Reading Genesis as Moral Instruction (Sunday School was wrong)

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.

Genesis as Moral Instruction

First, I no longer believe that Genesis is intended to be a collection of morality tales. If it were so, it would be a bad one. No moral explanation or direction is given regarding Abraham lying about his wife Sarah being his sister (or any other of the many deceptions in Genesis), Lot choosing the plains, Isaac's preference of Esau, or Joseph's imprisonment of his brother, Simeon. Were these right or wrong things for the characters to do? The text is unclear.

In the case of Abraham’s deception regarding his wife, if Genesis were moral instruction we could easily interpret the story as God’s approval of Abram’s prostitution of his own wife. She enters the king’s harem, and he likely sleeps with her. Upon discovery of Abram and Sarah’s real relationship, the king sends them away with animals and great wealth. This is, in fact, the beginning of Abram’s wealth in scripture. Was God blessing Abram through the king? Why? Was he right in what he did? The text is not clear.

Genesis does not display heroes whose lives we are to emulate or simple stories of their mistakes and what came of them. Sometimes the patriarchs did things that are clearly prohibited in scripture, without the text necessarily explicitly or even implicitly pointing out their error. Immoral behaviour by the characters in this book may lead to Godly ends. By no means should we follow their example.

In a text as old as Genesis, written and read by an ancient people in another part of the world, the gap between its cultural understanding of ethics and ours is vast. In the thousands of years that Genesis has been read, every new culture in every new age has an opportunity to read into the text its current understandings and teachings about right and wrong. This can easily amount to isogesis, a sort of reading animal shapes into the clouds of scripture. We should be very careful not to interpret scripture according to our own whims and worldviews. At best, this obscures or muddies the intended meaning of the book, at worst this leads to outright unbiblical interpretations and heresy. Let us respect the ancient cultures and the Word enough to leap past this cultural boundary.

The Bible does often teach morality, both explicitly and implicitly. If we find moral instruction elsewhere in scripture, we should teach that morality from that same scripture, and allow Genesis to stand alone to teach us what its author actually intends.

Moral lessons are not the primary purpose of the text, and a most correct interpretation of Genesis should reflect this. When Genesis does not clearly and explicitly teach a moral, we should not assign one. If we are to understand Genesis, we should look elsewhere.

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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.

(next - Genesis, Myth, Science, and History)