Review: The Widening of God's Mercy by Drs. Christopher and Richard Hays

There was no small amount of buzz accompanying the announcement of The Widening of God’s Mercy’s publication. Father and son, both Biblical scholars of some renown, publishing a volume where the elder would reverse his public and well-known position about same-sex relationships is not an event that most anyone had on their Evangelical Christianity 2024 bingo card. I was not immune to the anticipation, immediately pre-ordering the book. My eagerness was tempered only by the depth of my to-read shelf, which means I am only now reading and commenting on this book.

[Note: I found out only hours before writing this post that Dr. Richard Hays passed away less than two weeks ago at the age of 76, as the result of pancreatic cancer. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.]

The Widening of God’s Mercy, written by Dr. Richard B. Hays and his son Dr. Christopher B. Hayes, describes a stunning change of position on Christian acceptance of same-sex relationships. Richard had, in his 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, argued against their acceptance. His book has been used as a primary authority by many evangelicals over the past three decades, interpreting a handful of New Testament verses seemingly opposed to homosexuality as conclusive. And so this book comes as a genuine surprise. The book is concise, clear, easily readable, generous, and contrite. And yet for the life of me I can’t understand why this was their chosen approach to the question.

Widening makes the case that a careful reading of the Bible will show, contrary to traditional theological assertion, that God frequently changes his mind, being influenced by humans who appeal to God. The book is structured in three parts. The first part deals with Old Testament texts; the second with the New Testament, and the brief third part drawing conclusions.

Old Testament

The OT section is the most convincing in that respect, discussing texts from Genesis through the Prophets where the text blatantly describes God changing his mind. Traditional interpreters might argue instead that since God is, per theological agreement, unchangeable, that these texts must mean something more like humans came to a new understanding that looked like God changing God’s mind. Drs. Hays choose instead to take the text at face value: God changes his mind, and almost always in favor of more mercy and more inclusion. Good enough so far.

New Testament

The New Testament doesn’t include (at least to my recollection) any passages that explicitly describe God “changing his mind”. The second section of this book instead reviews a multitude of cases in the Gospels where Jesus brings a new, more expansive, more merciful interpretation of the OT law. Healing is appropriate on the Sabbath. Women are treated as fully equal to men. Prostitutes and sinners are embraced, not rejected.

It then spends its most significant time in Acts, examining Peter’s vision and experience with Cornelius, resulting in the church’s acceptance of Gentiles. This is the key interpretive text for the Hays’ as they argue for LGBTQ inclusion. They suggest three steps discerned from the Acts account of the subsequent Jerusalem Council that could be used for the church today in similar re-evaluations of understanding:

  1. The community’s discernment depends on imaginative reinterpretation of scripture.
  2. The community’s discernment depends on paying attention to stories about where God was currently at work.
  3. The discernment is made in and by the community.

This, too, is good as far as it goes. The church community should work together with the Spirit to discern God at work and how our understanding of God’s work needs to change over time.

And yet…

But this is where the book’s argument struggles. The section on the NT never argues that the NT accounts represent God changing his mind. It argues for the church’s “creative reinterpretation” of Scripture based on the leading of the Spirit, but the authors don’t try to argue that this represents a change of God’s mind. One could just as reasonably argue (as I think is more common) that God’s mind has always been for mercy and inclusion, but that humans have progressively had a clearer understanding of God’s mind over time.

If God’s change of mind is how we understand these interpretive evolutions, I am also left wishing for more insight into how we know that God’s mind has changed. What’s the trigger? The authors point to a series of interpretive changes of the past — they mention the acceptance of slavery as an example — but leave the how to the reader’s imagination. (They also ignore the many historic voices who spoke out against slavery even when the official voice of the church accepted it. Had God’s mind already changed and the church was just slow to catch up?)

Let me explain. No, it’s too much, let me sum up.

Am I happy where the authors have landed in their views of sexuality? Yes. Is it very heartening to see men admit their change of heart in public? For sure. But is their argument compelling? In my opinion, no, it’s not. I am sympathetic to arguments that God can change. It’s certainly the easiest way to deal with all the texts that say God changes his mind, and also the easiest way to think, say, about the efficacy of prayer. But the book fails to tie that idea to believers’ renewed understandings in the New Testament, and progressive revelation seems to me a much more reasonable interpretation given the textual evidence.

