Creation Week: What The Bible Doesn’t Say!

Genesis Chapter One

This is an article that I have wanted to write for a while, but time and life have frequently gotten in the way. It is much delayed from the Rat’s articles on Science and Religion which originally sparked the idea for writing it. It has also been delayed by my usual over-efficiency in disappearing down various ‘rabbit holes’ of interest whilst ensuring that I was happy with what I wanted to say.

Ground Rules

Before really getting into it, let’s set the ‘ground rules’ which I always try to follow in understanding any passage in the Bible.

First, I really dislike what is called eisegesis. This is taking our own presuppositions and questions to the text. Or reading ‘into’ (eis is the NT Greek for ‘in’ or ‘into’) the text what I/we want to see there. With the Old Testament/Tanakh, I believe that this should also be the case with reading it from a Christian perspective before I have let the text speak for itself. As a Christian, I am happy to also look at the text from a Christian perspective, but I also feel that it is irresponsible and disrespectful to the unfolding narrative and revelation of God to not look at the text purely from the point of view of those who existed before Jesus and the New Testament. I have also found, time and again, that avoiding eisegesis has immeasurably enriched my understanding of the Bible overall.

Secondly, this means that I am trying to work purely with exegesis. I take ‘out of’ (‘ex’) the text what can be understood from that text, using both the text itself and whatever may be acknowledged as being part of the ‘worldview’ of the writer of the text being considered.

If you haven’t read the text of Genesis 1, ever, or in a while, then you can find it here:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201:1-2:3&version=NIV

What’s the background to this story anyway?

With the Creation Week, we have a great poem which is commonly acknowledged as having an Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Babylonian ‘backdrop’ against which the narrative and theology of the poem is to be understood. In particular, one should consider the Epic of Atrahasis and the Enuma Elish.

In the former, we have a story of the creation of the world which progresses to an account of a great flood. The latter begins with a divine spirit and a primeval chaos. Here the great god, Marduk, defeats the monster, Tiamat, before following a broadly similar, but far from identical, pattern to the narrative of the Creation Week as it is in Genesis.

It is also common in the Creation, and other, Narratives for there to be a week in which the Temple of the god is established, before the god then enters his rest.

How is the Genesis story any different?

The main difference is in the fact of the uncompromising monotheism of the poem.

The story still follows the pattern of God establishing the Universe by declaring and assigning its function (as in meaning or purpose) both as a whole, and in assigning the function of its constituent parts, and it does have a literal week of 7 x 24 hour periods. Likewise, it also finishes with God taking up residence (resting) in God’s Temple – i.e. the Universe! But all of this is done from an entirely different theological perspective.

It is also significant that God’s resting is not like the idea of the Deistic Universe (where God simply starts things off, and then sits back and does nothing else), but God is intimately involved with this Creation precisely because it is God’s Temple, and because God has placed within it creatures who are of great value to God, because God has placed God’s image within them. How one understands this Image of God (Imago Dei) is not really straightforward. Certainly, within the Narrative, it is what sets humanity apart from the rest of Creation (including the animals). In summary, it is best understood under 3 words: stewardship, relationship, and complimentarity.

Stewardship is best understood as something akin to the Seneschal (or Chief Steward) of the Medieval Demesne. Under God, humanity is fully responsible for all of Creation, to nurture, mould and care for it, and there certainly is no mandate to exploit it without taking responsibility for that abuse. In fact, in the next part of the Creation Narrative, Adam’s naming of the animals spells this out clearly, as in the culture of the period, naming something was to accept and take responsibility for it and to acknowledge one’s role as a true nurturer and protector.

Relationship simply points to the fact that only in relationship to one another (and to God, if you believe) are we truly and fully human. Denial of relationship is one of the primary ways in which wrongdoing, or sin, is pictured throughout the OT/Tanakh, and the vast majority of the OT legal code is about restoration of relationship.

Complimentarity illustrates the fundamental equality of the human species. It is not man or woman alone who presents the full picture of what God is like. Rather it is in the best qualities of male and female working together in relationship that the image of God is fully shown.

What about the ‘Days’?

In this Creation Narrative, there are no rival or warring gods to be defeated, nor does any matter pre-exist prior to God’s commanding it to be.

First there is God and then there is the Space-Time continuum, and by this I don’t mean the current scientific understanding, but simply that on what is called the First Day, God is creating time by setting up the flow of time.

I can almost here the ‘hold on’s. But here is the evidence:

Throughout the OT/Tanakh, the Hebrew for light is ‘or (the diacritical coma should go the other way), but in Genesis 1 verse 5, God is said to call light (‘or) yom – and this literally means a period of time. So, the cycle of day/night is set-up by God on the First Day, and then the reason for the Sun, Moon and Stars appearing on Day 4 is also clear, because they are called the ways by which time may be marked or measured. In fact it is fair to argue that Days 1-3 are the setting-up of the basics of life (Time, Environment, and Food, as it would have been for a largely agrarian culture) before proceeding to ‘fine tune’ the Creation by putting in those things which either help, or benefit from, those basics in Days 4-6. In this respect it is a fairly straightforward story.

But, as the famous former Bp. Tom Wright so ably puts it, getting one’s doctrine of Creation right is essential for understanding so much else within the Judaeo-Christian Tradition*, and this is where the eisegesis really comes in.

Science should leave exegesis alone

The relatively modern questions of how old the Universe is, how life developed, and the rightness or wrongness of any aspect of any one of the evolutionary theories are completely and utterly alien, even irrelevant, to this text.

The bottom line is that we are dealing with a Narrative that is millenia old. The issue of the text is about the meaning or purpose of the Universe, as all the Creation Narratives of the surrounding cultures so clearly illustrate. Therefore the questions of 20th and 21st Century Science are not here. It really is like sitting down with the Neanderthal and, if you really could communicate meaningfully, getting the Neanderthal to grasp that the Earth goes around the Sun. The ‘mechanics’ of how the Universe came to be simply just aren’t part of the conceptual framework.

To put it in the rather trite way that I used to put it in the classroom. Genesis is dealing with the Why? whereas Science is dealing with the How?

Don’t miss the point!

And this is where I’m putting myself out there, and, perhaps, venting a little frustration: ‘6 Day Creationists’; Young Earth Creationists; Old Earth Creationists; Theistic Evolutionists – sorry, but you really have missed the point.

The text of Genesis permits me to assert that belief in God’s Act of Creation is, and remains, a fundamental part of the Judaeo-Christian Tradition, but marrying that text to the questions of modern science is not a legitimate part of interpreting the text and what that text means for us today.

As simply as I can assert it: the text does not deal with ‘structure’ (the mechanics, or How?) but ‘function’ (what is my purpose? Why am I here?).

I may, with the likes of John Polkinghorne and Alister McGrath, say that there really is scope within modern scientific enquiry to explore the Why? questions, but it is, as with them also, only possible when the dialogue between Science and Religion works by treating the texts which we have legitimately.

So, if I am persuaded by the evidence of ‘fine tuning’ and/or the latest version of the teleological argument (Intelligent Design) that there is a God, then I am fully at liberty to debate the Science on that basis, but it is completely illegitimate of me to say that the text of Genesis supports either ‘fine tuning’ or Intelligent Design, and ‘wade in’ on that basis. And the same goes for the arguments which come the other way.

Simply put: Science does not disprove Genesis, but neither does Genesis disprove Science. I can only hope that what I have said in some way enables a more responsible debate in the way forward in the dialogue between Science and Religion.

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*Wright, N T; Evil and the Justice of God