Marilynne Robinson: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think there’s room in Catholic theology, or even Arminian theology, for human free choice to be the reason why these different events are happening, say, in Genesis or the Hebrew Bible, that predestination is a bit less general than you’re making it out to be in Christian thought? Or what’s your view? It’s pretty general in Christian thought. Thomas Aquinas believed in it, for example, wrote about it in the Summa Contra Gentiles and also in the Summa Theologica. It’s very difficult to conceive of an omnipotent God who is relatively powerless in the way that our conception of freedom would imply. I argue in the book consistently that God does actually restrain himself from intruding too far on our own nature at the same time that what he intends works its way through our nature. You write in your book, and I quote, “The great figures of scripture are not at all Homeric.” What did you mean by that?…

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