Original Meaning

Literary Introduction (1:1)

IN THE BEGINNING. It sounds so simple, yet behind it lurk many of the ultimate questions of philosophy, theology, and metaphysics. Unfortunately, it is often the sad duty of the exegete to penetrate the sublime in pursuit of the tedious. The moment we begin to ponder the phrase, its cloudlike simplicity dissipates to reveal rugged mountain peaks. In the beginning of what? Many readers may have never specifically asked themselves this question, but most have an answer in their heads. We realize that it is not the beginning of God and therefore not the beginning of everything. Is the author suggesting a beginning of something abstract, such as time or history? Is it perhaps a more scientific beginning—like the beginning of matter or the universe (“the heavens and the earth”)? Is it possible that we are trying too hard and that the beginning is literary (i.e., the beginning of the story)? What about something more personal: our beginning as a human race?

Before we pursue the answer to this question, however, we need to consider our methodological assumptions. The questions just posed work on the assumption that the word “beginning” must (as in English) indicate the beginning of something. But does the Hebrew usage carry the same implication? One of the greatest obstacles we face in trying to interpret the Bible is that we are inclined to think in our own cultural and linguistic categories. This is no surprise, since our own categories are often all that we have; but it is a problem because our own categories often do not suffice and sometimes mislead. The fact that the Hebrew word b^ereʾšit can be translated “in the beginning” does not mean we can now be content to explore the English word “beginning” in English terms and categories. Linguistic and cultural information must be derived from linguistic and cultural sources. In this case we must explore the usage of this word in the Hebrew Bible and see if any cultural information across the ancient Near East can help.

Certainly Hebrew can use reʾšit to refer to the beginning of something. But there is more to it than that. J. Sailhamer has pointed out the unique function of the term as referring to an initial period or duration rather than to a specific point in time.1 His case is supported most convincingly by passages such as Job 8:7, which speaks of the early part of Job’s life, and Jeremiah 28:1, which refers to the beginning period of Zedekiah’s reign. Often in keeping records of a king’s reign, his first year did not begin with his accession to the throne, but with the first new year’s day of his reign. Historians refer to the partial preliminary year as the accession year. In Hebrew it was referred to as the reʾšit of his reign. This was an initial period of time, not a point in time. This linguistic discussion therefore offers an alternative way of understanding the “beginning,” but how can we know that this was on the mind of the author? None of these other verses are exact syntactical equivalents of Genesis 1:1.2

When we couple the linguistic discussion with cultural information, however, a clearer direction may be possible. Egyptian usage is particularly helpful on this point. Egyptian creation texts make use of a similar concept. For example, someone from Thebes speaks of the god Amun who evolved in the beginning or “on the first occasion.”3 Egyptologists interpret this beginning not as an abstract idea but as a reference to a first-time event.4 Given biblical usage and the Egyptian analogy, the Bible can be seen as presenting the creation account as an initial, distinct period of time that served as a prelude to human history. It would be a similar to the way that eschaton (“the latter days”) refers to an ending period of time, not an ending point of time.5

The next question must concern what portion of the text was contained in this initial period. Sailhamer is inclined to see it as an extended period of time preceding the seven days.6 Another possibility is that the initial period describes the entire seven days. In scholarly discussions of the twentieth century, the options have been reflected in the renderings of 1:1–2a found in popular translations today.

1. In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void. . . . (NRSV)

2. When God began to create heaven and earth—the earth being unformed and void . . . God said. . . . (NJPS)

3. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. [Now] The earth was. . . . (NIV, KJV, NASB, NLT)

The NRSV rendering treats verse 1 as a dependent clause that finds its main clause in verse 2. The NJPS considers the clause of verse 1 as dependent on a main clause in verse 3, with verse 2 being parenthetical. The third option, the traditional rendering, understands verse 1 as an independent clause, which either refers to creative activity that preceded the seven-day sequence7 or provides a literary introduction to the events of the seven days.8

The grammatical issues are complex and will not be discussed in detail here. The technicalities are thoroughly treated in the technical commentaries.9 In brief, those who favor the dependent clause approach need to emend the masoretic vocalization10 to achieve their end. They believe this is justified by (1) the fact that there is no definite article on b^ereʾšit, and by (2) the grammatical comparison to the Akkadian creation account preserved in Enuma Elish (which begins with the dependent clause, “When on high . . .”). Against (1), research has shown that time designations in adverbial expressions do not require the definite article;11 against (2), the Akkadian account provides insufficient basis for emendation.12

A further case can be made that the syntax of verse 2 favors the treatment of verse 1 as an independent clause. Turning to the traditional translation, we still must ask whether anything happens in verse 1. Does it refer to some creative activity that preceded the seven days (in which something that can be designated heaven and earth were created), or does it introduce and summarize the activity of the seven days (during which heaven and earth were created)? There are two evidences that I believe offer support for the second option. (1) The book of Genesis typically operates literarily by introducing sections with a summary statement. Thus, for example, beginning in 2:4 and ten additional times throughout the book, a tol^edot statement introduces a section (see introduction). (2) Even more persuasive is that the account of the six days closes with the comment that “the heavens and the earth” were completed (2:1).13

Thus, Genesis uses literary introductions, and the six days accomplished the creation of heaven and earth. It can therefore be concluded that the text is not suggesting that anything was actually created in 1:1; rather, the verse is a literary introduction, a summary of what follows. The “initial period” indicated by the word b^ereʾšit is not described in verse 1 but in chapter 1.

God created. The text next speaks of God’s activity using the Hebrew word baraʾ, unanimously rendered “created.” Again, however, we must be careful to remember that to interpret the Bible accurately, we must understand baraʾ in Hebrew terms. The verb occurs forty-eight times in the Old Testament and has some curious features worth noting. (1) It takes only God as its subject and therefore must be identified as a characteristically divine activity.14

(2) The objects of this verb are widely varied. They include people groups (Ps. 102:18; Ezek. 21:30); Jerusalem (Isa. 65:18); phenomena such as wind, fire, cloud, destruction, calamity, or darkness (Ex. 34:10; Num. 16:30; Isa. 45:7; Amos 4:13); and abstractions such as righteousness, purity, or praise (Ps. 51:10; Isa. 57:19). Even when the object is something that could be “manufactured” (“creatures of the sea” in Gen. 1:21), the point need not necessarily be physical manufacturing as much as assigning roles. This direction is picked up nicely in Genesis 5:2, where God “creates” people male and female, that is, with established gender functions. In all of these cases, something is brought into existence, but rarely does the statement concern the issue of physical matter.

Indeed, baraʾ never occurs in a context in which materials are mentioned.15 Instead of suggesting manufacture of matter out of nothing, its usages suggest that manufacture is not the issue.16 The essence of baraʾ concerns bringing heaven and earth into existence and focuses on operation through organization and assignment of roles and functions. Even in English we use the verb “create” within a broad range of contexts but rarely apply it to material things (i.e., parallel in concept to “manufacture”). One can create a piece of art, but that expression does not suggest manufacture of the canvas or paint. Even more abstractly, one can create a situation (e.g., havoc) or a condition (an atmosphere). In these cases, the verb indicates the establishment of a role or function. When someone creates a department, a curriculum, or an advertising campaign, it is an organizational task. One puts it together and makes it work. Hebrew usage of baraʾ is similar. Perhaps an English verb that captures this idea less ambiguously is “to design” (though baraʾ includes both planning and implementing the design).

When we are doing exegesis, we are not asking the question, “What does my belief system affirm that God has done?” nor even, “What would Israel’s belief system affirm God was responsible for?” Rather, we must ask, “What is the text asserting that God did in this context?” The above analysis suggests that in the seven-day initial period God brought the cosmos17 into operation (which defines existence) by assigning roles and functions. Later Scripture supports our belief that God also made all of the matter of which the cosmos is composed (and that he made it out of nothing, Col. 1:16–17; Heb. 11:3), but that is not what Genesis means by the use of baraʾ. The origin of matter is what our society has taught us is important (indeed, that matter is all there is), but we cannot afford to be so distracted by our cultural ideas. The existence of matter was not the concern of the author of Genesis.

The author’s concerns were much like others in the ancient Near East, where the greatest exercise of the power of the gods was not demonstrated in the manufacture of matter but in the fixing of destinies.18 In Enuma Elish, when Tiamat and Kingu undertook their rebellion against the gods, Tiamat procured the tablet of destinies and turned them over to Kingu. This element takes on even more significance in the older Myth of Anzu, from which Enuma Elish derived some of its material.19 In this tale the monster, Anzu, is impressed with the power wielded by Enlil using the tablet of destinies, and he steals it so that he can lord it over the gods. Each year at the all-important akitu, Babylon’s New Year’s enthronement festival, the gods fixed the destinies for the coming year, thus reasserting their power. Here in Genesis, Israel’s God also demonstrates his power by the assigning of roles and functions. This is an affirmation of his exclusive sovereignty. We will deal with this in much more detail in future sections.

Bridging Contexts

HOW SHOULD WE approach the text?48 As discussed in the introduction, if we are to interpret the text correctly, we must understand what the author would have communicated to his audience when he used the words he chose. Communication assumes a purpose as well as a common ground of familiarity as the arena in which it takes place. Thus the parameters of language and culture provide an essential setting for understanding the nature of the communication. If we read levels of meaning into the text on our own that neither the audience nor the author would have understood or been concerned with, we set ourselves up as the channel for the text’s authority. Since God’s process of inspiration utilized the author, I believe the author’s intention is our most important authority link. We must be willing to accept that it may not have been his concern to defend the ideas that our culture asks us to defend. For instance, the top question on our minds cannot be, “Can I use Genesis 1 to defend the New Testament teaching of creation out of nothing?” Instead it must be, “What points was the author trying to communicate?” I will refer to this as taking the text at face value.49

Interpreters of the twentieth century have been obsessed with trying to solve “the problem” of Genesis 1—the problem being identified as how to retain the integrity of the text in light of what is known or declared by the world of science. While some attempt (1) to construct an alternate science, others address the problem by contending (2) that the text is theological, not scientific, or (3) that it is poetic/figurative, not literal.

But if we take the text at face value, none of these approaches works. Regarding (1), the science that is reconstructed represents today’s sophisticated scientific principles and concepts. It has nothing to do with the face value that Israel would have understood, because it is simply reading our science between the lines. We will return to this in more detail below. Regarding (2), most interpreters acknowledge that Israel saw no distinction between theological and scientific. These were integrated into a worldview that saw most of what we call scientific as fully contained within the theological realm. Regarding (3), we must likewise admit that to Israel the ideas expressed in Genesis 1 are not just poetic expressions standing in for more sophisticated realities. The fact that they display poetic qualities does not demonstrate that they are figurative. In contrast to all of these, I intend to argue that if we want to understand the face value of Genesis 1, we must clarify the distinction between a functional and structural approach.

