Reading Genesis Quotes

“If we could do only those things God wills, we would not be truly free, though to discern the will of God and act on it is freedom. Our human nature as fallen and our human nature as divine have a dynamic, asymptotic relation with each other, meeting at infinity, perhaps.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“God’s great constancy lies not in any one covenant but in the unshakable will to be in covenant with willful, small-minded, homicidal humankind.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“All this is related to the fact that the Bible does not exist to explain away mysteries and complexities but to reveal and explore them with a respect and restraint that resists conclusion.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“the onset of Being and the creation by God of His image in humankind is undiminished in all that follows despite the movement away from the world of God’s first intention—modified as this statement must be by the faith that He has a greater, embracing intention that cannot fail.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“Our punitive bias, the legitimation of vengeance, in many cases the sanctification of it, which never means respect for the fact that God has claimed it for Himself, very much complicates the issue. If one wishes to align oneself with the will of God, granting every difficulty, grace, kindness is clearly the safer choice.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“Laws based on compassionate identification with those most vulnerable to abuse are vanishingly rare, in antiquity and in every subsequent era. It is a comment on human nature, presumably, that a captivity so long and profound would be required to introduce this kind of empathy into personal and social morality.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been.” Here is the realism that sets Scripture apart. Jacob has found Joseph, not only living but in a position to preserve the lives of his whole family. Benjamin is safe and favored by Joseph. But the days of many years have been full of dread and loss and grief and suspicion, and no ending can be happy enough to change this.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“Cain’s descendants, through vengeful Lamech, also included Jubal, “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.” Considering the importance of music in the Hebrew Bible, this is no small thing.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“The book of Genesis is framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, of Cain by the Lord, and of his ten brothers by Joseph.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“to emphasize Jacob’s refusal to entrust Benjamin to his brothers, which is absolute at first and then, under the extraordinary pressure of circumstance, becomes a tortured and weary concession to necessity. This family, of whom it is uniquely true that they are chosen by God to carry forward His will for humankind, must be as unhappy as any family could be. When we consider what the favor of God can look like, Jacob and his sons should surely be borne in mind.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“Since the Lord put that mark on Cain, the gist of every story in Genesis is that human judgment is no equivalent of God’s justice.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“It is a terrible dream, heavy with grief—in case providential might be taken as a synonym for happy or propitious. The long-term consequences of the choice to settle in Egypt will be—have been—unfathomably great. Debate about whether these events actually occurred, whether the figures involved are in any sense historical, can never be resolved and need not be. The great fact is the power they have had to shape history.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“History is so much a matter of distortion and omission that dealing in truth feels like a breach of etiquette. However, if a people truly believed that it interacted with God the Creator, it might find every aspect of its history too significant to conceal.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“History is so much a matter of distortion and omission that dealing in truth feels like a breach of etiquette.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“His debt cannot be repaid, but it can be forgiven. This is the economics of grace.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“The habit of reading Scripture piecemeal, whether for preaching or for the purposes of scholarly argument, or because it is considered to have its full meaning in isolated phrases or verses or episodes, is so deeply engrained that the larger structures of the text, its strategies of characterization, its arguments, can be completely overlooked.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“The very mingled characters in Genesis, in the fact of their flaws and errors, should give hope to us all.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“Love and grief are, in this infinite Creation, things of the kind we share with God. The fact that they have their being in the deepest reaches of our extensionless and undiscoverable souls only makes them more astonishing, over against the roaring cosmos. That they exist at all can only be proof of a tender solicitude.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“That God intends the unfolding of His blessing through human history, to all the families of earth, means that in its nature it anticipates what for human purposes is unforeseeable, that it does not reveal its whole meaning in the course of any life or generation or era.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“Here two of its great figures are determining the course of history—on one side weakness, custom, and fond partiality, on the other, deceit and shame and, no doubt, filial reverence and simple pity, divine intent embracing it all. The very existence of the Hebrew Scriptures, as much as the narratives they contain, testifies to the steadfastness of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a name the Creator of heaven and earth has chosen for Himself.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“This is an instance of the fact that the covenant is not contingent upon human virtue, even human intention. It is sustained by the will of God, which is so strong and steadfast that it can allow space within providence for people to be who they are, for humanity to be what it is.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“Somehow he is able to believe God long after belief seems impossible. This is the quality for which he is uniquely revered, and one meaning of it is that he does not in any way attempt to bend God’s favor and power to his purposes, to impose his very modest though very passionate yearning on God’s will, even though his longing aligns perfectly with God’s promise.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“we can be beautiful collectively as we are singly—”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“There is nothing for which the Hebrew writers were more remarkable than their willingness to record and to ponder the most painful passages in their history, even the desperate, brutal confusions of the early period in the promised land.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“I am assuming, always, that there is a point of view of the text, that these stories have been considered together, seriously and reverently and in the light of experience, that their antiquity does not mean they are naïve, and that the homiletic traditions that isolate them within the text, that impose the convention of pericope on them, should not be allowed to make them seem simple.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“In all three recurrences of the story, the patriarchs act badly and the pagans act well.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“To honor a curse, whatever potency it was thought to have, more highly than the blessing God gives through Noah to all people can only be a very grave error.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“Noah does what God will not do. He curses a human being.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“The Lord, in the thoughts of His heart, has yielded to His love for the incorrigible—in Old Testament terms, His Absalom; in New Testament terms, the Prodigal; in theological terms, the lot of us.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis

“This is the irony of providence, that it is served by just those steps that are taken to defeat it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis