Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

Still loyal, even to our dust? What is there to conclude, then, but that in ways we cannot conceive, we are very wonderful? Imagine that we find ourselves restored, and our friends, and our enemies, and those so blighted and neglected that all their beauty had been only God’s to enjoy. Souls. A heaven of souls. We know something of what this might mean if we have ever loved anyone, and we would know more if we loved more. The kingdom of God is among us.

Existence is remarkable, actually incredible. At least tacitly, awareness of this fact is as prevalent in contemporary science as it is in the Book of Psalms, the Book of Job. Those who follow such things will be aware, for example, that reputable scientists can hypothesize other universes where beings precisely ourselves live out other lives, or where our consciousness subsists immortally. Our reality might in fact be a hologram. Contemporary physics permits and indulges extravagant notions of the possible, many of them quite beautiful. There is no need to credit any of these theories in order to reject the claims of the old commonsensical science to have discredited the Christian mythos, which is actually rather restrained by comparison with them, loyal as it is to what might be called a sacred thesis concerning the origins and the nature of things. Implausibility, a word that needs looking into, no longer affords reasonable grounds for rejecting this grand statement about the place of humankind in the cosmos, this account of a grand enactment of human value. So I have returned to the original language of my faith, crediting its Word as meaningful in the very fact that it is aloof from paraphrase. I accept it as one among the great givens to be encountered in experience, that is, as a thing that presents itself, reveals itself, always partially and circumstantially, accessible to only tentative apprehension, which means that it is always newly meaningful. In this it is like everything else, but much more so.

The human sense of the sacred is a fact. Like mathematics or human selfhood, its existence is not to be reasoned to by way of positivist or materialist premises. It is a given, a powerful presence, whose reality it is perverse to deny on the basis of a model of reality constructed around its exclusion. Granted, a million complications follow from giving primacy to Christianity, even assuming there is reasonable consensus around the meaning of that word. A million complications follow from imputing value to religion indiscriminately. Nevertheless, to avoid these problems is to close off the possibility of exploring any religion, here Christianity, deeply, in its own terms. In what follows I propose that certain Christian tenets that have been challenged and devalued should be considered again.

I have taken my title from the genealogy in the Book of Luke. Son of Adam, that is, of man, and Son of God are profoundly resonant phrases for Christianity, which have become over time virtual synonyms for each other and for the figure we call the Christ. Their appearance here, in Luke’s genealogy, should remind us that they address the matter of sonship, literal descent, which was central to messianic tradition before Jesus. And they transform it.

Both Matthew and Luke acknowledge the difficulties involved in satisfying the expectations of their culture that the Messiah should be identified by, among other things, his having a place in a particular line of human descent.

(Perhaps I should say here that when I say “Matthew,” “Mark,” or “Luke” I mean the text that goes by that name. I adapt the sola scriptura to my own purposes, assuming nothing beyond the meaningfulness of forms, recurrences, and coherences within and among the Gospels, at the same time acknowledging that different passions and temperaments distinguish one text from another. I have solemnly forbidden myself all the forms of evidence tampering and deck stacking otherwise known as the identification of interpolations, omissions, doublets, scribal errors, et alia, on the grounds that they are speculation at best, and distract the credulous, including their practitioners, with the trappings and flourishes of esotericism. I hope my own inevitable speculations are clearly identified as such.)

When Christianity made dogma of the virgin birth, it seems to me, with all respect, to have put the emphasis in the wrong place. In the matter of improbability, conception in the Virgin Mary is not categorically different from conception in ninety-year-old Sarah. Is anything too hard for God? The astounding claim, from a scriptural point of view, and the claim that is secured by the virginity of Mary, is that God is indeed, in some literal sense, Jesus’ father. The circumstances of his birth have an importance to early writers far beyond any credibility the Christian narrative is assumed to derive from their miraculous character, especially weighed against the skepticism they aroused even in antiquity, and beyond their placing Jesus in the series of improbable births that recur in Scripture, from Isaac to John the Baptist. Throughout biblical history, epochal lives had begun from two parents as well. So to be a second and greater Moses or David or Elijah would not require this singular, extraordinary birth. While Luke draws attention to God’s fatherhood of the whole of humankind, the special case of the divine paternity of Jesus means for these writers that he is himself God, and that he participates profoundly in human life without any compromise of his divine nature. This is an extraordinary statement about the nature of human life. The role of Mary, notably her virginity, has been interpreted in ways that have caused anxieties about the flesh, and reifications and disparagements of it. These are anxieties the Incarnation, to my arch-Protestant mind, should properly allay. Granting that our physical life is fragile and easily abused, precisely on these grounds it craves and should not be denied the whole blessing of Jesus’ participation in it.

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Incarnation, Resurrection — where do these ideas come from? It is almost a commonplace that Paul invented Christianity. Paul is often said to have imposed a massive conceptual superstructure on the life and death of a good man, perhaps a holy man, who would not himself have dealt in these daunting abstractions. Then what was the character of the movement that was already active before the Gospels were written, even before Paul’s conversion? We can catch some glimpses of it. In his Letter to the Philippians, Paul is generally taken to have been quoting a hymn when he holds up to them the example of Christ, who surrendered “equality with God” and “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” To be able to allude to a hymn implies a community that knows and values the hymn, which in turn implies a stable culture, however small. The Gospel writers might have known this hymn, or one like it. From Jesus’ birth to his exaltation it tells the story they tell. The Gospel writers can evoke at the same time a figure so persuasively human that his life seems sufficient in itself, without any reference to his transcendence. This means that his Incarnation, his life on earth, was real. Theologically speaking, this is a crucial point.

The “messianic secret,” concealed by the veil of flesh that obscured Jesus’ character and meaning from his contemporaries and followers, was of course no secret at all to the Gospel writers or to the primitive church. The truth of Jesus’ nature and role was the point of the telling, withheld in the narrative, to the extent that it is, because Jesus would not have been understood even by his disciples if he had revealed it earlier than he did. His reticence permitted him in his life and his death to give new content to an expectation that had been mulled for generations. The story is so familiar to us now that we can forget how strange it would have sounded in anticipation of Resurrection and Pentecost, before the meaning of death was transformed, and while the emergence in the larger world of the movement to be called Christianity was hardly to be imagined.