We live in a world far different from the world of the Old Testament. We must recognize the elements that distinguish these two worlds and make appropriate adjustments to our expectations. In our world, we believe reality is described most accurately in scientific terms. Mythology in the ancient world played the role that science plays in our modern world—it contained the explanation of how the world came into being and how it worked.

The mythological approach attempted to identify functions of the natural world as a consequence of purpose. The gods had purposes, and their activities were the causes of what humans experienced as effects. By contrast, our modern scientific approach identifies the functions of the natural world as a consequence of structure and attempts to understand cause and effect based on natural laws that are linked to the structure, the composite parts, of a phenomenon.

Much of the change in our world we attribute to personal agents. But change is also attributed to natural causes, many of which are labeled natural laws. A thunderstorm is explained in terms of atmospheric pressure, convection and moisture. A dead battery is explained in terms of the law of entropy. The ancient Israelites, in contrast, perceived only personal causality. All change in the world was attributed to personal agents—to either humans (and animals by personification) or the gods. Natural events, for example, were manifestations of divine activity. Nature was not a causal agent, but rather the effect of divine agency.50

Because our scientific worldview is keenly interested in material structure and natural causality, we often go to the biblical account looking for information on its physical makeup and laws. In this area, however, the biblical worldview is much more like its ancient Near Eastern counterparts in that it views function as a consequence of the purpose of divine agency.

We must, of course, be careful how we use the comparative material from the ancient Near East. Many parallels can be identified between ancient Near Eastern mythology and Old Testament passages and concepts, and these will be discussed as we proceed through the commentary. This is not to suggest, however, that the Old Testament is to be considered simply as another example of ancient mythology or as dependent on that literature. As discussed in the introduction, mythology is a window to ancient culture just as science is a window to modern culture. Perhaps “mirror” would be better than “window” in the sense that both mythology and science reflect the worldview and values of the cultures that forged them.

For ancient Israelite culture, many of the writings we find in the Old Testament performed the same function as mythology did in other cultures—they gave them a literary mechanism for preserving and transmitting their worldview and values. Israel was part of a larger cultural complex that existed across the ancient Near East. There are many aspects of that cultural complex that she shared with her neighbors, though each individual culture had its distinguishing features. When we seek to understand the culture and literature of Israel, we rightly expect to find help in the larger cultural arena, whether from the mythology, wisdom writings, legal documents, or royal inscriptions.

The conclusion, then, is that we can often identify the questions the text addresses by familiarizing ourselves with ancient literature rather than by letting our culture dictate what questions the text addresses or how it answers questions. Once we stop pressuring the text to address our issues, we may find that it is easier to identify the text’s issues. As an example, we cannot feel free to try to transform “in the beginning” into either a scientific statement or a theological treatise. It is not a covert reference to the Big Bang any more than it is proof of creatio ex nihilo. If interpreters are free to transform text, text is stripped of its ability to transform lives. Consequently, we are motivated to explore the face value of the text.

Function, not structure, as the face value. The face value of Genesis 1:3–5 does not offer a description of the piece of our material cosmos that physicists know as light with all of its physical properties and functional operation. What carries much more importance for the biblical author and in the ancient world in general is the affirmation that God created time. I have referred to this as a contrast between function (or purpose) and structure. As the comments in the Original Meaning section show, this focus is evident through the early verses of Genesis 1 as the author moves us from a chaotic (nonfunctional) condition through the setting up of the functions that will establish an ordered, operational cosmos.

If it is true that the author of Genesis is communicating to his audience about God’s creation of the functional cosmos, we might expect to get little information concerning the structural cosmos (i.e., matter per se). It is fruitless to ask what things God created on day one, for the text is not concerned about things and therefore will not address itself to that question. In other words, the text of Genesis is not discussing what H. Van Till has called the “formational history” of the cosmos.51 This demonstrates the radical contrast between the terms in which the Israelites thought about cosmic origins and the terms in which we think about them. When we ask the question “How does the cosmos work?” we seek an answer that discusses physical laws and structures, matter, and its properties. In our worldview, function is a consequence of structure, and a discussion of creation therefore must, of course, direct itself to the making of things. In contrast, when an Israelite asked “How does the cosmos work?” he or she was on a different wavelength, because in the ancient worldview, function is a consequence of purpose.

This functional perspective is not only reflected in the text and context of Genesis but can be seen as the basic perspective of the ancient world in general. The wealth of Egyptian tomb paintings affords us ample opportunity to observe how they portrayed the cosmos.52 As the sky goddess, Nut is portrayed arching her body over the disk-shaped earth. She is often supported by the hands of the god of the air while the earth god, Geb, lies prone at her feet. Note that this is not their scientific representation of structure. The Egyptians did not believe that one could go step on Nut’s toes or throw a rock and hit her knees. Rather, the portrayal communicates important truths concerning what the Egyptians believed about authority and jurisdiction in the cosmos. These are functional truths, not structural truths. They represent what the Egyptians believed about reality. The cosmos functioned by means of the gods playing out their roles. J. P. Allen expresses it as a difference between physics and metaphysics:

Unlike classical Newtonian physics . . . Egyptian explanations are more metaphysical than physical. They are concerned primarily with what lies beyond physical reality. There are other differences as well. The Egyptian documents reflect a subjective rather than objective view of reality: concepts are expressed not in terms of mechanical forces and physical elements but in human terms, as the wills and personalities of sentient beings (the gods). And none of the Egyptian sources is the record of scientific or philosophical speculation for its own sake. All serve some practical end, whether the worship of god or the attempt to secure a successful afterlife for the dead.53

Whatever the physical structure of the heavens was, it was of little concern to the Egyptians. A later Egyptian text54 lists eighteen “creations,” only one or two of which refer to structural components (e.g., sweet water). The remainder are things such as summer/winter, birth, sleep, remedies, dreams, wealth/poverty, and succession of generations.55

The texts of Mesopotamia also offer a clear picture of the tenets of their cosmology. For Mesopotamia, cosmogony (origins of the cosmos) was intertwined with theogony (origins of the gods). When Enuma Elish speaks of one generation of cosmic gods giving birth to the next generation of cosmic gods and thus bringing the cosmos into operation, it is not offering its ideas concerning the material origins or structure of the cosmos. Instead, as the names are given, jurisdiction is established and the cosmos begins to function under the guidance of its divine overseers. It is not just that these peoples had a different concept of structure from ours; rather, they do not view creation as a structure issue. To describe creation is to describe the establishment of the functioning cosmos, not the origins of the material structure of the cosmos. Structure was irrelevant. L. Bronner summarizes this nicely:

The primary purpose of these myths was to explain the world and how it functioned to the men of their generation. This is in fact what ancient mythology has in common with modern theology. It endeavored to explain the meaning of life and the mystery of the universe to mortal man. It aimed to help him face up to the challenges and the perplexities of life. These polytheistic texts explained the secrets of the universe by claiming that there were opposing forces continuously at war with one another in the world. As Wright put it: “The primary purpose of the stories about the gods was to explain the world and how it works.”56

Generally in the ancient world, the assignment of functions is connected to the giving of names. Enuma Elish picks up its account when nothing yet had a name. Egyptian literature identified the creator god as the one who pronounced the name of everything.57 In this way of thinking, things did not exist unless they were named:

It was believed that the name of a living being or an object was not just a simple or practical designation to facilitate the exchange of ideas between persons but that it was the very essence of what was defined, and that the actual pronouncing of a name was to create what was spoken.58

Genesis follows the same pattern of thinking as we see the importance of God’s naming those items that he has made functional. Consequently, we can conclude that Israel’s worldview differed from her neighbors in the areas of theology and cosmogony (origins of the cosmos), but not in the area of cosmology. We operate in similar ways when we attempt to adopt the theology of the Bible to the Big Bang theory. Scientifically, we conform to a consensus view, but add our own theological twists to conform to the Bible as well.

Does Genesis 1 tell us anything about structure? If the focus of Genesis 1 is functional, is there anything that can be inferred from the text about structural origins, material creation, or formational history? There are only two possibilities regarding the incidental structural details in the text. On the one hand would be the idea that they reflect the “old-world science” the Israelites shared with their neighbors. This would have included a flat disk-shaped earth with mountains holding up the several levels of sky, each with solid elements such as floors and ceilings.59 The sun, moon, and stars moved across the sky in determined patterns, and there was water in heaven’s chambers that came down as rain as well as waters surrounding and running under the earth that made up the cosmic seas. There was a second level of earth that constituted the netherworld, the abode of the dead, through which the sun passed during the night.

On the other hand, if Israelites did not believe something like this, it could only be because God had revealed a different reality that transcended this old-world science. If God did not reveal realities such as the earth’s being spherical or the earth’s rotation and revolution around the sun, the Israelites would have had no means to arrive at those conclusions.

For some readers, the first option might seem theologically treacherous and likely to undermine the authority of text, but let us examine the options and their implications carefully. With regard to the second option, the evidence is strikingly clear. There is not a single example of God revealing scientifically transcendent information to the Israelites.60 In fact, the evidence is to the contrary. Consider the following four examples:

1. In Genesis 1:9 the “water” is gathered “to one place” so that “dry ground” appears. The ancient, classical, and medieval worlds all agreed that there was only one major landmass on earth. The Israelites understood this as a description of the world as they knew it, not of a scientific Pangea that preceded the onset of continental drift.

2. When the elders of Israel have their encounter with the God of Israel in Exodus 24, he is portrayed as standing in heaven on a pavement of sapphire (v. 10), exactly like that portrayed in Mesopotamian cosmology.61

3. The movements of the celestial bodies and the understanding of weather all are described in terms similar to that in the rest of the ancient Near East. Windows of heaven are not replaced with low-pressure systems and the movement of the jet stream.

4. When God wants to talk about the human intellect, he does not take time to inform his inspired authors that the true organ of thought was the brain. There is no Hebrew word for brain, and neither the Israelites nor any of the other ancient peoples knew what the brain was for. The Egyptian priests who mummified bodies carefully preserved all of the important internal organs in canopic jars, but they pulled the brain out with a hook through the nostrils and discarded it as so much trash. For the ancients, the representation of the heart as the seat of intellect and emotions62 was not simply figurative speech, as it is for us. They knew of no other reality.

Does God relinquish the authority or credibility of the text when he speaks of the heart as the seat of the intellect? Of course not—he is simply communicating in terms that his audience understands, as any effective communicator does. He is not misleading them about physiology, for he is not discussing physiology and is offering no revelation on that subject. In the creation narratives I contend that he likewise does not discuss material structure and therefore offers no revelation on that subject. One may as well try to reconstruct human anatomy, or our ideas about it, from a Picasso abstract painting.63

One could perhaps claim that the Israelites had only a primitive knowledge of science but that the ambiguity of the language left room for scientific sophistication (as is assumed by those who construct a new science based on the text). This does not help us. The authors were using words that their audiences understood. The view that God inspired the use of words to be construed in certain ways by the audience even though he meant something else does not save his reputation. If the authority of the Bible means anything to us, we must assume a level of integrity to the communication. It had authority for the original Israelites, so it could not mislead.

