Sound theology
Over the last few weeks, I have been mulling over an interesting passage from Marilynne Robinson’s fine novel, Lila. The Reverend John Ames, an elderly Midwestern Methodist preacher is in conversation with his much-younger new wife, Lila, who has come to find rest, shelter, and love after a brutally hard life full of abuse and neglect. The conversation is about hell and the final judgment. Lila knows little of theology and metaphysics, but she has questions. Hard questions. How, she wonders, could the many people she has known who struggled and suffered so terribly on earth be made to suffer further in eternity because they didn’t become Christians? Who could believe this? She asks her husband how any of it could be true.
[Rev. Ames] came into the kitchen and sat down at the table. “I must seem like a fool to you,” he said. “You must think I’ve never given a moment’s thought to anything.”
She was always surprised when he spoke to her that way, answering to her, when she had never read more than a child’s schoolbook. “I’d never think you were a fool,” she said.
