At-One-Ment and Atonement (5)
Appendix: 5 Ways to Preach/Teach Genesis 1-2 None of Which Involve Creationism/Intelligent Design or Evolution!
The
vexed matter of how to interpret Genesis 1-2 seems inextricably tethered to
debates about science and origins. Sadly, this misplaced focus robs these texts
of much of their richness and either unjustifiably inflates the explanatory
power of science on the one side, or unjustifiably jaundices our view of it one
the other. Many voices, of course, have been raised from many directions
contesting this focus on these texts but they seemed to have made little
headway. I don’t expect that my contribution will make much headway either. My
justification for it is my conviction that the most effective way to contest
another perspective is to show the fruitfulness of other perspectives in
treating the same issues. It would be a fine thing if all who preached and
taught these texts broadened their viewpoints enough to include some or all of
the 5 other perspectives on Genesis 1-2 that I will suggest in this piece.
All
the peoples and cultures surrounding Israel in the Ancient Near East of the 2nd and
1st millennia B.C. had cosmogonies (creation stories). None of
them are told in a manner that approximates what we would consider today
“scientific” (primarily because those ways of thinking about origins did not
and could not exist at that time and place). Israel’s creation stories in
Genesis 1-2 strive to be intelligible to its own people and in conversation
with these other stories (often called “myths” – which is not necessarily a bad
word!). To do so required Israel to “speak the language” of the times, the
language and concepts others were using to make clear what it intended by its
own stories and how those stories differed from those told by other peoples.
Let’s all this the missionary and apologetic aims of Genesis 1-2 which serve and
extend its primary theological purposes.
Creation
stories in the Ancient Near East serve varied purposes.
1. Some
describe the world in such a way that human beings can locate and understand
themselves in the world’s order. Genesis 1-2 can be read from this angle as a
description of “home” for human creatures, a place where they belong and have a
role and purpose. Genesis 1 structures its story in terms of a place (first
three days) and a placing in this place of vegetation, land, air, and water
creatures, and humanity. The effect of this unfolding of creation in all its
orderly abundance suggests this is a good “home” for all God has created. Of
course, God himself pronounces just this verdict over his handiwork. Humanity’s
creation in God’s “image” and his royal representatives and care-takers of his
creation reinforce this sense of creation’s goodness and our role in the “home
economics” of this creation.
2. Other
descriptions focus the nature of creation as “habitat.” That is, what kind of
place is this, especially for the human beings who have to make and sustain
life here. Is it a “friendly” habitat for humanity? Or will they experience and
perceive it as a threat and challenge to wrest life from it? Or some combination
of these? Are its processes stable and regular enough to establish routines and
practices of food gathering and production? Are the resources sufficient to
sustain life? What does it mean that human beings are to “till and keep”
(Genesis 2:15) the garden as habitat? Preaching/teaching from this angle has a
clear message that God has inscribed this creation with the stability,
regularity, and abundance necessary for a flourishing life for human beings who
can learn to work and care for this habitat in a way that benefits all. An
ecological or environmental mandate jumps off the pages of the Bible seen from
this point of view. Neither a domineering use of creational resources for human
whim and want nor a “tree-hugging” reverence for the creation that allows
little or nothing done to it are appropriate to the Bible’s picture of this
habitat. Rather, it seems clear that a responsible use of this creation to meet
all humanity’s needs within an overall care for its integrity and flourishing
is the Bible’s portrayal.
It is
worth noting at this point that the unfolding description of this habitat in
Genesis with God creating and assigning a place and role to the various
elements offers a critique, a demythologizing, if you will, of aspects of
creation considered to be deities in control of certain aspects of life. These
deities needed to be worshiped and placated for them to offer their gifts to
humanity. Often arbitrary and sometimes vicious, these gods and goddesses often
worked at cross purposes and treated humanity as slaves to do the “grunt” work
of maintaining creation they were tired of doing. Sun and Moon, for instance,
were major deities in many of the religions of the region. In Genesis 1,
however, they are only creations, astral bodies placed in the skies for
purposes assigned them by God.
3. Often
creation stories in Israel’s world were told as the construction of a cosmic
temple, a “Hekal” in Hebrew. It’s become very clear in recent research that
this is precisely what we have in Genesis 1 and 2. (Check out the article in
Kerux from 2002 entitled “Garden Temple” by Gregory Beale at
http://www.kerux.com/documents/keruxV18N2A1.htm or his “Eden, the temple and
the church’s mission in the new creation.” http://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-aPDFs/48/48-1/48-1-pp005-031_JETS.pdf JETS.
