Literature and How to Love and Date Genesis - (Views of Creation, Part 2) - Episode 015

## Introduction - Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and in this episode we are getting into two more views of creation. In one way, these views seem a bit simplistic, maybe. But they’re also some of the most practical in a way. Before we dive in, though, I want to take a second and thank you all for listening. My podcast has been going for three months now, which is still not very long…and I have so many topics I’m itching to get to, but unfortunately there’s only so much time in the day and the week. Time is such a bizarre thing. A week exhausts us but we’re not able to do nearly enough in that amount of time that we’d like to do. It’s really, really strange. - For those listening who might not be connected with me on social media, I’ve been invited on some youtube channels. If you happen to listen to my podcast on youtube, then I’m going to try to make sure those are listed in a playlist there on my channel so that you can keep track. Otherwise, I’m also hoping to begin an email newsletter, hopefully with a few relevant things thrown in there that aren’t in other places. So anyone interested in getting in on that—to be honest I still haven’t looked into the logistics of how newsletters work, but if I’ve figured out podcasting, I’m sure I can get that worked out. I think. Maybe. So go ahead and send me an email at [email protected]. If you do, I promise I won’t sell your email to the DMV or anything nefarious like that, but I’ll send out information about any other things I might be up to. - If you happened to catch me this week on my very first appearance on a live stream with Faith Unaltered, that was a lot of fun and I’ll hopefully be doing some more there, as well as in some other places. For those interested, I’ll try to remember to link to that livestream in this episode description. - All right, in any case, let’s dive in to a bit of a review first of what we’ve discussed in the realm of the views of creation…and part of the structure of how we are looking at these views is in the main question that these views ask of the text. Questions like “What happened?” or “How did it happen?” or “What is the text used for?” or “What does it teach?” or “Who are we?” - It’s kind of like those questions we all learned in elementary school…who, what, when, where, why, and how? - Last time, we took a dive into John Walton’s identity account of creation. Looking at the text from this perspective, the questions were “What is the cosmos?” and “Who are we?” We have two questions here because we can’t leave either the space of creation or the creatures of creation out of the equation when we are looking at Genesis 1. And these two questions can’t be lumped into one because the cosmos and humanity are related, because they’re both created, but they’re separate, right? - The answers to these basic questions were “the cosmos is sacred space” and “we are the image of God.” If you’ve been following or listening to some of the latest episodes, you’ll see that I’ve been talking a lot about the image of God, and that conversation is not done yet. And soon I will be getting into the sacred space motif, as well…which is another one of my favorites. - All right. At some point, we’ll be dissecting the literal view of creation and evolutionary creationism and some other things like that. But for now, it’s time to get into the analogical view of creation. ## The Analogical View of Creation - In a nutshell, the analogical days of creation is an idea that the days of creation are analogous to the typical human workweek—or at least the workweek that is supposed to have been used by the people of ancient Israel. The days of creation are the way we are to pattern our lives. Why? Well, yes, because working constantly with no rest is not good for us, of course, but there is, of course, there is more to it than that. It’s at least that, but it’s more than that. - I’m going to read a quote I used in my previous episode as a reminder of where we are at here; this is C. John Collins (who, by the way, is *not* the Jon Collins of Bible Project fame, for those of you wondering, just to clear that up). All right, quote: - So the six days that precede set for us a pattern of God’s activity of working, and you can see that most clearly in the way each day ends: “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day,” the second day, and so forth. Just like an Israelite, He’d start in the morning and He’d work until it was evening. Then He’d stop working, and then He’d rest during the nighttime. And then it was morning, and He’d start the next day. So you see God working just like He had told Israel to work. *Joseph A. Pipa Jr. et al., TH331 Perspectives on Creation: Five Views on Its Meaning and Significance, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017).* - Okay, so Walton asked the questions, “What is the cosmos?” and “Who are we?” and basically what we are doing here is asking “What was Genesis 1 used for?” So this is an application-type question. - Now, what we aren’t saying here is that humans are supposed to do the same things in their workweek that God did in his days of creation…we don’t do, like, fireworks on day 1 because that’s when God created light…and just because God created animals on the sixth day, that doesn’t mean we can skip out on feeding our pets or cleaning their litter boxes every day except Friday, right? Now, our plants might live if we only watered them on Tuesday, but that’s probably not quite our aim in reading the text this way. - So what matters in the way these line up, then, if it’s not the creative acts? Well, the major focus here is on the Sabbath day. Collins asks the question why do we even have this account in the Bible? What purpose does it serve? If, as he and many others suppose, Moses wrote Genesis, then why Genesis 1? What need of the people did this address or serve? - The seventh day of creation is described in the first three verses in Genesis 2. You’ve probably all noticed that, right? That Genesis 1 cuts off kind of oddly? Well, we have to realize that the chapter and verse breaks were introduced long, long after these books were written. This section of Genesis shouldn’t have been broken up like this, but it is what it is at this point. - All right so here is the seventh day: - Genesis 2:1–3 (ESV) 1Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. - For the rest of the book of Genesis, the seventh day isn’t mentioned a single time again. So that’s kind of weird. We need to wait all the way into the wilderness wanderings in Exodus before the Sabbath is mentioned again. And the way that it’s mentioned, or the times that it’s mentioned is a little strange. We could kind of assume that this whole time, from the beginning of creation, the Sabbath was observed, but we have to assume that because it’s never mentioned in Genesis. It’s not completely unreasonable to assume that there was a general knowledge or observance of the Sabbath, though, because its first mention is before the law was given at Sinai. But there might be some problems with that. - Let’s just go ahead and read it real quick; this is in reference to the manna which came from heaven to feed the people in the wilderness: - Exodus 16:22–30 (ESV) 22On the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread, two omers each. And when all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, 23he said to them, “This is what the LORD has commanded: ‘Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy **Sabbath** to the LORD; bake what you will bake and boil what you will boil, and all that is left over lay aside to be kept till the morning.’ ” 24So they laid it aside till the morning, as Moses commanded them, and it did not stink, and there were no worms in it. 25Moses said, “Eat it today, for today is a **Sabbath** to the LORD; today you will not find it in the field. 26Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, which is a **Sabbath**, there will be none.” 27On the seventh day some of the people went out to gather, but they found none. 28And the LORD said to Moses, “How long will you refuse to keep my commandments and my laws? 29See! The LORD has given you the **Sabbath**; therefore on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Remain each of you in his place; let no one go out of his place on the seventh day.” 30So the people rested on the seventh day. - If you read this, it kind of sounds like they were surprised, that this whole seventh-day-business wasn’t normal to them. So I don’t think anyone was observing it prior to this time, or at least they weren’t. I mean, I could be wrong. Maybe Abraham was, but there’s nothing that says this. - You’ll notice, too, here, that there is no mention of creation here. That’s not to say no one would have been thinking that. But remember, the people had been in Egypt; it’s entirely possible that they didn’t know a whole lot of history, that whether Moses may have been given a vision or oral history was passed down to get the information about the early chapters of Genesis, either way, maybe the people didn’t know all of that. - All right, the next mention of the Sabbath is in the ten commandments in Exodus 20: - Exodus 20:8–11 (ESV) 8“Remember the **Sabbath** day, to keep it holy. 9Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10but the seventh day is a **Sabbath** to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the **Sabbath** day and made it holy. - This is the covenant made at Sinai, right? The Sabbath is directly likened to the creation days. So this is where the idea of the analogous days of creation come from, it’s directly from Scripture. Let’s go to one other place in Exodus…this is chapter 31, this is right after talking about the quality of the work that, of the Tabernacle and the furnishings…and this is also right before the episode with the golden calf. - Exodus 31:12–18 (ESV) 12And the LORD said to Moses, 13“You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, ‘Above all you shall keep my **Sabbaths**, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the LORD, sanctify you. 14You shall keep the **Sabbath**, because it is holy for you. Everyone who profanes it shall be put to death. Whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people. 15Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a **Sabbath** of solemn rest, holy to the LORD. Whoever does any work on the **Sabbath** day shall be put to death. 16Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the **Sabbath**, observing the **Sabbath** throughout their generations, as a covenant forever. 17It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.’ ” 18And he gave to Moses, when he had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God. - First of all a point: the word “Sabbath” doesn’t just refer to the seventh day of rest; it also refers to the various festivals that they were to observe. So that’s why we have the word “Sabbaths,” plural, in verse 13. It’s not just talking about all the seventh days added up, but all the festivals. - But in singular use, it’s talking about that weekly habit. So we see the Sabbath as connected very deeply here to covenant. - Incidentally, this is one of those points that literalists will bring up in defense of the literal six day creation—they say, look, if the weekly Sabbath is a sign between God and his people that God made heaven and earth in six days, then…well, that’s what it means, that God made the earth in six days. - And I’m not going to argue against that here, exactly. We’ll talk more about that. But yeah, I think they’re right in a way, that the six days of creation point more towards the idea of, well, days as understood by humans (as opposed to epochs or ages or something like that). Does this mean that God here is proving some chronology, though? Well…I think that takes things too far. I know some of you will disagree with me on that, and that’s fine. But here’s my question: what matters more—that this is chronological information that we really need to know, does this knowledge matter in some way? Or is it that we should focus on the fact that the God of creation, the Sovereign Creator—he’s the guy! He’s the guy we’re making the covenant with? He’s the guy. My opinion is that, this is why this information is included—not as a “gotcha” to later evolutionists or anything, not because God really wanted them to be knowledgeable about the timing of creation, but pointing out that the Lord—he’s the guy, he’s the actual Lord of ALL CREATION. - Because let’s think about it. **What are the alternatives?** Did the people of their time make covenants with deities? Well, probably. This probably wasn’t an unusual action. But what kinds of deities were people making covenants with? What kinds of deities were they interacting with, in their estimation if you don’t want to believe in reality? What kinds of deities were they generally familiar with, coming out of Egypt? Yeah, that’s right, even if you don’t know a lot of specifics, you know the characters of those guys. They weren’t the creator; they were just powerful beings who could grant people benefits, right? The people interacted with these beings because they wanted something out of it. And they could interact with various deities and who cared, really? - Well, I’ll tell you who cared—God cares. But you see, that’s what I’m saying here. This is specifically pointing out that they were in covenant with the Creator of the universe. Not with a fertility god or the god of health or the god of the underworld—but the Supreme, Sovereign Creator. By pointing out that the Lord is the one who made the earth in six days and then rested, well….when they followed suit, when they worked and then rested—they were acknowledging and remembering and celebrating their Lord, that they were in covenant with the Most High. - Maybe you noticed in my reading of that passage, from Exodus 31, that it ends with the tablets being given to Moses. So the emphasis there, it seems to me, on the Sabbath, right as God was handing him the tablets, so to speak, that this Sabbath thing was an essential element to this covenant that was just made. The purpose of them remembering the Sabbath was to remember just who, exactly, they were in covenant with. And so of course, on the other end of things, this is why Genesis 1 needed to include this information, to connect these two things. That’s the purpose of the information in Genesis 1. - Now am I saying that Moses wrote it that way just to make this connection or something like that? That doesn’t need to be the case, okay? That’s not a necessary conclusion and that’s not my point. I’m saying that these two things line up, they have to line up, and that this is something that the people were supposed to think about weekly, which is pretty often, really. And then we could get into the point of what the Sabbath even is—why a day of rest? Why does that help them center on the Lord? - We can talk about provision, here, of course…being able to rest because God is the one who provides for us. They were given the manna for the same reason, but eating the manna wasn’t tied to the covenant. - If you want to do a super deep dive into what the Sabbath means, I highly suggest hopping over to the Bible Project podcast—they’ve got videos on this, too, which you should maybe watch first but the podcast is absolute gold. They did a series on the podcast and gosh I don’t know how many episodes they had to it, over a dozen, on the Sabbath. The series is called 7th Day Rest. So check that out if you want to. - The Sabbath is mentioned one more place in Exodus, in chapter 35. There it serves once again as kind of a concluding statement of some kind, and there’s a reminder to do what the Lord has commanded and it says whoever does work on the Sabbath shall be put to death. Pretty intense, really. It mentions not kindling a fire specifically, as well. - You know what’s interesting…a lot of times, we have a law or rule in the Bible and there aren’t any stories of what happened to people who violated the law—did they really follow all these laws and carry out their punishments? Honestly, we don’t know. But in the case of the Sabbath, we do have a place in Numbers 15, let me read that, because it’s weird: - Numbers 15:32–36 (ESV) 32While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the **Sabbath** day. 33And those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation. 