“Next they’ll be teaching our kids about evolution!”
I sat in the circle listening to a group of concerned parents worried about what their children were being taught at a local elementary school. I had been invited to listen to these parents and offer theological/pastoral insights for their “questions.” I was struck by two things. First, these parents deeply loved God and their children. Second, sincerity can’t overcome a poor hermeneutic.
Last time I blogged here, (Can We Ever Really Say “The Bible is Clear?”) I mentioned that it was worth asking (again) how we should see Scripture. Not only is it God’s Word to us, but it might be helpful to view it as Israel’s attempt to understand their relationship with God. Certainly I do not claim to be the first person to do this. Realistically, what I offer here is taught in many Christian universities around the globe, including Reformed ones. But for some reason, these ideas often fade away only to be replaced by more fundamentalist readings.
Sitting around the circle, we were confronted with the first words of Scripture. In the beginning…
Genesis 1 has troubled contemporary Christians for many years. In some ways, I thought we had moved beyond this once-heated debate, but this conversation told me differently. On the one hand, there were some who still wanted to read Genesis 1 literally. God created the world in six days. Others, however, viewed Genesis 1 as a fairy tale with no real value for modern readers. Evolution can be scientifically proven. Therefore, the Bible is “wrong” about this.
While these two arguments couldn’t have been further apart regarding creation, they shared an unhealthy understanding of Genesis and really Scripture itself. What if Genesis 1 wasn’t literal or a fairy tale? What if Genesis 1 wasn’t really about creation at all? What if Genesis 1 was Israel’s story about God during a time of national trauma?
While Genesis 1 narrates the story of creation and begins the section of primordial history before Israel was a nation, it was most likely composed, or at least edited, much later, during, or even after, Judah’s captivity in Babylon from 586-535 BCE.
That’s important, really important. Israel had just experienced a national catastrophe. Think September 11, 2001 on steroids. The northern tribes had been annihilated by the Assyrians. Now Judah had been taken into exile. The temple lay in smoldering ruins. The promises to Abraham and David went unfulfilled. Israel was in chaos. Now that Cyrus, King of Persia, allowed Judah to return home, it was a chance for Israel to start over.
What if “In the beginning” wasn’t talking about the beginning of the world but about Israel’s new beginning as they returned to the Promised Land?
Reading Genesis 1, we see that God did not create the world from nothing. There was darkness, there was deep, there was chaos. The miracle of creation is not that God created ex nihilo, it’s that God spoke order into the chaos. We see a God of power and order. Genesis 1 contains a pattern not found in the other (and probably older) creation story from Genesis 2. Over and over, there are evenings and mornings, and it is good.
Rather than argue about how God could create light on day one but not sun or stars until day three, we might look closer for what God is really doing. On days one to three, God creates the capacities or spaces for creation, and God fills them on days four to six. On day one God creates light and darkness, and fills those capacities with sun, moon, and stars on day four. On day two God separates the sky and the sea, while on day five, God creates birds and fish. God separates the sea and land on day three, while on day six God creates animals and humanity. It is all good. God has brought order to the chaos. Two orderly patterns of three days in the chaos.
Israel returned from captivity with their ideas, their politics, their theologies turned upside down. They wrote about a God who was in the business of bringing order to the chaos. Just as the Spirit of God had hovered over the deep chaos at creation, so now God’s Spirit had not left them during their chaos. Just as God had brought order to creation from the beginning, so now God would bring order to Israel in its new beginning.
Israel’s preachers knew that this was a side of God that Israel needed at that moment in time. I’m not suggesting they made it up, but the One who could bring shalom to the chaos was the God Israel needed to hear about as they re-entered the promised land once again.
Genesis 1 really has nothing to do with creation, evolution, theistic evolution or any of that. Fundamentally it’s about a God who is powerful and organized, who is present in the most chaotic times of our lives, and who can be trusted even when the world seems like it’s a mess.
I’m just not sure the people in that circle had the ears to hear in the midst of their chaos. It’s too bad, but it was exactly the shalom from God they needed most.
Destruction photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash
Scrabble tile photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
10 Responses
2000 years ago, a very small percentage of observers believed the direct words of the divinely incarnated one. They saw, heard, and experienced, WITH miracles, a new way of understanding “the scriptures.” But so many chose certainty over discovery. A robust view of God’s sovereignty might also suggest that students of science, ancient literature, and archaeology can similarly illumine our reading of the text. The scriptures are enhanced, not diminished, when illumined by the lens of Christ.
Thanks for these reflections, Chad.
