The Dangers of Literalism
from the ESA Planck mission.
The Construction of the Bible
The Two Creations
Genesis 1: Cosmocentric Creation
The first creation account describes how God created the world by bringing order to chaos. Here, the world was preexistent—meaning God did not create the world out of nothing (ex nihilo). Rather, "The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep" (Genesis 1:2) God's role was then to bring goodness and order to this world depicted as "formless," "void," "darkness," and "deep"—each descriptor symbolic of chaos and "evil."
Creation Ex Nihilo
Christian theology teaches that there was nothing but God, and that God alone brought the universe—all matter, energy, time, and space—into existence from nothing. There was no preexistent physical reality; therefore nothing should not be understood as an actual something.
The theological implications of this are significant. God made no use of pre-existing materials, nor did God make the world out of His own being. Christian theism rejects the view that identifies the world with God's being or essence (either pantheism or panentheism). God alone is infinite, eternal, and independent, while the physical universe, the creation, is finite, temporal, and contingent.
An important qualification of God's creation out of nothing is that it only applies to God's initial creation of the universe.
A Word on Anthropomorphizing the Divine
As you may have noticed above, the pronoun "He" is used for the Divine, or, in this case, God (not YHWH, although the tetragrammaton also possesses a pronomic function, as it replaces the true name of the Divine, which may not be spoken or written). In doing so, I am following long-standing Jewish and Christian theological tradition. The implications are both sexist and profound. We have now ascribed agency to the male form alone, feminized all believers (as we will see in The Song of Songs), and diminished the Divine to human stature.
The Six Days
During the six days of creation, God adheres to a strict pattern to create order: the first three days parallel the second three days.
- On day 1, He creates light to create day and night (Genesis 1:5). This is mirrored on day 4, when God creates the sun, moon and stars (Genesis 1:14).
- On day 2, God creates the waters and sky (Genesis 1:6-7) whereas on day 5, He creates fish and birds (Genesis 1:20-22).
- On day 3, God creates in two stages, first dry land then vegetation (Genesis 1:11-12) whereas on day 6, He creates land animals first, then mankind (Genesis 1:24-30).
Genesis 1 and Theodicy
By showing God created the world out of a pre-existing substance, thus creating "good" and separating it from chaos or evil, Genesis addresses the problem of evil—how God and evil can exist within the world. In polytheistic belief systems, evil isn't a problem because destructive acts can be ascribed to the many gods capable of harming humans. But in monotheistic belief systems where only one good, moral, all-powerful God is worshiped, the presence of evil is difficult to justify. Here, God is not to be blamed for "evil" because evil was already present. God took the materials he had and brought forth goodness from them.
Genesis 2: Anthropocentric Creation
The second account of creation (Genesis 2:4b–25) describes how God created man, created the Garden of Eden, then made Adam a female companion. In Genesis 2:4b–25, "the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." (Genesis 2:7) This anthropocentric account differs from the cosmocentric account in a number of ways:
- Different names for God: The first refers to the Creator as "God," or as "Elohim" in Hebrew, while the second refers to the Creator as the "LORD God," or YHWH Elohim, YHWH being God's Hebrew name.
- Different methodologies for creation: In the first, God creates through speaking. In the second, God takes physical actions (planting a garden, breathing into Adam's nostrils, etc).
- Different order to creation: In the first, humanity is presented as the climax of God's creation after He created vegetation and animals. Here, human males and females are created at the same time. In the second, God first creates man, then plants vegetation in the Garden of Eden, then makes animals, and then, finally, woman.
A Better Idea
Not surprisingly, there are a number of ways to resolve this Contradiction of the Two Creations. The most obvious is to deny its existence, to state that the second creation is merely an amplification of the first. When offered by a biblical literalist, one who says that Jesus performed miracles or that there was really a world-wide flood, this is the height of hypocrisy. You can't have literalism in those cases and interpretation here.
Another method is to take one account literally and read another account interpretively. So either of these accounts can be seen as additive, not as a replacement or a moving in parallel to the other.
Dick Tripp, an Anglican minister, offers five "scenarios" for reading the problems in Genesis 1 and 2. [http://www.christianity.co.nz/science7.htm.] His summaries of these positions are unbiased, so I present them at length below:
1. Recent Creationism
There are many Christians today who believe that to take the word "day" to refer to anything other than 24 hours is to be unfaithful to what they believe the Bible says, and therefore unfaithful to God. They would rather be true to what they believe God is saying than accept what appears to be the physical evidence presented by scientists. The world must therefore have been created comparatively recently and within a six-day period, and the scientists have just got it wrong - for whatever reason.