34They put him in custody, because it had not been made clear what should be done to him. 35And the LORD said to Moses, “The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.” 36And all the congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him to death with stones, as the LORD commanded Moses. - So this guy is gathering sticks and they bring him into Moses and it’s weird here that they don’t know what to do with him after putting him in custody. Didn’t they read Exodus 35? Of course…we read the Bible in a kind of sequence, but!….who knows if Exodus 35 had been written at this time, right? Did you ever think about that? That the people who are going along in these stories, they might not actually have had everything written out previously for them as it went along? It’s possible that they really didn’t know what to do, and this story, this event was why that bit in Exodus 35 was included…maybe this was the event that made Moses go out and tell the people, look, obey the Sabbath or else, right? See what it gets you if you don’t? - In the chapter in Numbers, it never said anything about building a fire, like Exodus 35 mentions. But the guy is gathering sticks, so it’s a pretty safe bet that he wasn’t gathering them just to play fetch with the dogs in the camp. - But why death? That seems pretty serious. And I don’t want to give some unsatisfying, simplistic answer here, but the covenant that the people made with God was serious, and this, at a minimum, reflects that. It’s probably got a lot more packed into that, but I’ll leave that for you to ponder for the moment. - All right, so I’ve pointed out here the connection of the Sabbath with the covenant at Sinai, and this is part of Collins’ argument, but it’s not the whole thing. I guess it’s the part I like most, because it connects it to the covenant to creation…that’s amazing. I love it. - Some of the other things Collins points out are interesting, I’m not fully convinced of all of them, but let’s get into it a bit more. - So, why rest and why does or would God rest? Well, similar to what Walton says about how the seventh day doesn’t have an ending and this means not really that God is doing nothing, but rather that God is engaged in creation. This is probably why in John 5:17, in response to being criticized for doing healing on the Sabbath, Jesus says, “My father is working until now, and I am working.” - So when we enter this rest with God who is resting, we’re not just taking a day off or doing nothing, but we are entering with God who is enjoying his Sabbath rest, too. So, well, to me, there’s this, this idea of communing with God, of connecting with him, so yes it’s about provision and how God provides—but when we leave it at that, when we only look at this Sabbath rest as something centered on our needs, we forget that we are also connecting with God on this level that is beyond our needs, recognizing that we participate in some way with God as we obey him, as we live our lives in accordance to his will and all of that kind of thing. - So because Collins views creation week as an analogy, he doesn’t believe that we necessarily need to see these days as literal days, as an exact replica of a human week. Because it’s an analogy. Analogies aren’t comparing two exact things. An apple is not **like** an apple, an apple ***is*** an apple. So Collins suggests that the creation week is like a human week, not that it **is** a human week. - He goes into Genesis 2 to see this. - Genesis 2:5–7 (ESV) 5When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— 7then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. - So, okay, so maybe you’ve read this and seen, wait a second, this seems a little bit out of order from what Genesis 1 says. But Collins says, this is not necessarily referencing the entire world. When it says “in the land,” it means a particular region. And because it means a particular region, we might think hey, that particular region has a particular climate, right? When it says “no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground”…well, in the area that the Bible is centered on, there are wet seasons and dry seasons. - Let me just go ahead and quote Collins again: - In that part of the world, it rains in the winter and stops raining sometime around Easter, and it doesn’t rain again until sometime in the fall. By the end of the summer, everything is brown and dry, and then when the rains begin, it starts greening up. Well, if that’s the explanation for why the bushes hadn’t been growing, for that to be the reason, it must mean that this climate cycle had been in effect, and it would have to have been in effect for at least a year, if not longer. So a week that is a year or longer is not an ordinary week. And all of this comes together to show that the best reading of the days is the one that Herman Bavinck offered when he said these creation days are “God’s workdays.” *Joseph A. Pipa Jr. et al., TH331 Perspectives on Creation: Five Views on Its Meaning and Significance, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017).* - Okay, so in a nutshell, Collins suggests that Gen 2 gives us a snapshot of a particular time and region, that it’s describing the creation of man, and because creation has been trucking along and it’s now the dry season, well…that means that the initial creative week, where man was created on “day 6,” that can’t have been a normal human week because normal human weeks don’t span entire seasons like that. Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense. This is one thing that convinced Collins that we’re dealing with an analogy in the week of creation, that it’s not a literal week, but there’s some more time passing than that. - All right, before moving on, I want to hit in a few other points in this view, because it is more than just looking at the Sabbath. - Collins is of the opinion that Genesis 1:1 is the first creative act in creation. And this isn’t something I’ve touched on yet in my podcast, mostly because, well, I think it’s done in summary perfectly in other places. But I’ll mention it here and I’ll leave a link in the show notes to provide a place where you can go to see this spelled out, but in short…there’s a debate that involves the Hebrew grammar of Genesis 1:1 and some of the verses after that. Some people take the grammar of the first few verses to indicate that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” is not a creative act in and of itself, but that it’s either a summary statement of the whole chapter (or alternatively it’s a title—because remember when this was originally written, it didn’t have the book titles and chapter and verse divisions and all that which we have today). Some translators say, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth…” And these are, frankly, all legitimate options as far as I can tell. The grammar constructions here just leave a lot of ambiguity, frankly. There’s another idea that this passage serves as part of