Balm in Gilead

A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson

Timothy Larsen, Keith L. Johnson, Timothy Larsen, Keith L. Johnson

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780830872961
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Marilynne Robinson is one of the most eminent public intellectuals in America today. In addition to literary elegance, her trilogy of novels (Gilead, Home, and Lila) and her collections of essays offer probing meditations on the Christian faith. Many of these reflections are grounded in her belief that the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin still deserves a hearing in the twenty-first century. This volume, based on the 2018 Wheaton Theology Conference, brings together the thoughts of leading theologians, historians, literary scholars, and church leaders who engaged in theological dialogue with Robinson's published work—and with the author herself.

1

The Theological World of the Reverend John Ames

Timothy Larsen

ONCE UPON A TIME in a land far, far away there was a quiet, little town called Gilead in which there lived an old minister of the gospel named the Reverend John Ames. That, of course, is not how Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead begins. If it were, presumably it would not have won a Pulitzer Prize and we would not have created this volume. Robinson’s novel does not take place in a vague “once upon a time,” but is precisely located chronologically. Ames begins writing his epistolary document in 1956 and continues doing so into 1957. Moreover, it is not set in an unreachable kingdom far away, but rather in a contiguous state from where I am here in Illinois, the great Hawkeye state to my immediate west. If the world of Robinson’s novel is set chronologically within the living memory of tens of millions of Americans, and it is located geographically in the adjacent state of Iowa, then the setting of her trilogy is a well-documented, historical world that we can study. This chapter will explore that world, the real-life analog to the theological and ecclesiastical world of the Reverend John Ames. Moreover, this chapter also seeks to advance a specific, additional claim: namely, that the town of Gilead, John Ames, and Marilynne Robinson herself are much closer to my alma mater and employer, Wheaton College, Illinois, in terms of their particular religious, ecclesiastical, and theological convictions, identity, and ethos than most people would suppose.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON AND MAINLINE PROTESTANTISM

With the obvious exception of the indefatigable Martin Marty, Marilynne Robinson is arguably the worthiest representative of the American mainline Protestant tradition active today.1 Her trilogy, among many other things, is a kind of vision of an America in which mainline Protestantism is truly at the center of our nation’s understanding of the Christian faith as a lived religion. Gilead is a town for venerable and respectable denominations known for their commitment to a learned ministry. This imagined midwestern community appears to be entirely free of the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of the Salvation Army, of the ecstatic speech of Pentecostals, of irate fundamentalists denouncing the “decadence of Darwinism,” and of soberly dressed Mormons donning their temple undergarments in an unpretentious act of devotion. From the evidence given in the novels, we only know for sure that there are five congregations in the Gilead of 1956: Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and Catholic. There once was a Baptist congregation and we can presume that it still exists, bringing the total to six. There also once was an African American congregation of indeterminate denominational identity, and we know that it no longer exists in the land of Gilead. Ames’s father went off to worship with the Quakers, but we are not told whether he needed to leave town in order to do so. If we therefore throw in the Society of Friends just to be safe, then we end up with a grand total of seven congregations, with the Methodists—as a Christian tradition that was then merely two hundred or so years old—being the upstart among them. Furthermore, true, old Gilead is revealed to have been largely a two-church town, namely Ames’s Congregationalists and Boughton’s Presbyterians: “In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I’d try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot, since many of the ones who weren’t mine were Boughton’s.”2 Outside this Iowan idyll is a messed-up world populated by the likes of Aimee Semple McPherson, emotionally over-wrought camp-meeting revivalists, radio and television preachers with less theological acuity than your average jackrabbit, and proselytizing Nazarenes with stern prohibitions against “practically swearing”—indeed against practically everything. It is enough to make you think of little, unassuming, mainline Gilead and sigh, “I love this town.”3

Helping along my project of exploring the real-life analog, Robinson revealed in one of her essays that she modelled her imaginary town on Tabor, Iowa.4 In 1956, Tabor had five houses of worship. The original, storied Congregational one that had inspired Robinson in the first place, of course, was there—as was a Methodist church. But that is the end of the overlap on this point between Tabor and Gilead. The Presbyterians are nowhere to be found. There was a Christian Church from the Disciples of Christ or Stone-Campbell movement which we may charitably count as one from the progressive rather than fundamentalist wing of that tradition. That is the best we can do, however. The next congregation on the Tabor list is the anticosmetics, Hollywood-denouncing Church of the Nazarene; and the last is the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.5 My claim is that Marilynne Robinson imagined a Gilead almost entirely populated by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Lutherans because she wanted to commend to us all a vision of an America in which Main Street is mainline.

