Is this the best theological book ever written?
Oliver Harrison writes:What's the best theological book y'all have always read? Something past Barth or Bonhoeffer? Aquinas or Calvin? Luther or Spurgeon? Rowan Williams or C South Lewis? Mine is a novel published xv years ago, written by a middle-aged American adult female and chosen simply Gilead.
Gilead is a single, relatively short and deceptively elementary book author and academic Marilynne Robinson. It was published in 2004 and is her second novel, following on from 'Housekeeping' in 1980. I don't know whether it took her all of those 24 intervening years to write only if it did it was quick work and time well spent.
The novel takes the class of an extended letter, written in the first person singular by an elderly and ill church building minister, The Rev John Ames, to his young son. The narrator, cognisant of his failing health, wants to leave the male child some communication, some autobiography, some aperçus – a kind of legacy in letters. Three primal numbers are established early on. The outset is the engagement. The book is set in 1956. The Cold War, nuclear weapons, race relations and television are all hot topics in America. The second is John Ames'south age. He was born in 1880, so he'southward 76 years erstwhile. He looks back on the Kickoff World War and the Low with first-hand experience and delves deeper into his family history with stories of his father and granddad from the Civil State of war and the abolitionist (anti-slavery) movement of the nineteenth century. The tertiary number is the age of his son: the unnamed boy is seven years. He remains bearding despite (or mayhap because) he is the recipient of the work, the intended reader.
Other characters appear in passing and are filled-out in a gradual way that reveals their human relationship with Ames and their personalities as perceived by him. Ames is subjective but besides self-reflexive, a reliably unreliable narrator or perhaps an unreliably reliable one. Principal amongst the cast are his wife (and the boy'southward female parent) Lila, much younger than Ames of course. Then in that location'due south Boughton, Ames' oldest and all-time friend, and a young man pastor at another church across town. The two old ministers take a kind of friendly feud, a theolomgical duel that has been going on for decades, but the love and affection them is undeniable. Finally, at that place is Jack, properly chosen John Ames Boughton. He is Boughton's wayward son, named for his begetter's best friend, our narrator, subsequently Ames' own wife and daughter died, leaving him widowed and childless – at least until Lila entered his life a decade or and so ago.
The last piece of information needed is the setting. Gilead is a remote boondocks in the southwest corner of Iowa and is almost as much a graphic symbol every bit whatsoever of the people. The place is nondescript: smalltown centre America. Hot in the summer, cold in the winter and a long bulldoze from anywhere interesting. And in the 1950s it is a backwater of friendship and fallings-out between families and gossipy neighbours. A identify where unseasonable weather or a pocket-size fire is big local news.
Enough with the synopsis already! Sounds wearisome, right? My wife thought then. I lent it to her and she described it as a 'yawn-fest' and 'the nigh wearisome book I take ever read.' Well, OK. I can see that that might be the instance. Certainly cypher that could be described as 'exciting' happens. No sex activity, no scandal, no violence or drama, no plot twists; nothing sudden or unexpected occurs. These are the musings, some might say the ramblings, of an old clergyman in the center of nowhere looking back on an uneventful life.
But that would be to miss the dazzler of the book. And the strange, unsettling, slightly sinister undercurrent of danger and malice that surrounds Boughton'southward dissipated son, Jack, our narrator's namesake and nemesis. What is his interest in Ames' son? Why is he sniffing effectually Lila, who is about the same historic period as him and surely about to be widowed? What are his intentions? And what, if anything, can Ames' do about it other than observe and record and warn and promise and fear?
'But' you might say 'what can this book tell me or teach me? How can it assist me, here and at present? I'm not a 76 year old church minister nearing the cease of my life. This isn't middle America. And even if, somewhat against the odds, you are an old pastor in Iowa this isn't 1956.' Ah, but this is a book of universal truths. Perhaps information technology speaks best to Christians or to parents or to preachers in detail (and here a confession: I am all three) only information technology has a lot to say about people, God and the world in full general. It's a book that will certainly exist ameliorate understood by those familiar with the Bible; many tropes and themes from both Testaments recur throughout 'Gilead' in ways both obvious and subtle. But information technology can also exist read (I would imagine) without any organized religion in, or familiarity with, Christian scripture.
And it's frankly difficult to overlook the stunning insights afforded by Robinson through her narrator. It'due south as if St Augustine's Confessions had been ready in the Midwest and written by Hemingway or Steinbeck. Information technology's Bruce Springsteen channelling Thomas A Kempis. Information technology's a miniature mod masterpiece of contemplative theology.
Ames is a blazon of Biblical patriarch in a clapboard chapel, a human being steeped in the stories of scripture. And, unsurprisingly, he finds himself identifying with Abraham or Zechariah, men like him who were unexpectedly and wonderfully the fathers of a son in old age:
The story of Hagar and Ishmael came to listen while I was praying this morning, and I found a great balls in it. The story says that information technology is not simply the father of a child who cares for its life, who protects its mother, and information technology says that even if the female parent tin can't find a way to provide for information technology, or herself, provision will exist made. At that level information technology is a story full of comfort. That is how life goes—we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, information technology seems, for all the assist we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of h2o. Fifty-fifty that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's. I need to deport this in heed. […] I began my remarks by pointing out the similarity betwixt the stories of Hagar and Ishmael sent off into the wilderness and Abraham going off with Isaac to cede him, every bit he believes. My point was that Abraham is in result called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to salvage the child. Abraham'due south extreme sometime age is an important element in both stories, not only because he can hardly hope for more children, not just considering the children of sometime historic period are unspeakably precious, but also, I think, because any begetter, particularly an erstwhile father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems well-nigh a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure and then little for their children, and so footling safety, even in the best circumstances. Groovy faith is required to give the child upwards, trusting God to honor the parents' love for him past assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness. I noted that Abraham himself had been sent into the wilderness, told to leave his male parent'due south house as well, that this was the narrative of all generations, and that it is only by the grace of God that nosotros are made instruments of His providence and participants in a fatherhood that is always ultimately His.
