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PÉTER PÁSZTOR 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 Robinson: Calvinian, Perspectives (March 2011) http://www.rca.org/Page.aspx?pid=7223, accessed 20 September 2016.
