| dc.description.abstract | Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer prize-winning novel Gilead is preoccupied with religious
epistemology. Protagonist John Ames, an aging and ill Congregationalist preacher in
1950s small town Iowa, maintains his Christian belief in spite of his father, brother, and
godson all rejecting the faith. Ames' engagement with modern skeptical reasoning does
not prompt a recourse to apologetics, however: Ames emphatically denies that argument
is up to the task of authenticating belief in God. His epistemology grounds faith in
religious experience, what Robinson calls "the shock of revelatory perception." Ames
has a way of seeing the world as obviously alight with the grace and glory of God. The
faculty for perceiving God in experience is not unique to Ames; it is a universal human
endowment also universally suppressed because of original sin. Only divine grace can
repair one's mind to perceive God rightly. Robinson and Ames inherit this epistemology
from the Reformation theologian John Calvin, whose reputation in cultural history
Robinson is trying to resurrect, beginning with her 1998 essay collection The Death of
Adam. In my research, I uncover the way that this Calvinist epistemology is at work in
Gilead under the aspects of perception, sin, and grace. I engage with Calvin, Robinson's
non-fiction, and recent articulations of Calvinist epistemology in the field of analytic philosophy by Alvin Plantinga. Robinson's conflict with the "New Atheists" provides a
cultural context for Gilead: The way she understands Christian belief is not vulnerable to
New Atheist arguments because of a deep disjunction at the level of metaphysics. Gilead
embodies an experience-based religious epistemology "for the rest of us," the great bulk
of humanity who are neither mystics nor rationalists. | en |