My 2024 Reading In Review

Another year full of books! (Previous summaries: 2023,2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007…

I read 63 books for the year, a few less than last year. I keep saying I’m going to stop logging to Goodreads, but it’s so easy and I’ve kept track there for so long that I still do it. I also keep my Bookshelf site over on my own website which I prefer to link you to instead.

The list is almost exactly a 50/50 split between fiction and non-fiction.

Here’s the full list of reading, with particular standouts noted in bold:

Theology / Ministry

  • Varieties of Christian Universalism by David W. Congdon
  • The Lost World of the Prophets by John H. Walton
  • Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
  • From The Maccabees to The Mishnah by Shaye J. D. Cohen
  • A Window to the Divine by Zachary Hayes
  • Wounded Pastors by Carol Howard Merritt
  • Lamb of the Free by Andrew Remington Rillera
  • Making All Things New by Ilia Delio
  • Reaching Out by Henri J. M. Nouwen
  • The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart
  • The Hours of the Universe by Ilia Delio
  • A Private and Public Faith by William Stringfellow

I wrote about the Zachary Hayes book this summer. It’s small and delightful. And I’m looking forward to revisiting Andrew Remington Rillera’s Lamb of the Free as a part of a book club starting next week.

Science and History

  • The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory by Tim Alberta
  • Finding Zero by Amir D. Aczel
  • The Murder of Professor Schlick by David Edmonds
  • Ringmaster by Abraham Riesman
  • The Grand Contraption by David Park
  • Neurotribes by Steve Silberman (RIP)
  • 3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan
  • A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis
  • Space Oddities by Harry Cliff
  • The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms
  • Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman
  • Black AF History by Michael Harriot
  • Debt by David Graeber

Ringmaster is a biography/history of Vince McMahon and his WWE empire. It’s a must-read as we enter four more years of a Trump presidency that will be about image and story line rather than truth.

Graeber’s book was fantastic as social science but prompted me to think theologically.

Memoir and Biography

  • This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz
  • The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon
  • An Autobiography, or, The Story of My Experiments With Truth by Mahatma Gandhi

Other Miscellaneous Non-Fiction

  • Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
  • All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld
  • Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
  • How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren

Fiction

  • The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer
  • Hell Is a World Without You by Jason Kirk
  • In Universes by Emet North
  • Exordia by Seth Dickinson
  • Through a Forest of Stars by David Jeffrey
  • Sun Wolf by David Jeffrey
  • The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain by Sofia Samatar
  • The Light Within Darkness by David Jeffrey
  • The Future by Naomi Alderman
  • Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  • The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes
  • Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
  • The Revisionaries by A. R. Moxon
  • Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
  • I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
  • The Midnight Line by Lee Child
  • Blue Moon by Lee Child
  • Do We Not Bleed? by Daniel Taylor
  • Heavenbreaker by Sara Wolf
  • Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde
  • Airframe by Michael Crichton
  • Extinction by Douglas Preston
  • Killing Floor by Lee Child
  • Die Trying by Lee Child
  • Moonbound by Robin Sloan
  • Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
  • Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
  • 2054 by Elliot Ackerman
  • Shadow of Doubt by Brad Thor
  • Tripwire by Lee Child
  • Spark by John Twelve Hawks (unintentional re-read)

Summary

I didn’t realize until I typed up the list for this post that I had run through so much fiction. Guess it was a year I needed some lighter reading. I did a quick count on the books on my to-read shelf and if I constrained myself to just those books, I might have it cleaned off by this time next year. (I mean, that’s unlikely, but it’s a decent goal.)

On Killing First and Loving Your Enemies

Last night I finished up reading Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman’s extensive history of Israel’s secret services. My friend Matt Burdette pointed me to the book and then gave me his copy to read. (Thanks, Matt!) It was enlightening for me, providing some adult perspective on events that linger vaguely in my childhood memories.

