Human Nature and Morality in Genesis

“The whole of human existence is like some sweet parable told in the most improbable place and circumstances. … God values our humanity. … One of the things that's fascinating about the Hebrew Bible is that it declared and was loyal to the fact that God is good and creation is good.”

Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson joins Miroslav Volf to discuss her latest book, Reading Genesis. Together they discuss why she took up this project of biblical commentary and what scripture and theological reflection means to her; how she thinks of Genesis as a theodicy (or a defense against the problem of evil and suffering); the grace of God; the question of humanity’s goodness; how to understand the flood; the relationship between divine providence and working for moral progress; and much more.

About Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson is an award-winning American novelist and essayist. Her fictional and non-fictional work includes recurring themes of Christian spirituality and American political life. In a 2008 interview with the Paris Review, Robinson said, "Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I've found fruitful to think about."

Her novels include: Housekeeping (1980, Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award, Pulitzer Prize finalist), Gilead (2004, Pulitzer Prize), Home (2008, National Book Award Finalist), Lila (2014, National Book Award Finalist), and most recently, Jack (2020). Robinson's non-fiction works include Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015), and What Are We Doing Here?: Essays (2018). Her latest book is Reading Genesis (2024).

Marilynne Robinson received a B.A., magna cum laude, from Brown University in 1966 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977. She has served as a writer-in-residence or visiting professor at a variety universities, included Yale Divinity School in Spring 2020. She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has served as a deacon for the Congregational United Church of Christ. Robinson was born and raised in Sandpoint, Idaho and now lives in Iowa City.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
• Marilynne Robinson’s New York Times article, “What Literature Owes the Bible” (2011)
• Reading Genesis as the singular ancient literature that it is
• The Bible (and Genesis) as theodicy
• How Calvin and Luther influenced Robinson’s approach to Genesis
• The benefit of reading Genesis as a whole
• The story of Joseph
• The fractal nature of the bible
• Unsparing, honest descriptions of the characters
• “I think that the fact that they are recognizably flawed creatures is, what that reflects is the grace of God. He is enthralled by these people that must have been a fairly continuous disappointment, you know? We have to understand humankind better, I think, in order to understand what overplus there is in a human being that God loves them despite their being so human.”
• “An amazing little theater of domestic dysfunction.”
• Abraham and Isaac: “Poor Isaac … or he could just be a plain old disappointing child.”
• “The Bible is a theodicy.”
• God’s goodness, and a defense of God
• God’s value of humanity and the conservation of the human self
• “God stands by creation.”
• Humanism in Genesis
• “Humanity sinks so deep into evil. that they become near incarnations of evil.”
• Genesis 6: “Every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was Only evil and continually.”
• Total depravity and the bleak view of humanity
• Noah and the Flood
• “… there's a kind of a strange lawlessness of Genesis.”
• “When God remakes the world after Noah, after the flood, he does not change human beings. He gives them exactly the same blessings and instructions that he did originally, which is simply another statement of his very deeply tested loyalty to us as we are.”
• “Finding a humane way to deal with the inhumanity of human beings.”
• Genesis 8: “Because human beings are evil, I will never destroy them.”
• Grace as a condition of possibility for all life
• The similarities between Hebrew Bible as a philosophic text, drawing influences from cultures around them
• “what is a greater question of theodicy than the fact that populations are wiped off the face of the earth every so often—it must have been so common in the ancient world with plagues and wars and all the rest of it.”
• “Every human, every thought, all the time: evil.”
• “Genesis is a preparation for Exodus because the solution to human wickedness, which nevertheless does not violate human nature, is law.”
• What is the moral purpose of humanity?
• The roaring cosmos and modern atheisms: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on moral purpose is gone, humanity is just a little boat amidst a storm
• “The whole of human existence is like some sweet parable told in the most improbable place and circumstances.”
• Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
• Providence and moral progress
• “We’re still terribly violent. Terribly violent people.” “And terribly blind to our violence.”
• Revelation and God’s control of an otherwise nasty world
• The possibility of human encounter

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Marilynne Robinson and Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give