It is hard to put your finger on what makes a novel great. It seems impossible to articulate what makes a set of written words beautiful. Words are such poor things, after all.¹ But then, words are what we have: as ministers, the words of blessing, of sacrament; as pastors, the words of comfort and hope; as preachers, the words of challenge and exhortation. The painter has canvas, the sculptor has stone, the musician, instruments, the surgeon, bodies, the accountant, numbers, and we clergy have words. To make matters worse, so to speak, it is precisely the articulation and explication of “a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate” to which we have been called.² There are many times when I feel, in the act of preaching, the same sentiment Marilynne Robinson’s Rev. John Ames conveys to the prying Jack Boughton on the subject of predestination: “I’m just trying to find a slightly useful way of saying there are things I don’t understand.”³ Then I hear, in the often blank stares of congregants, the words of Ames’ young wife Lila: “For a preacher you ain’t much at explaining things.”⁴

2025 marked the 20th anniversary of Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize win for Gilead, so I thought I would take the opportunity to highlight a few things I’ve learned about preaching from this influential novel. The narrative world of the town of Gilead, built by Marilynne Robinson across four novels now, is teeming with a kind of humility that is needed in our preaching, and yet so often absent. Robinson’s stories model a comfort with complexity and nuance that is embodied in nearly every character. For generations of people in the West—steeped in hermeneutics of skepticism and distrust—the antidote to skepticism is not a homiletic of prideful certainty but one of epistemic humility. This essay seeks to tease out the models of epistemic humility found in Gilead, and to suggest ways in which such humility could be applied in the pulpit.

Complex Characterization

One of the ways Gilead models epistemic humility is in the complexity of the characters Robinson draws. There is a depth of nuance in the characterization that goes beyond the cursory sentiment that ‘all people are complicated.’ Robinson’s characters display profoundly paradoxical motivations through their words and actions, which makes the characters all the more compelling. And in their complexity, they become real to us as readers. Our introduction to Rev. John Ames, the primary character in Gilead, is through what becomes a magnanimous demonstration of humility: in the opening lines the aging and unwell father assures his seven year old son, “[T]here are many ways to live a good life.”⁵ Though he comes from a long line of preachers, John Ames does not presume that path upon his son. Throughout Gilead, there is a profound sense in which Ames holds delicately and loosely the very things he has longed for his whole life: a wife and child. Further complicating Ames’ character is his relationship with Jack, who is both godson to Ames and named after him. Ames both loves and rejects his prodigal godson, even while he goes out of his way to tell Jack’s story to his biological son. And Jack himself is equal parts penitent and obstinate, but Ames “[doesn’t] know another way to let [his son] see the beauty there is in [Jack].”⁶ Because Robinson’s characterization is so complex, we as readers are invited to explore our own complex emotions, thoughts, motivations and beliefs. Becoming more comfortable with complexity in ourselves and in others helps us resist epistemic certainty. We need that kind of comfort with complexity as preachers in order to faithfully, rather than reductively, communicate the mystery of God and faith. This extends even to the way in which we interpret Scripture.

Interaction with Scripture and Christian Doctrines

Rev. Ames’ multifaceted portrayal is also well-illustrated through some of the ways he interacts with Scripture and doctrine. Ames’ theology might be boiled down to the words “mystery” and “grace,” but then whenever he appeals to these he is anything but reductive. In fact, it is quite the opposite. He is opening the world up, and opening his eyes wider to the vastness of existence in God’s world. In the conversation about doctrine between Ames, his best friend Rev. Boughton, Jack, and Lila, Ames’ theology of mystery is on full display. When asked what he tells people who ask about difficult doctrines such as predestination, he urges Jack to avoid simplification: “I tell [people] there are certain attributes our faith assigned to God: omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.”⁷ His responses to Jack even provoke an accusation of cagey-ness, which we can admit could be easily leveled at the epistemically humble. But Ames is not phased by this; he resolves, “I’m not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it.”⁸

Moreover, he rejects the idea of simple apologetic “proofs” and those who would espouse them.⁹ He laments, “You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten.”¹⁰ Just change “radio” to “podcast” and see if that statement doesn’t ring true in 2026! This is one of the many ways that Ames resists reductive and overly certain ways of talking about the Christian life and faith in God. Through the character of Rev. Ames, Robinson cracks open difficult theological issues while painting them with simple language like mystery and grace.

I could cite many more examples of Robinson’s exploring, meandering way of engaging with Christian Scripture and doctrine. It is as if Robinson is a bird that lights on a very thin branch. She walks toward the end of the branch, curious about its sturdiness, and then just before the branch begins to give way she flutters to another branch entirely. This isn’t vindictive, malicious, or strident exploration of Scripture and doctrine; she doesn’t want to see the branches break. Instead she seems interested in seeing how, and in which directions, those branches might bend. So with every biblical theme or doctrinal principle to which Robinson alludes, she is content without conclusions. Perhaps, as Boughton puts it in that remarkable conversation about predestination, “To conclude is not in the nature of the enterprise.”¹¹

Unresolved Questions

After reading another of Robinson’s Gilead-world novels, Lila, my wife Brittany and I were talking about the way Robinson writes, and she said, “Robinson concludes scenes, even whole novels, without ever getting to the bottom of a [question she wonders about]. She just settles her mind about it for a while.” Robinson’s way of leaving questions unresolved is another way to model epistemic humility. There is no settled certainty about these characters or stories. In Gilead, the unsettled questions are about existence and grace, aging and the frailty of fatherhood. There are also unresolved questions about whether the world can change at all, whether transformation of any sort is truly possible, or whether the mundanity and sameness of life is all there is. Transformation requires time and patience, much like reading novels, as it turns out. Perhaps this is a reason that novels have the power to inspire and instigate transformation.

Epistemic Humility in the Pulpit

When either of the reverends Ames or Boughton get a little too polemical or a little too church-y in their speech, the phrase Robinson has for it is “That’s the pulpit speaking.”¹² The sense is that there is a different kind of tone and demeanor, vocabulary, and even authority and certainty that is conveyed when the preacher speaks from the pulpit, and that pulpit-speech is something less than the whole truth of what the preacher thinks or believes. Both of these are probably true—that preaching is something different from normal speech and something less than the whole of what can and should be said on any issue—and yet, I can’t help wondering if the models of epistemic humility portrayed in the Gilead novels could be employed in the pulpit. Could it be that a willingness to embrace complexity and uncertainty, a willingness to embrace the vastness of mystery in Scripture and doctrine, and a willingness to humbly accept that some questions remain unsettled in one’s mind, might allow the preacher to be heard as authentic by an inherently skeptical generation? Could it be that epistemic humility actually allows the preacher to come closer to communicating a whole truth about God and the nature of the Christian life? As in Gilead, the characterization in biblical stories is complex and multifaceted. As in Gilead, biblical characters wrestle with Scripture and interpret it in ways that are not always prima facie consistent. As in Gilead, there are many aspects of the Christian faith that remain unsettled, because even the settled beliefs of orthodox Christianity—the communion of the Triune God, the divinity of Jesus the Messiah, the depth and prevalence of brokenness, the promise of resurrection life—are mysteries we cannot fully fathom. It should not be scary to admit this, but rather it should humble us and invite us to preach from a posture of epistemic humility.