Science’s structural focus is not the only way to express truth. The very fact that the Bible’s ability to use Israelite modes of thinking poses such a problem for us demonstrates how significantly we have been influenced by certain aspects of our culture. We have been persuaded to believe that truth about origins can only be packaged in scientific terms; that the only cosmological reality is a scientifically informed reality; that if a cosmological text operates outside of the scientific realm, it ceases to be truth. We too easily accept the dictum that the only absolute is science.64 This presupposition causes us to think that the Bible’s authority would be jeopardized if its revelation fails to address origins in terms that reflect our worldview. This modern arrogance that insists that revelation must be packaged in our terms to be true betrays us, because even scientific thinking is in constant flux. Del Ratzsch describes the situation this way:

Science is a complicated, historically shifting interplay among nature, theories, data and a host of often-unstated nonempirical principles that shape our thinking, evaluating, theorizing and even perceiving. Since the parts are so interwoven, changes in one part frequently have consequences for the content and contours of other parts. Parts do change over time—theories are replaced, shaping principles alter, and so forth. And sometimes entire systems involving all three components are overturned and replaced by others.65

As a result, if God were going to ensure that his revelation was culturally and scientifically accurate and modern in its communication, he would have to issue periodic revelation updates.66 So, for instance, if his revelation took the form of eighteenth-century understanding, it would have to have been totally revised by the mid-1900s. Then in the post-Darwinian era, it would certainly be obsolete. By our day, very little would be able to stand up to scrutiny. The solution to this problem must be for us to realize the validity of a reality other than a scientific, structurally oriented one for the communication of truth. N. Postman has observed that “truth” is often perceived by the hearer on the basis of the way that it is expressed:

The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the “truth” is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.67

Postman was not speaking of pluralism or denying the existence of absolute truth here, and neither am I. The phenomenon he observes can perhaps best be illustrated by the obsession of society today with political correctness as the essential garb in which truth must be clothed. Enjoying even a more distinguished reputation for being the ultimate garb of truth is the rhetoric of scientific description. We must recognize this as a cultural bias. For example, can the truth of the relationship of the earth to the sun be reflected only from the vantage point of assuming a position in outer space (where most of us have never been) and imagining a time warp so as to view the earth moving around the sun? Is it false to speak of the sun simply as rising and setting?

Why should it be supposed that men in the twentieth century have any fundamental advantage over previous ages just because men lately have refined the capacity for abstract thought and scientific technology? Why should it be assumed that “historical development” has escalated modern men to a height from which we can look down upon those who preceded us? Once we surrender the proud notion that people in the twentieth century, and especially people whose roots are in the West, are better off than the generations that have gone before, the door is opened for a poetic and philosophic sharing of the riches of human creativity from the dawn of history to the present. Indeed, when modern men are emancipated from contemporaneity, they may discover dimensions of existence shared with all men and all times.68

Are we so presumptuous as to think that inspired text, to be “true,” must somehow incorporate our view of science into its discussions of origins? C. Hyers has referred to this way of thinking as “intellectual imperialism” even as he demonstrates the bankruptcy that it produces:

One of the consequences of intellectual imperialism is that instead of bringing all knowledge under its dominion, it reduces knowledge to its own dimensions. It is imperialistic in aspiration but reductionistic in result.69

Truth cannot be held hostage to such reductionism. It can be validation of a perspective as easily as it can be a validation of physical laws or structures. Consequently, I could contend that it is true that the sky is blue, even though I cannot get a slice of it for laboratory analysis. In C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace is in conversation with Ramandu, who has identified himself as a retired star. When Eustace comments that in his world a star is a huge ball of flaming gas, Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” This is precisely the sort of distinction that is important in the reading of Genesis.

The purpose and message of Genesis 1:3–5. As indicated in the introduction, Genesis 1 as a whole is intended to show that the miserable condition of humanity that motivates the covenant in chapter 12 is not the result of some defect in God’s creative work. On the contrary, God made everything just right and set it up to function properly within his purposes. The initial verses we have studied reveal that God alone takes responsibility for imposing order on chaos. He demonstrates his power and sovereignty by bringing the cosmos into conformity with his purposes. He does not accomplish this through battle with cosmic monsters, as the rest of the ancient world portrayed it, but by simply speaking the functions into existence.

The difficulty some have with the interpretation offered above is that it is theological in nature. So, for instance, if Genesis 1:1 is a literary introduction rather than a creative act, then the story really begins in verse 2, when a chaotic earth is already in existence. In the minds of some, this jeopardizes the concept of creation out of nothing and detracts from the all-inclusive portrayal of God as Creator. If the ruaḥ (spirit/wind) of God is an “it” rather than a “he,” the theology of the Holy Spirit and his role in creation may be undermined. If the days of creation offer revelation of functions using ancient ideas of structure in the communication, the door might be opened to evolutionists or the text’s inerrant status might be damaged.

Here we must beware. Just because a given text does not explicitly support a particular belief does not mean it contradicts or undermines that belief. Neither the Old or New Testaments can be construed as allowing for any other creator or for supporting such ideas as the eternality or preexistence of matter.

The lesson to be learned here is the principle of allowing the Bible to say what it wants to say and not impose our imperialistic agendas onto it, squeezing it into our molds. I am not for a moment suggesting that religion and science occupy entirely different realms and never touch; or that evolutionary theory, when it puffs itself up and pretends to offer us a worldview which can take the place of biblical theism, is not something to be fought against; or that Christians ought not to raise questions about the hard evidence which is said to favor a purely naturalistic account of origins. My intention is to make the simple plea for the sovereignty of the biblical text over reader agendas. Our exegesis ought to let the text speak and the chips fall where they may.70

It is methodologically dangerous to construe a text in such a way so as to affirm our beliefs in the clearest possible terms. We must accept the text on its own terms.

Contemporary Significance

WE NEED TO RECLAIM certain important aspects of the worldview that is here affirmed and taught by the text. We cannot allow our culture to lull us into accepting the concept that creation refers primarily to formational history. Like the magicians of Egypt at the time of the plagues, science can offer theories to replicate that. The Bible claims much more for creation. It claims the sovereign work of God, who maintains and sustains the functions of the cosmos and his own purposes within it. As H. C. Brichto rhapsodizes, “The God of Creation is the guarantee of Order, the repudiation of Accident or Chance.”71

The diabolical nature of Evolutionism72 is not to be found first and foremost in its claim that things came into existence in a randomly generated sequence through mutation and natural selection, but rather in the insidious way that it strips the cosmos and everything in it of purpose. Even more subtle is the way that Christians have distorted the text and theology by allowing science to define the roles that we attribute to God and the Bible. Here, before we consider the contemporary significance of the text, we must examine the contemporary significance of the methodology.

Methodology problem: We have let culture/science set the parameters of how we deal with the text of Genesis 1. I have heard a story in several different forms about a mother who was approached by her four-year old with the question, “Where did I come from?” She had not been prepared to give the “birds-and-the-bees” talk so soon, but she stumbled through the best explanation she could devise on short notice that would package this sensitive information for a four-year old’s mind. She was feeling rather pleased with the effort until her son shrugged, turned on his heels, and departed with the comment, “Jimmy says he comes from Indiana.”

The interpretation of Genesis 1 has a long and checkered history. Modern evangelicalism has proponents who, as mentioned above, contend that the chapter is purely a literary formulation that has a carefully articulated theological message. The seven-day structure is seen by these as a convention of literary art rather than an affirmation of historical time periods.

In contrast are those who insist that the face value of the text requires a belief in seven twenty-four-hour days, which in turn mandates a young earth. They believe that between the lines of Hebrew text (or at least the English translations of the Hebrew text) can be discerned a scientific sophistication that addresses the concerns of our modern cosmological questions. They seek scientific validation of the waters above the earth by positing a water canopy suspended in space, and they try to figure out how light could have existed before the sun and moon.

Still a third group looks at the text as containing symbolic language by which a transition may be made between the simplicity of the ancient wording and the theories of modern science. In this view the days represent ages, and perhaps the earth bringing forth animals refers to some aspect of the evolutionary process. Of interest to many of these interpreters is how the biblical text can be understood to reflect our modern tenets of cosmology. They believe that our modern cosmology is flavored by a generous dose of truth, and since God’s Word must also be truth, the two must coincide. They are well intentioned but, I believe, at times misguided as they try to give the Bible’s answer to “Where did we come from?”

In his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll discusses the state of scientific posturing within evangelicalism today and how we got where we are.73 With the advent of Darwinism and its adoption into the secularist agenda, science came to be portrayed as the enemy of the church. The battle against the penetration of secularism became a battle against scientific thinking. This battle was waged on several fronts, with apologists in the vanguard protecting the values of Christianity and arguing its case. This included attempts to refute scientific positions that were deemed detrimental to Christianity as well as proposing theistic scientific views and undertaking an aggressive campaign to harmonize the Bible with scientific findings. As a result, the Bible was forced into a position of dependence on the field of scientific inquiry because it was only used to respond in reaction to the parameters set by the debate. Thus, Noll observes:

The failure of either the proponents or opponents [in the debate over evolution] to question historic Protestant commitments to that bond between Enlightenment notions of science and traditional conceptions of Christianity testified to the deep historical commitment of evangelicals to the scientific enterprise, but also to an unself-conscious commitment to the assumptions of Baconian science.74

This approach has become so pervasive and so ingrained that we no longer realize we are asking the wrong questions. It only distorts the biblical text to try to read science between the lines, as if the text were constructed to accommodate modern scientific understanding. Nevertheless, it also undermines the text to reduce it to a harmless variation of primitive mythological misconceptions. We cannot defend either a totally postponed communication (i.e., one that would make no sense until scientific knowledge had progressed and new models developed) or a symbolic message (e.g., that the waters above the earth really stood for a canopy in suspension) when it would have corresponded to something very different in the ancient audience’s cosmology. These do not take the text at face value, even though the original audience would have been taking the text at face value.

The solution is to understand the worldview through which the text is communicating and focus on that which it seeks to communicate in isolation from our pro- or antiscientific agendas. We should not be asking (1) how the text validates my scientific understanding or (2) how the text describes the scientific system we know to be true; rather, we must ask (3) on what level the text is communicating its message. This does not require scientific apologetics and text manipulation; it requires comparative study. We must come to an understanding of the ancient worldview. Where does this lead?

