Genesis: Raiding the Ivory Tower - Episode 001

## Introduction to the Podcast Hey everyone and welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, a podcast where we are going to be **raiding the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith**. I’m going to be bringing forward some common topics and resources that maybe most people haven’t heard of or aren’t familiar with and we’re going to be interacting with them in different ways, trying to see how these ideas may or may not fit into a proper biblical theology. If you recognized that intro music, then you’re awesome…thanks to Wintergatan for making their music available. This has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re talking about here, but if you don’t know about Martin and his building of the marble machine and marble machine x…you should go check it out on YT, it’s seriously incredible. - Welcome and brief introduction to who I am - So. Who am I and what am I doing here? I am a Christian who is engrossed in biblical studies. Maybe much later we’ll get into what it means to be a Christian, but for now I will tell you that I was raised LDS, in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, though I no longer hold to a particular denomination. Maybe I’ll tell about my faith history at some point and how a faithful and confident LDS girl came to a wider conception of faith. - A brief introduction to the kind of material I am going to cover - In this podcast, we’re going to be looking at the biblical text (beginning in Genesis and moving on from there) from a critical perspective—and by *critical* I don’t specifically mean the formal means of study that carry the “critical” label, like higher criticism or literary criticism (though we will get into that kind of thing)—I mean *critical thinking.* We Bible readers tend to rush to find our answers, or want them handed to us by someone else on a silver platter. We want to check off the boxes of what we determine is true so that we don’t have to seriously consider those things anymore. We want to put our shiny truths securely on a shelf so that we no longer need to be bothered by any of those pesky alternatives. This is human and it’s understandable, but it’s not Bible study…and as Christians, we want to do Bible study. - Okay, so, does this suggest that I somehow *don’t* think there is truth to be found? Certainly not. But truth isn’t easy to uncover. In fact, sometimes, hard as this is to admit, it might be impossible to uncover the unvarnished truth …and the way to get as close to truth as we’re going to get is ***to be less wrong*.** - That’s an idea suggested by Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist who wrote a recent book called *Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know*. We’ll be exploring some of his ideas. - By the way, if someone had told me at one of those job fairs in high school that there were such fields as organizational psychology…I don’t know what I would have thought, but it would have been something…in spite of job fairs and school counselors, I unfortunately left high school without having any idea of how many cool professions there are out there; but I digress. - Why does critical thinking matter in Bible study? Surely someone’s already thought about what the Bible means and can explain it to us. - Yes, people have, but it’s not that simple. The biblical text is foreign to every single person alive today. And we’ve since muddied the waters with centuries of historical interpretation of varying ilk. Some of those interpretations are no doubt spot-on, and some aren’t—so we don’t get to check our brains at the door. - The Bible was written in a time long distant, in languages that are no longer spoken, by a culture that is not our own. To be sure, it remains the most relevant text ever composed, but there is so much in its pages that we cannot and will not understand through merely picking up our English Bibles and reading the words on the page. Here’s a secret—the text had a meaning to the original recipients…a meaning we skip over to our detriment. In our hurry to get to the “application” part of our Bible study, we miss out on so much we could be learning (not to mention turning the text into our own personal fortune-telling machine; we are not Tom Hanks and the Bible is not a fake gypsy at a carnival). - Once we realize that our setting isn’t their setting, and their setting isn’t ours, we free ourselves up to recognize that some of the problems that we might have with the text maybe aren’t the problems we’ve made them out to be. This also equips us to take our faith into our own hands—we can start to analyze the text for ourselves and compare that to what we are given by others. - This isn’t to suggest nefarious motives on the parts of our authority figures, but authority figures, as important as they are, ought not to be doing our thinking for us. Thinking is an action that we get to own all for ourselves. - Application of the text is important, but it’s not an instant leap of whatever two points your brain wants to make up out of thin air. It’s okay that application can take a bit more work than that. (In fact, it should take a LOT more work than that!) Application should not be divorced from Bible STUDY. Which includes thinking! ## Thinking is Important - Sometimes we mistake an idea that resides in our mind as a thought we had ourselves. Often this is not true! Many times the “thoughts” we have in our minds were put there by someone else (hopefully a source we trust) and maybe we questioned or investigated it initially to some degree (but frequently we don’t) and it has resided there, in our minds, for so long that it feels like it is a thought we ourselves have had. *Of course we are in full agreement with this thought! It is a good thought*!