Matt’s comment when recommending the book was how careful the Israelis were about collateral damage. Indeed, Bergman’s sources recount many, many times when an attack on a target was either delayed or cancelled because the strike had the potential of killing wives, children, or bystanders. Regardless of where you fall on the morality of extrajudicial killing, this seems like a bare minimum of circumspection. Which makes Israel’s absolute destruction of Palestine this past year all the more striking in its wanton disregard. I’ll come back to that.

Israel’s history as a modern country is short and Bergman shows how intensely personal the mission of national protection and vengeance was to many early leaders of their security services. (One leader of the Mossad had on his office wall a picture of his grandfather, kneeling at gunpoint before Nazi soldiers, about to be shot. Imagine walking in to work every day and having that set the tone. Phew.) That fresh, personal link can make me sympathetic to the motivation for and justification of the long documented string of murders they committed. And yet I have some hesitancy.

To wade at all into the waters of discussion on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a cause for trepidation, but let me see if I can (carefully) arrange a few thoughts about this tragic past century.

First, the persecution and expulsion of Jews from many lands where they had lived for generations, finally culminating in the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust. Words fail to describe the horror. If any people could or should be forgiven for acts of vengeance, these people could and should.

Then the cycle of violent retribution begins. The Israelis begin their life as a country with the displacement of millions of Palestinians from their generational homes, sending them as refugees into unwelcoming neighboring countries and packing them into small enclaves. This causes Palestinian terror groups to strike back in truly horrible ways. Which in turn causes the Israelis to attack. And the cycle continues. At times over the past few decades it has seemed like peace had a chance to be established. Last year’s Hamas attack on Israel, though, followed by Israel’s unprecedented destruction of the Gaza Strip, leave even the most hopeful observers doubting that change can come.

I, of course, don’t have any good answers here. Both sides have been the victims of displacement and horrors; both sides have committed unspeakably violent acts. Whether one can try to put them in the balance to justify one side or the other is a question for ethicists and philosophers far wiser than me. Regardless, both sides are both victims and perpetrators. A century of an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth has left far too many toothless and blind. The leaders and fighters on both sides are shaped by generations of unresolved trauma. Things don’t look good.

At the risk of bringing the world’s third major religion into the discussion and making too pat an end to this post: this book and historical reflection make the revolutionary nature of Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies stand out to me in sharp contrast to the natural, justifiable inclinations for revenge. The Christian church throughout history has systemically done a really lousy job of following that teaching. But as individuals of all faiths, it seems to me that the path away from universal toothlessness and blindness starts with being willing to give it a try.

Life’s too short for uninteresting books

Nick Hornby, writing over at Lithub, says something that I am finding increasingly true: as you get older, life is too short to spend time on bad novels.

I try to find works of fiction, I promise, but it’s like pushing a wonky shopping trolley round a supermarket. I constantly veer off toward literary biographies, books about the Replacements, and so on, and only with a concerted effort can I push it toward the best our novelists have to offer. I suspect it’s to do with age and risk. A bad book about, say, the history of Indian railways will inevitably tell you something about railways, India, and history.

Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, however, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire.

It’s no secret that I read lots of books. For a long time my reading strategy has been one book at a time, in completionist fashion. Once I’ve put the effort in to give it a try, why not finish it so I can add it to my reading log? But more and more I pick up a book, almost always a novel, get a few chapters in, and decide I just can’t be arsed to finish it. So back it goes to the library. (Or, rarely, it gets resold to the used book store. Though I very rarely buy fiction any more when it can be borrowed instead.)

I’m at the point where my “to read” bookshelf has books that have been sitting there so long that I am no longer interested in the topics that were apparently interesting to me when I bought them. It feels like an entire next level of giving up to just throw those books in the resell pile, but, well, I’m getting older. Life’s too short to spend time in uninteresting books.

David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”

With some of my recent reading getting my mental wheels turning about the nature of who God is, I figured it was a reasonable time to pull The Experience of God off my shelf. Right off the bat in the introduction, Hart promises what I was hoping for: “My intention is simply to offer a definition of the word ‘God’…” Unfortunately, 332 pages later, what David Bentley Hart has written isn’t at all simple, and approaches a definition of “God” only from an oblique angle.

