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APPENDIX A
INTERPRETING
GENESIS 1-11
Genesis 1-11 provides the foundation of the rest of
biblical revelation because it tells the Judeo-Christian origin story.
As I noted in Chapter One, origin stories are
absolutely necessary for man to give meaning to life. They are unavoidable in
everyday thought and speech. No one can speak about anything without saying (by
implication at least) something about origins. Modern Christians find an
obvious tension between the story of Genesis 1-11 and that told by the
evolutionary origin-myth.
To relieve this tension some Christians hope that an
accommodation strategy exists whereby the Genesis text can be made to say what
evolution is saying. This appendix will review why the accommodation strategy
is a dead end. It has been tried again and again over the past several
centuries with no success.
The way you interpret literature shows the way you
think about language and reality. Critical views of the Scripture generally
come from a pagan view of language. As I pointed out in Part I of this course
and again in Chapters 1-3 of this Part, language is the tool God and
creature-spirits made in His image think and communicate with. On the presupposition
of the Bible, language and knowledge have real justification.
The Second Person of the Trinity is called the “Word”
showing how important language is in the biblical worldview. God’s omniscience
and His Word are the archetype, or ultimate metalanguage, that support human
language. Thus the Genesis 1-11 text is not a mystical symbolism lacking
inherent truth. Nor is this text about something that cannot be clearly
communicated and understood by man made in God’s image.
On the biblical presupposition it is God’s own story
to us about how He created all things in and around us. It establishes the
original context of key biblical concepts and doctrines. It is intended to
distinguish the Creator from the creation over against all forms of paganism,
ancient and modern. It is intended to tell us about our first biological
parents, about how evil--natural and human--came into existence, and about the
rule of God in the present universe. Only with such a clear origin story can we
remain free of idolatry and love Him with all our heart, mind, and soul.
Readers of Genesis 1-11 who share its worldview have
had no great difficulty interpreting the text over the centuries. The clarity
of this text as well as all the Bible is central to.104 Protestant faith: the doctrine of the perspicuity of
Scripture. No intervening priesthood is necessary to understand what God is
saying in all matters basic to the faith. Surely, the foundations of revelation
in Genesis 1-11 are basic to the faith. Christians must, therefore, view with
skepticism claims that it has been profoundly misunderstood for nearly nineteen
centuries until modern natural historians have “enlightened” us.
TRADITIONAL INTEPRETATION OF GENESIS 1-11.
Authors of the rest of the Bible continually refer to
these chapters as literal, straight-forward history. From Genesis 1:1 and
subsequent quotes of God’s creative speaking the world into existence, John
derives the Trinity (John 1:1-3). The six days of creation are reiterated at
Mt. Sinai in an obviously literal way (Exod. 20:11). Jesus speaks of both
accounts of man’s creation as constituting one event (Matt. 19:4-6). Paul
utilizes the distinct biological “kinds” as models for profound qualitative
differences in God’s eternal plan of salvation (I Cor. 15:21-47). An obvious
symmetry exists between the miraculous origin of the creation and the
miraculous recreation (Rev. 21-22). Many references exist showing that the
people mentioned in Genesis 1-11 were considered real, historical persons by
other biblical authors (Isa. 54:9; Matt. 23:35; 24:37-39; Luke 3:38; Rom
5:12-14; I Tim. 2:13-14; I John 3:12; Jude 11, 14-15).
Are Christians to suppose that Jesus and other
biblical personages were naive and lacked the modern “insight” we do in our
day? Or said more bluntly, they were completely wrong about the origins and
early history of the universe and man. Of course, if they were wrong in these
earthly matters open to verification, then they would be completely untrustworthy
in heavenly matters of relationship to God (John 3:12: I Cor. 15:32). Throw
away an inerrant Genesis text, and you also throw away the New Testament.
Often accommodationists claim that many of the Church
Fathers held to allegorical interpretations of the creation story. This is a
false claim. While a few wandered around in the pagan philosophical climate of
their day, most Church Fathers clearly mentioned literal events such as stars
being created on the fourth day. Moreover, the vast bulk of Church leaders in
the Reformation and afterward held to a literal Genesis text.[1] The reason the
traditional interpretation has remained so conservative over the centuries is
because of the interrelated structure of Genesis 1-11. Literarily and theologically,
the Genesis story is a coherent unity.
To tamper with the traditional interpretation in one
chapter quickly yields absurdities in another. For example, a favorite.105 place to re-interpret is the six-day creation
sequence. Hoping to gain badly-needed time, accommodationists urge various
proposals about the days’ duration. Since stars and sun weren’t created until
the fourth day, they argue that the days can’t be literal 24-hour days. Why
not? Is time dependent upon a clock? Or could there have been a 24-hour
pulsing-cycle in the cosmic light of the first day? Also, almost unnoticed in
this argument is the self-refuting reliance upon a literal interpretation of
the creation of stars on the fourth day!
The far-reaching results of such a literary maneuver
are also largely unnoticed. By expanding the days, all critical evaluation of
paganism’s habitual long-chronology is wholly abandoned. Geological and
anthropological history are accepted uncritically. The next features that go
are the genealogies of Adam and the catastrophic global nature of the flood.
Now a whole set of interpretative compromises have to be made, including a
reinterpretation of New Testament commentary on Genesis by Jesus and the
Apostles.
