THIS volume is the happy fruit of a substantial conference on the novels of Marilynne Robinson, and, because the focus is so sharp, it has more coherence than many books that come out of conferences. In this book, Robinson’s novels are placed within the context of the varying phases of American Evangelicalism, and, indeed, of Wheaton College, Illinois, where the conference was held.

Different chapters relate the theology of the main characters in Robinson’s trilogy (Gilead, Home, and Lila) to St Augustine and Calvin, especially the latter, of whom Robinson is a doughty public champion. This means that issues such as predestination and divine grace are prominent.

There is a chapter on John Ames (one of the central characters of the trilogy) as a preacher, for whom composing a sermon is a kind of prayer. He is a “manuscript” preacher: every word is written and read out, a method that is defended by Lauren Winner. Ames admits to feeling inadequate when Lila, the itinerant girl who became his wife, is in the congregation, and Winner suggests that this is because of his love for her.

That may be partly true, but more significant is the fact that Lila has been through so much turmoil and suffering in her life that Ames, who has led a very comfortable life, wonders how it can possibly seem real to her. That comfortable life is brought out in the important chapter on the African American experience; for, although Ames’s grandfather was a fierce abolitionist, he himself reflects the white conservative attitude of the 1950s and ’60s, distancing himself from the civil-rights movement. The town of Gilead once contained a black community, but when their church burnt down and they moved out, the white churches remained unmoved. The balm of individualistic faith was not enough, if the cancer of racism had not been first cut out.

A chapter by Rowan Williams argues, therefore, that we need to move from the pursuit of goodness to a sense of solidarity with all humanity, especially those on the margins. He links this with Barth’s election, in Christ, of all humanity, and reads the novels in this Christological light. It is Lila who represents this dimension, because she cannot bear to think of heaven without all those she has lived with in her vagabond life, whose kindness and frailty made her what she is.

There is a chapter by Robinson herself, and a discussion between her and Williams, as well as an interview with her, in which she discusses the importance of novels in enlarging our sympathetic imagination, and her own vocation as a novelist. She says of every Christian: “What you have to do is consider yourself to be a unique expression of what is humanly possible.”

She notes that she is blessed in knowing what she had to do, “and if you’re trying to accommodate yourself to expectations that are not yours — or that are culturally defined for you ahead of you — then you are not being what God made you to be.”

In her novels, she has succeeded wonderfully in what she felt that she had to do, and this book illuminates important aspects of what this is.
 

The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford, and an Hon. Professor of Theology at King’s College, London. He is the author of The Beauty and the Horror: Searching for God in a suffering world (SPCK, 2016).

Balm in Gilead: A theological dialogue with Marilynne Robinson
Timothy Larsen and Keith L. Johnson, editors
IVP Academic £21.99
(978-0-8308-5318-2)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80