….or so we believe. Or it might be a new thought that was planted by an authority, and it sounds so good and so right that our minds immediately take it over as “our own.” (19c2) - But a thought doesn’t become our own thought unless we’ve put in the work to make it our own thought. If your mind is just playing back to you what *someone else* has thought, if you haven’t put in any effort to break down the places where the idea *doesn’t* work so you can find those places where it might be brilliant, then it’s an idea but it’s not *your thought*. > *From Jordan B. Peterson’s FB page, Sept 8 2022* **(note source below)** People think they think, but it’s not true. It’s mostly self-criticism that passes for thinking. True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It’s difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world. Viewpoint One is an avatar in a simulated world. It has its own representations of past, present, and future, and its own ideas about how to act. So do Viewpoints Two, Three, and Four. Thinking is the process by which these internal avatars imagine and articulate their worlds to one another. You can’t set straw men against one another when you’re thinking, either, because then you’re not thinking. You’re rationalizing, post-hoc. You’re matching what you want against a weak opponent so that you don’t have to change your mind. You’re propagandizing. You’re using doublespeak. You’re using your conclusions to justify your proofs. You’re hiding from the truth. True thinking is complex and demanding. It requires you to be an articulate speaker and a careful, judicious listener, at the same time. It involves conflict. Source: "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life." Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't. > - Note that rule. The person you are listening to might know something you don’t. Thinking isn’t about having a thought pop into your mind out of thin air and then giving that thought a thumbs up. Thinking is often about entertaining *new* ideas from unexpected or unusual sources, considering points that are not obvious, points that you might not even like! And you really have to consider those points as if they are, or could be, true—or you’re not thinking. If your whole goal is to confirm the suggestion that is already in your mind, that’s as Jordan states—it’s propagandizing, hiding from the truth. Even if the other idea you’re avoiding isn’t entirely true itself—we need to realize that very little that exists in our brain on its own, without conflict or argument, very little of that is entirely and fully and completely true. - Conflict. That’s tough. That’s uncomfortable. - Going back to Adam Grant and his book *Think Again.* This is a book about thinking—but it’s primarily a book about *rethinking*. Rethinking requires us to do more than have new thoughts; it requires us to *unlearn*, to discard old thoughts we’ve previously believed were true. Grant’s stated goal in his book is to **get people to listen t0 ideas that cause them to think hard rather than ideas that make them feel good.** - Oh that’s rough when we’re talking about the Bible. When it comes to the Bible, we want uplifting sermons on Sunday that, even if they contain a lot of hard truths about our worst natures, still leave us feeling good. - Sorry, pastors, Grant has some things to say about your jobs that might leave you feeling a bit miffed, but first…. Listen, I’m not saying we can’t feel good about what’s in the Bible, and Grant is not trying to be *against* pastors and what they do, but he uses a useful metaphor. As Grant states in his introduction, **“We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt.”** And doubt doesn’t need to be a dirty word just because we’re talking about things connected to faith.) - Grant suggests that we spend too much time in three different modes: pastor, prosecutor, and politician. - **Pastor**-mode has us propping up our own arguments, working to evangelize for our opinions. We’ve made up our minds as to what is true and we’re going to go out and preach those ideas! - **Prosecutor**-mode has us tearing down the opposition. We don’t care if they might be a *little bit* right; they’re wrong and we’re going to show them how. - **Politician**-mode has us focusing on listening to those who agree with us and surrounding ourselves with ideas which support what we think. We probably are quite motivated to remain “true” to what we’ve claimed and wish to appear *consistent*. - How do we get out of these modes? Grant suggests—and I heartily agree with him—that we start thinking more like **scientists**. (I guess there’s no synonym for “scientist” that starts with p.) - In scientist mode, we hold our views as experiments. - Scientists do not start with answers and solutions but rather with **questions** and **puzzles**. - A scientist works to be **actively** open-minded. - Being proven wrong is a **good** thing in science. You’ve eliminated a possibility and thus are one step closer to the truth; you become a little **less