an envelope, of sorts, with the end of the passage in 2:4 where it speaks of the generations of the heavens and the earth. - So these are legitimate discussions that I don’t think anyone’s really going to be able to solve, but of course people are free to land on one side or the other in their opinions and Collins sides with this being the first creative act, so he does see creation out of nothing in Genesis 1. Now, like I said, I think that’s a perfectly legitimate translation, but I don’t think we can assume that creation out of nothing is what they actually had in mind—it’s certainly possible, but not certainly certain, in other words. And as I’ve said before, we don’t “need” this passage in order to affirm that God created everything and that everything is dependent on him. - But, you see, all this is getting a bit nit-picky at this point and that’s why I think it’s okay to leave things a bit ambiguous and let people have their opinions as long as it’s an opinion that lines up with a holistic view of what Scripture is as it shows itself to be. I don’t completely agree with Collins’ opinion in detail, but we agree in meaning. And that’s what a lot of differences kind of end up being between Christians until and unless one or the other of us decides to batten down the hatches and camp out in our position as something that is necessary. - Anyway, stemming from this basic idea that all of creation has its origin in God’s creative acts, we have now a distinction between God and creation. And here I’m inserting my own summation of this view now. This isn’t exactly how I’ve seen others lay it out, but I think that this is what they are getting to. So, because of this distinction between God and creation, we have the need for analogy, because what God is doing is not going to be like what humans do, surprise, surprise. It’s not a one-to-one correspondence, nor does it need to be. I find it a bit funny, to be honest, that people are generally all about the creator-creature distinction…til it comes to this and suddenly God’s actions need to be just the same as ours, the description of a week where humans only enter in on the sixth day suddenly needs to be the exact same as our week, despite the fact that it doesn’t start out with a solar system… Anyway…moving on… - What God created was deemed good and very good, right? So creation…the material world, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it as God made it. - I’m going to give another quote from Collins, because I like this: - In fact, God was pleased with what He made; He liked it. Since we’re Christians, we must also think of God as the redeemer. But His purpose in redemption is to restore His broken creatures, so that they function properly as they did at first. So our Christian faith does not take us away from the world that God made, rather it equips us to live in it and to appreciate it for that magnificent work that it is. God doesn’t treat His world as a rival for our affections; as we enjoy it, we enjoy its maker. *Joseph A. Pipa Jr. et al., TH331 Perspectives on Creation: Five Views on Its Meaning and Significance, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017).* - And why am I pointing this out in particular? Because I think we really do have this idea, often, that there’s something wrong with this world and enjoying this world. How often have you heard a sermon where the pastor waxes on in how we create idols out of the things in our lives? Now, of course we can do things like having wrong priorities and treating things in ways that we shouldn’t treat them. But this idea that it’s wrong to enjoy things, or wrong to be plugged in to something that exists here on earth, I’d say that goes against what Genesis 1 is telling us about creation. Though, yes, there are ways we can make creation a rival for God, and we often do in various ways, creation can be enjoyed and it ought to be utilized as well. - One aspect of this view that I really like is that it helps us see that there is a likeness between God and ourselves, but also that God and his work is very distinct. That’s what analogies are about…finding those ways that are alike while also realizing that it’s a comparison and not the exact same thing. - So, to me, all of this offers up support that we can most certainly take the text seriously without saying, Oh it’s got to mean exactly what we mean in regards to things like our human time scales, right? Again, it’s not any kind of a slam-dunk by any means. But it offers up some space to think within and consider things from different perspectives if we haven’t already done so. - Before moving on, of course I want to offer up some of the critiques against the view. And Collins brings up some of these himself, so we’ll start with those. - He acknowledges that his view does kind of contend against that literal view that these six days are literally six days. But Collins points out that these people are missing the entire point of having an analogy…our week is “like” God’s week; it’s not the same as God’s week. Collins points out, as others such as Walton also do, that the seventh day breaks the cycle of the first six. The seventh day does not have an ending. Collins also suggests that the “evening and morning” language in Genesis 1 serve as brackets for the time that God rests between the days, just like in our week we rest between days. I’d personally push back on that point and suggest that the “evening and morning” language serve as a type of idiom called a merism—a merism, where you mention two opposite things which indicate that you’re actually talking about the whole thing—for instance, if you say, “from east to west,” you’re talking about the whole world or the whole area or something like that. If you said, “I work day and night,” well that’s hyperbole, as well, but you, what you mean you work all the time, constantly. - But Collins makes a very fair point that the evening and morning language may very well have been there to help the Israelite connect how God is working in the world to be equated in some ways to how they worked in the world. We don’t really have to choose between these interpretive options (analogy vs merism) as it might functionally be the same thing, anyway. - Another view that opposes this one is the “day-age” view, which I haven’t really even hardly mentioned yet. This is the idea that each day of creation lines up with a particular historical epoch. This was developed as scientists were looking at the geological column and trying to make sense of that in regards to Scripture. Maybe all the layers they were seeing corresponded in some way to the days of creation. - Collins opposes that view because he doesn’t understand how describing creation in days to equal epochs really has nothing to do with the needs of the original audience. It wouldn’t have connected with them in any way like that, so what would be the point of describing it in that fashion? I can hear an objection, like, “Oh but God was just trying to preserve his truth for all time…” Well the thing is, geological science is always changing its mind, just like any good science should, so this really doesn’t make much sense. If we think it lines up a certain way, what happens when we learn more and that gets upended? The meaning of the text can’t change like that. That’s ridiculous and post-modern silliness. - My own personal annoyance with this view is actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things: it’s just not a super comprehensive view. It doesn’t explain the exact content of the first six days of creation. That doesn’t provide anything against the view—it just suggests to me that this view is only part of a greater view, which we will get to next. - But before we end, I will give one more quote from Collins where he lays out a bit of essential information