Not only the literary structure disintegrates but
serious theological errors arise. The Creator-creature distinction is
threatened by an eternal universe. The man-nature distinction dissolves into
the same Continuity of Being. Natural evil is either no longer considered evil,
or it is due directly to God’s creating activity. Man is no longer the cause of
the curse upon nature (cf. Rom. 5:12; 8:20-21); God is its direct cause. God’s
goodness thus becomes indefensible with this approach. More seriously, man’s
intellect is thereby granted a pretended autonomy from God’s Word. He can
interpret reality apart from submission to verbal revelation. In this view
general revelation in nature not only can but must be interpreted without
reference to the special revelation God has given in Scripture.
The inter-locking structure of Genesis 1-11, then,
makes it difficult to accommodate modern paganism without throwing the text out
completely and without undermining biblical theology. Such has been shown time
and again during the last several centuries. Let’s look at three specific
places where accommodationism most frequently focuses.
ACCOMMODATIONIST FOCAL POINTS
The Days of Creation. A traditional area of focus is trying to get more time in the Genesis
text. The six days are made into “ages”, turned into days of revelation, or
simply interpreted figuratively. Support for the figurative view includes
others uses of “day” throughout the Bible as well as the events of the sixth
and seventh days. Adam, it is claimed, would have required a long time to name
the animals God brought to him..106 And the
seventh day’s cessation of creation work extends into the present.
Against this approach are the stubborn facts that whenever units of measure such as “day” are used with ordinal numbers (“first”, “second”, etc.), they point to literal usage. Even Hosea 6:2 (the only so-called exception to this rule in the Bible) may well be a prophecy of Jesus’ resurrection. Where else is the “scripture” Paul refers to in I Cor. 15:4? With each day summarized by the phrase “there was evening and there was morning” and with the interpretation given in Exodus 20:11, the accommodationist approach has to strain the normal use of language. Even the oft-cited quote by Peter (II Pet. 3:8) from Psalm 90 occurs in a context of units of time (90:10).
The sixth and seventh days are interpreted as normal
days in their context. Adam with a mind undamaged by sin would have had no
problem naming the selection of animals of the field that God brought to him
for the purpose of showing him the necessity for a human helper (Gen. 2:19).
God ceased from His work of creation on the seventh day, but history is filled
with His subsequent works (cf. John 5:17).
Adam-to-Abraham Genealogies. Older accommodationists used to try to find gaps in
the genealogies between Adam and Abraham, hoping to fit the [then]
hundred-thousand year duration hypothesized of mankind’s history. Such an
approach strained the language both in requiring thousands of years between
each name and in ignoring the set formula used to construct the genealogies (“X
lived M years and begat. . .Y and the days after he begat Y were N years. . .
.And all the days that X lived were M + N years”). If this approach strained
the language in the past, today with mankind’s history supposedly millions of
years duration it makes a complete mockery of literary interpretation.
Pre-Genesis 1 Existence. Recent accommodationism has tried to adopt modernist
renderings of Genesis 1:1-3 so as to allow vast ages for the universe prior to
the work of Creation Week. The supposedly sinister quality of a watery chaos
and darkness in Genesis 1:2, in this view, points to a prior existence for the
universe. The sense of Genesis 1:1-3 is rendered something like “when God began
to create, the universe was in chaos and darkness. . .”, i.e., Genesis 1 speaks
of a relative beginning only, not an absolute ex nihilo creation of all things.
This maneuver suffers from the same faults of the
previous ones. It avoids the interpretation given to this text elsewhere in the
Bible. John 1:1-3 certainly has this passage in mind and speaks of an absolute
beginning in the very terminology of Genesis 1:1. This maneuver also lands
itself in unbiblical theology. The central distinguishing mark of biblical
faith is the Creator-creature distinction which is undercut in this.107 approach. The universe is seen, in this view, as
pre-existing along with God which then makes the “creation” work of the six
days not creation work at all. The contrast between paganism and biblical faith
becomes blurred at the very starting point.
The meaning of “without form and void” has been shown
from Isaiah 45:18 to be “uninhabitable”. After the initial ex-nihilo creation
in Genesis 1:1, the universe was not yet finished. The Spirit of God was
already at work in it, and God named the darkness along with the light (Gen.
1:5). He is clearly the Creator of all things not just those details mentioned
after Genesis 1:3 (cf. Isa. 45:7). To cite the supposedly sinister nature of
Genesis 1:2 as a reason for excluding it from God’s creating activity is simply
to confuse “darkness” as a symbol for evil with “darkness” as a physical
description.[2]
The accommodationist strategy has won widespread
allegiance of neither believer nor pagan. It hasn’t accomplished what it set
out to do: relieve the tension between the Genesis text and the
officially-sponsored origin-myth of today’s society. The tension remains; it is
real and unavoidable. Precisely because of this failure, the modern creationist
movement arose. It is not that modern creationists are naive and unaware of the
history of the interpretation of Genesis. Rather, they know very well this
history and because of it have turned to a new strategy of counterattack. They
seek to further a more sanctified and biblical view of human knowledge.
1. A compact review of the interpretation debate is
given in Mark Van Bebber and Paul S. Taylor, Creation and Time (Mesa, AZ: Eden
Productions, 1994). This small volume I mentioned in Chapter 1 rebuts
present-day accommodationists in evangelical circles.
2. A recent review article with detailed bibliography
on this controversy is Mark F. Rooker, “Genesis 1:1-3--Creation or Re-creation?
Parts 1 and 2, Bibliotheca Sacra Vol. 149, (Jul-Sep and Oct-Dec, 1992), Nos.
595-6, pp. 316-23, 411-27.