wrong**. - Learning is the motivation, and we get to come closer to truth while we understand that we will likely fall short. - The traits of a good scientist are **curiosity** and **humility**. - Humility is a really, really big point! And a difficult one… - Scientists engage in thinking critically. One part of critical thinking is *rethinking*. Rethinking involves not only having new ideas, but dismantling old ideas—often updating old convictions and “truths” that we once held. This is, in fact, part of our everyday existence, likely without our knowledge most of the time. A big question is…why don’t we accept this as a normal aspect of living life, and living faith, (as it really is)? - One reason is what psychologists call “cognitive entrenchment.” This is a lack of adaptation in our thinking in life. We tend to regress to experience rather than immediately considering our situation and figuring out the best way of proceeding. Something happens to us and we fall back on what we have previously done or thought before. There are domains in which this is actually a really good thing. If you’re trying to learn to play a musical instrument, you need cognitive entrenchment in order to progress. If you’re trying to write a song, however, cognitive entrenchment will hamper your creativity. - Rethinking also causes us to recognize on some level that the world is more unpredictable than we want to believe. - A third reason is…personal pride. We don’t want to feel “stupid,” even to our own selves. - People also shy away from rethinking due to social pressure. We risk being ostracized in our groups if we begin believing something other than what the group expects you to believe. This is a big factor in questions that touch on faith and religion. - A final reason I’ll mention is that rethinking can threaten our very identities, which are often connected to our groups, to our sense of self as competent and consistent human beings. - Rethinking is an uncomfortable idea; we want to believe that our identities are founded upon the solid foundation of truth. Rethinking feels like a threat to who we are. - We can pull away from this discomfort by introducing the idea that our ideas are not *equal to* our identities. Another helping factor can be that we can categorize ideas into foundational principles and ideas that we will believe until we receive further information. We can introduce *learning* and *flexibility* as core values, in conjunction with intellectual humility. - Incidentally, this can also help us when we are talking to other people and disagreeing with them—realizing that they themselves are **not the same as** their ideas, that is part of gracious communication. - When thinking, we are still going to start out with some preconceptions, and that’s okay. We all need foundational principles. None of us start from scratch in our thinking. We all have values and biases. We don’t need to start out by questioning every single thing in our existence. We’re not going to start out with a study on epistemology or anything like that here. For anyone wondering, I affirm the truth of Scripture—not for the sake of Scripture, but for the person of Christ, to whom Scripture points. So these discussions—and I hope they will be in the form of discussions even if I’m the only one talking—will take that as a starting position. But there’s a lot to look at when it comes to the biblical text. And there’s a lot we can question. And believe me, there are many, many viewpoints. I’m not going to be relying on myself—we’ll be using resources, common views and voices in scholarship and that kind of thing. Some if it maybe you’ve never heard before, some of it you might think is crazy, but I’ll be providing ways you can look at things yourself and I promise we’re not going to be using the History Channel for documentation. - Our procedure here is going to be to listen to various (legitimate) view points and let those viewpoints have their say, as fairly as we can. We’re going to see what we can do to argue those viewpoints from the perspective of a good communicator—we are going to look at the strongest evidence that we can find in support of that viewpoint. We may or may not come to conclusions here; the initial point is to give as much credence to an idea as we can, even if we initially disagree with it. - I really like Adam Grant’s suggestion that we find a **joy** in being wrong. There’s really something to that. The rush of learning something new that you’ve never seen before. ## An Ancient Text - What does it mean to think about an ancient text? - This is challenging when we’ve based a large portion of our worldview on this text. We feel like analyzing it, thinking about it critically, will rock our boat of faith, that it’s somehow *unfair* to upend it in thought when we’ve declared that we hold our faith due to what this text claims. - There is a common story in the halls of seminaries. Students who love the Bible go to school to learn—and end up learning things they didn’t expect. In the book *Thinking Theologically*, Jessica Shepherd recounts experiences she had in seminary that rocked the boat of her faith. She encountered new ways of thinking about the text and she started to despair because, as she says (edited quote), “I was expecting a single, correct interpretation…I assumed…you could and should eliminate all other interpretive options as illegitimate…when it became clear to me