on the term “rest” because between Genesis and these passages in Exodus that I mentioned, the term “rest” is not the exact same: - …the word used for “rested” in the fourth commandment is a little bit more explicit than the word that we have in Genesis. In Genesis, it’s properly translated as God “rested.” We think of the Sabbath as a day of rest, but the word is He “ceased” working in order to rest. That’s the idea. But the word that we have in the fourth commandment is more explicitly “to rest,” “to get relief.” And then in Exod 31, there is an even more explicit word; its meaning is like “getting your breath back.” Well, God doesn’t need to get His breath back after a workweek. We know that about God. And so what we have to see is that there are differences, and the ways in which God’s activities are presented to us are by analogy. So since we have analogy, we don’t have to have our workdays being the same as God’s workdays, just so long as they resemble God’s workdays in the ways in which we can discern—namely, we’re active in the creation; we’re trying to imitate God in our use of intelligence; we’re trying to plan ahead. We, as human beings, use language as we communicate with one another. We even use language as we communicate with the creation. We speak to the animals, and we expect them to obey us, to comply with our wishes; and animals under human care actually learn to respond to human speech. So we can see that there are plenty of analogies, and we don’t need to concern ourselves with the question of how long all these things took, nor even how long ago these things took place. That there are actually events that took place need also not concern us because we’re accepting this as a part of the true story of the world. *Joseph A. Pipa Jr. et al., TH331 Perspectives on Creation: Five Views on Its Meaning and Significance, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017).* ## The Framework View of Creation - I’m going to get into the next view of creation by quoting C. John Collins once more as he mentions the “framework view” of creation because, although I don’t think this is at all the **best** description of the view, he shows nicely how this view isn’t really all that uniform, and thus it might be a little bit difficult to talk about: - Another way that people have read this account is called the “framework view,” namely to think of the days as having no particular sequence. And the framework view has lots of subspecies. So you might even think of what I’ve presented as one of the subspecies of the framework view, but there are other versions that think of the first three days and the second three days as just alternate ways of telling the same events. The trouble with that is, of course, you have six workdays and not three told twice. And so I don’t really think that that does full justice. There are other subspecies of the framework view that basically say that history has nothing to do with what Genesis is telling us. However, in the presentation in the Bible, the creation account is how the story got under way, the true story of the world. And so it seems to me that we have to accord some kind of historicity to the account in Genesis. It’s about events that really took place; the world that we live in is really a world that God made and He made for the wellbeing of human beings. *Joseph A. Pipa Jr. et al., TH331 Perspectives on Creation: Five Views on Its Meaning and Significance, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017).* - All right, so as I said, this isn’t the best description, but it’s fair to some formulations of the framework view. It’s very broad, so because it’s very broad, I thought it might be interesting to do more of a response to why some of these framework views don’t really work. - This view might better be called the literary framework view. So, basically, those holding to a literary view take a step back from the text and they aren’t looking so much for the literal meaning of the text, but rather looking at the Bible as a piece of literature. To be honest, if you don’t accept *some* form of a literary framework view, then I think you might want to think a bit about it because, well, the Bible is literature. I just don’t see how this could possibly be denied. So as literature, it ought to be written in a way in which literature is written, right? It ought to have design. It ought to have repetition of patterns and themes. It ought to be organized in a literary way in order to get its point across. - This is one reason why you hear people say, “The Bible isn’t a science book,” because it’s not. It’s literature. If you took a science book and wrote a story that talked about the information from that science book, you might expect to explain things in metaphor, in allegory, with idioms. And because of that, this means that it doesn’t need to be literal and factual in everything. In fact, it would be a little weird if it was. Recitation of bare facts don’t tend to make good stories. They just don’t. - All right. So let’s look at the claims that Collins made. He says that his view could be seen to reside under the umbrella of the literary framework view. That’s one reason I have put these two together in this episode. But Collins claims that in a literary framework view, the days of creation have no particular sequence. That might be true for some, but it’s not the case for everyone who reads this in literary context. There are literary reasons the days of creation are in a certain sequence, and I drew that out in my, I think it’s my second episode, where I talk about the days of creation and how the first three days line up with the second set of three days. Collins mentions that some people think the second set of days is a retelling, and I’ll get into that a little more in a minute, but that’s not how I presented the design in my episode…first God created the environments and then he populated those environments. This is not only scientifically logical, to be honest, but also allegorical to how the ancient person would have crafted their life. You can’t put animals into a place until that place is ready to keep them. - Collins mentions that some people will say that Genesis and history have nothing to do with one another, and he disagrees, and I do, too. It’s got to correspond to history because, news flash, we’re all here. And Scripture is overwhelmingly confident in saying how that happened. God created, God sustains, God performs new creation; it’s all dependent on him, start to finish. And personally I’d say that logic and science also demonstrates this truth, as well, but that’s for another type of podcast. If you’re on FB, we can talk about it there, though, in my discussion group if you’d like. - All right, so far we’ve kind of knocked down a few ideas and structured how we might think about this view. Though a literary framework might in some sense “go against” a literal view of creation, we **do not** need to take that to mean there is no historicity, that it’s just randomly described without any structure, that it doesn’t correspond to the world, etc etc. - So. What we do want to say is that in this structure, the literary design is there to describe a reality that is also there (but that might not be exactly like how the text describes things, because language and imagery are useful and flexible). I call my daughter a mermaid, but you know she’s not really a mermaid, right? But I think it’s much more descriptive than saying she loves to swim, because not only does she love to swim, but she loves hanging out at the bottom of the pool. So it’s okay to combine some logic and physical evidence to realize that oh this isn’t absolutely descriptive in every way, so then let me think about how it might be descriptive. - Saying that something is figurative does not mean that it’s not