This portion of the Blog will include posts that relate to the interpretation of Creation in the Bible.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Genesis 1:1-5 (ESV)
The big messages, the most critical messages in Genesis 1 are not subtle or hidden. We don’t have to worry about translation or which manuscript we are using. They include things like:
1. God is our creator… We are His creation.
2. It was not the work of multiple Gods. God is one.
3. God created the universe, and thus is not a part of it.
4. God controlled the entire process.
5. Humans are unique in creation and God has a special relationship with them.
6. Creation was created as good. Genesis 3 goes on to show that this would change.
Christians all agree on points such as these. Finer levels of details have been debated for millennia. In our generation, the debates of the times involved and meaning of the word “day” have been often been intense.
In coming posts in this section, I will discuss Bible interpretation issues. First it is worth backing up and thinking about what the Bible’s creation accounts are. I will take them to be a form of personal testimony from the creator, though reported by a human author. I take Genesis and the entire Bible to be God’s Word. As such, I expect that if interpreted correctly, both the Bible and nature will be consistent. Part of understanding Genesis is recognizing that it was written in an ancient language to a people with different problems and questions than ours. Genesis was not written as a scientific account of creation but that does not mean that it must be wrong where it touches science. While I cannot read ancient Hebrew, there are many scholars writing on this passage to draw on.
Here is an illustration that I have used to help us to understand this type of personal testimony. Imagine this setting, an aging ex-President Ulysses Grant is sitting on a porch and his eight-year-old grandson crawls up into his lap and demands this of him: “Tell me all about the Civil War.” President Grant, of course, was lieutenant general and commander of all the Union armies that won that war. He could have expounded for hours about the war in great detail. President
Grant had a real sense of history and could have discussed the war from almost any angle. However, he would have known that his grandson could not understand most of that detail. The grandson also would not have really cared about much of the detail. Grant would have tried to tell his grandson the information that he needed but in a simple enough way that the boy would have been able to understand it. God speaking to man through Genesis is a bit like the imaginary scene above. The difference in the level of understanding would be vastly greater between God and man than between Grant and an eight-year-old. In some ways, we are much farther along today compared to the original
intended readers of the book of Genesis, but when compared to God’s understanding, that difference probably isn’t all that significant. What might President Grant have told his grandson? In theory, he might have made up an imaginary tale, using totally imaginary characters and imaginary battles. I really expect that he would have used real people and real events, although he would have told only the parts that suited his purposes. Similarly, I believe that in Genesis, God provides a story of real people and real events but only those that suited His purpose. They would have been meaningful for the human author and his readers but God would have known what we need today as well. Grant’s discussion of the Civil War would have represented personal testimony by one the principle participants. It would be significant to any historian trying to understand the conflict even if the historian could not interrogate Grant themselves. Similarly, God’s testimony on creation is vitally important to our understanding it, even if it is not written to answer all the questions that we bring.
How could a modern person picking up the story that our Grant told his grandson use it? If he understood that it was to a child, he would use it differently than if he thought it were to a scholar. He ought to understand that the details given would be true but might be misunderstood. If our person who picked it up only spoke Hindi, he would have to rely on a translation. The aging Grant probably would have used figures of speech and those might easily be missed in translation. The account would be true, but a lot of care would be needed to not misunderstand.
If God spoke through the author or Genesis to reveal creation, it would have been first to answer the questions of the first readers. It also would be to people of later generations. Our understanding of creation from science has changed much over the last hundred years and will continue to change. Even so, it is possible to understand much about the history of creation from science. Can we see connections between the scientific account and Biblical accounts?
If the Bible is the Inspired Word of God, then it is true. When it speaks to an issue, it speaks truth. However, it does not speak exhaustive truth. Today, Christians disagree about many details in the interpretation of both scripture and nature. Yet if several interpretations of each are possible, surely those that are consistent with both scripture and nature are more likely to be true.
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