Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

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Calvin said the world is a school that draws us on always to know more. It is true that this has been a large part of our business as a species. Christian tradition tells us that we have a history of error, and a predisposition to err not at all diminished by the endless grief we have caused ourselves. So let us say Christ entered the world as essential truth, cosmic truth mediated to us in a form presumably most accessible to us, a human presence, a human life. That he should have done so is an absolute statement of our value, which we have always done so much to obscure.

If I am justified in proposing that the human is intrinsic to infinite creation, then the finitude by which we are constrained is providential, adapted to our genius — for meaning, thought, the treasuring up of art and knowledge — all of them things cultures have called god-given or godlike. Here is an analogy. Old John Locke wrote this about the self:

I suppose nobody will make identity of persons to consist in the soul’s being united to the very same numerical particles of matter. For if that be necessary to identity, it will be impossible, in that constant flux of the particles of our bodies, that any man should be the same person two days, or two moments, together.

Richard Feynman, the great twentieth-century physicist, wrote this:

[Atoms in the brain] can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago — a mind which has long since been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance and then go out — there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.

So the self would seem to be another arbitrary constraint. If there is at root no physical reason for individuality to be self-identical from one day to the next, then the self, like the world of our experience, is of great interest in the fact that it abides within and despite constant flux. There are times when selfhood feels like exasperating captivity, times when it feels alone with its ghosts, times when it feels confident in its particular resources, times when it is deeply disappointed with itself, distrustful of itself. Yet it is a constant in experience. And, within it, a history of life, a coherency of thought, a system of persisting loyalties, language, culture, habit, learnedness, even wisdom, accumulate and enrich themselves for all the world as if the self were a shelter from the storms of change. It isn’t, and it is. Vulnerable to influence of every kind, recidivist, intractable, through all its variations it is an indubitable presence. The wealth we can make of our capacities and perceptions we have entirely by grace of our selfhood. It is our part in the drama we all live out in this theater — of God’s glory, Calvin would say. But, unmodified by the language of theology, there is plain truth in the fact of its special character, as an enclosed place, so to speak, where what we say and do and feel, our birth and death, can be said to matter. Think how languages and cultures free and shape — and limit — expression and understanding. The pattern is so strongly recurrent that it ought not to be set aside simply because it does not reward interpretation in positivist terms.

We might turn to the mystery of a divine self. Certain attributes have always been ascribed to God and claimed by him — love, faithfulness, justice, compassion, all of these expressing but also certainly constraining an infinite power. The paradox of the Incarnation is already implicit in the divine nature. A boundless freedom is in effect limited by gracious intent toward our world and our kind. Calvin makes a beautiful integration of cosmic power with intimate solicitude. He says: “The whole world is preserved, and every part of it keeps its place, by the will and decree of Him, whose power, above and below, is everywhere diffused. Though we live on bread , we must not ascribe the support of life to the power of bread , but to the secret kindness, by which God imparts to bread the quality of nourishing our bodies.” Within the closed system of the world we are nourished, life sustaining life. Language like Calvin’s expresses the sense that, within this world, God is articulate in our terms, terms we share because he created us to share them. Kindness is uttered again in everything that nourishes. The attributes of the divine self are not merely theological, but present and intentional, as they would be if the bread were from Christ’s own hand. Calvin would say, And it is.

Christian theology must always be tested against its consequences for the interpretation of text. This is the vocabulary we have been given, to sound it as well as we can. I will turn to the Gospel of Mark. If my primary argument is that the experience we inhabit is an arbitrarily constructed, special reality relative to which God, Creator of the universe and whatever else besides, remains free, limited only by his own nature and will, then certain historical contingencies that are respected and sustained before the Incarnation can be put aside after it, without any negative reflection on the brilliance with which they also serve as carriers of sacred meaning. If I am correct that the genealogies in Matthew and Luke are both in some degree ironic, critiques of the assumptions that lie behind all genealogy, then there should be no surprise in the fact that laconic Mark altogether omits any mention of Jesus’ descent, and even of his parentage.

If the writer of Mark was John Mark, in Rome with Peter, he might have been writing for Gentile hearers who would not care much about blood ties to Abraham and David, and might even be misled or alienated by the mention of them. In any case, the conventions Matthew and Luke test and transform, changing the question of the meaning of the Messiah’s origins, Mark passes over entirely. That his Gospel was addressed to Gentiles is suggested by the explanations of Jewish practices that occur in it. In 1 Timothy, Paul cautions against those who “occupy themselves with myths and endless genealogies which promote speculations rather than the divine training that is in faith.” Paul says, “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith.” These defining attributes of those who identify with the God of the Bible are not new. They depart from earlier tradition in the degree to which they are freestanding, sufficient by themselves. They define and constrain without appeal to the historical identity of a people, the community to which Paul writes being newly created, self-selected, heterogeneous, polyglot. The writer of Mark, whoever he was, might simply have felt that the case for Jesus was strongest if Jesus himself, his healing and preaching and his Passion, were made the sole focus of the Gospel, with the story of his baptism and his acclamation by John and by the voice from heaven to establish his identity.

It is in order to find a broader base of interpretation that I discuss the three Synoptic Gospels together, no more than touching on any of them, but taking there to have been a community behind them, and a brief but striking and unfolding history as well. Never assuming anything as tactile as the dependence of one document on another, I do assume that the major business of the early church was to tell a sacred narrative again and again, to ponder it, to refine it to its essence, and that this would be as true for apostles and evangelists among themselves as it would be when they spoke in congregations. This is to say that refinement is no doubt to be expected even in very early writings. Paul’s epistles are sufficient to make the point.