literal in any way. But if you go the other direction with that, to say that something is and always must be literal, well, you lose out on being able to look at it figuratively, and so you’re going to miss out on some very deep meaning there. If I really took a mermaid to the pool, why would be interesting that she liked hanging out at the bottom of the pool? That wouldn’t even be anything that would register to you on any level. So you see, analogies and metaphors and idioms, all these things, they help us to see contrast and differences and surprising things that we’d never consider otherwise, unless it was just spelled out—and in that, some of the magic is lost, right? - Okay, so right about now, maybe you’re saying, okay we get it, move along now…and if you get it, then great, cool, but you see so many people don’t seem to get it and I have to wonder if that’s because they’ve just never thought of how the figurative and literal really do blend together, that they need to blend together, that we can’t really have excellent communication without both. And we forget how jarring it is to think about these things for the first time. Like, omigosh, if this is figurative, then does that mean it’s not real?? We jump from one extreme to the other and we forget that what we need to do is learn to integrate. - It’s a bit about the categories we have in our minds, you see. When we categorize the Bible as historically accurate—because in apologetics we are used to defending it this way, because it needs to be to some extent for us to accept it as the basis for our faith—then what do we do when we suddenly start seeing it as figurative? Does that mean that the Bible then needs to be placed from our mental bucket of “literal and historical” and then put into another bucket of “figurative literature”—which that bucket mostly holds fiction! Or is it that we need to make an entirely new category, a new bucket to put the Bible inside, mentally? - The thing is, making new mental categories is exhausting and difficult. It really is. And so I don’t think any of this is really easy if you’re not already along the path of constructing that bucket. You might ask, do I even need buckets? Well, we do, because in order to function in this complex world, we need structured thoughts. The more we learn about the complex world, and the more buckets we construct, the more nuanced we’re able to think. But we can only do that so far, though, because our brains need to do everything they can in order to conserve energy to deal with what we are presented with on a daily basis. - All right, so now that we’ve talked a bit about what the literary framework doesn’t necessarily have to be (that is, it doesn’t have to be opposed 100% to a historical view), let’s see how it’s described by some of its proponents. - Just like the analogical view asked, “How is the text used?” and it answers that it’s meant to teach the correspondences but also the differences between God and us—and I’d further that by showing how the covenant of Sinai and the people’s remembrance of all that is tied up in observance of the Sabbath—the literary framework view also asks, “What does the text teach?” This reminds me of Dr. Heiser’s theological messaging of the text. What is the meaning being conveyed about God and our relationship to God? - The questions we bring to the text, we’re going to mine for answers for those questions, right? So the difference between the question, “What happened and how did it happen?” and “What does the text teach?” is a pretty big distinction and guess which one is actually more directly applicable to, well, application? - When I briefly overviewed this view of creation in my last related episode, which was, I think, number 10, I brought out the distinction that Mark Futato brings out when he’s talking about this, and that is the distinction between ultimate causes and proximate causes. The proximate cause is the thing that directly made something happen. The proximate cause of milk spilling is that a hand hit the glass. The ultimate cause, though, is the cause behind this cause. The ultimate cause of the milk spilling was that your child was reading at the table instead of eating. - Futato suggests that the Bible isn’t explaining anything about the proximate causes of creation. Yes, God spoke and we can take that in some literal fashion, I suppose, but it seems to me that the act of God speaking is still really the ultimate cause, not the proximate cause. I mean, we could debate that and I’m not sure there’d be a clear victor in that discussion. But let’s look at the conception of Isaac in the story of Abraham and Sarah. God supernaturally intervened, but we can still suppose that the reproductive cells of both Abraham and Sarah still came together to produce Isaac, right? God is the ultimate cause, but the proximate cause of the things happening inside the body of Sarah quite likely remained. - Well, and we can see this in Genesis 1. God said let there be light. That’s the ultimate cause. And there was light…something happened in reality that caused the light to appear. Or God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation,” and the earth brought forth vegetation. God was the ultimate cause and the earth was the proximate cause. There’s still included, often, the language of “God making” or “God creating” as if he was doing this like we create a sculpture or a pan of cookies. But even in the sixth day, God says, “Let the earth bring forth.” So there is still a dynamic of ultimate and proximate causes there. - And I have no idea why this would be controversial once you really look at it, to be honest. God using something to make another thing happen doesn’t lessen God’s will or involvement or sovereignty. And we see it right in the text, God using things to make or create. It says it right there, in plain English as people like to say. - The literary framework is immensely helpful to those who wish to read the Bible in its original contexts (contexts, plural) because it is one way in which we can try to get into the heads of the original authors because they didn’t repeat themes by accident. They didn’t structure the text and go, oops, look at that! Well, at least for the most part they didn’t. I mean, there are things like prophecy and typology where the original writer didn’t fully intend or realize the meaning of what he was writing (but of course God did). But I’m generally talking about the completed text that we have today, after compiling and editing and all of that. These things were done intentionally and they were done with purpose. - So how do we see these things? How can we tell that the Bible and Genesis 1 in particular is laid out literarily? Well it starts getting obvious once you look very closely. Again, you can go back to my reading of Genesis 1 in episode 2 to see how there’s a very definite and obvious structure to the first six days of creation. - We can look at the repetition of phrases, such as “And God said,” and “God saw that it was good.” There will be differences that pop up there, too, like when it suddenly says, “And God saw that it was very good.” When we see these differences in the similarities, we ask, why is that there? Why is it suddenly very good as opposed to just good? Those are literary methods. - Now, when Collins claimed that people who read the Bible in this literary way suggest that there is no particular order to things, he might have possibly meant what Futato calls, “dischronolo gization” (dis-chron-o-logi-zation). This is where things in the text are not written in chronological order. How do we tell that? - I’m going to read an example that Futato shares from the temptation narrative in the New Testament: - If we’re reading the temptation narrative in the Gospel of Matthew, we read that Satan tempted Jesus to