Reading Genesis

Marilynne Robinson's new book on Genesis, thoughts on the Duggar family fiasco and more in this week's roundup

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Reading Genesis

Novelist Marilynne Robinson is well known for being a Christian. She recently published a new book called Reading Genesis, that is her literary commentary on the first book of the Bible.

Robinson is politically and to some extent theologically liberal, so her analysis probably doesn’t resonate with evangelicals. I couldn’t tell exactly who her target audience was, but the book has an apologetic tone that suggests that she’s trying to get secular readers to open themselves up to the possibilities of scripture.

It was a very interesting read. She does not adhere to the evangelical literalist readings of the text, but nor does she fully embrace higher criticism. For example, she believes the Genesis evolved and was edited by many others, but rejects the so-called “documentary hypothesis.”

I thought she had interesting takes on the text. For example, she sees one of the core points of the abortive sacrifice of Isaac as an emphatic rejection of child sacrifice as practiced by the Israelite neighbors. God does not want the Jews to sacrifice their children to him (a point made explicitly multiple additional times in the Bible).

She sees the text being written about the time of the Exodus and recording of the Jewish law (which is actually consistent with the Mosaic authorship view). And thus Genesis has to be read under a kind of dramatic irony. The audience reading of Jacob marrying the sisters Rachel and Leah would have have in mind that this practice was forbidden by the Levitical code, for example. The story of Jacob has to be read in light of that knowledge, just as Oedipus the King was meant to be seen by people who already knew the story. (The same literary device is used in the Passion narrative. When people mock Jesus about being a prophet, a king, or the Son of God, he really is all of those things - something we know that they did not).

As an example of her apologetic style, she directly acknowledges that some of the same stories exist in other Ancient Near East cultures, including that of Joseph in Egypt, and the flood narrative. She contrasts the Biblical versions with those stories to highlight the very different conclusions the Bible reaches. To her, for example, Genesis does borrow from the Babylonian flood myth, but fundamentally transforms the message. She doesn’t think the world really flooded, but that this familiar story was intentionally being used as a parable, with the takeaway being precisely in the differences with those other versions. This appears to be designed to provide a comprehensible defense of the text to secular readers who would reject the idea of a worldwide flood for which there is no geological evidence.

One strange choice was her equating Cain’s descendants Enoch and Lamech with people of the same name descended from Seth. In fact, I don’t recall her mentioning Seth at all. This is fundamental to some of her analysis - she draws a parallel between Lamech the descendent of Cain and Noah, for example - but she doesn’t explain why she did it. It doesn’t seem likely that this was an error though, given her attention to detail elsewhere. For example, she notes that when Joseph was sold into slavery, there’s some ambiguity in the text, with a group of Midianites actually being the ones who pulled Joseph out of the pit and selling him to the Ishmaelites. I’ve read that passage many time and never noticed that detail myself.

Evangelicals typically have little use for this type of analysis. But the joke’s on us. I recently attended an appearance of Jordan Peterson here in Indianapolis in which he sold out a 2,500 seat theater at a ticket price of over $100 minimum. People paid that money to, in essence, hear him give a sermon on Genesis 12.

Millions of people are looking to Jordan Peterson to interpret Genesis and Exodus for them. As I’ve said many times, the fact that millions of young men turn to Peterson and other influencers instead of the church ought to be embarrassing, but there seems to be little reflection on why that is.

While their theology may have defects, commentators like Peterson, Robinson, or Mary Douglas can often give insights into the biblical texts that people find very compelling. In some though by no means all cases, I do believe these can give legitimate perspectives that help illuminate the text, but are often missing or under-emphasized in evangelical expositions.

For example, in “gospel-centered” preaching, the idea is that the entire Bible is about Jesus, and thus the preacher should look to Jesus and the gospel in every single passage they preach from. Or you will hear, for example, that the Bible is all about God.