Hart structures the book in three major parts. In the first, he clarifies that the “God” he is describing is the ultimate deity, the prime mover, from which all other creation and being have their source. It is here even in the beginning section that he starts taking aim at what appears to be his actual target with this book: the arguments of the popular atheists of the late 20th and early 21st century. (Richard Dawkins is a regular whipping boy.)

The second section (comprising the bulk of the book) is structured around three characteristics which Hart points to as the core aspects of God: being, consciousness, and bliss. Each of these (long) chapters seems less interested in enlightening the reader on who God is than in disputing with the atheists and materialists. God is the root of being, declares Hart, and anyone who says differently is just stupid. There is no materialist explanation for consciousness, says Hart, and the materialists who argue for an evolutionary reason and dismiss God are illogical and foolish. There is no evolutionary reason for a search for beauty, truth, and goodness, says Hart, and those who would try to argue thus are intellectually dishonest. So it goes.

Hart’s arguments are at his strongest when he’s arguing for something instead of railing against something. The first part of his chapter on bliss was particularly good in that regard. Sadly, most of the book goes the other direction.

It’s very hard to review Hart without taking his blustery style into consideration. He’s never met a big word he didn’t like. He makes huge sweeping assertions without any hint of supporting justification. He seems to think that just by declaring something “obviously” wrong that it’s obvious to everyone and doesn’t need explained. In doing so he dismissively waves away not just the weak sauce of people like Dawkins but also more substantive scientists and thinkers who deserve better. Hart falls almost into self-parody at the beginning of chapter six: “[W]e should not mistake every pronouncement made in an authoritative tone of voice for an established truth.” While aiming this at popular atheists, it’s an argument that is equally valid against Hart himself.

There’s an old joke about a preacher, who at one point in his sermon notes has written: “weak point, pound pulpit”. As a lay theologian and not much of a philosopher at all, my trouble with Hart’s book is that he does so much pulpit pounding it makes me suspect the strength of his points. Even in places where I find myself in agreement with his conclusions I have a hard time feeling like the book was beneficial.

Henri Nouwen: An alert and aware spiritual life

Currently reading Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. What a wonderful little book! This bit in particular hit home today:

Not too long ago a priest told me that he cancelled his subscription to the New York Times because he felt that the endless stories about war, crime, power games, and political manipulation only disturbed his mind and heart and prevented him from meditation and prayer.

That is a sad story because it suggests that only by denying the world can you live in it, that only by surrounding yourself by an artificial, self-induced quietude can you live a spiritual life. A real spiritual life is exactly the opposite: it makes us so alert and aware of the world around us, that all that is and happens becomes part of our contemplation and meditation and invites us to a free and fearless response.

As timely in 2024 as it was when Nouwen wrote it in 1975. And I both understand the plight of the priest in his story and desire to have, as Nouwen says, a free and fearless response to all that happens around me.

2024 Reads: Making All Things New by Ilia Delio

Making All Things New is the most complete and succinct compilation of Delio’s theology and philosophy that I’ve encountered so far. She’s strongest in her call to bring our theology into alignment with modern cosmology, and in exploring how the human brain works and interacts with others. (Let’s not forget she’s got a PhD in pharmacology, after all, and was doing research on ALS or Parkinson’s or something.)

I still think she’s way too bought into Kurzweil’s singularity and transhumanism, but I’ll forgive her that because I think the rest of it is bang on. Very manageable at 200 pages.

Lamb of the Free by Andrew Remington Rillera

I have a small handful of theological books in my past that I look back on as turning points - books that spoke to me at my particular place and time, opened my eyes, and set my thinking about God in a new direction. The first of those is NT Wright’s Surprised By Hope; the second is Ilia Delio’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being. I’ll give it a week or two before I inscribe this in stone, but I’m inclined to think that Andrew Rillera’s Lamb of the Free is the next one. Let me try to explain.

In the Protestant church (at least), there has been much ink spilled over the years to systematize atonement theories, that is, to organize all the teaching about Jesus’ death and how it works to save us into some sort of coherent, synthesized framework. In the conservative evangelical world of my first 40 years as a Christian, the predominant, nay, the only acceptable atonement theory is penal substitutionary atonement, usually abbreviated PSA. PSA says that each of us, as a sinner, deserve God’s punishment, but that Jesus died in our place, taking that wrath upon himself. The children’s bibles usually summarize it as “Jesus died so I don’t have to”.