that my particular tradition was as thoroughly human as other traditions…I experienced a feeling of being set adrift…” - In her essay, though she is reassuring the reader that there is, in fact, nothing wrong with this, she called “encountering the unexpected” to be “an unavoidable hazard.” - I think that’s an unfortunate way of putting it—calling it a hazard suggests it is something that you *should* avoid if you can. But rethinking *requires* encountering these other perspectives and actually taking them seriously. In fact, you ought to seek them out! - Here’s a secret, my fellow Christians…thinking about the text, even introducing some doubts about it…is not the same as doubting our faith, doubting where our loyalty lies. What or who do we have faith in, anyway? Hint: It’s not some dry words on some ancient pages. It’s certainly not those words translated into English. We do not worship the Bible—we worship the true and living God. - Yes…there’s that word I hear you saying. Inerrancy. The text, you say, is inerrant because it’s inspired, written by God as the ultimate author. We can’t question God, can we?? - I mean, yes, yes, we can. He’s big enough that he can handle it. - But here’s the thing (not getting into the various definitions and perspectives of what inerrancy even means): the Bible is still a text. It didn’t drop from the sky. It wasn’t written in a trance. And we cannot ignore the human author’s (and editor’s) roles in creating that text. The fact that God chose the people he did, in the time he did—those are choices with which we ought to become comfortable. - As a text, the books of the Bible have little things like *context* and *genre* (both of which I hope we will explore a great bit in this podcast). You don’t read a grocery list the same way you read the *Canterbury Tales*. You don’t analyze your tenth grade journal the same way you do an email you’ve written to a coworker. - A little story from my own childhood. I distinctly remember picking up my Bible as a child, maybe around 10 years old, and reading Genesis 1 for myself for the first time and wanting—wanting so desperately—to memorize the days of creation. And I couldn’t do it! I couldn’t remember the creation order from a measly six days (because of course I at least remembered the last day!). I’d been taught the story in church, of course. Probably seen it laid out on a flannel board. We’d read it as a family. I probably colored pictures about it. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it was so hard to remember the order of the days! It was very frustrating. - As I grew a bit older, I realized the problem. The problem was—the order of creation isn’t scientifically logical. It’s not even 10-year-old logical. Oh boy was that a frustrating reality for me! Even as a fairly young child, in order to memorize the order of creation days, I needed it to be logical. I needed it to fit into my experience in some way—and it simply didn’t. - Rather than realizing that **there may actually be** a reason it did not fit into *my* experience, for years I continued to try to cram it into my modern way of thinking. - Now, it actually so happens that there *is* a logical format to the days of creation—and we’ll get there; it’s actually ***incredibly cool*** and I’m more than a little irritated that it took me so long in life to learn about this, but that’s life for you. We don’t always get to choose when we learn facts in our lives—and this is why it’s so essential we open our minds and start learning for ourselves and eagerly seeking out knowledge. - But even without seeing the structure, if I had realized as a child that my Bible was written to people who had a very different idea of the world, that it wasn’t, in fact, written to address modern scientific concerns—then I could have known it wasn’t all that surprising, in fact, that I couldn’t memorize the structure of Genesis 1. - As an adult, with the knowledge I have now…this seems somewhat obvious. But it’s not obvious, actually, at least not when we are steeped in cultures that take the “plain” reading of Scripture as if it is a given. As if it is the *only* way of reading it. - But *can’t* we just read the text and know what it says?? Are we English readers *doomed*?? - No, we aren’t doomed. Yes, of course we can pick up our English translations and understand, more or less, what God is trying to say to us. We can absolutely grasp the core message. We might get some things wrong, we might get a lot wrong, but we’ll understand the core message. - In fact, let’s do that right now. ## Is Genesis a Science Book? - Read Genesis 1 (NET) **Genesis 1:1** In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. - So far, so good. God created All The Things. He started time and he began creating. Specifically, he created the heavens and the earth. So, maybe the sky and the globe we stand on? Is that how we are supposed to understand the heavens and the earth? Maybe. Of course, most people reading this text back in the day wouldn’t have understood anything about a globe, but they’d know they were standing on solid ground, so either way, that’s all the same to us, right? God knew it was a globe! - The heavens could have been some spiritual realm, too, of course; that’s a possibility. - We’ll get a lot more into this verse later, but for now, I think we can say so far so good. **Genesis 1:2** Now the earth was without shape