0.0 – Christian Science Author – Chute, Marchette – Biography and Publication Index

Actress ~ Teacher ~ Author
Christian Science Practitioner
 
The second of three daughters born to a Minneapolis realtor and his English-born wife, Marchette Chute studied at the Minneapolis School of Art before earning her B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1930. After her father's passing in 1939, Chute moved to a Manhattan apartment with her mother and younger sister, novelist Beatrice J. (B. J.) Chute. 
Chute's diligently researched reconstructions of the lives of Shakespeare and Chaucer have contributed a great deal to scholarship about the ages in which they wrote. 
Throughout her writing career, Chute applied her investigative talents to  reconstructions of events of biblical stories. The Search for God (1941) is a biblical commentary using the techniques of the New Criticism: by placing familiar lines of Scripture into their original contexts, she evokes the personalities of writers behind the words. Chute identifies the Genesis conflict of creative love with punishable sin as an ancient dissatisfaction with human ignorance of the God who would be found in Jesus, the teacher who overcame not only death but irritation with his slow-witted disciples. She initiates her study with Job, who sanctifies intellectual struggle with ecclesiastical authority. Adroit quotation and lucid style compensate for theological simplicity.
A sequel to this work, The End of the Search (1946), is a guide to the New Testament history of the early church. Chute emphasizes the Jewish tradition within Christian doctrine, practice, and factionalism. Her contextual approach allows her to overlook Paul's pharisaical admonitions to women and to admire his panegyric on love, but it gives her little help in decoding the mystic metaphors of Revelation. Chute begins and ends her biography of Jesus of Israel (1961) with messianic prophecies and conflates conflicting gospels to show the son of God as an orthodox, 1st-century Jew under Roman rule. Show all