As discussed in Bridging Contexts, our scientific worldview has established certain perspectives for us of which we are hardly aware. We think of the created world in terms of its physical components, its laws, and its properties. We think of the cosmos principally in reference to its material structure. The Greeks persuaded people that the material structure of the cosmos was discernible. The Enlightenment persuaded people that the material structure of the cosmos was most important. The post-Darwin era has persuaded people that material structure is all there is to the cosmos. Ravi Zacharias similarly observes, “First the world was denuded of transcendence, then the Scriptures were rendered irrelevant, and finally humankind was made nothing more than matter.”75

When the ancients wanted to describe or discuss creation, they had little interest in the material structure or the formational history of the cosmos. Rather, their concerns focused on the functional cosmos. Instead of understanding creation as making things, they saw God establishing a reality continuum. The reality of how we experience the cosmos does not need to be informed by a description of the shape or structure of the cosmos, or its formational history. The text communicates a universal reality—how all peoples throughout time have experienced the cosmos. It affirms that though people have often perceived the cosmos as a threat to their survival, God set up the cosmos to operate this way, and it was just right.

People understood how to interact with the weather long before the development of modern meteorology with its satellites tracking the movement of fronts, pressure systems, and the jet stream. In fact, our understanding of the physical universe is primarily important to us because it can help us understand the functional cosmos. Young earth creationists, old earth creationists, and theistic evolutionists have been locked in an argument concerning who offers the best picture of creation’s formational history.76 Each want to claim that it has a biblical view of creation’s formational history. The problem exists because from a biblical point of view, it is an oxymoron to speak of “creation’s formational history,” in that the Bible’s view of creation is not concerned with formational history. C. Hyers has clearly identified the misguided reactions:

Charles Darwin, in comparing his observations of nature with the biblical accounts of creation, assumed that they were the same sort of statement and declared that the Old Testament offers a “manifestly false history of the earth.” While religious objections have tended to focus on the word false, and many evolutionists—following Darwin—have been inclined to agree that it is false, the central issue is whether the biblical materials are being offered as a “history of the earth” in a sense comparable to the modern meaning of natural history. If they are not, then both the attempts at demonstrating their scientific falsity and the attempts at demonstrating their scientific truth are inappropriate and misleading.77

If we come to the Bible expecting it to discuss creation in terms of material structure, we will be sadly disappointed. As Hyers concludes, we must inquire after the meaning of creation in the creation texts themselves.

We cannot, therefore, use the biblical text to draw conclusions about material structure, nor should we infer from the text what our beliefs ought to be about material structure. We do not need to harmonize our thinking about material structure with the use in Genesis of that terminology, just as we do not have to try to figure out whether the blood pump in our chests has some role in our thinking ability. The face value of the text reveals important truth about God’s creation of the functional or operational cosmos. Obviously, the functions require structures, but we cannot cross-examine the text with regard to structures. We must accept the direction that the text lays for itself. This can be established through an understanding of the ancient mindset.

By distinguishing the text from science in this way, I am not endorsing the argument that science and religion have nothing to do with one another. That argument was articulated by Stephen Jay Gould as follows:

No scientific theory, including evolution, can pose any threat to religion—for these two great tools of human understanding operate in complementary (not contrary) fashion in their totally separate realms: science as an inquiry about the factual state of the natural world, religion as a search for spiritual meaning and ethical values.78

I am not saying that we should abandon all attempts to harmonize science and Scripture. I am saying that we should not expect the text to do that. There is a difference between the role of religion or theology and the role of the text. “Harmonize” is actually a good word. Unfortunately, what we have termed harmonization has often been a masked attempt to make science and the Bible sing in unison. In contrast, our harmonization must allow for some degree of compartmentalization between the role of science and the text.

In our day and age we really can understand this type of compartmentalization and the place that it has. If we spoke of someone building a computer, we would understand that it meant assembling it so that it could operate. We wouldn’t be interested in who manufactured the monitor screen, where the motherboard was constructed, or who wrote the software. The following rendition is not intended to be frivolous or irreverent, though it is offered tongue-in-cheek, hopefully as an enlightening illustration.

In the beginning, Tom built himself a computer. Now this computer was just scattered pieces all over the workbench still in boxes and manufacturers’ wrappers. Darkness was over the face of the monitor.

Then Tom installed the motherboard. And Tom said, “Let this Intel^® chip make my computer run fast and efficiently.” And Tom called the chip CPU. And Tom gave the CPU memory, and he separated the memory into static and dynamic; the static he called ROM, and the dynamic he called RAM. And Tom saw that the motherboard was good.

Day 1

Then Tom said, “Let there be a hard drive to gather the data into one place, and let the floppy drive appear,” and it was so. Tom called the hard drive “C,” and the floppy he called “A.”

Day 2

Then Tom said, “Let there be communication lines.” And Tom separated analog and digital lines. And Tom said, “Let comm links sprout forth after its own kind, fiber optics connected to fiber optics, copper to copper, and wireless to wireless.” And Tom saw that it was good.

Day 3

Then Tom said, “Let there be an operating system to integrate all the functions of the computer. And let it be for allocation and initialization, diagnostics, and retrieval. And let it rule over the motherboard.” So Tom installed the operating system and named the operating system “Windows™.” And Tom saw that it was good.

Day 4

Then Tom said, “Let there be a SETUP program to set the defaults of the system.” So Tom installed the control panel onto the hard drive and made it accessible from the desktop.

Day 5

Then Tom said, “Let there be icons and shortcuts, file structures, and programs.” And he blessed them and said, “Be productive and multiply and fill the hard drive and the memory.” Then Tom said, “Let us install a User Interface through which the system can be managed exactly as he would do it.” So Tom installed Program Manager and set it up to rule the software. And Tom saw that it was good.

Day 6

So on the seventh day Tom finished setting up his computer. And he turned it on and it worked perfectly. So Tom sat down and enjoyed it on the seventh day.79

This rendition illustrates a number of points that have already been made as well as others that will be made in the next several sections of this commentary.80

Compartmentalization can also be seen in the example of a theatrical production. If someone came into a play late and asked the woman in the seat next to him how the play began, he would not expect her to reply with information concerning the construction of the set, the playwright’s experiences, or the casting of the players. This would not be an incorrect answer. It would simply be addressing something other than what was being asked. We must be careful not to make that same mistake with the Bible. If we superimpose this illustration on the cosmos, taking it as the play, science might be seen as addressing the questions about the set, the cast, and the script. Scripture is more interested in the play itself, even though God, the Producer/Director, is the link between the two and was involved on both ends.

It is not therefore appropriate to construe science as the enemy of the faith or of the text. Interestingly, even as many evangelicals have adopted this sort of antagonism toward science, they have delivered the agenda of the text over to scientific inquiry.81 It is not science that is the enemy, it is naturalism. The scientific endeavor by its very nature operates by means of what I would call an “atheistic premise”—that is, it tries to figure out the natural world without resorting to supernatural explanations.82 If we were to assume that something happened without God’s intervention, how would it have happened?

We operate this way in our lives all the time. When we cannot find a magazine, we assume that someone moved it, not that God somehow spirited it away. We rarely factor God directly into our cause-and-effect inferences as we go through the day. Scientists operate the same way, and if they did not do it, we would not call it science. This atheistic premise does not presume that scientists do not believe in God, it only explains how they go about their job.83 The proponent of a naturalist worldview, however, presumes there is no God involved in these processes and that science is all there is. The scientist qua scientist might hypothesize that if life as we know it were to arise from nonlife without God taking a form-imposing role, the scientific concept of evolution offers the best model. The proponent of naturalism says that God was not involved in creation, so evolutionary naturalism should be accepted and taught as truth.

Scientific Creationism took on a significant role in society because even as it declared science as the enemy, it used its own brand of theistic science to make sense of the Bible.84 It claims to take the Bible literally, yet attributes scientific sophistication to terms that could not possibly have had those meanings to the original audience or author.85 The alternative to Scientific Creationism is not to formulate Day-Age theories or to revert to understanding Genesis 1 as broadly figurative poetry, for these both still try to “make sense” of the Bible in reference to our scientific categories. We need to “make sense” of the Bible on its own terms.

It must be understood that the explanations given in the Original Meaning section are not offered as simply a literary reading of the text of Genesis 1. While there is no doubt that the account is characterized by literary artistry, I am not suggesting that the affirmations of the passage are merely to be taken with a literary grain of salt. I am suggesting that the face value of the account—that which is mutually understood by the author and his audience—is focused on God’s setting up a cosmos with carefully established functions.

At the same time, the case of Christianity against naturalism can be capably argued by proponents of intelligent design, such as Phillip Johnson,86 Hugh Ross,87 and Michael Behe.88 They need not engage the interpretation of the text of Genesis but can simply target the logic of the argumentation supporting naturalism. Noll laments that evangelicals who are interpreting the text are often defending the wrong thing.

Millions of evangelicals think they are defending the Bible by defending creation science, but in reality they are giving ultimate authority to the merely temporal, situated, and contextualized interpretations of the Bible that arose from the mania for science of the early nineteenth century.89

We need to defend the teaching of the text, not a scientific reconstruction of the text or statements that are read between the lines of the text. Our best theological, hermeneutical, and scientific minds need to work to forge a new consensus for the relationship between science and Scripture, as was done in the wake of the Copernican revolution, rather than sacrificing more Galileo-type martyrs on the altar of stone-rigid, quasi-scientific presuppositions dressed up as if they were the Word of God.

Theological problem: We have let culture/science set the parameters of how we view God working in the world.

Actively sustaining the cosmos. Is our view of God too integrated into a scientific worldview, or does he transcend it? In our society, even Christians struggle with how to view God as outside of and distinct from the natural processes or natural “laws” that define our “real” worldview. We find little room for the supernatural, and though we may affirm the existence of miracles, there is little that we identify as miraculous. Does God still hold the forces of chaos at bay as he sustains the functions of the cosmos, or have we drawn a scientific circle around God? D. A. Carson describes the philosophical options as involving an open universe, a closed universe, or a controlled universe:

An open universe is espoused by animism. The spirits control most things, and the appropriate thing for human beings to do is to appease the spirits so that they may do the things we want. Science is not possible because nothing is regular: the whims of the spirits are unpredictable, and even the sacrifices do not always work. In a closed universe, everything is explained by cause and effect at a purely material level. Science is possible; God is excluded. A modification of this model is espoused by deism. God set the whole thing up and established the principles of operation, but since then he has been rather removed from the scene, while he lets nature take its course. Science is possible, but there is little need to appeal to God, except for the initial act of creation.

The controlled universe reflected in the Bible, however, has God as both its creator and its sustainer/ruler. He creates in an ordered way, and sustains and rules it in an ordered way, so that science is possible; but he is not bound by what he has created, so he is at perfect liberty to do things another way, with the result that miracles are possible.90

In his book The Human Quest, Richard Bube discusses the sense in which God sustains the universe. We more easily think of God having set up natural laws to sustain the universe, but Bube’s view is more comparable to Carson’s third option. Here is his thesis:

The universe exists moment by moment only because of the creative and preserving power of God.