So where does that leave Wheaton College, a bastion of evangelicalism that spent a decade or two of Ames’s ministry fraternizing with fundamentalism? Our composer for the conference from which this volume arose, Shawn Okpebholo, is a member of the Salvation Army, and after a convivial beverage or two you might be able to get me to admit to being a Pentecostal. In short, what hath Wheaton to do with Gilead? To go about answering that question in the most profitable way, it would be helpful to take some guidance from Marilynne Robinson herself. She has observed, “The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself—forget definitions, forget assumptions, watch.”6 I have tried to adhere to that counsel—to not foreground the assumptions that one tends to bring with labels such as mainline, liberal, modernist, fundamentalist, and evangelical, but actually to watch Wheaton, to watch Gilead, and to see to what extent they were both recognizably forged in the exact same fiery movements of the Spirit of the living God.

ABOLITIONIST EVANGELICALISM

A recurring theme in the Gilead trilogy is recollections of Ames’s grandfather and the deeds, struggles, and convictions of that antebellum generation. At this point of origins, one can pronounce unequivocally that Wheaton and Gilead are together as one. To start at the most general level, they are both evangelical by profession and conviction. The nineteenth-century Manual of the Tabor Congregational Church of Christ, Tabor, Iowa not only self-identifies as evangelical, but it also proclaims that its communion table is open to guests, provided that they are: “Church members who are in regular standing in any evangelical denomination” (italics original).7 One reads that as stipulating that, for instance, Unitarians and all other nontrinitarian traditions were not allowed to partake. More specifically, both Gilead and Wheaton College arose from a potent mix of evangelical, revivalist, heart religion and uncompromising, radical abolitionism. A founder of Tabor was its first Congregational minister, the Reverend John Todd. As was common in nineteenth-century Congregationalism in Iowa, his patriarchal stature was acknowledged through the honorary title of “Father.” It is apparent that just as Gilead was modeled on Tabor, so Ames’s grandfather was modeled on Todd. We will therefore also refer to this Gilead patriarch as Father Ames to better distinguish him from our John Ames of 1956. (When referring to the latter’s father, that is, the son of the patriarch, we will identify him as John Ames II.)

Let’s begin by exploring the life of the Reverend John Todd, the real-life analog to Father Ames. Todd attended Oberlin College, an evangelical and abolitionist stronghold, whose president in the decade leading up to the Civil War was the preeminent evangelical revivalist and social reformer Charles Finney. Todd also stayed on after being awarded his undergraduate degree to train for the ministry in Oberlin’s seminary. As a student at Oberlin in 1842, Todd declared in a letter his militant convictions: “I don’t believe any man in the world can justify the war of the American Revolution & at the same time condemn the slaves for rising to obtain their liberties.”8 Todd was among a group of abolitionists who in 1853 founded the town of Tabor in the southwest corner of Iowa. The frontline of the anti-slavery cause was the contested territory of Kansas. Tabor’s location made it a conducive spot for militant abolitionists active in Kansas to use as a staging ground, retreat, supply depot, and hideout, as well as a station on the Underground Railroad. It is hard for us to grasp today how much Iowa was the furthest western frontier for Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century. It would take a whole month, for instance, to send a letter to Ohio and obtain a reply. Nevertheless, tiny, remote Tabor’s strategical location in the struggle against slavery made it a magnet for people who lived storied lives in this generation. Samuel Gridley Howe, the husband of the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Julia Ward Howe, visited Tabor in his work on behalf of abolitionism. The famous militant abolitionist Jim Lane was often in and out of the town. Lane, of course, came with his bodyguards, one of whom was a young “Wild Bill” Hickok. Most of all, one of the most famous and controversial militant abolitionists of them all, John Brown, made Tabor his base. It is said that Brown was inspired to dedicate his life to the abolitionist cause while attending a prayer meeting in Father Todd’s Congregational church.9