turn stones to bread, throw Himself down off of the temple, and then worship Satan. However, if we read that same story in Luke, we read that Satan tempted Jesus to turn stones to bread, to worship him, and then to throw Himself down off of the temple. We have two different chronological orders. Now, it’s possible that neither of these authors has chronology in view. It’s possible that one has chronology in view and the other doesn’t. If I were going to pay my money and take my pick, I would say that Luke the physician would be more likely to put things in chronological order than Matthew, who was more of the artist. But the point is, our exegetical question is not: Which is the order that really took place in time and space? Our exegetical question is: Why does Matthew give us his order? What’s he teaching us by that order? And why did Luke give us his order? What is he teaching us by that order? And I doubt that part of the answer to either of those questions is: “Well, because this is the order that it actually happened in in real time and space.” No, they have theological reasons for shaping the text the way they do, for dischronologizing the text. Now this is not to say that they falsified anything, because ancients were aware that you could tell a story in chronological order or you could tell it in topical order, much like we could rehearse what we did on vacation either chronologically or topically—just different ways of presenting the data. *Joseph A. Pipa Jr. et al., TH331 Perspectives on Creation: Five Views on Its Meaning and Significance, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017).* - So what about Genesis 1? Futato compares days 1 and 4. What does God do on day one? He separates light and darkness, day and night. What happens in day 4? The purpose of the sun and the moon are to divide day and night. Well, what’s the point of that, if day and night were already separated in day 1? From a literal point of view, it’s really hard to see how that works out. - Futato suggests that day 4 is giving us another perspective on day 1 (and here’s what Collins means when he suggested that some read the second set of three days as just being another recounting of the first three days). So you see, when you read the text literarily, it’s easy to come to slightly different conclusions. This is probably also why some people dislike this way of reading. I personally think that Futato here is still taking the text and reading it in too literal of a way….like these three things happened separately, maybe not in this order, but like this…but, it’s hard to separate out the ideas of where literal is and where figurative is. - But, you can see quite easily how we have the ultimate cause, God, on day 1, and he’s using the proximate causes, the sun and moon, in day 4. So day 4 presents the same thing in day 1, just amplified. - Now, just an aside and a mild criticism on my part—that works great in days 1 and 4. I’m not quite sure that “amplification” is how I’d read the comparisons of days 2 and 5 and days 3 and 6. If we say the same things about those days that Futato says about days 1 and 4, then what do the birds and fish have to do with the separation of the waters, and what does the creation of animals and man have to do with the separation of land and the production of plants? - But the general idea of what he’s saying is, I think, spot on. They amplify one another in the sense of meaning and fullness, I guess we might say? Well, there’s a lot we could go into detail here, but maybe another time. - I don’t think there’s a whole lot more I need to say specifically about this view, because as I expect you can see, it’s pretty integrated to the way I read Scripture and the points I try to draw out. But I definitely want to include one more quote from Futato: - …the direction that the dischronologization of Gen 1 leads us to is to see that there is a topical arrangement with an emphasis on day three and day six and a particular emphasis on what we could call day 3b (the second act of creation: vegetation) and day 6b (the second act: the creation of humanity), because this text in particular is written to an ancient agrarian society, which is asking itself the question, where are we going to get the grain that we need in order to live, in order to survive? And the answer is that it is the God of Israel, who from the very beginning has been the provider of vegetation for humanity, and so in particular, one ought not to turn to Baal or any other Canaanite deity to look for the supply of the vegetation that leads to life. These are theological questions that the text is intending to answer, not modern scientific questions. The text is teaching us about, metaphorically speaking, how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. The text is not teaching us, in Calvin’s words, astronomy or “other recondite arts.” It’s teaching us theology about the true and living God and about humanity and how humanity fits into the world that God has made. *Joseph A. Pipa Jr. et al., TH331 Perspectives on Creation: Five Views on Its Meaning and Significance, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017).* - I find it fascinating how much the Bible works to point out the differences between YHWH God and the gods of the nations that people of the time would otherwise be turning to. In all of these views of creation so far, in fact, that is integrated deeply into the meaning of the text, and why wouldn’t it be? We know how steeped the people of the time in general were in these general ideas, and we see over and over how the people of Israel did, in fact, turn to other gods, time and time again. The Bible isn’t a story of God’s faithful people, it’s a story of God **the** faithful himself. And the people need a whole lot from that God….but not in a transactionary way. - One thing that would be good to get in deeply with this view is ancient cosmology, or how the ancient person would have viewed and structured the world. - For sure we don’t have time to do that justice, so what we’re going to do instead is touch on the point of the dating of the book of Genesis. When was it written? ## Dating of Genesis 1 - The answer is, I don’t know…but the question is a good one for our purposes in this episode because the purpose of the text is going to be dependent on when it was written, or when the people had it. - I haven’t taken any polls on this, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suppose that the most common view of the writing of Genesis is that Moses wrote it. But of course Moses didn’t live through any of the events in Genesis. So either he got visions or, heaven forbid, was put into some sort of trance to write it (which, the trance thing, I don’t think is the right way to look at things, but that’s another topic), or there is, of course, the possibility of oral tradition having been passed down. So there’s plenty of ways that Moses could have written Genesis. - The main reason, I think, that people take this position, though—or actually, really, there’s two reasons. One is that this is just the traditional way of looking at it. So it’s assumed there’s a reason for that, right? That people had valid reason for thinking Moses wrote it all, and why buck against that long train of belief? But also, Jesus referred back to the “books of Moses,” and this is assumed to mean that Jesus believed Moses wrote them all, as well. And of course if Jesus believed or said a thing, well, there we go. - But the question now is, is that what Jesus meant? Do we have to take a reference to “the books of Moses” to mean that he wrote them with maybe a touch of editing here and there? - I want to put on the Jeopardy music here or something, because do you see how this, in particular, as well, relates to what I’ve been talking about? If