The emphasis of the . . . thesis is that everything that happens in the world is possible only because God is active at all times in maintaining and guiding the world. In a sense, then, this is a radically different perspective from the traditional one that pictures God as having created the world and its laws at some point in the past, after which they later became essentially self-sustaining except for God’s occasional intervention to cause something special.91

The theological term for this is providence, and it refers to the way God acts through all so-called natural processes, whether in creation, nature, or history. The scriptural premise can be seen in places such as Acts 17:28, “For in him we live and move and have our being.” Bube finds that even though people are not necessarily reluctant to accept this view, they often fail to grasp its implications. So, for instance, he asks focus groups, “What would happen to the world and us if God should suddenly ‘turn himself off?’ ” While some reply that “nothing would happen” or that there might be gradual deterioration, others opine that values like morality or love would disappear. Bube contends, however, that such responses assume that the world is far too independent of God or that he is too far removed from its operation. He suggests that the results would be far more dramatic.

We propose here that a full understanding of the nature of the interaction between God and the world permits only one answer. If God were to “turn himself off,” everything would cease to exist! Without God there are no laws, no world, no us; to attempt to distinguish between physical and spiritual in this case is impossible. Not only do we rely on God as the Creator at the beginning, as the Source of order and purpose in the world, as the personal Father who gives meaning to love and depth to personal relationships; we rely on God constantly for our very existence.92

I contend that the view proposed by Bube corresponds very closely to the ancient worldview, to the Bible’s teaching about God (esp. in Gen. 1), and to the implications of a well-informed theology today; yet we do not live or think this way. Instead, we have juxtaposed God and science so that God is used simply to fill in the gaps that science has left unexplained. This contributes to a constantly shrinking view of God.93 In contrast, Bube illustrates the totality of our dependence on God using the analogy of a television screen.

Personalities appear on the screen and interact with one another according to the laws of the world and of life. They love, they fight; if they step off buildings, they fall (barring children’s cartoons!); if they are cut, they bleed. But what happens if the plug of the set is pulled out? Do the laws of nature in the events on the television screen begin to fail? Do the characters begin to be less loving and considerate? No, when the power is removed—when the plug is pulled—the very source of existence is gone: the personalities on the screen in their life and story context simply cease to exist.94

Another way of pondering this is to think of the cosmos as a symphony orchestra performing a concert. In such an analogy, we would likely be inclined to think of God as the conductor. Bube’s thesis, I imagine, would posit God as the music. How radically would the adoption of such a view affect our perspective and our conversation?

All such phrases as “God intervenes in the natural order,” “God uses natural processes,” and “God works through natural law” are ruled out. The natural order exists only because God is constantly active in upholding it. God does not use natural processes as if they existed without him. God does not take advantage of natural laws to accomplish his will as if the laws existed without him. We see immediately why the question “Can God intervene in a world ruled by orderly laws?” is meaningless. There is no world ruled by orderly laws except that one constantly maintained in existence by the activity of God.95

Making something is a one-time act. But “creation” as the Bible understands it is a perpetual activity. As Van Till puts it, “if God were not at this very moment acting in the capacity of Creator, we would not at this very moment even exist.”96 Controlling the operation of something is an ongoing process. Our modern inclination to overemphasize the theology of Genesis in terms of God making things has allowed us to feel satisfied that our interpretation of Genesis is theologically sound. Turning Genesis 1 into a scientifically configured account of God making things is like taking your towel into the pool with you so you will have it handy when you want to use it. Its ability to be used as it was intended has been precluded by the very act that sought to give it practicality. Our scientific view of the cosmos has caused us to reduce the “Creator” role to the mere task of forming things. In contrast, Van Till presses the point that a biblical theology of God as Creator identifies him as Originator, Preserver, Governor, and Provider of the Creation.97 Our modern theology is more inclined to have him make something and be done with it.

The fact that we have, in this process, sent God to the corner of the cosmos so he will not get underfoot is particularly tragic. Chaos still threatens at all sides. It is not just the chaotic forces of nature (tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, volcanoes, tidal waves, and the like) that appear to rage out of control. International terrorism, nuclear arms available to irresponsible parties, ethnic cleansing, and political upheaval are all part of the chaos of our world. Social chaos reveals itself in unfettered abortion, school shootings, hate crimes, and the decline of morality. More than ever we need a theology that recognizes God’s role in holding in check the chaos of our world as he sustains the cosmos moment by moment.

What would change in our outlook on life if we took this issue seriously? Consider how it would affect our response to Stephen Jay Gould’s comment, “Science and religion should be equal, mutually respecting partners, each the master of its own domain, and with each domain vital to human life in a different way.”98

We have said that text and science are different things. That does not mean that God and nature are different things. If we see the world in terms of science and nature on one side and God on another, we are going to end up with a worldview problem. God will be a God of the gaps,99 filling in only where science cannot. We will end up as practical deists. We have said that science, by current definition, operates on an atheistic premise. That does not mean that nature operates apart from God.100

An excellent illustration of this can be found in the book of Esther, where circumstance takes center stage and God is not mentioned. The fact that circumstance is in focus, however, does not mean that circumstance is all there is. In contrast, if we truly understand Esther, it is not saying that there is no God at work, but neither is it saying that there is no circumstance. Instead, it insists that God works through the circumstance. The only proper view of circumstance is one that sees it riddled with God, or better, that there is no such thing as circumstance apart from God. The only way to understand how God works is to see circumstance as one of his agents. They are not mutually exclusive, and circumstance cannot be seen as independent of God or divorced from him for even a second. There is no such thing as circumstance apart from God.

Nature is much the same. In Esther, Haman had the problem that he saw only the circumstances, but he had no knowledge of the God behind them. His wife intimated that he was missing that important dimension (Est. 6:13); indeed, it was a fatal error. Those who hold a naturalistic worldview make the same mistake in that they only acknowledge the nature side of the equation. The book of Esther serves as an encouragement to those who cannot understand where their covenant God has gone. Where are the great deliverances of the past? Are the plagues, the parting of the sea, the manna, and the angel of the Lord striking down the enemy only things of the past? Where does God fit into the picture?

These are our questions today as we grapple with God’s role in our world. Is God’s hand seen only when there is something that can be called a miracle? Does God only act by intervention? The testimony of Genesis suggests otherwise. There is no nature apart from God. This is poignantly expressed in “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

Earth’s crammed with heaven

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Science, when it accurately portrays nature, is describing the work of God. Whatever natural processes were involved in the origins of matter, God carried them out, and he did so with purpose. Sometimes, undoubtedly, nature was his agent. But he is not limited to the use of a single agent, and whatever he did through other agencies, science has no way of detecting. Because of this, science cannot offer us a complete picture; it can only offer explanations of the possible ways in which nature may have served as an agent of the work of God. Science asks different questions from what the text does, but it does not operate in a realm apart from God.

Our response to Gould, then, is that science and religion are not two separate coins to be kept in separate accounts in separate banks. They are rather two sides of the same coin, distinct though inseparable. In the opening scene of Thomas Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the two protagonists find a coin and are mystified that it keeps coming up heads. As many times as they flip it, it is always heads. When I first saw the play, I surmised that the coin actually had identical pictures on both sides, that there was nothing but heads. In fact, however, it did not; this was rather the first indication that they were in a world that was devoid of logic and reason—a world described philosophically as “absurd.” The same can be said of the naturalists, whose flip of the science/religion coin always comes up “science.” They deduce that the coin has science on both sides. In reality the repeated result of “science” as they flip the coin to find answers about existence only shows the nature of the world they have chosen.

As Christians our theology would be much improved if we could make a slight change in our terminology. Instead of proclaiming that “the cosmos was created by God” (using past tense as if the job is done), we should rather proclaim, “The cosmos is God’s creation.”101 We may thus lay claim to the dynamic role of God in a perpetual act of creation. Additionally, we may see Genesis 1 not as “the story of creation” but as the beginning of the “Story of the Creator.”102

God and time.

Master of time. What is the significance of God as the creator of time? Time was part of a cosmos that was judged as good; yet, because death is in the system, we often consider time an enemy. Even a casual glance at the birthday-card section at the local supermarket shows the recognition of the negative aspects connected with the relentless march of time. We mark the passing of personal time with mixtures of celebration and remorse. Celebration comes when we reach age sixteen and can drive, or when we reach twenty-one and can be considered full-fledged adults. Comedians joke about being perpetually thirty-nine, and during the 1960s the young generation was advised not to trust anyone over thirty. By the time we reach forty or fifty, the black balloons begin showing up. On a social level, each new year is observed as time ticks on, and the changeover of a millennium takes on epic proportions. Time passes whether we want it to or not, forming the parameters of our existence and taking its toll.

On the other side of the ledger, each of us has probably had the sensation of being awakened from a deep sleep and experiencing in our grogginess the total disorientation that comes from not being able to identify the day or time. We find it difficult to carry on existence in the absence of time indicators. Prisoners in POW camps mark the days of their captivity in any way available to them so as not to lose some sense of orientation in time. If the conditions of imprisonment do not afford the ability to observe whether it is day or night, the delivery of meals can become a marker. We need to feel oriented in time.

For good or ill, then, time is our reality. Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 explores this reality as it enumerates the “times” of life. In the world that God has created “under the sun,” we must learn to accept the good times and the bad times as coming from the hand of God, for even the bad times can enrich us as God’s people (Eccl. 7:14). And although he has locked us in time for now, he has set eternity in our hearts (3:11).

Openness of God. We experience God in time. Many of God’s attributes have their reference point in time. For example, faithfulness and patience can only operate within time. As a result, God interacts with us in time. This is an obvious conclusion from the definition of time as a dimension in which cause and effect takes place.103 Christian theologians throughout history have generally seen God’s interactions with us in time as another example of his condescending to our humanity. More recently, however, some have postulated a theology referred to as the “Openness of God,” which considers God to be fully integrated in time and, to some extent, limited by it.

Instead of perceiving the entire course of human existence in one timeless moment, God comes to know events as they take place. He learns something from what transpires. We call this position the “open view of God” because it regards God as receptive to new experiences and as flexible in the way he works toward his objectives in the world. Since it sees God as dependent on the world in certain respects, the open view of God differs from much conventional theology.104

This theology is supported by deriving logical conclusions from commonplace observations about God and his interaction with the world.