and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the watery deep, but the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water. - Okay, I don’t know about you, but I’m getting into some trouble here trying to picture this. Why was the earth without shape? I thought it was a globe. Did God need to take the earth and roll it around in his proverbial hands like you do to make a ball of playdoh? - I don’t know but it’s empty, which makes sense because God is going to do some more creating. He didn’t do it in an instant, after all! Clearly. - There’s a watery deep, but verse 1 didn’t say anything about a watery deep. Maybe the water is just part of the earth? - The Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water and I have no idea why. Is this integral to the physical act of creating? - I have no idea how to fit this information into a scientific understanding of the creation of the world. But, the Spirit is there, involved in creation, so there is that. I can at least take that information. **Genesis 1:3** God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light! - Okay, so after the earth and the sky or heavens were created, God created light. We’ve all read ahead and we’ll get into some confusion with the fact that the sun is created later, but we could say at the moment that God is the source of light—is he literally the source of all physical light? That seems a little weird to me, but I have no problem with thinking of all kinds of other ways in which God could be the source of light. (But oh no did I just introduce metaphorical thinking into my science narrative here? Hmm, what to do with that?) - These are also the first words spoken by God. So that’s neat; it seems that this is a pretty important thing, then. **Genesis 1:4** God saw that the light was good, so God separated the light from the darkness. - Ah-ha! I knew that light was important. And now God has separated the light from the darkness. Was it all mixed up before? I don’t know, but I can agree that light is good. **Genesis 1:5** God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” There was evening, and there was morning, marking the first day. - So God names the light day and the darkness night. At this point, just from reading the text, I can’t tell why it matters that he named them. Maybe this is just pointing out the creation of time or something like that (except, hang on, time must’ve started in verse 1 because of the “beginning” language, so I guess this can’t be the creation of time but maybe just the way of marking of time?). But that’s just a total guess, let’s be honest. - Anyway, let’s move on past the first day. **Genesis 1:6** God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate water from water. - An “expanse.” I grew up with the King James Version, so I grew up reading this as “firmament.” I had a hard time picturing that, but it’s clearly something *firm*, right? A dome, it feels like. God is separating waters for some reason. I’m not sure where the earth is supposed to be. **Genesis 1:7** So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. It was so. - Ah. So there’s water above and under the expanse. This now sounds like the sky since there is an “above.” **Genesis 1:8** God called the expanse “sky.” There was evening, and there was morning, a second day. - Ah-ha! There it is; the sky. In this case, I’m awfully glad that God did name it because I really would be left wondering otherwise. The sky is some hard-ish substance that separates water below—the seas, I suppose—and water above—the rain, right? I mean, I know it’s not actually a hard substance, but air is hard in a strange way, so I can take this to be describing the atmosphere. - But. Okay, listen. I’ve never been above the sky, but call me crazy if you will, I happen to trust scientists who tell me there *isn’t* a big ocean up there. This could be metaphorical, of course…the rain isn’t an ocean, but it floats up there in clouds (until it doesn’t anymore). - I don’t think the sky is a big ocean. But it is blue. And to pre-scientific people, it might really seem like there’s an ocean up there. So is it possible maybe I’m taking this whole science-thing a bit too seriously when I’m reading this? I’m just saying, at this point in my reading, that sure seems like a legit idea. - So, remembering that there’s no harm in thinking, if I kept reading and I kept along this track of thought that I just had—that Genesis 1 *isn’t* recording a *scientific* account of the creation of the world—does that mean it’s *lying*? Does that make it categorically ***untrue***? … - Well, do we call people *liars* if they have a more primitive understanding of the world? Of course not; that’s ridiculous. - Ah, but the Bible is inerrant, you say? God is The Author. There are no lies, no mistakes! Well what about that? Did God ***download*** scientific knowledge into the mind of the writer ***just so*** he could accurately record what went on those first days of creation? That’s certainly what I thought growing up. - But if that is so, then why is there so much crazy, silly stuff in the Bible (and I don’t mean miracles, but just *general knowledge*)? Why do they seem to think that people thought with their kidneys? Why did they believe in a flat earth? Why don’t they seem to understand disease? Surely, if God was downloading scientific information, he’d want to tell them about disease. (Some people believe that the list of kosher food as well as washing rituals have something to do with this; but why not give them a bit more to work with here, seeing as how he’s downloading knowledge and all?) … - There’s nothing wrong with using our common sense and experiential knowledge when we’re doing Bible study. God did, after all, create the world that we study and he is a reasonable and logical being. So I think these questions are fair and, for me, they pose a gap between understanding the Bible as if it’s describing something in a scientific way and understanding the world I see around me. - What do I do with such a gap? Do I cling to those “plain” readings of the text or do I **turn to science!!