Utumishi Blog

I know this is a massively controversial one. The last thing I want to do is stir up an unnecessary hornets nest. It’s just that we’ve been looking at Genesis in iServe devotions recently and this came up in discussion. A few thoughts (definitely not a final word):

Some basic ground rules:

• Genesis is first and foremost teaching theology. I know no-one is really denying that – the issue is whether it is also teaching the scientific how – but all the same, it so often gets lost in the debate about genre. In the beginning GOD. And to be more specific, the big point of the first few chapters of Genesis (as the whole Bible) is Jesus – the good news of Him (Luke 24, John 5, 1 Peter 1). Richard Bewes calls Gen. 1:3 “the first and primal Christ-centred sermon”. Who is discussing the creation of man? Who is walking around the garden? Who is the serpent crusher? Let our searching the Scriptures be with the goal of coming to Him for life.
• There’s got to be loads of love and generosity as we discuss this stuff – and the forbearance described in Romans 14-15. We also need to be fair and open about the evidence – both from the Bible and science – not overstating or understating, not picking and choosing what fits our position.
• All of us should believe at least that God could have made the universe in six 24 hour periods should he have wished to – that is the sort of God we are dealing with. The new universe will presumably be created in the twinkle of an eye when Christ returns.
• Adam must be a historical individual (the ‘one man’) and the fall of Adam (the move from a sinless to a sinful world) must also be historical (e.g. Rom. 5; 1 Cor. 15). Also Eve, her being created second, her marriage to Adam and her being deceived are also depended on by the NT as historical events.
• The genre of Gen. 1 is not strictly speaking a salvation issue. Sure, you can argue that everything has implications and the Bible is an integrated whole but the gospel is Jesus – died, buried, raised, seen (e.g. 1 Cor. 15:1-11). The gospel is not Christ crucified plus a particular view on Creation. We are not saved by having a perfect understanding of every passage of the Bible but by glimpsing the glory of God in the face of Christ in the pages of Scripture. That is the core of our evangelism, our preaching and our unity.

So, to a starting point for discussion…

Harrison pointed us to Tim Keller’s article where he deals with this genre issue at some length:

So what genre is Genesis 1? Is it prose or poetry? In this case, that is a false choice. Edward J. Young, the conservative Hebrew expert who reads the six-days of Genesis 1 as historical, admits that Genesis 1 is written in ”exalted, semi-poetical language” (Young, Studies in Genesis One (P&R, 1964) p.82). On the one hand, it is a narrative that describes a succession of events, using the wayyigtol expression characteristic of prose, and it does not have the key mark of Hebrew poetry, namely parallelism… On the other hand, as many have noted, Genesis 1’s prose is extremely unusual. It has refrains… including the seven-time refrain, “and God saw that it was good” as well as ten repetitions of “God said”, ten of “let there be”, seven repetitions of “and it was so,” as well as others. Obviously, this is not the way someone writes in response to a simple request to tell what happened (Henri Blocher, In the Beginning (IVP, 1984) p.33).In addition, the terms for the sun (“greater light”) and moon (“lesser light”) are highly unusual and poetic, never being used anywhere else in the Bible, and “beast of the field” is a term for animal that is ordinarily confined to poetic discourse (Blocher, p.32).

All this leads Collins to conclude that the genre is: “…what we may call exalted prose narrative. This name for the genre will serve us in several ways. First, it acknowledges that we are dealing with prose narrative…which will include the making of truth claims about the world in which we live. Second, by calling it exalted, we are recognizing that… we must not impose a ‘literalistic’ hermeneutic on the text” (C. John Collins Genesis 1-4 (P&R, 2006.) p.44).

I’ve got another thought on this but that’s plenty for now…