Marilynne Robinson

The Argument

Marilynne Robinson is the most important Christian novelist writing in English today, and her significance for literary apologetics is difficult to overstate. Her Gilead novels — Gilead, Home, Lila, Jack — are the most sustained and serious attempt in contemporary American fiction to show what a genuinely formed Christian consciousness looks like from the inside, without apology and without sentimentality.

The Reverend John Ames, writing his letter to his young son in the knowledge that he will not live to see the boy grow up, is one of the great voices of American fiction — a man of genuine learning, genuine faith, and genuine doubt, who has lived long enough to know that he does not understand everything and wise enough to know that this is not the same as knowing nothing. His meditation on grace, on light, on the strangeness of existence, is theology done in the mode of fiction.

For literary apologetics, Robinson is the model of what Christian fiction at its best can do. She does not argue for Christianity. She inhabits it so fully that the reader experiences what it is like to see the world through eyes formed by the Reformed theological tradition — to see grace in the ordinary, to find the physical world saturated with significance, to hold together rigorous intellectual seriousness and genuine wonder. She demonstrates that these are not in tension. They are, in the tradition she inhabits, the same thing.