An action makes a difference. It brings about something that would not otherwise exist. In the case of specific acts, it brings about something that did not previously exist. To say that God acts, therefore, means that it makes sense to use the words before and after when we talk about him. God makes decisions, and then he acts. He decides before he acts, he acts after he decides. This is so simple that it sounds trivial, but it points to a fundamental truth about God. Not only does he bring about change, but in a significant sense God himself experiences change. After God acts, the universe is different and God’s experience of the universe is different. The concept of divine action thus involves divine temporality. Time is real for God.105

Proponents claim that only this perspective allows God to react to human choices as the Bible suggests he does. There remain some serious drawbacks to this position, however, that make it unacceptable. Not only is it difficult to maintain a robust view of God’s foreknowledge, but there are also philosophical issues that mitigate against placing God so firmly in time. In refuting this view, D. A. Carson, for instance, contends that since our notions of time are dependent on the motions of bodies in the universe and since God created the universe, God must stand outside of both time and the universe on which it depends and be independent of them.106

Carson’s assertions reflect current scientific thought with regard to time. In the late 1960s, three astrophysicists, Stephen Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose, working from the implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity, deduced that “space and time must have originated in the same cosmic bang that brought matter and energy into existence.”107 If time had a beginning, God cannot be within it, for he existed before it. This does not imply that God dwelt in a timeless eternity before his creation of our cosmos (as Augustine maintained), because God’s activity even before our cosmos existed implies sequence and cause and effect. Hugh Ross therefore posits a multidimensional time in which God exists as opposed to the singular dimension of time to which we are limited.

If time were two dimensional, for example, both a time length and a time width would be possible. Time would expand from a line into a plane. In a plane of time, an infinite number of lines running in an infinite number of directions would be possible.108

Ross’s suggestion offers just one way of understanding how God may transcend our time concepts, but even this expanded version may be overly restrictive. We must at times admit that we simply do not have enough categories or a broad enough understanding of the possibilities to figure out how to define God’s existence.

What does Genesis 1 have to contribute to this discussion? It does not assert God’s creation of time as an abstraction any more than it deals with physicists’ light. It does not consider time a dimension and is not concerned with the conditions of God’s independent existence. God’s creation of time in Genesis 1:3–5 affirms only that time is set up to function in the cosmos based on the alternating periods of light and dark that characterize our existence. It is the creation of time for us and offers no statement beyond that.

Breakout Points

THE TEXT OFTEN touches on, rather than teaches on, certain issues. These arise in our minds as we read the text, but we discover that the text offers no information about them. In that sense, they constitute digressions from the text. They should not be the focus of an expository sermon or Bible-study lesson in that they do not represent the focus of the text; nevertheless, they can offer opportunities for fruitful discussion concerning our theology or worldview. I will address these as “breakout points” so as to distinguish them from the Contemporary Significance sections that seek to address issues that the text consciously addresses. These can be nothing more than my reflections, for the text of Genesis has nothing normative to say about them.

For example, in this passage our thoughts could easily wander to the question of our stewardship of time. If time is one of the functions that God has set up in this world of ours, perhaps we should consider carefully the best ways to use our time. In the foreword of Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, he compares the apocalyptic visions of George Orwell (1984) to those of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). One of the comparisons speaks to the issue at hand: “In 1984 . . . people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”109

Our time is filled with those things we love. In the process we can easily lose sight of important things such as service, accountability, and duty, which commend themselves as more responsible discharges of the valuable commodity of time. In his assessment of the role of television in American society, Postman notes that it has “made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.”110 This has inculcated in us an unquenchable lust to be entertained, and we are happy to contribute large proportions of our time to the quest. Postman’s conclusion holds little optimism as it looks ahead to the fate we have chosen for ourselves.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.111

Original Meaning

God and the Forces of Chaos (1:2)

FORMLESS AND EMPTY.20 If the text were going to talk about the manufacture of matter, it would begin when no matter existed. But since, as we have seen, it intends to talk about bringing the cosmos into existence by organizing and assigning roles and functions—that is, by bringing order to chaos—it will start with the cosmos in a chaotic state. That is just what it does. James Barr puts it this way: “Genesis is interested in an organized world, as against a chaotic world, and not in the metaphysical question of something against nothing.”21

In the ancient Near East the existence of chaos was a central concern. Within the cosmos, the raging sea and darkness are the forces of chaos.22 Within human existence, the most common representatives are death and warfare. In the mythology of the ancient Near East, the gods demonstrate their power by defeating or holding at bay the forces of chaos. Sometimes this motif accompanies creation narratives, as in the Babylonian Enuma Elish. Other times it simply displays the emerging status of the deity being featured, as in the Myth of Anzu or the Ugaritic Baal Epic. The book of Psalms often portrays Yahweh as defeating or neutralizing the forces of chaos (e.g., Ps. 74:13–17; 89:9–10; 104:7–9). Genesis does not portray any battle, nor does it indicate chaotic forces being held back, but there is a clear establishment of order from disorder. That disorder is described in verse 2, starting with the Hebrew terms tohu and bohu (NIV, “formless and empty”).

Obviously this expression, commonly and appropriately considered a hendiadys,23 does not concern matter. No one suggests that this verse indicates that matter had not been shaped or that the cosmos described in verse 2 is empty of matter. By logic alone the words can be seen to concern functionality, and analysis of the Hebrew confirms the conclusion that these terms indicate that the cosmos was empty of purpose, meaning, and function—a place that had no order or intelligibility. D. Tsumura concludes that “the term tohu seems to refer to a situation which lacks something abstract that should be there, such as worth, purpose, truth, profit & integrity.”24 It is the condition that baraʾ, by its nature, remedies.25

In Egyptian views of origins is the concept of the “nonexistent” that may be close to what is expressed here in Genesis.26 It is viewed as that which has not yet been differentiated and assigned function. No boundaries or definitions have been established. The Egyptian concept, however, also carries with it the idea of potentiality and a quality of being absolute. These concepts are likewise supported in biblical usage where tohu generally refers to a desertlike wasteland or to “emptiness.”27

Darkness over the deep. The text continues its description of this chaotic state in the next phrase, “darkness was over the surface of the deep.” While both darkness and the watery deep (t^ehom) are elements of chaos, neither is personified here. In contrast, the latter is personified in Enuma Elish in the Babylonian goddess associated with the primordial deep, Tiamat, the rival of Marduk. This lack of personification in Genesis removes from the element of chaos any sense of evil. C. Hyers helpfully draws out this distinction in light of some of the views that theologians have expressed:

The three “chaotic” elements of verse 2 (formless earth, darkness, and watery deep) are not negative realities, but ambiguous ones. They should not be seen as sinister, nihilating, demonic powers and therefore, in Gerhard von Rad’s phrase, as “simply the threat to everything he created.” Nor should they be seen, in Brevard Childs’ words, as “a chaotic condition existing independently of God’s creative activity,” an activity “over against the chaos.” There is certainly no exegetical justification for Karl Barth’s proposal that this should be understood as das Nichtige, a nothingness which “has as such its own being, albeit malignant and perverse . . . which God does not will . . . [but which] lives only by the fact that it is that which God does not will. . . . It is a mere travesty of the universe . . . which opposes God and tempts and threatens His creature.” The sheer tranquillity of the account belies this approach.28

There is nothing sinister or menacing about this chaos in Genesis; it is simply the indication that God has not yet done his work.

Spirit of God: translation. Interpreters of the last century debated whether verse 2 speaks of a supernatural “wind” or the “Spirit” of God29 since Hebrew uses the same word (ruaḥ) for the meteorological phenomenon (wind) and for the metaphysical entity (spirit). But the issue is more complex than that. The reason Hebrew uses the same word is because the two are so closely related in Israelite minds. Other examples of this can be found, for instance, in the use of nešer to refer either to a vulture or an eagle. In English we can point out that the more generic “panther” refers to a wide range of feline carnivores (black leopard, puma, cougar, or jaguar). Technically, it is not, then, that Hebrew uses the same word for both a spirit and a wind. It is rather that ruaḥ is sufficiently broad to cover the whole category from spirit to wind. It is not always easy to determine which of these the author intended; in fact, the author intended ruaḥ.

Westermann, representing those who translate “wind,” has pointed out that the three phrases of verse 2 should all be considered descriptions of the chaotic state.30 This he supports by the close parallelism of the second and third clauses.31 Some object to this on the grammatical level in that it would require ʾ ^elohim to be translated as a superlative adjective (e.g., “mighty” to go along with “wind”) rather than as a noun (“God” to go along with “spirit”). It is rare that ʾ ^elohim is used as an adjective, though not unattested (cf. Gen. 23:6, where NIV translates ʾ ^elohim as “mighty”). Furthermore, as an adjective this word would not necessarily lose its association with the supernatural. Even in English we can speak of something as being of “supernatural” proportion or of “divine” cake or “infernal” paperwork. These adjectives achieve their point by retaining their allusions to the spiritual realm. The more significant problem occurs on the semantic level: All of the other uses of the phrase ruaḥʾ ^elohim in the Old Testament are translated “Spirit of God,” never “supernatural wind.”32

One of the most difficult exegetical situations occurs when context and semantics appear to be pulling the interpreter in different directions—as here, where the context appears to favor reference to chaos, but the usage of the phrase appears to favor God’s working against the chaos. In such situations cultural data can sometimes be brought in to reconcile or harmonize apparently incompatible elements.

The motif of the wind in chaos scenes is well-recognized both in the ancient Near East and in the Bible. In the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, the sky god, Anu, creates the four winds that stir up the deep and its goddess, Tiamat.33 There it is a disruptive wind bringing unrest. The same phenomena can be seen in Daniel’s vision of the four beasts, where “the four winds of heaven [were] churning up the great sea” (7:2), a situation that disturbs the beasts there. The motif of the wind used as an instrument of God to master the waters can be found in the Exodus narrative (14:21; 15:8).34 In these cases the wind is closely connected with deity and can be seen as something that is disturbing the pattern by creating chaos in the realm of chaos.

God can use forces of chaos against one another. As an example, the Flood brought the waters of chaos as a solution to the chaos of human violence that had overrun the land. Then the waters of chaos were again brought under control. In this way the ruaḥʾ ^elohim can retain a provocative ambivalence in meaning. It can be both a wind of supernatural proportion and character that contributes to the chaotic landscape and, at the same time, a representative of the power of God that embodies the potential about to be realized. This shares some similarity with the Egyptian concept of “nonexistence” (not yet differentiated or assigned function) mentioned above that carries with it the idea of potentiality and a quality of being absolute.35 Here the ruaḥ may be seen as disrupting the power of chaos by bringing chaos into the realm of chaos. No citizen of the ancient Near East would miss the reference to the chaos motif, and no Israelite would fail to understand the potential for action inherent in the divine spirit.