**—or might there be a third way? - If I were an ancient person rather than a modern one burdened with these pesky notions of the way we think scientifically, what might I have thought, reading this text? Let’s try reading it again with that person in mind. - God created everything I see. Hey guess what, ancient person, that’s what I think, too, as a modern person! - I’m going to cheat now with a little bit of information. When you compare the Genesis account of creation with other accounts, as we will do more in depth later, every account began with something that wasn’t nothing. So the fact that we see *stuff* sitting here in the first part of Genesis really isn’t that surprising. It was a chaotic mass of material that wasn’t good for anything. It needed the imposition of order. - There’s actually a lot that can be said about chaos vs order, so that’s way more interesting to me, personally, than trying to figure out what kind of **Science** the Spirit was doing over those waters. - I have to admit, already this is making a little more sense to me. - Ancient peoples would have had *no idea* about how light waves work, and so it’s not really surprising that they might come up with some idea of light as a substance in and of itself. There was no need to discuss a source at all if it was just another *thing* that existed. And in fact, that’s **sort of** what I was thinking in my previous analysis—light as a *thing* (but I really wanted to give it a source because I know that light has a source. I want there to be cause and effect beyond the words “God said…” Hey, am I the one who is inserting things into the text that aren’t there? Well, shoot…) - I could definitely buy the idea that for all of time, light has been considered “good.” Here’s another place where the ancient writer and I agree completely. - But what’s with this separation business? This is another place where looking at contemporary literature is going to help us. There is a lot of separation that goes on in these other texts. This is obviously something that made sense to them at the time. - Here’s that naming that seemed so strange to me before to a point where I really had to do some serious stretching to guess why it was there. Meanwhile, in the ANE, “naming” had something to do with the status of ruling and authority. - This, and other points we’ve mentioned, is the type of thing that I would *not* pick up on my own “plain reading” of the text. Clearly we won’t grasp the significance of everything we read—but again, this should not surprise us. Here’s the question…does it ***matter fundamentally*** that we don’t grasp every little detail? Does that mean we just forget about understanding anything? No, of course not…that’s silly. It just means we won’t get all of the details; it doesn’t have to mean the big picture and message of the text is missing. - Let’s read again about the second day of creation. - More naming, more separating! Good thing I already learned about that. - In my scientific understanding of the days of creation, this second day of creation made ***zero*** sense to me short of suggesting that God created the atmosphere, but the *language* sure doesn’t sound like a gaseous atmosphere. The ancient reader wouldn’t have read that and said, “yes, of course, that’s the air I breathe!” - So the question before us now, after looking at the text from two different perspectives, is …what have we seen? Can we read the Bible “in plain English” and understand what it says? Let’s look at what both Scientific Me and Ancient Me had in common: - God created All The Things. - The Spirit of God was involved in creation. - God created light, and light is good. - God has authority and rule (I kind of cheated in putting this in there for myself, but Ancient Me would have recognized this in things like God’s naming and Modern Me would have recognized it in different ways.) - What were the disconnects? - Modern Me wanted to see *my* cosmology being depicted here. As such, spoiler alert, I’m probably going to *miss out* on some meaning in the text later because of this. Not because they were writing obscurely or wrongly—but because I’m imposing **my own ideas** on the text. - In fact, I was kind of bringing the idea of “God said” to something *less* than what the ancient reader believed—I wanted a physical source for the light created rather than being satisfied with the fact that…God said something and light existed, boom! That’s just a liiiiittle cooler than God manipulating some molecules and making light shine out of himself like a Care Bear. - Are we **losing** something by suggesting those disconnects aren’t actually there or important? - I don’t think so. In fact, we might be gaining a few things as far as giving up the notion that we