But these are overly reductionistic. Yes, the Bible is about God and the gospel, but it’s about other things too. One of its most important functions is explaining why the world is the way it is, and why people are the way they are. Robinson sees clearly this anthropological purpose in Genesis:

Theology is the study of God; anthropology is the study of humankind. Why are we so brilliant? Why are we so self-defeating and self-destructive? How is the diversity of languages to be accounted for? How do tribes and nations form and spread themselves over the earth? What constitutes a religious culture, and how does it perpetuate itself? These are all questions of anthropology, using the word in the modern sense. The Hebrew Bible raises them and responds to them in its own terms. The questions themselves indicate where the interest of the text lies – with humankind, God’s image, among whom words like justice and righteousness have meaning, as they do when they are used of Him. Modern anthropology has tended to build upward or outward or downward from reductionist definitions, humankind as naked ape, as phenotype of the selfish gene. Biblical anthropology begins with an exalted conception of humanity, then ponders our errors and deficiencies and our capacities for grace and truth, within the world of meaningful freedom created for them by an omnipotent God. This seems paradoxical, but sustaining paradox is the genius of the text.

You’ll note from this, that she also retains the now nearly obsolete practice of always capitalizing references to God (e.g., “Him”).

And in an age when evangelicals are very often trying to downplay the importance of family, of marriage and children, she says directly that, “The desire for children and the love of them is central to the Hebrew Bible, as is loyalty to them despite all and grief at their loss.”

While evangelicals will differ sharply from many of Robinson’s presuppositions and interpretations, this is still very much worth reading for a literary rather than theological take on Genesis - especially since she is probably the most prominent and respected Christian literary figure in the country.

The Duggars, Lust, and Legalism

Tom Owens wrote some very interesting reflections on Bill Gothard, the Duggars, and evangelical legalism.

American religion in particular did its best to prove the Catholics right. In a span of 50 years in the 1800s, Americans developed more sects with historically incongruous theology than any other Christian people: Mormonism, Adventism, Dispensationalism, Christian Science, Landmark Baptists, and Campbellism, to name just a few. For a few years, it seemed like any Yankee with a head injury was liable to start a new religious movement.

Most of the evangelical churches embraced Finneyism during the Second Great Awakening, transforming religious faith into a predominantly emotional experience and church services into theaters of manipulation for dramatic public conversion. This change tended to promote preachers known more for their charisma than any other quality. In the loosey-goosey ordination practices of the backwoods churches, ministers without orthodox theological training could develop cult followings and enormous influence.

Results attained in mass evangelism or charismatic influence became self-proving evidence of the actions of the Holy Spirit, that the men who attained these results were anointed of God. Such leaders could often get away with much private misbehavior. The lack of any instruction beyond the basic gospel in their congregations led to a general gullibility to the three major problems in evangelical churches that enable movements like Gothard’s: a tolerance of private revelation, literal interpretation of the wisdom genre of literature in the Bible, and general superstition.

…

He [Gothard] claimed to have direct revelations from God. He declared, for example, that Cabbage Patch Dolls were invented by a warlock who infected each doll with a demon. Now in his 80s, he believes that God has revealed to him that he will live to 120 years, and now teaches a special form of meditative prayer that God also revealed only to him. Since his ouster in his 70s from IBLP over sexual misconduct allegations, he has written 26 books on various aspects of Christian life and successfully defended lawsuits with aggressive and shrewd litigation strategies. He’s a person of extraordinarily high energy and cunning.

The primary error of Gothard’s teaching is an attempt to take wisdom literature of the Bible, such as Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount, and apply it literally to Christian living. For evangelical families reeling from the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, he offered easy, formulaic answers in the 80s and 90s, before the collaborative power of the Internet could apply much scrutiny to his organization or teaching.

He combined bad interpretation with fear-based superstition. His primary concept of “umbrellas of protection, ” that God provides authorities in our life to protect us, is statistically true. That’s the nature of wisdom: it’s statistically true, but not always. In general, parents are wiser than children. But when wisdom is taught as an absolute, and deviations from it are seen not as natural consequences but rather as divine punishment or demonic influences, all sorts of abuse are enabled.

