Notes — Marilynne Robinson on Biblical Interpretation, Calvinist Thought, and Religion in America

Notes on Marilynne Robinson in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/marilynne-robinson/), 20 March 2024.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson discusses biblical interpretation, Calvinist theology, and American religiosity shortly after publishing Reading Genesis, her book-length reading of the Bible’s first book. The conversation moves from the characterisation of Genesis’s flawed protagonists, through Leviticus and ritual sacrifice, to a sustained defence of John Calvin against his popular caricature as harsh and intolerant, then to Shakespeare, American secularism’s concealment rather than absence, Bible translation, and Robinson’s decades teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Q2 — How is it argued? Robinson argues by close reading and historical contextualisation rather than abstract doctrine: she reads specific biblical episodes (younger sons chosen over elder, Moses’s stutter, Leviticus’s dietary laws) as internally coherent literary and theological choices, and repeatedly redirects Cowen’s doctrinal framings (predestination, hyper-Calvinism, literalism) back to what Calvin’s own texts actually say, insisting that his popular reputation rests on people not having read him. Her recurring move is to treat apparent problems — cruelty in the flood narrative, arbitrary Levitical law, Calvin’s severity — as requiring interpretation rather than either wholesale acceptance or dismissal.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? Robinson’s textual claims about Calvin (the Institutes’ opening argument, his practice as an interpreter rather than a literalist, the scale of the Servetus execution relative to contemporaries) are stated with the authority of someone who has read the primary text closely, and are broadly consistent with standard intellectual-historical accounts of Calvin. [?] Her claim that American secularism is substantially performed rather than real — inferred from anecdotal evidence (a prayer request from an apparently secular person) — is a plausible but essentially unfalsifiable claim on the evidence given here. [?] Her genealogy connecting Calvinism to the American Revolution and Civil War via the Great Awakenings is a real strand of historiography (associated with the ‘political Hebraism’ and ‘Reformed Protestant political theology’ literatures) but contested rather than a consensus reading. [?source] Her account of Leviticus’s dietary laws as community-defining, parallel to Herodotus’s ethnography, reflects a mainstream historical-critical reading rather than a fringe one.

Q4 — What of it? This is the wiki’s first sustained encounter with Calvinism argued from the inside, by a serious literary and theological voice rather than as a historical curiosity or a doctrinal target — it gives Science and Religion a companion perspective distinct from Douthat’s evidentiary ‘probabilistic supernaturalism’ or Lennox’s science-versus-atheism framing: Robinson’s case rests on close reading of scripture and Calvin’s own texts, and on a claim about American religiosity being culturally suppressed rather than genuinely absent. It is also a rare wiki instance of a working novelist discussing craft (the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Shakespeare, work habits) directly alongside theology, making the episode a candidate anchor for any future literature-and-faith synthesis.

Glossary

Predestination (as Robinson frames it) — the doctrine that God’s choices, not human institutions or free choice, determine outcomes such as which son is favoured; Robinson resists applying the term narrowly to isolated biblical scenes, arguing nearly all Christian theologians, not only Calvinists, hold some version of it. [§ Betrayal, election, and biblical characterisation]

Hyper-Calvinism — a caricatured extreme of Calvinist determinism holding that, since salvation is already settled, evangelism and preaching are futile; Robinson declines to identify with the label and notes that Calvin himself preached constantly and founded schools, which she treats as inconsistent with the hyper-Calvinist reading. [§ Calvin: the interpreter, not the caricature]

The Institutes (of the Christian Religion) — Calvin’s major theological work, roughly 1,100 pages in the edition Cowen references; Robinson reads its opening chapters as a celebration of human dignity drawn from Renaissance humanism, preceding any discussion of sin. [§ Calvin: the interpreter, not the caricature]

Revised Standard Version (RSV) — Robinson’s preferred English Bible translation, which she calls ‘the classic American Protestant Bible in its latest form’; she contrasts it favourably with translations that retain words like ‘jealousy’ and ‘vengeance’, which she considers poor renderings in modern English. [§ Bible translation and teaching at Iowa]

The Antichrist (Robinson’s reading) — not a single climactic figure but, in her account, ‘an array of bad human actors and behaviors’ recurring cyclically across historical epochs. [§ Leviticus, ritual sacrifice, and the Antichrist]

Key claims by section

Betrayal, election, and biblical characterisation [§ Betrayal, election, and biblical characterisation]

Betrayal between brothers models ‘the offenses against ourselves as human beings that happen at every scale’; the recurring pattern of younger sons chosen over elder ones shows God acting free of human convention, including primogeniture.
Robinson resists reading any single episode as narrow ‘predestination’, noting that most Christian theologians, including Aquinas, held some doctrine of God’s determining choice.
Biblical figures are deliberately ordinary and fallible — unlike Homeric demigods — so that the reader understands God as acting through people rather than rewarding some innate exceptional quality; Moses, ‘a stumbling, bumbling figure, a stutterer’, is her central example.
She calls the Bible ‘the most complex document on the planet’ and does not treat her own inability to resolve every difficulty in it as a criticism of the text.

