffling or alarming but that always bring an insight, pose a question, or make a demand, to the benefit of those who are alert to the will of God.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.100. 

OUR ETHICS SHOULD NOT BE LIMITED BY OUR CAPACITY

'Sigmund Freud said that we cannot love our neighbor as ourselves. No doubt this is true. But if the reality that lies behind the commandment, that our neighbor is as worthy of love as ourselves, and that in acting on this fact we would be stepping momentarily out of the bog of our own subjectivity, then a truth is acknowledged in the commandment that gives it greater authority than mere experience can refute. There is a truth that lies beyond our capacities. Our capacities are no standard or measure of truth, no ground of ethical understanding.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.100. 

THE NEW CREATION

'...at some particular hour when we least expect it, a veil will be lifted and there will be an ending and a beginning, creation purged, healed, and renewed, afterward forever in a new and right relationship to God, who so loves the world. The clocks will stop, and we will find ourselves on the threshold of the everlasting.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.237. 

SIN

'I have no problem with the word "sin." I think it is one of our most brilliant evasions to have associated sin so strongly with sexuality that we can by coy about it, or narrowly obsessed with it, or we can dismiss it with as a synonym for prudery, as we go on hating and reviling. as we go on grinding the faces of the poor. We alone among the animals can sin - one of our truly notable distinctions. Or, to put it another way - we are the only creatures who are, in principle if seldom in fact, morally competent. Responsible, or at least answerable.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.236. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF INTUITION

'...the criticism of religion that derides its central intuition as a projection of human fears and desires onto a universe that is alien to such things is itself a projection of human influences, deductions, and expectations onto a universe that is wholly incommensurate with them.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.220. 

THE LIMITS OF RATIONALISM

'I wish only to say one more time that the rationalistic arguments that claim to winnow out the implausible and the meaningless by applying the flail of common sense are products of bad education. Religions are expressions of the sound human intuition that there is something beyond being as we experience it in this life. What is often described as a sense of the transcendent might in some cases be the intuition of the actual. So the religions are quite right to conceptualize it in terms that exceed the language of common sense. The rationalists are like travelers in a non-English-speaking country who think that they can make themselves understood by shouting. Sadly, too many religious have abandoned their own language, its beauty and subtlety and power, accommodating to the utilitarian expectations of those demanding outsiders who have no understanding of the language or culture and refuse on principle to acquire any. But the unfathomable has a most legitimate place in any conceptualization of an unfathomable reality.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.212. 

THE CENTRALITY OF THE TRINITY

'Is there are great Christian theology that does not have the Trinity at its center? Does the highest sense of the sacred abide where the Trinity as a concept is isallowed? Well, I think not, for what it's worth.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.210.