literal-one-to-one-correspondence is not always necessary in interpretation, then the conversation now opens up here…did Moses have to literally put pen to parchment or papyrus in order to have these books known as the books of Moses? - Now, of course, there ought to be some connection, right? Because we’re not going to deny historicity along with accepting literary design. But it opens up possibilities, that’s what I’m saying. - So, when we’re looking at the dating of texts, we don’t have any manuscripts that are any earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls, which the oldest of those are round about two centuries before Christ. Obviously this was still well after all the biblical texts were written. So how do we date things in that case? - Well, traditional views can give us a starting point…the idea that Moses wrote these books suggests that if there’s any core that is earlier than Moses, then it’s either tradition itself or oral history. And because we believe in an ultimate author of the text, we can take this as correct oral history if that’s the case. So it’s possible for the stories in Genesis to greatly predate Moses, and really that’s kind of necessary since they tell the tale of how the people go to be in Egypt, right? - Okay let’s back up for a moment here. The books of Moses, what would those be? They would be the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These are also called the Torah or the Pentateuch. Who is, arguably, the main character in these books? I’d suggest Moses is because he’s the guy who leads them out of Egypt and through the wilderness. The only book he isn’t prominently in is Genesis. But you can’t leave Genesis out of this entire narrative, because it leads up to everything else. So if Moses is the main character in the books, in a sense, then Genesis is going to be bound up with it as, if nothing else, a prolog or something setting it all up, right? And the entire structure of these five books is integrated in a deep, deep way. They are separate scrolls, with separate purposes in each book, but they belong as a unit. - Why else might these be the books of Moses? Well, because he legitimately has a lot to say in them. There are speeches by Moses. Conversations that Moses has with God. Information about events that only Moses would know (but of course there are events that Moses wouldn’t be present for, too). But God directly told Moses to write things down. Do we need to assume that what God told Moses to write was all of these books, as we have them now? Honestly, no, we don’t need to assume that. But he did do a lot of writing. So it’s a safe bet to think that Moses did have a lot to do with the composition of these books. I just don’t think it’s necessary to say that he’s the one who wrote the whole thing. - And what evidence do we have for that? Well, it records his death for one thing. He obviously didn’t write that. Moses is always referred to as “he” rather than “I.” And there is evidence of place-name changes, so there’s clearly some editing going on there. How much? In spite of what some people will claim, we really don’t know how much, and that’s okay. My personal opinion is that there is no need to hold on tightly to the idea that “these books were all written by Moses,” but it’s quite likely that he had a lot to do with them. - I will just briefly mention here, too, there is the whole idea of the “documentary hypothesis,” which is a whole mess in itself and I think generally takes too much liberties with thinking they know more than we can really know. I will get more into that idea later, but that idea doesn’t really help with the question of the dating of Genesis because it presupposes that it was written over very long periods of time and that there were several authors and all of that. It’s not entirely bunk, but the idea that we can piece out the authors as specifically as they suggest is highly suspect to me. - But in either case, the documentary hypothesis also doesn’t really factor in so much right now because my question here has much more to do with the text as a whole…when did that come about? Because what we’re looking at is the purpose. And again, I have to say…I really don’t know and I’m not at all convinced we can say really well. But that’s not to throw out the question; I do think there are some things we can be pretty confident about. And some of those have to do with the themes and images that the text uses. The early chapters of Genesis are undoubtedly connected to Mesopotamia in many ways. There is the tower of Babel, which of course refers to Babylon. There are the literary parallels with other Mesopotamian texts which highly suggest that the Bible in some part functions polemically against these—that it’s fixing the theology of the period into something that is correct. But here’s the problem with all that in relation to Moses being the author…while Abraham may have come from Meosopotamia, it’s a little strange that there is *so much* content that seems to be steeped in that context in Genesis. Does that mean that Genesis was written later than Moses’ time? Or does it just mean that Genesis was edited at some point later? That’s a pretty common view, that Genesis has an old core, but that it was edited during the time of the exile when they’re in Babylon. In order to know that, we’d need to look into the potential themes and purposes of the book from the perspective of each time period and we’d need to ask, which timeframe makes more sense? - I would argue that Genesis is not entirely Mesopotamian, which means that it couldn’t be entirely written during the exile. There are some stories that would suggest we ought to see Egyptian influence, and of course if Moses had his hand in the writing of it at all, it ought to have that Egyptian flavor that we so clearly see in books like the Exodus (which, by the way, in my opinion, is proof enough of the exodus event, because if the book was written only during the exile, there’s simply no way they could have gotten so many details about Egypt and the fashions of the tabernacle and all that just right). - All right, sadly, I’m running out of time, and I’m still working on compiling some information for this, anyway. But I wanted to get your gears going. If you’ve got any ideas on cultural or thematic data in which the text which reveals where its writing might fit in history best, let me know! When you read Genesis, does it seem like it’s written for a people who is reforming themselves in the wilderness to take their inheritance in the promised land, or does it sound like it’s written to people who are in exile after their monarchy pretty much fell apart? Or does it sound like it’s written to people before the exodus even happened? Or is there another idea entirely? - I think that looking at cultural themes and literary purpose is maybe one of the best ways to date the book, at least in its compiled form, because looking at how the book was used is quite valuable in the question. Note that all the questions are centered around the purposes of Israel. Any theory that doesn’t take that into account isn’t looking at the text as a whole. ## Outro - All right. I kind of packed some stuff in here, so I hope it made sense to you listening. Some of this is just not expanded upon often to get to the meat of things. Appreciate you all listening and thank you to those who share these episodes and also to those of you who have given me ratings. That is really helpful. If you’ve not done those things, I’d ask you to do so if you find it valuable. And remember, if you want to get in on the newsletter action, feel free to email me at [email protected]. You can ask me questions there and throw tomatoes at me if you want. A quick thank you to Wintergatan for the music and a wish to you all for a blessed week. We’ll talk to you next time!