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There is a strain of pietism and naivety endemic in many churches, particularly around divorce, physical, and sexual abuse. Let’s say there’s a situation where a spouse is physically abusing members of the family. In many quarters of fundamentalist piety, the Biblical exceptions to divorce for abuse/abandonment and adultery are quietly evaded.

While they may technically say these exceptions exist, for victims to escape abusers, the slant of all their teachings is towards forgiveness and restoration of the marriage. The victim is often encouraged to forgive and not utilize the option of divorce or is counseled that they are forbidden to remarry if they do so. Voices as mainstream as John Piper endorse this view. It’s as if they see the formal declaration of a marriage’s termination as worse than the acts that terminate it convenantally.

…

Jim Bob strikes me as an incredibly gullible person who is energetic but not smart enough to handle complexity. His religion, like Gothard’s cult, is formulaic. So instead of seeing his son as someone who needed to be separated from the family and subject to years of intense intervention, and perhaps that having more children (when he already had 14+) was unwise because he was already inadequately supervising his son, he simply assumed that simple evangelical methods of prayer, apparent repentance, and marriage would be sufficient to solve his son’s problem.

Likewise, Jim Bob saw the TV show as a “ministry opportunity,” not a huge outlier risk in exposing his children to fame and invasion of privacy when they were too young to meaningfully consent. His lack of sophistication was also apparent from his business sense. The Duggars were TLC’s #1 show, and eventually the #1 reality show nationwide, yet his contract at one point paid the entire family a mere $800,000 a season, well below the compensation of other reality TV stars of equivalent fame. The Kardashians, for example, had lower ratings and the top two stars were earning over $4 million per season, each. The Duggars made obscene profits for TLC, building the base of a cash horde where Discovery, Inc. would go from being a minor cable player to merging with Warner Brothers.

…

J.D. Vance, in Hillbilly Elegy, talks about the good work many fundamentalist churches do in the areas of drug recovery and addictions. When a church serves populations with low baseline levels of self-control, an absolute prohibition on substance use, say alcohol, can be highly functional. A person with a predilection for alcoholism, if they never touch alcohol, can be completely free, as alcohol is not necessary to human life. The problem is when this approach is applied to natural, necessary desires that must be moderated, such as food and sex.

Click over to read the whole thing. Interesting and provocative.

Best of the Web

Magdalene Taylor: Bring Back Meeting In Real Life - Another piece about opting out of the dating apps

Freya India: Your boyfriend isn’t your camera man

The Guardian: America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world - One again, Effective Altruism is creepy, even when adopted by people on the right. This profile shows that there’s something very weird and off putting about secular, rationalist right thinking and approaches.

Joel Kotkin: Faith and the City - Even in an age of rationalist skepticism, religion remains indispensable to urban life

Mary Harrington: What America’s weed habit says about the fall of Protestantism

David Murrow: Grandma-cracy: How older women take over churches

New Content and Media Mentions

I was a guest on the BBC World Service business report talking about Eli Lilly’s $5.3 billion expanding manufacturing center in Indiana.

As you know, I previously focused my research and writing on state and local policy in the US, and I still have people reach out to me about that.

I also have a new column out in Governing magazine talking about the case for subsidizing pro sports stadiums, something almost every economist and good government type opposes. Modeled as a branding expenditure, I think these can make actual business sense.

I was also mentioned about my book Life in the Negative World and other topics by Brian Almon, Mark Marshall, Joe Rigney, and Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox.

And I was a guest on several podcasts this week, including the Layman’s Lounge, Street Talk Theology, and the NC Family Policy Council.

New this week:

• My guest on the podcast was Anthony Bradley, who talked about the problems facing men, as well as the dynamics around men and the church. Bradley really knows his stuff here and this one has been racking up the listens.

• John Seel wrote a follow-up on the Christian Buddhism debate.

• And I highlighted more recent evidence about the failure of dating apps.