humans have to understand this process. The ***process of creation*** isn’t what is the essential takeaway—understanding God’s sovereignty, understanding why he and he alone is the one worthy of our worship—that’s the big message of the text so far. And in that, both Modern Me and Ancient Me are in full agreement. - And we will see later that this text—this text has everything to do with the rest of the Bible, not because of the scientific process of creation, but because creation enters into the story of how God and humanity merge. - Another major thing that I think we take similarly to creation is eschatology…we want the book of Revelation to describe the process of Christ’s return—is that really what matters? Or might there be something else? - Sorry; we’re not actually going to get into eschatology here. But it’s a question I’d pose for all of our Bible reading—what was the purpose of the text originally rather than first asking what the text’s purpose for today is. ## God Can’t Lie - I hope you can see the difference in thinking here. If the Bible was never meant by God to be a science book full of scientifically accurate data, but rather its **purpose is to teach theological truth,** that’s going to play into how we read it. - As I said, we’re not going to think that an ancient person who is describing their world is *lying* when they talk about that world. **We’re not talking about *untruth* here;** the text can *lack truth*—truth being that which corresponds to reality—without “being *false*” (*false* being something like uttering a statement that you know is wrong). Let me say that again…***the text can lack truth without being false.*** My point is, if the human writers of the Bible were writing from a perspective that they understood and affirmed—an idea which I suggest we are wise to get used to because the Bible is both a human *and* a divine book—then they weren’t telling anything that they thought was untrue. They were writing for an audience *who had to understand what was being written.* An audience who, frankly, understood what was being said a lot better than we might. - Maybe you think I’m splitting hairs here, but these things matter a great deal when we’re trying to uncover the meaning of the text. “God can’t lie.” I’m not going to argue against that here, but even if there are things in the Bible that are factually inaccurate, ***the Bible isn’t lying***. It’s not even mistaken, really. The points that God wanted communicated…were communicated. None of that was mistaken or a “bit off” somehow. - We don’t realize how steeped we are in scientific thinking. The reason why people struggle with the idea that things in the Bible may not be “real” in some sense is because, as Robert Nelson writes in his book *Raising up a Faithful Priest*, “only if something can be conceptualized as real can it really be believed.” But it’s not really that hard to see how the authors of the Bible conceptualized reality; we need, then, to translate *that particular description of* reality into how *we* think. This is another method of translation—not just words but ideas and ways of thinking. What is the underlying truth that spans both worlds? Kevin Vanhoozer calls this forming our biblical imagination. This is something that is definitely going to require some rethinking. (18) - At the risk of belaboring my point, science has falsified biblical cosmology because we’ve looked into our spatial universe and seen what is there. The truth of the Bible, however, **doesn’t hang** on the truth of its conceptual physical universe. There are quite a few preachers out there who claim that if there is anything—anything at all—that is untrue in the Bible, that demolishes the whole thing. This is a type of all-or-nothing thinking that is common today; a binary mode of perception where you have two choices and one must be right. The more you engage in rethinking, the more you realize that true dichotomies like that are rare; the truth is usually somewhere between those initial choices. ## Summary - Here’s a suggestion. Maybe the text is actually not *about* me and my ideas at all. It’s not about science. It’s not about giving us to-do and to-don’t lists in life. It’s actually far cooler than that. It’s about God interacting with people who lived long ago—and because it was God interacting with them, that means we get to see some really cool truths that apply to all of time. - The text isn’t about us, but of course that doesn’t mean it has no *relevance to* us. - The fact that we can’t or shouldn’t just jump to any old conclusion—the fact that the text is rooted in a particular context and that original context ought to be our starting point rather than whatever-thoughts-pop-into-our-head—that ought to be comforting to us, in fact. It means that *there is something we can base interpretations on* because otherwise, in our lovely post-modern atmosphere, the text could be twisted to literally any meaning that a person chose. - And before you say, “but the Spirit guides me!”