John Ames II objected vehemently to his father’s belief that violence was a legitimate way to further a righteous case. But Father Ames and Father Todd were certainly at one in that stance. With Todd’s full approval, the town of Tabor developed its own militia. John Brown’s men used Tabor as a military training camp, including setting up a rifle range. Todd had his home and property double as an abolitionist arsenal: he had two hundred Sharps rifles concealed in his basement. This was the latest technology in efficient slaughter. It was so associated with the militant abolitionists that these rifles were nicknamed “Beecher’s Bibles” after another antislavery Congregational minister, Henry Ward Beecher. You can feel how that would have disgusted John Ames II: the assumption that what the West needed most to advance the cause of Christ was not a shipment of Bibles but rather of firearms. Todd also had two cannons hidden on his property. Early in the twentieth century, Tabor residents who had been children at the time remembered fondly the year that one of these cannons was brought out and fired to celebrate the Fourth of July. The Todd property also had an impressive stash of ammunition. Admittedly, the people of Tabor disapproved when, at the end of his time there, John Brown turned toward aggressive acts of violence against slave owners as if a war were already on. Nevertheless, Brown’s controversial and fatal raid on Harper’s Ferry was staged with weapons that had been issued to him and his men from the arsenal in Todd’s basement. Brown was convicted of murder and conspiring with slaves to rebel and was executed on December 2, 1859. John Brown’s body lay moldering in the grave, but his soul went marching on. As was also true for Father Ames, Todd was too old to enlist as a regular soldier in the Union Army, but he managed to obtain a place as a chaplain. After the war, he helped to found Tabor College, a Congregational institution which aspired to become like Oberlin.

JONATHAN BLANCHARD AND WHEATON COLLEGE

Wheaton College has its own John to add to John Todd and to the first John Ames, namely Jonathan Blanchard, our founding president. Blanchard was from the same generation as these two other men and, just like them, he also was a Congregational minister and a social reformer who moved out to the Midwest to plant a flag for freedom. The similarities are uncanny, making it clear that Gilead and Wheaton were as one in their shared patriarchal generation. I must confess that before doing the research for this chapter I never had much affection for Jonathan Blanchard. I always thought of him as a stern, rigid, old ideologue. It turns out, however, that before he was a stern, rigid, old ideologue, he was a stern, rigid, young ideologue. And I have developed tremendous admiration for that young man. All three men grew up in the Northeast—Father Ames in Maine, Blanchard in Vermont, and Todd in Pennsylvania—and chose the West as adults precisely because of their commitment to abolitionism. Blanchard began his training for ministry at Andover, an evangelical seminary that had been founded as a protest against heterodox Harvard. The greatest impetus to Congregationalism in Iowa in its early days was from the Iowa Band, a group of eleven ministers who met while students at Andover and covenanted together to help establish the work of Christ on the western frontier.10 As was true for the members of the Iowa Band, Blanchard too was a Congregational minister who studied at Andover, felt called to the West, and stood in his ministry for a blend of evangelicalism and revivalism, abolitionism and social reform, and higher education and the liberal arts.

Blanchard, however, took a year off from his seminary studies in order to become a full-time abolitionist activist, serving as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In our smug, northern complacency, we have forgotten how viscerally offensive abolitionism was during this time period even in the North. There was a large group of northerners who thought vaguely that slavery was wrong and ought gradually to come to an end, but its immediate abolition was overwhelmingly seen as wild, bomb-throwing, anticonstitutional, revolutionary, crazy talk. Many northern denominations refused to ordain anyone who confessed to being an abolitionist and churches passed resolutions against the immediate abolition of slavery. Furthermore, the young Jonathan Blanchard was not only presumably destroying his career with this decision, he was literally risking his own life. Like he was reliving apostolic days, on more than one occasion he was severely beaten up, and on several other occasions he was assaulted with stones. In some towns, guards had to be placed around the bu...