The provocative aspect could be illustrated by comparing a report of a coup in progress in a Third World country. A journalist may observe, “There was broken glass littering the streets and numerous fires raging out of control. Gunshots could be heard constantly, and armed soldiers could be seen scurrying about everywhere one looked.” The description of chaos is clear, and the soldiers contribute to the chaotic scene. What is not clear from the report, however, is whether the soldiers are involved in the coup or trying to restore order.

Before we can draw a conclusion about this ruaḥ, then, we must explore the Israelite theology concerning the Spirit of God.

Spirit of God: theology. We have already discussed the nature and function of the wind, but what of the Spirit of God? Christian interpreters from the earliest ante-Nicene fathers to modern conservative theologians have unabashedly identified ruaḥ here as the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. This would be a natural theological understanding of the ruaḥ of God and finds support in the doctrinal affirmation of the Holy Spirit’s role in creation.36 It is of interest, however, that of the five most recent major evangelical commentaries (Hamilton, Mathews, Ross, Sailhamer, and Wenham), only Hamilton makes any reference to the question of the Trinity, and that only to say, “To translate ‘Spirit’ runs the risk of superimposing trinitarian concepts on Gen. 1 that are not necessarily present.”37

This reticence of the commentators is not duplicated in the theologians. Even in his highly respected and judiciously balanced systematic tour de force, Millard Erickson does not qualify his conclusion that “in short, the Old Testament ‘Spirit of God’ is synonymous with the Holy Spirit.”38 The problem arises when we begin to consider the hermeneutics involved. What did the phrase spirit [ruaḥ] of God convey to the Israelite audience? We must raise this question because there is communication taking place here from God, through the author, to his audience. While much correlation can be drawn between the spirit of God in the Old Testament and the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, there are also points of discontinuity that must be recognized.

Throughout the Old Testament, the burden of the text is to convince the Israelites that there was only one God. Mercifully, since they were having enough trouble in their cultural environment, God did not confuse them with Trinitarian elaboration. As a result, it is generally contended that the Israelites did not know about the Trinity. If that is admitted, then the authoritative communication behind the text’s use of the ruaḥ of God refers to something else. It is our exegetical duty to determine what the phrase did refer to in the Israelite understanding rather than imposing our theology directly onto the text.

A thorough study of the use of the phrases spirit of God and spirit of the Lord in the Old Testament results in a fairly clear profile of the revelation given to the Israelites and their resulting understanding. They understood the spirit of the Lord not as a separate entity, but as an extension of Yahweh’s power and authority. In this sense it was understood as something like the “hand of the LORD” (2 Kings 3:15; Ezek. 1:3; 3:14, 22; etc; cf. 1 Kings 18:46, KJV). The spirit of the Lord empowers but does not indwell, gives authority but does not regenerate.

It is not unlikely that the Holy Spirit was behind at least some of the activity attributed to the ruaḥ of God in the Old Testament.39 But if that ruaḥ was an “it” and not a “he” and was not used as a phrase to communicate anything Trinitarian to the initial audience, then its use alone cannot give guaranteed evidence of the involvement of the Holy Spirit. More specifically, if “the Spirit of God” in Genesis 1:2 cannot be identified as the Holy Spirit by the use of the phrase, and if there is no affirmation of a role of creation for the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, then the popular belief that the Holy Spirit’s role in creation is supported in Genesis 1:2 must be recognized as informed only by theological speculation. Exegetical analysis in light of biblical theology and progressive revelation suggests that the ruaḥ here represents an extension of God’s power, like his hand or his breath.40

Hovering. Before reaching our conclusions regarding the final phrase of verse 2, the verb that describes the spirit-wind’s activity requires some attention. The NIV translation “hovering” is fairly common, not because it enjoys abundant supporting evidence, but because there is insufficient evidence to suggest other plausible alternatives.41 This shortage of biblical references poses a problem because proper nuancing of a word’s meaning can only be achieved by having sufficient number of contexts in which to observe the details of its use. As a result, interpreters have frequently gone outside of Hebrew to related (cognate) languages for lexical help. This is a risky procedure, because no matter how closely the languages may be related, the same word may have developed in two very different ways in the respective languages.

When we investigate the cognates of the Hebrew root used here, we discover that Syriac uses the same root for brooding protectively over a nest or incubating the eggs.42 Ugaritic uses the same root to speak of vultures circling overhead, apparently waiting to devour the scraps of a feast.43 Ugaritic is the more helpful here. So is there a translation that can account for both Hebrew and Ugaritic usage and accommodate both biblical contexts? A bird may circle overhead (fits both Hebrew and Ugaritic contexts) and a wind may swirl about, but what verb would be appropriate to the ruaḥ of God? A verb that captures all of these elements and still preserves an appropriate level of vagueness to acknowledge our uncertainty about the word is “circulate.”

Our conclusions, therefore, about verse 2 can be conveniently summarized in the following paraphrase: “The earth was nonfunctional; primordial, watery darkness prevailed, and a supernatural wind that was permeated with the power of God circulated over the surface of the waters.”

Bridging Contexts

HOW SHOULD WE approach the text?48 As discussed in the introduction, if we are to interpret the text correctly, we must understand what the author would have communicated to his audience when he used the words he chose. Communication assumes a purpose as well as a common ground of familiarity as the arena in which it takes place. Thus the parameters of language and culture provide an essential setting for understanding the nature of the communication. If we read levels of meaning into the text on our own that neither the audience nor the author would have understood or been concerned with, we set ourselves up as the channel for the text’s authority. Since God’s process of inspiration utilized the author, I believe the author’s intention is our most important authority link. We must be willing to accept that it may not have been his concern to defend the ideas that our culture asks us to defend. For instance, the top question on our minds cannot be, “Can I use Genesis 1 to defend the New Testament teaching of creation out of nothing?” Instead it must be, “What points was the author trying to communicate?” I will refer to this as taking the text at face value.49

Interpreters of the twentieth century have been obsessed with trying to solve “the problem” of Genesis 1—the problem being identified as how to retain the integrity of the text in light of what is known or declared by the world of science. While some attempt (1) to construct an alternate science, others address the problem by contending (2) that the text is theological, not scientific, or (3) that it is poetic/figurative, not literal.

But if we take the text at face value, none of these approaches works. Regarding (1), the science that is reconstructed represents today’s sophisticated scientific principles and concepts. It has nothing to do with the face value that Israel would have understood, because it is simply reading our science between the lines. We will return to this in more detail below. Regarding (2), most interpreters acknowledge that Israel saw no distinction between theological and scientific. These were integrated into a worldview that saw most of what we call scientific as fully contained within the theological realm. Regarding (3), we must likewise admit that to Israel the ideas expressed in Genesis 1 are not just poetic expressions standing in for more sophisticated realities. The fact that they display poetic qualities does not demonstrate that they are figurative. In contrast to all of these, I intend to argue that if we want to understand the face value of Genesis 1, we must clarify the distinction between a functional and structural approach.

We live in a world far different from the world of the Old Testament. We must recognize the elements that distinguish these two worlds and make appropriate adjustments to our expectations. In our world, we believe reality is described most accurately in scientific terms. Mythology in the ancient world played the role that science plays in our modern world—it contained the explanation of how the world came into being and how it worked.

The mythological approach attempted to identify functions of the natural world as a consequence of purpose. The gods had purposes, and their activities were the causes of what humans experienced as effects. By contrast, our modern scientific approach identifies the functions of the natural world as a consequence of structure and attempts to understand cause and effect based on natural laws that are linked to the structure, the composite parts, of a phenomenon.

Much of the change in our world we attribute to personal agents. But change is also attributed to natural causes, many of which are labeled natural laws. A thunderstorm is explained in terms of atmospheric pressure, convection and moisture. A dead battery is explained in terms of the law of entropy. The ancient Israelites, in contrast, perceived only personal causality. All change in the world was attributed to personal agents—to either humans (and animals by personification) or the gods. Natural events, for example, were manifestations of divine activity. Nature was not a causal agent, but rather the effect of divine agency.50

Because our scientific worldview is keenly interested in material structure and natural causality, we often go to the biblical account looking for information on its physical makeup and laws. In this area, however, the biblical worldview is much more like its ancient Near Eastern counterparts in that it views function as a consequence of the purpose of divine agency.

We must, of course, be careful how we use the comparative material from the ancient Near East. Many parallels can be identified between ancient Near Eastern mythology and Old Testament passages and concepts, and these will be discussed as we proceed through the commentary. This is not to suggest, however, that the Old Testament is to be considered simply as another example of ancient mythology or as dependent on that literature. As discussed in the introduction, mythology is a window to ancient culture just as science is a window to modern culture. Perhaps “mirror” would be better than “window” in the sense that both mythology and science reflect the worldview and values of the cultures that forged them.

For ancient Israelite culture, many of the writings we find in the Old Testament performed the same function as mythology did in other cultures—they gave them a literary mechanism for preserving and transmitting their worldview and values. Israel was part of a larger cultural complex that existed across the ancient Near East. There are many aspects of that cultural complex that she shared with her neighbors, though each individual culture had its distinguishing features. When we seek to understand the culture and literature of Israel, we rightly expect to find help in the larger cultural arena, whether from the mythology, wisdom writings, legal documents, or royal inscriptions.

The conclusion, then, is that we can often identify the questions the text addresses by familiarizing ourselves with ancient literature rather than by letting our culture dictate what questions the text addresses or how it answers questions. Once we stop pressuring the text to address our issues, we may find that it is easier to identify the text’s issues. As an example, we cannot feel free to try to transform “in the beginning” into either a scientific statement or a theological treatise. It is not a covert reference to the Big Bang any more than it is proof of creatio ex nihilo. If interpreters are free to transform text, text is stripped of its ability to transform lives. Consequently, we are motivated to explore the face value of the text.

Function, not structure, as the face value. The face value of Genesis 1:3–5 does not offer a description of the piece of our material cosmos that physicists know as light with all of its physical properties and functional operation. What carries much more importance for the biblical author and in the ancient world in general is the affirmation that God created time. I have referred to this as a contrast between function (or purpose) and structure. As the comments in the Original Meaning section show, this focus is evident through the early verses of Genesis 1 as the author moves us from a chaotic (nonfunctional) condition through the setting up of the functions that will establish an ordered, operational cosmos.

If it is true that the author of Genesis is communicating to his audience about God’s creation of the functional cosmos, we might expect to get little information concerning the structural cosmos (i.e., matter per se). It is fruitless to ask what things God created on day one, for the text is not concerned about things and therefore will not address itself to that question. In other words, the text of Genesis is not discussing what H. Van Till has called the “formational history” of the cosmos.51 This demonstrates the radical contrast between the terms in which the Israelites thought about cosmic origins and the terms in which we think about them. When we ask the question “How does the cosmos work?” we seek an answer that discusses physical laws and structures, matter, and its properties. In our worldview, function is a consequence of structure, and a discussion of creation therefore must, of course, direct itself to the making of things. In contrast, when an Israelite asked “How does the cosmos work?” he or she was on a different wavelength, because in the ancient worldview, function is a consequence of purpose.

