Tuesday would normally be my science and Scripture day, so I thought I would put a pulse in. This would be the beginning of chapter 4: "Interpreting Genesis 1."
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4.1 Differing Views
At first glance, the meaning of Genesis 1 might seem rather straightforward. However, given the tension between science and faith these last 150 years, a multitude of attempts have been made to harmonize Genesis 1 with contemporary science. These interpretations fall into three broad categories. First, there are interpretations that take the days of Genesis 1 as literal 24 hour days and read the chapter as a straightforward historical account. Then there are those approaches that see the days symbolically even though broadly sequential. Finally, there are views that interpret Genesis 1 as a more theological or liturgical presentation.
4.1.1 Literal Approaches
Within each of these options, we find several other suggestions. For example, the "literal" interpretation of Genesis 1 takes the "days" of the chapter as literal 24 hour days. You thus have young earth creationists like Ken Ham who would argue that the world was created 6000-10,000 years ago. [1] Indeed, Exodus 20:11 and 31:17 seem to take the days of Genesis 1 as normal 24 hour days.
Yet there are some interesting variations on this approach both on the Scripture and the science side. For example, on the science side, there are those who have argued that the earth is young but that it has apparent age. The notion is that God created the universe and Earth to look old even though they are not. Someone might say that God created the light from the stars already here rather than having to travel all that distance from the start. In this way of thinking, all the inferences scientists have made about the age of the Earth and the universe are correct -- it is just that God made it look that way from the beginning. However, the days of Genesis remain literal 24 hour days.
A common response is that God comes off as a trickster or deceiver in this scenario. [2] However, this response seems somewhat debatable. If God made light from distant stars already here, he presumably did it for our benefit. He did not say, "The universe is really old." God did not tell you a lie. You simply would have drawn a wrong conclusion on your own. The universe never asked you to guess its age.
Nevertheless, it would be a little puzzling why God would make meteorites look like uranium had been deteriorating for 4.5 billion years. It is puzzling why he would plant less complex fossils on lower geological layers and more complex ones on higher ones. It would not be lying on God's part, since he never directly told us what these things meant. It would just be puzzling.
On the Scripture side, there are some very clever interpretations that take the days of Genesis 1 literally yet find a way for the Earth and universe still to be quite old. For example, the gap theory supposes that there may have been a large period of time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. Isaiah 45:18 is sometimes invoked, a verse that says God did not create the world "formless and void" (tohu), a word used in Genesis 1:2. So, if God did not make the world tohu, yet the world in Genesis 1:2 was tohu, then the argument is that something must have happened between the initial creation in 1:1 and the disorder of 1:2, something like the fall of Satan.
In the early days of evolution, many Christians used the gap theory to try to harmonize the discoveries of science that seemed to point to an old earth with a literal reading of Genesis 1. This view was very prevalent even into the 1950s. For example, the very conservative C. I. Scofield, known for his Scofield King James reference Bible, took this view. This interpretation allowed someone to suppose that dinosaurs and other aspects of geology took place during a period of millions of years between the first two verses of Genesis.
A similar view is the intermittent day view. This view takes the days of creation as literay 24 hour days, but proposes that there could have been long periods of time between each day. The days become, as it were, the lead off hitters for long periods of time that may have lasted millions of years. Similarly, some have considered the first two verses of Genesis as "Day 0." This could allow for billions of years of development prior to God's specific work on the Earth starting in verse 3.
4.1.2 Symbolic Approaches
In the early church and some parts of Judaism, allegorical readings of Genesis 1 were very common. Philo was a Jew from Alexandria who lived about the same time as Jesus. He did not believe that Genesis 1 gave us a historical account of creation because divine creation for God would have been instantaneous. Instead, the days of creation were a logical explanation of what God created at once. [3]
Similarly, the Christian Origen, writing about 200CE, argued that Genesis 1 could not be literal. How, for example, could there be light before the Sun, moon, or the stars? The deeper meaning of Genesis 1, he supposed, was about Christ (light), the church (firmament), and spiritual growth.
