What If God is a ‘Pagan Amalgam’: Marilynne Robinson and Historical Bible Scholarship

Abstract

Abstract Marilynne Robinson is one of the most influential Christian writers and public intellectuals alive today, and her views on a range of topics should be taken seriously. In her 2015 essay entitled ‘Memory’, she argues that the ‘liberal side’ of American Christianity has retreated from scriptural theology under pressure from academic biblical criticism. Her dismissal of Hebrew Bible scholarship is centred on two primary and interrelated ideas. First is the idea that Israelite religion was embedded in a broader context of Ancient Near East (ANE) religious cultures, such that biblical stories and characters sometimes borrow from other ancient sources. Second is the problem that the scholarly understanding of ancient Israelite polytheism threatens to make God into a ‘pagan amalgam’. The interrelated problem, that is, is the uniqueness and transcendence of the Hebrew Bible, and the God who is its main character. In this article, I review the scholarship on ancient Israelite religion and Robinson’s complaints about it. I argue that Robinson treats the critical scholarship only at a distance, allusively, (mis)representing it and sometimes (mis)understanding it in superficial ways, but that her theological anxiety is warranted.