Rillera says that PSA fails to pay attention to how sacrifices worked in the Old Testament, and as such then horribly misreads the New Testament (particularly Paul and Hebrews). This may be the book that inspires me to go back to where I always get bogged down in the Bible In A Year reading plans, and do a close reading of Leviticus.

Rillera starts right off the bat in chapter 1 by making the assertion that

There is no such thing as a substitutionary death sacrifice in the Torah.

He notes that “for sins that called for capital punishment, of for the sinner to be “cut off”, there is no sacrifice that can be made to rectify the situation”, and that far from animal blood on the altar being a substitute for human blood, human blood actually defiled the altar rather than purifying it. Neither was that animal sacrifice about the animal suffering; to maltreat the animal “would be to render it ineligible to be offered to God”, no longer being “without blemish”. Already you can see the distinctions being drawn between this close reading of Levitical sacrifices and the usual broad arguments made in favor of PSA.

Lamb of the Free takes 4 chapters - a full 150 pages - to review OT sacrifices. I’m not going to try to summarize it here. But I have a new understanding and appreciation for paying attention to those details now! Then in chapter 5 he turns the corner to talk about Jesus, and summarizes his arguments thusly:

(1) According to the Gospels, Jesus’s life and ministry operated entirely consistent with and within OT purity laws and concern for the sanctuary.
(2) Jesus was a source of contagious holiness that nullified the sources of the major ritual impurities as well as moral impurity.
(3) Thus, Jesus was not anti-purity and he was not rejecting the temple per se.
(4) Jesus’ appropriation of the prophetic critique of sacrifice fits entirely within the framework of the grave consequences of moral impurity. That is, like the prophets, Jesus is not critiquing sacrifice per se, but rather moral impurity, which will cause another exile and the destruction of the sanctuary.
(5) But, his followers will be able to experience the moral purification he offers.
(6)The only sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’s death that is attributed to Jesus himself occurs at the Lord’s Supper. At this meal Jesus combines two communal well-being sacrifices… to explain the importance of his death. However, the notion of kipper [atonement] is not used in any of these accounts…

There’s a lot there, and Rillera unpacks it through the second half of the book. (I was particularly enthusiastic at his point (2), as it dovetails neatly with Richard Beck’s Unclean, where Beck argues that Jesus’ holiness was of such a quality that indeed, sin didn’t stick to him, but rather his holiness “stuck to”, and purified, other people’s sin and sickness.) Rillera says that Jesus’ death conquered death because even death was transformed by Jesus’ touch, and that Jesus came and died not as a substitution but rather as a peace offering from God to humankind. (His unpacking of Romans 3:25-26 and the word hilastērion was particularly wonderful here.) Jesus’ suffering under sin and death was in solidarity with humankind, and uniquely served to ultimately purify humankind from death and sin. (Really, I’m trying to write a single blog post here and summarize a 300 page book. If you’ve gotten this far and you’re still interested, go buy the book and read it. If you want to read it but it’s too pricy for you, let me know and I’ll send you a copy. I’m serious.)

I’ll wrap this up with a beautiful paragraph from a chapter near the end titled “When Jesus’s Death is Not a Sacrifice”. In examining 1 Peter 2, Rillera says this:

First Peter says that Jesus dies as an “example so that you should follow his steps”. In short, Jesus’s death is a participatory reality; it is something we are called to follow and share in experientially ourselves. The logic is not: Jesus died so I don’t have to. It is: Jesus died (redeeming us from slavery and forming us into a kingdom of priests in 2:5, 9) so that we, together, can follow in his steps and die with him and like him; the just for the unjust (3:18) and trusting in a God who judges justly (2:23; 4:19). This is what it means to “suffer…for being a ‘Christian’” (4:15-16). It does not particularly matter why a Christ-follower is suffering or being persecuted; it only matters that they bear the injustice of the world in a Christ-like, and therefore, a Servant-like manner.

There are a dozen other bits I’d love to share - maybe in another post soon. But for now, I’m thankful for Andrew Remington Rillera and his wonderful work in Lamb of the Free. I’ll be thinking about this for a long time.

