Creation Myths

In Marilynne Robinson’s latest book, Reading Genesis, she carries the theology implicit in her fiction back to its scriptural source. “So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word ‘good’ so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing,” marvels the pastor John Ames in Gilead. Passages like these provide the opportunity to inhabit, if only for a moment, a mind that can sustain such a vision of goodness—distilling the most hopeful and joyous parts of Christianity without lapsing into hokeyness. Part of what makes Robinson’s sense of goodness so plausible, and so compelling, is that even characters of astounding decency like Ames are also as clearly fallen as anyone else. Like Robinson’s novels, the Book of Genesis is about the faithfulness of God that surrounds human striving and suffering. The latest of Robinson’s attempts at resurfacing the beauty and truth of Christian faith in the face of its popular distortion and devaluation, Reading Genesis aims high: to establish the absolute goodness of God.