March 2005 48(1): pp 5-31 for details.) This creation is to be the dwelling
place of God and site of the eternal fellowship (communication, communion, and
community) between God and humanity forever. And where does a God dwell? In a
temple. Further, the words used for the roles God assigned to humanity (male
and female, Genesis 1:27!) in the Garden (Genesis 2:15 again) are used together
most often for the service of priests in the temple! This suggests that as divine
image-bearers humanity is God’s family of royal (because God is the Great King)
priests representing and expanding the boundaries of the Garden temple until
they are coextensive with the world itself along with mediating God’s presence
in this expanding temple by “protecting and serving” it (another way of
translating the terms for “till and work” in Genesis 2:15). This is
corroborated at the end of the biblical story with the vision of the New
Jerusalem descending from heaven, coextensive with God’s new creation and in
the cubic shape of the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s temple (the only other
cubic-shaped structure in the Bible (1 Kings 6:20). Creation as a temple, a
Hekal, a dwelling for God and humanity highlights God’s deepest intention for
creation. We live in this world with God, for God, as his royal-priests serving
in the expansion throughout the world of the temple it is destined to become.
4. The
creation story has also be preached as a story of hope. Many ancient creation
stories served to buttress the idea that the way things were was the way the
gods wanted them to be. To try and change the way the world worked, then, was
to act against the gods and court the divine punishment the authorized powers
that be would swiftly and brutally deliver. Israel’s story, though, moves in
the opposite direction. As we say in #3 the creation is not yet what it will
be. The originating point, far from setting the way things are at that point in
stone, set creature and creation on a journey to each’s full
flourishing. In this maturing journey, even apart from sin, we will
have to learn and discover how best to implement God’s order as we make our
through life and across the creation. We are responsible for this due to our
creation as God’s image-bearers and response-able to do it as those who live in
constant communication, communion, and community with God. Sin tragically
disrupts this journey and makes it infinitely more difficult, but still
necessary. Jesus Christ, in whose image we are created and will be remade
(Colossians 1:15; Romans 8:29), who would have come to be God with us and one
of us (thus fulfilling God’s deepest desire to draw near his people) even apart
from sin, takes on the task of reclaiming and restoring us to God’s divine
intention through his life, death, and resurrection as well. Thus we have hope
that the world of interdependent harmony, cooperation, generosity, and beauty
prefigured in Genesis 1-2 will finally and fully become reality as pictured in
Revelation 21-22. How things are, often quite unjust and oppressive for the
many, is not how things have to be or are supposed to be. And the God of the
Bible is indisputably and unreservedly on the side of changing things to more
closely approximate the world he desires and will one day have. Hope, yes, the
creation stories in Genesis are hope-full stories for those held down, put
upon, and mistreated at present.
5. Another
way of preaching/teaching the Genesis creation stories is to consider the date
of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis – Deuteronomy. A
consensus exists at present that these books did not take their final form, the
form in which we have them, until after the exile to Babylon (6th century
B. C.). And it was put together in this form as a response to the catastrophe
of exile. Everything for Israel was put in question when Nebuchadnezzar and his
armies destroyed Jerusalem, razed the temple, and hauled the best and the
brightest of the land off to Babylon – God, their future, what their lives
meant – everything. How might the struggling, dispirited faithful respond? For
what might they hope now? The answer Genesis 1 provides is the people may hope
for Help. It gives us a lexicon of salvation. When the “tohu wabohu” (‘formless
void, Genesis 1:2) descends upon us – and exile was “tohu wabohu” to the nth
degree – we are reminded here that such chaos is not beyond God’s interest or
redemption. He will again utter his recreative “Let there be” and new order
will take shape out of the chaos. And this recreative utterance will be matched
by its fulfilment (“and it was so,” 1:7). Genesis 1 is a story of Help. The
help that the God who creates and redeems alone can and will offer. The help
that we can hope for when hope itself fails us!
Creation
as Home, Habitat, Hekal (Temple), Hope, and Help. I hope my sketchy comments
trying to begin to flesh out some directions a preacher/teacher might go with
them. Even more, I hope all such folks will catch a vision of the fullness that
lies within these texts and can and ought to be put to use regardless of how
one treats the “scientific” issues. I suspect that over time a repeated
exposition of the creation stories in this manner will reveal the poverty and
irrelevance of the “scientific” issues we continue to struggle over today. And
it may just lose its hold and drop aside in favor of the rich possibilities of
reading these stories from other angles.
[Now
I do believe there is an issue that must be contested in the “scientific”
struggle over origins. But it is not whether to read Genesis 1 “literally” or
not. It is evolutionism or scientism. When advocates of science or evolution
rule out a theistic creation (even an evolutionary theistic one) because
science tells us all we can or need to know about human and cosmic origins,
then Christians, at least, must cry “foul.” Science, properly conceived and
invaluable for its proper purpose, can only tell us what is and some parts of
the story of how what is came to be. It cannot tell us whether or what kind of
deity may stand behind the creative process. It’s when science becomes such an
ideology (scientism, evolutionism), a philosophy that we must say “no.” But we
don’t resist it by turning theology into science! Rather, we let Genesis 1 and
2 answer the “who,” “why,” and “where” questions – who is God? Who are we as
God’s creatures, Why are we here? Where is creation going? - and let
them frame and interpret whatever account of origins the best science of our
time affords us. Bad science (science as ideology or philosophy) and bad
theology (theology as science) have created the huge distraction of
creationism/intelligent design vs. science that continues to haunt our approach
to Genesis 1 and 2. It’s time to let that go, isn’t it, and turn to riches we
so easily ignore in these wonderful texts?]
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