Pulitzers Marilynne Robinson does grand job explaining Biblical Truths from the Get Go

You're gonna have to do some background reading for this blog to make much sense. Begin with Sunday School for the last twenty years at a minimum then James Wood Review in the New Yorker. He does a spectacular job I think the March 14 print issue. And it's online.

     Ive met both of them, Wood at a Sewanee writers conference and Marilynne Robinson, professing Christian, Pulitzer prize winner and author of the new book on Genesis.

     Here are two salient quotes I will dance around later, one on page 126 and the other page 132. In addition to something to think about the rest of the year and taunt other thinkers, I think in my 8th decade I finally got the characters right in the story of Laman , Leah and Rachel, Jacob the father and his sons Benjamin and Joseph after he fathered many by Leah to get a shot at Rachel.

     Rachel dies giving birth to Benjamin. The writer Ron Rash does  Biblical justice to his fictional Rachel in his novel Serena. She loses a father in a knife fight but lives through the birth of her son and does not have a second child. 

   On page 126 Robinson says: " Modern anthropology has tended to build upward or downward and outward from reductionists defintions, humankind as naked ape, as phenotype of the selfish gene. Biblical anthropology begins with an exalted conception of humanity, then ponders our errors and deficiencies and our capacities for grace and truth, within the world of meaningful freedom created for them by an omnipotent God. This seems paradoxical, but sustaining paradox is the genius of the text."

    And page 138 : "Jacob is sometimes seen as a picaresque figure, the kind of prankster found in folktales....But writers understand and use the methods of storytellers. These ancient writers would surely have listened to the lore of their culture with intense interest, and reverence as well, and have found it authenticated by signs of ancient origins. Our Popular culture is the product of capital and technology and marketing. It is a best guess at interests and tastes that it also instills and exploits. It has only accidental points of contact with collective identity or memory. At the same time, a modern prejudice to associate theologically important narrative with folktale is often to diminish its capacity for meaning."

   Genesis moves quickly from Creation to the intimate Stories of Jacob and Laman, Rachel and Leah. the fact that we have love and grief in the deepest reaches of our soul "only make them more astonishing, over against the roaring cosmos.That they exist at all can only be proof of a tender solicitude".