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she explains in a stunning essay on confession, predestination is "attractive to
me because it makes everything mysterious. We do not know how God acts
or what he intends toward ourselves or toward others. We know only that his
will precedes us, anticipates us, can never look away from us. I think a sense
of mystery, therefore reverence, is appropriate to all the questions at hand.”®
These brief musings might not have done justice to the many ramifications
and beauties of Marilynne Robinson’s imaginative Calvinist apologetic, but
it should be clear that readers have responded to this fictional and discursive
portrayal of Calvinism. Indeed, Robinson is increasingly seen as one of the
major writers of our time.
One is therefore all the more flabbergasted to see the old hammer of doctrinal
correctness banging down on Robinson’s endeavours. A professor of theology,
I. John Hesselink, has written an appreciative two-part essay on Robinson’s
work, but could not resist the temptation of dogmatic censure: Robinson fails
to give Christ his due, she lacks the Christology she could have learned from
Calvin.’ To this criticism Robinson responded by saying that she writes for a
secularized readership who would be put off by references to Christ they would
perceive as trite. But she was too polite to answer that the professor, before
demanding doctrinal correctness in novels, might have noticed that Christ
is, as in the Old Testament, the hidden hero of her writing — which, by the by,
has no obligation to doctrinal completeness. The professor has failed to notice
that nearly every word Robinson has written is a call to pay attention to what
ministers have to say, ministers who have every means of offering an all-round
Christology. Theological critics might suspend, perhaps forgo, the use of old
hammers and take their cue from Robinson, who in her modern idiom, after
all, sings with the voice of the Psalmist, Milton and Emily Dickinson.
S RoBINsON, Marilynne, Credo, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, 36 (2008), 20-32, specially 24.
° HESSELINK, |. John, Marilynne Robbinson: Distinctive Calvinist, Perspectives (January 2011) see:
http://www.rca.org/page.aspx?pid=7142 accessed 20 September 2016, and Id., Marilynne Robin¬
son: Calvinian, Perspectives (March 2011) http://www.rca.org/Page.aspx?pid=7223, accessed 20
September 2016.