Leviticus, ritual sacrifice, and the Antichrist [§ Leviticus, ritual sacrifice, and the Antichrist]

Leviticus’s arbitrary dietary and ritual laws, read alongside Herodotus’s ethnography of small ancient communities, function to establish a distinct communal identity for Israel under Moses against a surrounding idolatrous culture.
This Mosaic law is not, in her view, still binding on Christians — ‘we’ve been given other means by which to create identity’ — though commandments like ‘thou shalt not kill’ persist as characterising moral laws.
Biblical ritual sacrifice functioned largely as a communal feast, including provision for ‘the widow, the orphan, the Levite’, and probably served as a rough public-health measure ensuring periodic shared nourishment.
The Antichrist is, for Robinson, a recurring pattern of ‘bad human actors and behaviors’ across historical epochs, not a single figure to be named (she explicitly declines to single out any pope or historical individual).

Calvin: the interpreter, not the caricature [§ Calvin: the interpreter, not the caricature]

Against ‘bite-the-bullet’ literalist Calvinism, Robinson insists Calvin’s own career was interpretive: he wrote that a thousand years of misreading scripture would take a thousand years to correct, and his method reconciled the text to ‘the best understanding we feel we have about the nature of God.’
Calvin’s diminished modern reputation traces, in her account, to his association with early European revolutions — Cromwell’s England, the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch revolt against Spain — and arguably the American Revolution and Civil War; this volatility, not his theology’s content, explains the polemic against him. [?source]
Calvin’s sole association with a religious execution (Michael Servetus) is, she argues, a minor event set against the record of contemporary European monarchs and bishops.
The Institutes’ opening chapters — ‘the only true knowledge of God is born of obedience’; to encounter God, ‘descend into yourself’; to understand yourself, ‘contemplate God’ — celebrate human dignity in a Renaissance-humanist register, before any discussion of sin.
Calvin never licensed judging who is saved or damned (‘Can’t. You can’t tell about yourself; you can’t tell about anybody else’), and his Dutch, English Protestant, and early American cultures were, in her reading, comparatively egalitarian rather than hierarchical by the standards of their time.

Shakespeare and Calvinist encounter [§ Shakespeare and Calvinist encounter]

Shakespeare’s religious context, per Robinson’s doctoral research, was political rather than theological: the operative distinction of his time was Anglican versus dissenting Protestant, not Catholic versus Protestant, since Catholicism had been effectively expelled from England since Henry VIII.
She traces Calvin’s influence on Shakespeare’s late plays (The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest) to his account of any human encounter as an encounter with God — ‘what would God want from this encounter?’ — which she connects to the late plays’ scenes of recognition, pardon, and embrace.
She reads Leontes’s jealousy in The Winter’s Tale as pure imagination, comparable to Othello, and treats the play’s wronged women as genuinely ‘honest, virtuous people.‘

American religiosity and its concealment [§ American religiosity and its concealment]

American secularism is, in Robinson’s account, substantially a matter of concealment rather than absence: religion’s association with ‘inhumane values’ in public life drives people, including apparently secular academics, to hide belief rather than abandon it. [?]
Against the ‘least common denominator’ theory that religious pluralism dilutes American religiosity, she argues immigrant communities — sustained by religious cultures tied to their places of origin — are now the country’s most reliably religious population.
She attributes Iowa’s recent rightward political shift largely to a ‘brief period’ under Governor Kim Reynolds and a broader Trumpist ‘fad’, and expresses grief at what she sees as the erosion of the state’s historic ‘generosity and civility.’
Asked whether progressive ‘woke’ politics descend from seventeenth-century American Protestantism, she declines the direct lineage but accepts the substance: alleviating injustice is consistent with her own Protestantism, and she reads it as the ‘generous evolution of a democratic society’ rather than a specifically Protestant inheritance.

Bible translation and teaching at Iowa [§ Bible translation and teaching at Iowa]

Robinson prefers the Revised Standard Version, criticising newer translations for retaining words like ‘jealousy’ and ‘vengeance’, which she considers poor modern-English renderings; she favours the Jewish Publication Society’s ‘passionate’ over ‘jealous.’
Across roughly twenty-five years teaching at Iowa, she was repeatedly surprised by students’ private biblical knowledge despite public reticence, and identifies a ‘spontaneous generosity’ in younger students’ admiration for Jesus exceeding formal religious adherence.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and craft [§ The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and craft]

The Workshop’s enduring pre-eminence rests, in her account, on a self-sustaining culture: students trained as constructive critics of each other, a highly autonomous faculty, and a reputation in which ‘everybody’s success feels like everyone else’s success.’
Unlike Southern writers, who write as Southern writers, most Iowa students arrive from elsewhere to study rather than to express a regional ‘Iowa voice.’
Her ‘most unusual successful work habit’ is patience with the slow, often frustrating approach to a piece of writing, treated as part of the process rather than an obstacle.
She declines any engagement with AI and large language models, saying she feels fortunate her lifespan has not required her to become ‘adequate with’ them.