This seventh and final installment of my response to a former student concerning my understanding of the authority of scripture will offer an extended case study of Genesis 1-2 to demonstrate how biblical interpretation benefits from careful attention to all three of the contexts involved in reading Scripture.
We begin for reasons that will soon become apparent with the literary context. An attentive reader of Genesis 1 and 2 will quickly recognize that they constitute two, distinct accounts. The world of Genesis 1 is watery; Genesis 2 begins with a world in which there are yet no sources to water the ground. The order of creation varies: in Genesis 1, God creates the components of the world in a hierarchical order, beginning with energy and substance and culminating in the creation of human kind in God’s likeness (plants, animals, human kind); Genesis 2 says nothing about the creation of the material world and God’s creative activity begins with Adam, after which God planted plants and then “formed out of the ground” all the animals and birds as potential partners for Adam (man, plants, animals, woman). As depicted in Genesis 1, God speaks the universe into existence; as depicted in Genesis 2, God “plants,” “forms,” and performs surgery.
So, which version tells the story ‘correctly’? Since the authors and editors of the book of Genesis were probably as capable of reading the text carefully, they almost certainly recognized the differences. Yet, they still included both versions in the book of Genesis. Clearly, they meant for readers to take seriously both accounts and, just as clearly, they meant for readers to find significance, not in the differences in details concerning God’s “methods” or sequence, but in the fact that both accounts contribute to the truth.
If one asks what each account has to say about God and about humankind, their complementarity comes into view. Genesis 1 depicts a transcendent God beyond the world, yet calling it into being, directing the forming universe like a conductor leading an orchestra. In contrast, Genesis 2 (and 3) depict(s) an imminent God who walks in the garden (in the cool of the day), who plants trees, who shapes clay. Apparently, when confronted by two creation accounts, the editors/compilers of Genesis did not see them as exercising competing truth claims about God’s nature and character. Instead, they recognized that each spoke an important, but partial, truth. The transcendent God is also with us (Immanuel).
Similarly, Genesis 1 portrays the creation of human kind as God’s crowning act and human beings as bearers of the “image and likeness” of God in the world. According to Genesis 2, on the other hand, human beings are little more than animated clay figurines, living dirt balls. Indeed, the continuation of the account in Genesis 3 makes it clear that humans are dirt and they return to dirt, that God formed Adam/humankind (Hebr. adam) from the earth (adamah). Are human beings noble creatures, created “a little lower than angels” (Psa 8:5) or fallible, transient mortals? The best understanding, of course, balances human dignity and human frailty (cf. Ecc 3). We are like God, but we are not God.
A second context, the cultural context, can also shed light on the thrust of Genesis 1, in particular. Since the late 19th century, scholars have recognized the close similarities between the Mesopotamian creation story known as the Enuma Elish and Genesis 1. The earliest surviving manuscripts of Enuma Elish date to the 13th century BCE, and thus is probably older than Genesis 1. The likeliest explanation for the similarities is that, while exile in Babylon, the author of Genesis 1 became familiar with the Mesopotamian account of how Marduk created the world. As important as the similarities may be (a watery chaos at the outset, seven steps of creation, etc.), the differences announce the theological intentions of the Genesis account. Chief among them are:
Enuma Elish Genesis 1
Marduk conquered Tiamat (chaos monster) The one God spoke the cooperative world
in a battle between the gods into being
Humankind made from the body of a rebel god Humankind created in God’s image
to serve the gods to represent God in the world
The gods are part of the universe Components of the universe are not deities
(sun, moon, and stars, for example)
Thus, if one reads Genesis 1 with Enuma Elish in the background, as the first readers of Genesis would have done, one can hear in it assurances that the world is not in chaotic rebellion against God, that it does not rest on violence, that human beings are not the stuff of rebellion. Put positively, Genesis 1 asserts that the one God created a good (see vv 3, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25), indeed a very good (v 31) world. God placed in it human kind to bear God’s image and to exercise responsibility for it as God’s deputies, as it were.
Finally, of course, interpretation of the Bible requires setting it in relation to its contemporary context. Regarding Genesis 1, this process immediately raises the specter of the relationship between faith and science. What is true? Did God create the universe (in 7 ‘literal’ days) or did the universe we know come about through the Big Bang and evolutionary processes over the course of 13.8 billion years? The question involves a binary choice like those concerning the nature of God (transcendent or imminent) and human beings (noble or frail). Close examination of Genesis 1 reveals that its interests relate to ‘who’ and ‘why’ (in the sense of purpose, not causation) questions and not at all to ‘how’ questions.
