"a typical error of Christian theology" - The Intellectual Courage Of Marilynne Robinson

INSTEAD OF GOING OVER the stupid things said about me on another perhaps even more moribund blog, which might be entertaining and which might give me a chance to exercise my wit after a period of too much seriousness in my life, I'm going to go over one of the most interesting things I've come across this week in an interview with Marilynne Robinson  conducted by Belle Tindal and Justin Brierly on the Re-Enchanting Podcast from Tyndale House.   

After many fascinating passages touching on Marilynne Robinson's long time public fascination with the Puritan tradition and John Calvin, in particular she says the single most insightful and interesting thing about what I think is the Christian theological error of predestination.   It's notable before the question and answer to note that in addition to giving what I think is the exact source and etiology of the error in the theological attempt to make the mind of God obey our own limited concepts of causality (which she insightfully  notes is a product of our limited knowledge of how objects interact) and what I take to be the Greco-Roman conception of "omniscience,"  she definitively calls it "a typical error of Christian theology." I will note that in several places the great Bible Scholar and theologian out of the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition, Walter Brueggemann has dismissed the traditional Calvinist triad of God being "omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent" as coming from Greek classical philosophy and not the Hebrew tradition.  

Far more than is typical of especially modern polemical secular intellectualism, you can see two real intellectuals engaged in theological practice are ready to make a critique of something which is basic to the tradition they come out of and, in Brueggemann's case, was the church that ordained him.  I think that's something that is far more typical and, at least in mainline churches, permissible than it is in modern secularism, both on an intellectual and, far more so a popular and media level.  You don't typically find Harvard credentialed lawyers bringing up the fact that it has produced some of the most corrupt, craven and cowardly lawyers before the public mind and trace it back to some of the most typical strains of thought taught there, nor for those from Yale, Princeton, Georgetown, etc.  

JUSTIN BRIERLY:  It's interesting hearing you say that your approach to writing the novel, you don't necessarily know what's going to happen, you haven't necessarily sketched the end from the beginning. Obviously many people think of a novelist as a bit like God in their "world," sort of has mapped out everything and knows what will happen, and is essentially writing the script in the play. And in a way that's often the way it's associated especially with some forms of Calvinism, that there is a predetermined script and that we are all going to follow. For the glory of God, of course. But none the less we cannot diverge from the character lines and parts that we play, in that sense.  What's your view on that, Marilynne?  Is it like that or is it more like your one where you don't necessarily know what's happening, maybe God doesn't necessarily know exactly what's happening next?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I don't speculate on what God knows, that's above my pay grade, as they say.  But, you know, if you read Calvin he, obviously,   neither he nor anyone who believed in predestination believed that it had the kind of consequences that you describe.  They make the argument for the theory, then they are all moralists, ethicists who put most profound importance on the choices you make on the assumption you are making them responsibly out of your own resources or lack there of. If you look at the Summa Theologia or at the Summa Contra Gentiles you will find that Thomas Aquinas believed in predestination.  If you read Ignatius of Loyola you will find that he believed in predestination, it's very straight forward about it.  Augustine, of course, did.  I mean it seems to theology in the pre-modern period to have been a natural consequence of God's omniscience.  You know.  I think that if you understand time differently - haven't written that essay yet - but I think that they are, all of them captive - here I'm talking about St. Augustine - all of them captive to a locked-in causality, the only kind of causal relations that we can see among things before very recently.  And that has very direct determinist implications.

I think predestination is characteristic of Christian theology, it is a typical error of Christian theology that we could learn to think around it.  That Calvin has been associated with it polemically and, based on the ignorance of other traditions that it has been treated as if it has been something that were only his.

As she has in the same interview and elsewhere commented on the modern habit of relying on cartoons drawn by second-third-fourth, etc. party critics and mockers for people who were deep and profound thinkers in place of doing the intellectually responsible thing, READING WHAT THEY SAID INSTEAD OF WHAT THEIR DETRACTORS CLAIMED THEY SAID, I will have to defer to someone who has actually read him.  Though that is exactly what the problem she presents consists of in the beginning, relying on what other people have claimed to have read other authors' works claim about them.  It is a problem that there is no other way to weed out the responsible secondary sources from the irresponsible and dishonest ones than to check their claims against the primary texts.  

Clearly what she criticizes among the would be intellectual class, certainly much if not most of what passes as educated points of view in academia and the even more apt to be irresonsbile tertiary and even remoter reaches of would be erudition in the popular presentation of polemics and pop garbage - the media, for the most part resides in those last two categories.

Most of what is taken to be "educated" and credentialed as that is based in what a cynical older music major told me when we were both taking a course in Bach my Freshman year.  As we were preparing for the mid-term exam (do they still give those?) she said you have to psychoanalyze the teacher, figuring out what they wanted to hear and handing that in to them.  I think that's as accurate a description of the basis of English language education as it has devolved into being - who knows, perhaps it generally has always been that.  The business of credentialing students as being "educated" is a pretty dodgey thing as it is.  

But the most important thing is that she, a confirmed admirer of and student of John Calvin and other Calvinists, has no problem diagnosing what has to count as a major and extensive instance of him getting something very wrong and which has, especially in the expansion and, perhaps, distortion of the idea of predestination.  I think it is one of the major sources of the pathology that infects a majority of those white evangelicals who have adopted Trumpzian fascism, though that's more to do with the fun-house mirror view of the pseudo-religious media than anything from Reform theology at its most responsible and nothing much to do with the Gospels, Acts or the Epistles.   

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I will note one interesting thing based on Marilynne Robinson's comments about the consequences and and implications of our very human limits in perception, cognition and thinking, especially in regard to the ability to focus on the natural universe that the first two times I listened to the interview I was doing manual labor and didn't look at the screen.  While listening again to type out that passage, the border of the image of the hosts and Robinson, I took the background to be a sort of marbleized paper effect, having a random, unintended spread of color and tone.  But then I realized it was a panoramic view of what I believe is London, with its myriad of intentional, precisely built structures and roadways, no doubt hiding the People and animals and other life in the picture due to its big-picture view.  Science strives to give the big picture view, as well, mashing together many individual objects and events to try to discern some general patterns or non-patterns and to come to some allegedly overall ways to think about those.  That's especially true at the most reductionist scale of things which can only see atomic and subatomic particles and claims that that is the entirety of reality.  

That seemed to be something worth pointing out, too.