In the last entry, I began exploring three of the common interpretive frameworks used when reading Genesis. I began by suggesting that we avoid reading Genesis as a collection of morality tales. In this entry, I will discuss Genesis as interpreted by science or history. I retain the introduction of the previous entry to allow this entry to be read more independently.
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Welcome to Genesis, an ancient and beautiful epic book of creation, rebellion, judgment, restoration, forgiveness, lust, power, poverty, and wealth. In my recent enriching exploration of Genesis, I have discovered and rediscovered a beautiful story that has for much of my life remained hidden. This book in the eyes and hands of many has collected a great deal of baggage, paintings and repaintings that obscure it’s delicate and detailed forms.
In my study, I have concluded that there are three common frameworks that people (especially us evangelicals) place Genesis in that serve to confuse or outright blind its theologically robust message. These frameworks are (1) the popular Sunday School method of reading Genesis as a collection of morality tales, (2) pressuring Genesis (especially chapters 1-11) into a modern scientific or historical understanding that did not exist in the ancient world of this book, and (3) reading Genesis only through a New Testament understanding and theology that had not yet formed when the book was written.
I will briefly touch on each of these frameworks in turn. If interest in further study or conversation is communicated in the comments, I will explore or explain these ideas further. If not, consider these to be an introduction to my own framework, what it is and what it isn’t. Whether you agree with me or not does not matter. My intention is to be forthright regarding my own paradigm from which I consider the text.
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Genesis, Science, and History
As Christians, it’s important when we read Genesis or any scripture that though we may believe that it was written for us, it was not written to us.* Genesis is an ancient book, written to a people many degrees removed from us in culture, worldview, language, and even (by at least one degree, but probably more) religion. Our understanding of science and history, though ours, is not even close to the only paradigm by which humanity has always discovered or explained truth. Indeed, it is not the only way that all of humanity understands truth even today.
As Christians, we may believe that all truth is indeed God’s truth. As such, we need not abandon or despise the modern scientific method, nor reason, nor art. However, we should understand that each of these realms of understanding truth does exist within its own paradigm. Science is a great tool for discovering the nature of the created world. However, empirical natural science is by definition limited to the physical realm, and therefore it is not equipped to explore the metaphysical, or answer questions of purpose. These are in the realm of theology. Science has its place, but in its place it must remain. Questions of purpose, or teleology, are science interpreted, which is philosophy. Pure science must remain teleologically neutral.
To put it another way, science may explore and describe the natural realms and theories of embryology, biology, and evolution, but it may not draw conclusions of human purpose or divine existence from that study or it ceases to be science.
Also, to put science in its proper perspective, we should remember that the scientific method is new on the scene of human understanding. Before a portion of humanity began using science for the last four hundred years, humanity engaged (and still engages) the world and each other through storytelling, art, and legend as they grappled with both origins AND purpose. I suggest that a reading of Genesis that seeks to pressure its interpretation into our understanding of a scientific framework is both arrogant and blind. We are arrogant to assume that Genesis should speak to us alone in our language, a small minority of the human race in both the present and in history. We are blind because our intellectual colonialism makes us unable to see the text as the original readers would, who had no understanding or value for science as we have today.
Whether we disregard Genesis because of modern science, or seek to force it into a scientific paradigm to support our faith, we do violence to the text by insisting on a scientific understanding that it never intended.
In our zeal to support our faith, we should be careful not to elevate too highly our secular modern myths of truth finding in our interpretation of a sacred and ancient text. Genesis need not match our modern understandings of science or history in order to be true. Though Genesis intends to be a history, the historical accuracy is not the intention of the message of the text. Both science and history are always open to revision. The message of Genesis remains true. Genesis need not be exhaustive in order to be true. It does not matter how Cain found a wife. Any plausible explanation is enough, but does not matter to the story. We should be careful as we fill in details that we do not place our interpretations on those details.
In Genesis fifteen, God shows Abram all the stars. As Abram looked up, he did not see a vast expanse filled with innumerable gigantic balls of flaming gas. In Abram’s understanding, he saw the firmament, a solid dome that stretched over the flat earth. Within the firmament, he saw distant lights that lit the night, directed travellers, and showed the seasons. Beneath the firmament, the earth held up this dome by the furthest mountains, the edges of the world. Beneath this flat earth was the underworld, the land of the dead where the sun went each night. Beyond the firmament was the waters of heaven, from which came the rain.
It shouldn’t shock us that the story does not include God’s correction of Abram’s understanding of the ways of the natural world. In the story, God speaks to Abram according to his own worldview, in his own understanding. If we read further, we see this even more explicitly in the way that God communicates his promise to Abram. The ceremony of broken animals was a contemporary Canaanite ritual of oath taking that Abram would have known well. God sealed his promise to Abram in Abram’s own language and culture.
We should also notice that a few verses after God shows Abram the stars in the sky, the story tells us that the sun went down. A modern literal interpretation of this must conclude that these details are impossible. This is only one of many examples in Genesis and the Torah of details that do not correspond with our understanding of a true and literal narrative. When we explore the questions of the ethnicity of Joseph’s slave traders, the names of Esau’s wives, conflicting genealogical records, or the circumstances of Joseph’s brother’s discovery of their returned silver, the evidence piles up that we and the original readers of Genesis do not understand truth in the same way.
Genesis is written as narrative history, and intends to be taken as truth. As Christians, we approach Genesis and all scripture as God’s Word, and as our authority for religious doctrine, worship, and practice of faith. We believe that Genesis is true, and true in a sense far greater than any other truth.
Let us approach the text with humility, with the willingness to consider the ancient worldviews and understandings of these ancient writers and readers. Let us read to discover a fuller and more robust theology, as God speaks to us his wisdom through their ancient understandings and stories.
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To be clear, I do intend to approach Genesis with reverence and prayer. I do believe that Genesis and the rest of the Bible is scripture, and I read it as such. I believe that God speaks to us through the words of Genesis. I believe that Genesis is true, more true than anything outside of scripture.
However, I believe that Genesis and all scripture is only as true as it intends to be, and only true in the way it intends to be true. I do not believe that a faithful reading of Genesis means that we need to disengage our God created mental faculties. I also believe that we can gain much from the scholarship of many others in the church or outside of it, whether we agree with them or not. The consequences of our readings and conclusions can affect our views of God and others deeply, so let us be humble and considerate as we interpret God’s Word, or share our interpretations with others.
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I believe that the caution I stated in the previous entry regarding isogesis, or reading our cultural paradigm into the text, also applies to insisting on a scientific framework for Genesis. Though I find the writings of some thoughtful Old Earth Creationists like Hugh Ross to be interesting and engaging, I believe that these interpretations can do as much damage to the text as Young Earth Creationists. Either way, we search the text to support our current understandings of the material world. This is an incorrect hermeneutic (interpretation theory) when reading for theology, and just as incorrect when reading for science. Just like when we read Genesis for morality, we risk reading animal shapes into the clouds of scripture.
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*John Walton said something like this first in his great book, The Lost World of Genesis One
I owe a great debt to this book for much of this article, as well as John Walton’s other excellent book, Genesis – The NIV Application Commentary
(next entry – Genesis and the New Testament)
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