2. Creation, then chaos, then re-creation
To get around the evidence produced by geologists, some have suggested that "the earth was formless and empty" in verse 2, should be translated "the earth became formless and empty". (The Hebrew could be translated that way, though I understand from good authority that the grammatical construction is against it here.) That implies that there was an original creation which was good, and the life now represented by fossils flourished. But then something went wrong, perhaps associated with the rebellion of Satan and other spiritual beings. As a result of God's judgement chaos resulted. The rest of Genesis 1 then speaks of a re-creation which did take place within the six-day period.
3. Stages of creation revealed in six days
A very reasonable view was presented by Air Commodore P. J. Wiseman, CBE RAF (1888-1948).… Wiseman’s basic argument is that the six days do indeed represent days of 24 hours, but they are not days in which God created the universe, but days in which he revealed truths of his creation to an individual at the dawn of history over a period of six days.
4. God spoke his words of creation over six days
This view suggests that on each of the recorded days God spoke his intention. Thus, on Day One God spoke his intention of creating light, on Day Two of creating the earth's atmosphere, and so on. After each spoken word a parenthesis is added to show the consequence of that word.
5. The "days" represent unspecified ages
This is most succinctly presented by Hugh Ross in Creation and Time:
[I have removed extraneous commentary concerning contemporary biology.]
The "days" represent unspecified ages.
"'Yôm,' the Hebrew word for 'day,' is "frequently put for time in general, or for a long time, a whole period under consideration… 'Day' is also put for a particular season or time when any extraordinary event happens" (William Wilson, in his Old Testament Word Studies). Some examples would be Genesis 30:14 (yôm = wheat harvest time); Joshua 24:7 (yôm = a long season); Proverbs 25:13 (yôm = harvest time); Isaiah 4:2 (yôm = a future era); Zechariah 14:8 yôm = summer + winter); and many references to the day of the Lord where it means "an occasion when God acts." A particularly significant verse in this regard is Genesis 2:4, "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day of their making" (literal Hebrew translation) where the word is used of the whole creation period. Also, the plural "generations" in this verse implies a lengthy period.
The Hebrew word "'ereb," translated "evening," also means "sunset," "night," or "ending of the day." And the word "boqer," translated "morning," also means "sunrise," "coming of light," "beginning of day," "break of day," or "dawning," with possible metaphoric usage. In other words, evening and morning refer to the beginning and ending components of "day," however it is used.
It doesn’t make sense to see the events of Genesis 2 compressed within a 24-hour-day.
However, there is no "evening" or "morning" mentioned for the seventh day. This suggests that this day has not yet ended. This is further implied in Psalm 95:7-11 and Hebrews 4:4-11. Though God is obviously still active in his creation, as Jesus indicated (John 5:16-18), his "creative work" of producing new forms of life has ceased. [Notice the author moving from linguistic work into interpretation here.]
In describing the eternity of God’s existence, several Bible writers compare it to the length of the age of the mountains or the "foundations of the earth." The figures of speech used in passages such as Psalm 90:2-6, Proverbs 8:22-31, Ecclesiastes 1:3-11, and Micah 6:2 depict the immeasurable antiquity of God’s presence and plans.
The Sabbath day for man, and Sabbath year for the land, are analogous to God's work week. Exodus 20:10-11 tells us that the seventh day of each week is to be honored as holy, "For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth… but he rested on the seventh day." This passage is often cited as proof for the 24-hour-day interpretation. Evangelical Hebrew scholar Gleason Archer disagrees:
By no means does this demonstrate that 24-hour intervals were involved in the first six "days," any more than the eight-day celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles proves that the wilderness wanderings under Moses occupied only eight days. The rest period for land is a full year (Leviticus 25:4).
Since God is not subject to biological cycles, his rest period is completely flexible. The emphasis in Exodus 20 is on the pattern of one out of seven, not the literal duration of the days of creation. just as the priests served "at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven" (Hebrews 8:5), the days demarked by the rotation of the earth are copies and shadows of the days distinguished by God in the Genesis creation record.