Besides as reflections on fatherhood late in life there is as well some wry, cocky-deprecating humour about the office of a government minister who, is afterwards all, only human: 'I had a dream one time that I was preaching to Jesus Himself, saying whatsoever foolish affair I could think of, and He was sitting there in His white, white robe looking patient and distressing and amazed.' And similarly funny observations nearly his flock: 'And so often people tell me almost some wickedness they've been up to, or they've suffered from, and I recollect, Oh, that once again! I've heard of churches in the South that oblige people to make a public confession of their graver sins to the whole congregation. I remember sometimes there might exist an reward in making people enlightened how worn and stale these old transgressions are. Information technology might take some of the shine off them.'
Perchance most striking are the comments on what used to be chosen (and still might be, for all I know) 'the human condition'. Ames notes: 'An old fire volition make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet. I believe the same metaphor may depict the man individual, as well. Peradventure civilization. Prod a lilliputian and the sparks will fly.' Indeed. Try it some time, with a leather frock and a welder'south mask and asbestos gloves.
This is an important thing, which I accept told many people, and which my father told me, and which his male parent told him. When yous encounter some other person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So y'all must remember, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you face up insult or antagonism, your outset impulse will be to answer in kind. Only if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the run a risk to show that I exercise in some minor caste participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You lot are free to human action by your ain lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably express mirth at the idea that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), just that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it. I am reminded of this precious instruction past my ain great failure to alive upwardly to it recently. Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an role player on a phase and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, considering it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be idea of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well exercise we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? I suppose Calvin'southward God was a Frenchman, just equally mine is a Middle Westerner of New England extraction. Well, nosotros all bring such light to carry on these great matters equally we can. I exercise similar Calvin's image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy the states. I believe we think about that far also petty. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God'due south enjoyment, not in whatever simple sense, of course, only equally you enjoy the beingness of a child fifty-fifty when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.
At times Ames is an old but clear-sighted seer with a swing seat on his porch: 'I take e'er worried that when I say the insulted or the downtrodden are within the providence of God, it volition be taken past some people to mean that it is not a grave thing, an evil thing, to insult or oppress. The whole teaching of the Bible is explicitly contrary to that idea. And then I quoted the words of the Lord: "If anyone offend these lilliputian ones, it would exist better for him if a millstone were put effectually his cervix and he were cast into the sea." That is strong language, merely there it is.'
Although if Ames is a prophet, he is ane without rancour or rough edges; every bit he himself reflects: 'How do you tell a scribe from a prophet? The prophets beloved the people they chastise.' But that doesn't mean he downplays God's justice and judgment: 'the desire for war would bring the consequences of war, considering there is no ocean large enough to protect usa from the Lord's judgment when we determine to hammer our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears, in contempt of the will and the grace of God.'
At that place is as well much about the hidden, secret joys of ministry:
When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the 'I' whose predicate can be 'love' or 'fear' or 'want,' and whose object tin can exist 'someone' or 'nothing' and information technology won't really thing, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around 'I' like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, and avid, and resourceful. To run into this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned. A good sermon is one side of a passionate chat. Information technology has to be heard in that way. In that location are iii parties to it, of course, only so are there fifty-fifty to the nearly private thought—the self that yields the idea, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the idea, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.
In another passage Ames goes through a box of those same sermons and revisits an former one:
1 of the sermons is on forgiveness. It is dated June 1947. I don't know what the occasion was. I might have been thinking of the Marshall Plan, I suppose. I don't observe much in information technology to regret. It interprets 'Forgive us our debts as nosotros forgive our debtors' in light of the Police of Moses on that bailiwick. That is, the forgiveness of literal debt and the freeing of slaves every seventh yr, and and so the great restoration of the people to their land, and to themselves if they were in bondage, every fiftieth year. And information technology makes the point that, in Scripture, the one sufficient reason for the forgiveness of debt is simply the existence of debt. And it goes on to compare this to divine grace, and to the Prodigal Son and his restoration to his place in his begetter's house, though he neither asks to be restored as son nor even repents of the grief he has acquired his begetter. I believe it concludes quite effectively. It says Jesus puts His hearer in the role of the father, of the one who forgives. Because if nosotros are, and then to speak, the debtor (and of course nosotros are that, too), that suggests no graciousness in us. And grace is the great gift. So to be forgiven is only half the gift. The other half is that nosotros besides tin can forgive, restore, and liberate, and therefore we tin feel the volition of God enacted through u.s.a., which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves. That still seems right to me. I think it is a audio reading of the text.
Finally, the book is also excellent on what might exist called the existential question of innate individual identity or fundamental, irreducible ontology, fusing Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein in a beautifully poetic passage that is typical of the whole:
In every important style we are such secrets from each other, and I practise believe that there is a separate language in each of united states of america, as well a separate aesthetics and a dissever jurisprudence. Every unmarried one of u.s. is a trivial civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, just with our ain variant notions of what is cute and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to alive. We take fortuitous resemblances among u.s.a. to exist actual likeness, because those around the states have as well fallen heir to the same community, trade in the same money, acknowledge, more or less, the aforementioned notions of decency and sanity. Simply all that really just allows usa to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between u.s.a..
It's very hard to either debate against that or to put it better.
Oliver Harrison keeps wicket for the Quakers in his Joy Segmentation oven gloves. He's likewise the Vicar of Holy Trinity Wilnecote almost Tamworth in Staffordshire. He sings out of tune but loudly, which is a kind metaphor for his whole life.
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