…just remember how many people have said that before. Sure, sure, I know—*you’re* trustworthy and *you* can see the truth for what truth is—right? Except… if you’re honest, how often have you realized that you’ve been deceived or misguided in one thing or another? If you’re one of those elite in humanity who have never fallen to self-deception—well, I’m sorry to break it to you, but that might be your first self-deception right there. I’m not discounting the Spirit’s involvement in your life or in the fields of interpretation and application, but even in the Bible, it was a little bit more difficult than the Spirit downloading knowledge into brains. (Take the Jerusalem council, for instance, from Acts 15—they actually had to get together and share thoughts and ideas to come to a right conclusion.) - In subsequent episodes, we’ll get a lot more into Genesis, which is one of the most-studied texts of human history. It is also one of the most closely-held in terms of interpretation for wide swaths of humanity. But how closely have most of us studied and considered why we hold the beliefs that we do about this text and have we adequately given consideration to the opposing viewpoints from our own? Do we even know what those *are*, let alone understand why others consider them to be as valid as the ones we cling to? - Going beyond interpretation, how many of us understand the context within which the Bible was written? How much do we understand the text itself—its underlying structure and genius? - I hope you keep coming along with me on this deep dive beginning in Genesis where we explore the text from angles both familiar and new, sharpen our critical thinking skills by twisting this gem of a text and looking at its facets from perspectives we may not have seen, and where we push beyond our typical conventions while striving to be true to the text and the possibilities it can reasonably hold. - We’re going to dig up what we can find in conjunction with the text—whether those are genuine gems, fool’s gold, or the occasional trash that might surface from the deep and then we will be in a better position to think, to analyze, and also to appreciate that sometimes other people might have good reasons to think the way they do, even if we disagree with them. - I know, that’s a rough one. ## Reading Gen 1 - Before we end, because I didn’t get fully through the first chapter of Genesis, I want to go ahead and read the whole chapter. Actually, we’re going to read up til verse 4 in chapter 2. This is the NET: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was without shape and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the watery deep, but the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water. 3 God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light! 4 God saw that the light was good, so God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” There was evening, and there was morning, marking the first day. 6 God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate water from water.” 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. It was so. 8 God called the expanse “sky.” There was evening, and there was morning, a second day. 9 God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let dry ground appear.” It was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” God saw that it was good. 11 God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: plants yielding seeds and trees on the land bearing fruit with seed in it, according to their kinds.” It was so. 12 The land produced vegetation—plants yielding seeds according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. God saw that it was good. 13 There was evening, and there was morning, a third day. 14 God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs to indicate seasons and days and years, 15 and let them serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” It was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to rule over the day and the lesser light to rule over the night. He made the stars also. 17 God placed the lights in the expanse of the sky to shine on the earth, 18 to preside over the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good. 19 There was evening, and there was morning, a fourth day. 20 God said, “Let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” 21 God created the great sea creatures and every living and moving thing with which the water swarmed, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth.” 23 There was evening, and there was morning, a fifth day. 24 God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: cattle, creeping things, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” It was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the cattle according to their kinds, and all the creatures that creep along the ground according to their kinds. God saw that it was good. 26 Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.” 27 God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground.” 29 Then God said, “I now give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the animals of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has living breath in it—I give every green plant for food.” It was so. 31 God saw all that he had made—and it was very good! There was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. 2 The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. 2 By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. 3 God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he ceased all the work that he had been doing in creation. ## Outro - All right, well that’s it for this episode. - Thank you for listening; next time we’ll talk about the structure of the days of creation. This is, seriously, one of the coolest things I’ve ever learned. Maybe that’s just the nerd coming out in me…