PositiveBookPost\"She reads scripture as sensitively as she has shaped her novels, and, as a Calvinist, she brings a coherent theology to bear. But I suspect that her main preparation for this project was in the pulpit. The proper work of preaching and religious teaching, to my mind, is simply love, Robinson’s great topic in the novels—not romantic love but the helpless needs and attachments of the family. She bolsters the old hope that, when women get more power and more audible voices, these will be constructive and moderate on this instinctive basis ... The divinity who needed explaining was the single, remote, unembodied, all-powerful, just but loving and protective God of the Hebrews. In this connection, Robinson naturally takes up theodicy, or the problem of reconciling such a God with the existence of evil in his creation ... For me, merely contemplating such contradictions is inspiring, as if violent and greedy humankind is not going to wear out nature’s patience or reach other logical limits within this generation. One glory of good scriptural and theological exegesis (as C.S. Lewis found out) is that those who are neither converts nor candidates for conversion may welcome it; it is literature. The book has definite faults. Robinson brushes off important matters of textual and contextual history; she shows very little interest in Classical Hebrew, or in Judaism of any age. The propensity to “assume” what she wants to be so feeds into her most disturbing tendency, which is to jump forward to Christianity, as if that religion were something the Hebrew Bible inherently prepared for or led to—or even were subordinate to or replaced by, a belief called supersessionism. No hint of this would be needed for Robinson to work her wonders.\
