Reconsidering Genesis, Part 1

Imagine if what we think we know about Genesis 1Genesis 1 is probably all wrong. What if it was colored by 20 centuries of baggage from church history that has gone around the baggage return to many times to actually realize what the actual picture looked like. Let’s face it for the first 1500 years or so Genesis 1Genesis 1 was kind of a text people read and basically just left alone other than stating “Genesis 1Genesis 1 says God created the Heavens and the Earth including you ” and this is usually followed by “perhaps you now see a good reason to believe in Him.”

Around the 400s when Christianity became the established religion and went through a 1000 year period without a lot of critical thought hence the often right title of “dark ages” ensued. It stayed this way to the starting of the 1600s, Genesis 1Genesis 1 just wasn’t that big of a issue for a millennium and a half. Then came those pesky Reformers and Protestants who began to question everything. Yet sadly the Church hadn’t exactly bothered to do a lot of studying of ancient cultures including the Jewish. The Reformers and Protestants had a text but amongst the other issues of the day they certainly couldn’t spend all their time pondering Genesis 1Genesis 1 when they were trying to rediscover doctrines such as soteriology (how we get saved) and Christology (who Jesus is and what that means to us). We can and should forgive them for not coming to consensus on the issue.

They did however start a bunch of exploration and made it legal to do so, something the established Catholic Church had not done at that time. By the 1800s a lot of Christians had turned to studying the sciences and some of the new discoveries where in their view not compatible with Genesis 1Genesis 1. Sadly they should have sought to see if they understood Genesis 1Genesis 1 correctly. Enigo Montoya said: “You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means.” This has been the sad case of how Genesis 1Genesis 1 has been treated for centuries by most everyone who has approached the text. In recent centuries, people on both sides of the “Evolution-Creation” debate have used the text but it doesn’t mean they understand fully what it meant or means.

After Darwin came along and gave a scientific ground for the long standing theory for unguided creation of biological life, the Protestant and Reformed churches took a page out of the really dark days of Catholicism and stated that any questioning was wrong and dangerous. Ironic considering how they got their start. Thus they unwittingly made science which had blossomed in the Reformation countries into a over night enemy of the Church. That is dangerous business since all truth including scientific truth is supposed to glorify our heavenly Father. It is true that questions based on faulty premises could lead to false conclusions and bad reactions. Yet improper handling of a touchy situation can also spin off equally egregious problems like the emergence of Christian fundamentalism. Fundamentalism began as a reaction to the emerging scientific field blossoming around Darwinian theory. At that time biology was almost a mystical science and many believers simply didn’t know how to respond to the issue. Fundamentalist with their own skepticism and a dogmatic narrow understanding of their own key text on the matter, which is Genesis 1Genesis 1, created a “gulf” that need have never been created between faith and science. The irony is dogmatic religious skeptics ended up butting heads with dogmatic misinformed and ill-informed devout believers creating a rather nasty impasse for both sides. The problem is both were arguing on faulty presuppositions about Genesis 1Genesis 1.

Let me be clear. I am a conservative. I do not believe we can not redact everything but certainly we must be willing to go “I wonder if when I read this I’m getting the same thing the first hearers and then readers got out of it”" and “how much of my 21st c. baggage including religious indoctrination and scientific pre-conceived notions have made me miss what God intended for this text?” That is exactly what a true conservative does. They ask questions about their own views to make sure that they line up with the truth and defend that truth even when it requires tedious work that may be at times uncomfortable. The truth is always worth it.

We live in age with a plethora of translations that are getting closer and closer to the original language. William Tyndale said “a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than the clergy” (David Daniell, introduction to Tyndale’s New Testament, trans. William Tyndale, 1989). This of course is true since a ploughboy or plumber, mother, IT director, or anyone else dedicated to the Truth can be used more by God than the supposed learned clergy. However, I am seriously beginning to believe that the plough boy in the field can read the text and be spoken to by God yet without the context of why what he is reading was originally wrote it will be lost to him. For him to get this clarifying element he would need to study the basics of the Hebrew language and culture. That same ploughboy would have his head spin and praise how awesome his God is when he gets the full picture of the text in the original context.

So what are we going to do? We are going to try and strip away 34 centuries of cultural baggage. We are going to attempt to find out how Genesis 1Genesis 1 came about, what it meant and what it means, and how to rethink Genesis and see what God is doing in our world. We are going to do this by getting into the culture of Moses (or whoever wrote Genesis) and understand how Genesis 1Genesis 1 came to be at the front of the Bible.