2024 Reads: A Window to the Divine by Zachary Hayes, OFM

I just finished up a slow read of a wonderful little book. A Window to the Divine: Creation Theology by Franciscan theologian Zachary Hayes draws from Teilhard and Whitehead to suggest that we need to recognize that our approach to synthesizing modern science and creation theology needs some updating. As he notes,

…the worldview mediated to both believer and unbeliever alike by our modern culture is radically different from that which provided some key structural elements for our familiar theological vision and language.

After all, he asks,

If scientific or prescientific views of the world inter into the structure of a theology in some way, and if believers forget where a style of theology has come from and what elements have entered into its structure, what would one expect to happen when the scientific vision of the world begins to change?

In the first chapter, Hayes examines the relationship between theology and science, noting that they exist to answer very different sorts of questions. They need not exist in opposition to each other, he says.

…we will not expect science to prove faith claims, nor will we expect theology to prove the claims of science. But we will attempt to allow religious faith to express itself in terms relevant to its cultural context, which, at least in the Western world of the present, is strongly conditioned by scientific insights.

Hayes goes on to briefly examine the creation texts, suggesting a theological interpretation of the beginning of Genesis that is focused far more on God as the source and origin of creation rather than on a scientific explanation of how things came into being. He takes a chapter to discuss the origin of humans (all from Adam? or from multiple parents?) and how that view interacts with Romans 5. (As in Adam all sinned, so in Christ all will be saved…) Hayes suggests that these texts, too, should be read etiologically, that is, as discussing the cause or origin of sin and salvation, not of some literal genetic propagation of sinfulness. He bogs down a bit in a very Roman Catholic discussion of Original Sin, trying to briefly address both Augustine and the Council of Trent.

The last chapter, though, is worth the whole read, as he pulls the threads together. I will quote more liberally here, it’s just too good.

First, about sin:

Human history is a history of response, both negative and positive, to the lure of God’s love… Sin is not a mere infringement of a law extrinsic to our nature. It is a failure to realize the potential of our nature itself. If our nature is fundamentally a potential to expand, sin is a contraction… Sin is the resistance to expansion through union with others. It is the attempt to create human history in alienation from the only end that we ultimately have… Sin is a failure in the collaborative effort to move toward full personalization in human community.

And then regarding grace:

The history of God’s grace and human response finds a distinctive form of self-consciousness in the history of the Bible, and an unsurpassed level of realization in the person and destiny of Jesus Christ… God, who is love community, calls forth love community in creation through free response of human persons to the offer of divine grace.

And then, finally, about the relation of theology and science, and why it matters:

Theology need not fear science nor tremble before the power of reason. Rather both theology and science need to stand in awe in the face of the mystery that is our world and in the even greater mystery of God to which the world points…

We have no reason to assume that the mere fact of human life is the goal of the universe. What is important above all is a quality of life, not the mere fact of life. With this in mind, we can see that it is a more significant question to ask whether this sort of world is apt for the accomplishment of God’s purpose. It is, indeed, a cosmos that challenges humanity in mind and in will, and that is capable of eliciting both awe and wonder. It is a cosmos that draws humanity out of the narrow point from which it begins to expand to the mystery of the world and thus to move towards the Ground of the world. It is a world apt to stretch the finite spirit to the limits of its possibility to bring forth not only the fact of life, but a Godlike quality of life that is a created sharing in the loving thought of God from which the whole of creation emerges.

Beautiful stuff.

Finished reading: Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Robinson writing on Genesis, but I enjoy her writing enough it was definitely something I was going to read. Structured as a narrative commentary, Robinson doesn’t employ chapter breaks or other touchpoints within the text itself. It’s fascinating to read a commentary by a Christian writer who takes the text seriously but not necessarily literally. If there is a broad “point” to her book, it is to feature the uniqueness of Genesis among the Ancient Near Eastern texts, and to highlight the theme of unmerited grace that runs through it. From God’s forgiveness of Cain to Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers, Robinson tells us that Genesis is set apart from the other ANE texts this way.

I appreciated her book, but didn’t enjoy it as much as reading her essays. I need to pick them up for a re-read.