Augustine (354-430CE) similarly did not think that Genesis 1 could be pinned down to a literal meaning. Like Philo, he believed that God created the world instantaneously. The days were figurative, a teaching device. They might symbolize six stages to the Christian life, for example.
In general, medieval interpretation of the Bible saw various layers of meaning to the text, the so called fourfold sense of Scripture. Yes, there was the "literal" interpretation, the apparent surface meaning. But there was also often an allegorical meaning thought to be hidden in the text. There was a "moral" to the text. And sometimes there was thought to be an "anagogical" meaning that pointed to final realities like heaven or the end of history.
In more recent times, the day-age theory is an example of an approach to the days of Genesis that does not take them as literal 24 hour periods but possibly as representing long periods of time. Reference is often made to Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8, which say that a 1000 years is like a day for God. What if, this approach suggests, each day of Genesis represents millions of years?
The day-age theory, along with the gap theory and intermittent day theories, are often approaches taken by old earth creationists. These are individuals who do not believe in what is called "macro-evolution" but who accept the scientific evidence for an "old" earth and universe. Such individuals reject the notion that complex life developed from simpler forms purely through a process of natural selection. However, they accept the consensus of the scientific community in relation to findings in geology, astronomy, and physics that point to an earth that is around 4.5 billion years old and a universe that is about 13.8 billion years old.
As we look back through history, non-literal or figurative readings of Genesis 1 were fairly common prior to the modern era. It is a reminder that the interpretations that seem obvious to us in any period of time are usually more than what the text actually says. In each time and place, we inherit a paradigm that seems clear but is as much a product of our culture and environment as the text itself.
4.1.3 Literary-Theological Approaches
Most of the views we have expressed thus far are usually classified as concordist views. That is to say, they harmonize a somewhat historical or quasi-scientific reading of the Genesis text with science in some way. They can sometimes come across as finding ingenious, less obvious ways to make the text and modern science align.
In the end, the original meaning of Genesis 1 is a matter of its genre -- what type of literature it was meant to be. Most modern scholars of Genesis would critique the approaches above as imposing later or modern frameworks on the text. In other words, they fail to let the text speak in the way it was originally intended to speak.
In the mid-1900s, a less historical approach arose that was sometimes called the framework hypothesis. [6] The idea was that Genesis 1 provided a more poetic, theological framework for thinking about God and the creation rather than a literal, scientific, or historical one. However, perhaps it would be clearer to call this a literary-theological approach to the text.
For example, John Walton would categorize the genre of Genesis 1 as ancient cosmology, perhaps even as liturgy. [7] As ancient cosmology, it was presenting the Israelite view of the world without giving us a scientific view of the world. The key aspects of it were about the nature of God and the creation, not the specifics of how the creation unfolded historically. If it were a liturgy, Walton wonders if Israel might have re-enacted God coming to sit on his throne in a cosmic temple each year. [8]
Viewing it in this way removes any need for us to harmonize the details of Genesis 1 with modern science. In effect, they become somewhat independent of each other. Genesis 1 comes to be about who God is and how Israel was meant to view the creation. Science is then asking completely different questions. We will explore the genre of Genesis 1 in the next section.
[1] Ken Ham, The Lie: Unravelling the Myth: Evolution/Millions of Years (Master, 1987).
[2] E.g., Kenneth Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (Harper, 1999), 77-80. So also Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free, 2007), 177-79.
[3] See Philo's work, On the Creation.
[4] Origen, On First Principles, Book 4.
[5] Augustine, Confessions, Book 11; Literal Meaning of Genesis.
[6] For example, Nicholaas Ridderbos, Is There a Conflict Between Genesis 1 and Natural Science? (Pathway, 1957).
[7] John Walton, Lost World of Genesis 1 (InterVarsity, 2009), 14-20.
[8] Lost World, 86-91.
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