Thanks for your good reflections on this continuing matter of biblical interpretation and the manner in which the Genesis creation and fall stories are handled or understood, Chad.
I am wondering, however, why it seems we pastors and theologians quickly move from our skepticism that the early chapters of Genesis are “factual history,” whatever that means or whatever people assume about it, to a reading of these stories as the theological myth created by pre- and post-exilic Jews who were amazed that they survived, and imagined up a story that supported their own inflated self-worth as a people. Why must these be the only options to interpreting Genesis and Exodus?
The biblical texts, within their own expressions, indicate that the writing of scripture begins with the Sinai Covenant (Exodus 20-24), thus jumping into a challenging time for an enslaved people, and pointing to a miraculous divine deliverance that begins a long story of God’s missional intent through a partnered community. In the world of Israel’s Exodus beginnings, all their neighbor nations (also the Creator’s peoples) had worldviews (understandings of the nature of reality) that were summarized in origins myths. So it made perfect sense for Yahweh to clarify the divine problem (all God’s children left home, turned their backs on their heavenly father, and forgot who and whose they were) and the divine mission (bring all God’s children back home), which was now partnered with the modestly-sized family of Abraham that could reasonably occupy the one spot of territory on earth that was the narrow bridge between Africa, Asia, and Europe before there were planes, trains and automobiles, and everybody walked in the great migrations. And reading backward from the Sinai Covenant (which partnered Israel with the Creator on the Creator’s mission), a clearer worldview, including meaningful myths of origins that mirrored rather than masked reality, was an absolute necessity.
To interpret Genesis 1 in the strange “literal” fashion of so many is weird. But so too is the relegating of Genesis (and with it, often, Exodus through Judges) to creative stories imagined by Judah’s prophets of the 7th through 5th centuries in order to affirm the supposed mythical divine nod and assistant that “saved” this particular people from annihilation by the Assyrians.
For more, see my “Covenant Documents: Reading the Bible Again for the First Time” (3rd edition, Cognella, 2024).
Oh, Wayne Brouwer, I’m with you. And while it may be true that the final shape and editions of the Torah were post-exilic , there is no reason not to suppose that most of the material itself was much earlier.
“What if Genesis 1 was Israel’s story about God during a time of national trauma?”
Your take here makes a lot of sense, but it also seems Israel’s cosmology, and it’s sense of God, as having been shaped to fit Israel’s political challenges: Preachers crafted a story to portray a “God that Israel needed at that moment in time.”
Typically, these days, we take a dim view of religious people who shape their theology to fit their political aspirations, do we not?
This is a really good point. Am I being overly simplistic, though, for wondering if this is just one of many instances in which the inspired Word of God operates on several levels at once? Perhaps Genesis 1 did in part reflect Israel’s specific challenges at that time, while also applying beautifully to the larger story of God as Creator of all.
, howeverGood point.
But any true story that’s relevant to a particular situation will be operating at those different levels at the same time: something objectively true that also has an intimate impact on my situation.
I’m not sure that’s what the author is saying. He asks, eg, “What if Genesis 1 wasn’t really about creation at all? What if Genesis 1 was Israel’s story about God during a time of national trauma?” (That “at all” is doing a lot of work, and needs to be appreciated.)
That seems to erase the first half of the equation, does it not, and reduce the story to something the Israelites thought they needed to hear to bolster their confidence, or whatever?
Thank you for this nuanced article on creation. It reminded me of the old Garrison Kiellor joke “A Lawyer, an engineer and a doctor walk into a bar and have a debate about what was the first profession” Creating Order out of Chaos is part of the punch line.
I am teaching a first-year seminar this fall entitled “Science, Anti-Science, and the Christian Faith.” I just added this essay to the syllabus. Thank you!
I was raised with a conservative (literalist) view of scripture that no longer works for my current spiritual life. I appreciate insights like yours to help guide me to a new understanding of such a familiar passage. Thank you.
One more round here….
When we describe the written word as “God’s word,” does that really have to imply God’s audible, verbatim words? That feels presumptuous. It seems more plausible that God entrusted His prophets, some of them anonymous editors perhaps, to tell His story in contrast to other narratives of the day. There is some oral tradition, some “theological myth,” some history, some poetic imagery, even some nationalistic propaganda, but what matters most is the overriding story behind the story. We can debate when the oral traditions were actually written and edited, why, and by whom, but it does not diminish the overriding inspiration of the story. Perhaps the appropriate question is: What is the context and what is the particular question the scriptures seek to answer at various points in history?