Remarkably, Genesis 1 describes God’s role in creation without reference to any physical act of God. Instead, in a series of phases, God wills elements of the world to be, observes that they have become, and evaluates them. According to Genesis 1, this state of nothing except potential becomes something through God’s performative word. In stark contrast to the creator gods of the world’s mythologies, the biblical God does nothing in this account except to express volition. The backbone of the Genesis account consists of a series of statements God makes about the components of the universe, in each case before these components have come into existence (vv. 3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26). All but the last employ the peculiar Hebrew verb form, with no counterpart in English, known as a “jussive,” which expresses the speaker’s will in the third person. Significantly, Genesis 1 reports that the components of the cosmos came into being, not because God caused them in any physical manner, but because God willed, authorized, enabled, or required them to come into being. God did not participate in the physical process as the first cause and, thus, from within existence. Rather, to employ Paul Tillich’s phrase, God was and is “the Ground of Being,” the will upon which beings can exist.
In contrast to the creation of light, in which case God occasioned its existence merely by expressing the wish that it exist, five moments of creation involve creaturely agency as the direct means of creation through the emergence of higher order from lower. The waters under the firmament “gather themselves together” (yiqqāwû) and the dry land “appears” (tērā’eh) in response to God’s wish (v 9). God authorizes the earth to cause (tadšē’) the herbage and trees to sprout (v 11). Similarly, the waters are to “teem” (yišrĕṣû) with life (v 20), and the earth is to “bring forth” (tôṣē’) land life in its various kinds (v. 24). John Polkinghorne (“Scripture and an Evolving Creation,” 165) calls attention to the descriptions of the creative agency of natural processes in parallel with statements that God “made” components of the world (vv 11, 20–21, and 24–25). Taken together, vv 20–21 offer an instructive amplification of the process. The author of Gen 1 has God first express the will for the existence of aquatic and avian life (v 20), then specifies that God created (bārā’) the giant sea creatures (v 21), and finally “blessed” all this life by endowing them with the capacity for pro-creation and enjoining them to fill their habitats with life (v 22). This capacity extends creaturely agency to subsequent generations of living things. Summarizing wonder at this cooperation between God and God’s creation, the nineteenth-century theologians Charles Kingsley and Frederick Temple reacted to Darwin by observing that God cleverly created a world in which “creatures would make themselves” (cited in Polkinghorn, 169).
Finally, I will offer some “principles” in summary but in no ranking:
- It is very important to distinguish between the human and the divine components of the Bible.
- It can be misleading to absolutize a specific passage of scripture. The context of the whole of God’s revelation, especially in Jesus Christ, is much more revelatory and authoritative. Here it is important to pay attention to what a text says explicitly, but also to what a text does not say.
- The virtue of humility is a chief desideratum for biblical interpreters.
- Always operate with transparent motives, logical consistency, and coherency. Do not pick choose among texts. Do not employ purely subjective criteria.
- Takes care not to canonize either ancient culture or contemporary culture. We, too, will almost certainly one day be seen as having been bound to our culture and blinded to God’s direction.
- Scripture is both fixed and living. No one in my neighborhood owns an ox, so no one is likely to call on me to help get an ox out of a ditch, but all manner of opportunities to help another human being out of difficulties present themselves almost daily. Does the biblical prescription concerning oxen pertain to cars with flat tires. Paul said that the letter kills while the spirit gives life.
- Attention to trajectories can be helpful. Deuteronomy 14-15 call upon Israelites periodically to release slaves because God once delivered them from slavery. I wish the text had drawn the logical conclusion that a God who delivers slaves does not want those delivered slaves to turn around and enslave others. It did not, however. Paul, who could write that in Christ there is neither “slave nor free,” could not bring himself to insist to Philemon, therefore, that it is simply incompatible for a Christian to own another person. I wish that Paul had done so, but he did not. Nonetheless, the trajectory is clear. In the light of Exodus and Easter, slavery is contrary to God’s character and will. The Bible never quite gets to this explicit statement. On this and many other issues, the contemporary interpreter of scripture can trace the direction in which the Bible points and extend it further, heralding love, life, and liberty!