This functional perspective is not only reflected in the text and context of Genesis but can be seen as the basic perspective of the ancient world in general. The wealth of Egyptian tomb paintings affords us ample opportunity to observe how they portrayed the cosmos.52 As the sky goddess, Nut is portrayed arching her body over the disk-shaped earth. She is often supported by the hands of the god of the air while the earth god, Geb, lies prone at her feet. Note that this is not their scientific representation of structure. The Egyptians did not believe that one could go step on Nut’s toes or throw a rock and hit her knees. Rather, the portrayal communicates important truths concerning what the Egyptians believed about authority and jurisdiction in the cosmos. These are functional truths, not structural truths. They represent what the Egyptians believed about reality. The cosmos functioned by means of the gods playing out their roles. J. P. Allen expresses it as a difference between physics and metaphysics:

Unlike classical Newtonian physics . . . Egyptian explanations are more metaphysical than physical. They are concerned primarily with what lies beyond physical reality. There are other differences as well. The Egyptian documents reflect a subjective rather than objective view of reality: concepts are expressed not in terms of mechanical forces and physical elements but in human terms, as the wills and personalities of sentient beings (the gods). And none of the Egyptian sources is the record of scientific or philosophical speculation for its own sake. All serve some practical end, whether the worship of god or the attempt to secure a successful afterlife for the dead.53

Whatever the physical structure of the heavens was, it was of little concern to the Egyptians. A later Egyptian text54 lists eighteen “creations,” only one or two of which refer to structural components (e.g., sweet water). The remainder are things such as summer/winter, birth, sleep, remedies, dreams, wealth/poverty, and succession of generations.55

The texts of Mesopotamia also offer a clear picture of the tenets of their cosmology. For Mesopotamia, cosmogony (origins of the cosmos) was intertwined with theogony (origins of the gods). When Enuma Elish speaks of one generation of cosmic gods giving birth to the next generation of cosmic gods and thus bringing the cosmos into operation, it is not offering its ideas concerning the material origins or structure of the cosmos. Instead, as the names are given, jurisdiction is established and the cosmos begins to function under the guidance of its divine overseers. It is not just that these peoples had a different concept of structure from ours; rather, they do not view creation as a structure issue. To describe creation is to describe the establishment of the functioning cosmos, not the origins of the material structure of the cosmos. Structure was irrelevant. L. Bronner summarizes this nicely:

The primary purpose of these myths was to explain the world and how it functioned to the men of their generation. This is in fact what ancient mythology has in common with modern theology. It endeavored to explain the meaning of life and the mystery of the universe to mortal man. It aimed to help him face up to the challenges and the perplexities of life. These polytheistic texts explained the secrets of the universe by claiming that there were opposing forces continuously at war with one another in the world. As Wright put it: “The primary purpose of the stories about the gods was to explain the world and how it works.”56

Generally in the ancient world, the assignment of functions is connected to the giving of names. Enuma Elish picks up its account when nothing yet had a name. Egyptian literature identified the creator god as the one who pronounced the name of everything.57 In this way of thinking, things did not exist unless they were named:

It was believed that the name of a living being or an object was not just a simple or practical designation to facilitate the exchange of ideas between persons but that it was the very essence of what was defined, and that the actual pronouncing of a name was to create what was spoken.58

Genesis follows the same pattern of thinking as we see the importance of God’s naming those items that he has made functional. Consequently, we can conclude that Israel’s worldview differed from her neighbors in the areas of theology and cosmogony (origins of the cosmos), but not in the area of cosmology. We operate in similar ways when we attempt to adopt the theology of the Bible to the Big Bang theory. Scientifically, we conform to a consensus view, but add our own theological twists to conform to the Bible as well.

Does Genesis 1 tell us anything about structure? If the focus of Genesis 1 is functional, is there anything that can be inferred from the text about structural origins, material creation, or formational history? There are only two possibilities regarding the incidental structural details in the text. On the one hand would be the idea that they reflect the “old-world science” the Israelites shared with their neighbors. This would have included a flat disk-shaped earth with mountains holding up the several levels of sky, each with solid elements such as floors and ceilings.59 The sun, moon, and stars moved across the sky in determined patterns, and there was water in heaven’s chambers that came down as rain as well as waters surrounding and running under the earth that made up the cosmic seas. There was a second level of earth that constituted the netherworld, the abode of the dead, through which the sun passed during the night.

On the other hand, if Israelites did not believe something like this, it could only be because God had revealed a different reality that transcended this old-world science. If God did not reveal realities such as the earth’s being spherical or the earth’s rotation and revolution around the sun, the Israelites would have had no means to arrive at those conclusions.

For some readers, the first option might seem theologically treacherous and likely to undermine the authority of text, but let us examine the options and their implications carefully. With regard to the second option, the evidence is strikingly clear. There is not a single example of God revealing scientifically transcendent information to the Israelites.60 In fact, the evidence is to the contrary. Consider the following four examples:

1. In Genesis 1:9 the “water” is gathered “to one place” so that “dry ground” appears. The ancient, classical, and medieval worlds all agreed that there was only one major landmass on earth. The Israelites understood this as a description of the world as they knew it, not of a scientific Pangea that preceded the onset of continental drift.

2. When the elders of Israel have their encounter with the God of Israel in Exodus 24, he is portrayed as standing in heaven on a pavement of sapphire (v. 10), exactly like that portrayed in Mesopotamian cosmology.61

3. The movements of the celestial bodies and the understanding of weather all are described in terms similar to that in the rest of the ancient Near East. Windows of heaven are not replaced with low-pressure systems and the movement of the jet stream.

4. When God wants to talk about the human intellect, he does not take time to inform his inspired authors that the true organ of thought was the brain. There is no Hebrew word for brain, and neither the Israelites nor any of the other ancient peoples knew what the brain was for. The Egyptian priests who mummified bodies carefully preserved all of the important internal organs in canopic jars, but they pulled the brain out with a hook through the nostrils and discarded it as so much trash. For the ancients, the representation of the heart as the seat of intellect and emotions62 was not simply figurative speech, as it is for us. They knew of no other reality.

Does God relinquish the authority or credibility of the text when he speaks of the heart as the seat of the intellect? Of course not—he is simply communicating in terms that his audience understands, as any effective communicator does. He is not misleading them about physiology, for he is not discussing physiology and is offering no revelation on that subject. In the creation narratives I contend that he likewise does not discuss material structure and therefore offers no revelation on that subject. One may as well try to reconstruct human anatomy, or our ideas about it, from a Picasso abstract painting.63

One could perhaps claim that the Israelites had only a primitive knowledge of science but that the ambiguity of the language left room for scientific sophistication (as is assumed by those who construct a new science based on the text). This does not help us. The authors were using words that their audiences understood. The view that God inspired the use of words to be construed in certain ways by the audience even though he meant something else does not save his reputation. If the authority of the Bible means anything to us, we must assume a level of integrity to the communication. It had authority for the original Israelites, so it could not mislead.

Science’s structural focus is not the only way to express truth. The very fact that the Bible’s ability to use Israelite modes of thinking poses such a problem for us demonstrates how significantly we have been influenced by certain aspects of our culture. We have been persuaded to believe that truth about origins can only be packaged in scientific terms; that the only cosmological reality is a scientifically informed reality; that if a cosmological text operates outside of the scientific realm, it ceases to be truth. We too easily accept the dictum that the only absolute is science.64 This presupposition causes us to think that the Bible’s authority would be jeopardized if its revelation fails to address origins in terms that reflect our worldview. This modern arrogance that insists that revelation must be packaged in our terms to be true betrays us, because even scientific thinking is in constant flux. Del Ratzsch describes the situation this way:

Science is a complicated, historically shifting interplay among nature, theories, data and a host of often-unstated nonempirical principles that shape our thinking, evaluating, theorizing and even perceiving. Since the parts are so interwoven, changes in one part frequently have consequences for the content and contours of other parts. Parts do change over time—theories are replaced, shaping principles alter, and so forth. And sometimes entire systems involving all three components are overturned and replaced by others.65

As a result, if God were going to ensure that his revelation was culturally and scientifically accurate and modern in its communication, he would have to issue periodic revelation updates.66 So, for instance, if his revelation took the form of eighteenth-century understanding, it would have to have been totally revised by the mid-1900s. Then in the post-Darwinian era, it would certainly be obsolete. By our day, very little would be able to stand up to scrutiny. The solution to this problem must be for us to realize the validity of a reality other than a scientific, structurally oriented one for the communication of truth. N. Postman has observed that “truth” is often perceived by the hearer on the basis of the way that it is expressed:

The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the “truth” is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.67

Postman was not speaking of pluralism or denying the existence of absolute truth here, and neither am I. The phenomenon he observes can perhaps best be illustrated by the obsession of society today with political correctness as the essential garb in which truth must be clothed. Enjoying even a more distinguished reputation for being the ultimate garb of truth is the rhetoric of scientific description. We must recognize this as a cultural bias. For example, can the truth of the relationship of the earth to the sun be reflected only from the vantage point of assuming a position in outer space (where most of us have never been) and imagining a time warp so as to view the earth moving around the sun? Is it false to speak of the sun simply as rising and setting?

Why should it be supposed that men in the twentieth century have any fundamental advantage over previous ages just because men lately have refined the capacity for abstract thought and scientific technology? Why should it be assumed that “historical development” has escalated modern men to a height from which we can look down upon those who preceded us? Once we surrender the proud notion that people in the twentieth century, and especially people whose roots are in the West, are better off than the generations that have gone before, the door is opened for a poetic and philosophic sharing of the riches of human creativity from the dawn of history to the present. Indeed, when modern men are emancipated from contemporaneity, they may discover dimensions of existence shared with all men and all times.68

Are we so presumptuous as to think that inspired text, to be “true,” must somehow incorporate our view of science into its discussions of origins? C. Hyers has referred to this way of thinking as “intellectual imperialism” even as he demonstrates the bankruptcy that it produces:

One of the consequences of intellectual imperialism is that instead of bringing all knowledge under its dominion, it reduces knowledge to its own dimensions. It is imperialistic in aspiration but reductionistic in result.69

Truth cannot be held hostage to such reductionism. It can be validation of a perspective as easily as it can be a validation of physical laws or structures. Consequently, I could contend that it is true that the sky is blue, even though I cannot get a slice of it for laboratory analysis. In C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace is in conversation with Ramandu, who has identified himself as a retired star. When Eustace comments that in his world a star is a huge ball of flaming gas, Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” This is precisely the sort of distinction that is important in the reading of Genesis.

The purpose and message of Genesis 1:3–5. As indicated in the introduction, Genesis 1 as a whole is intended to show that the miserable condition of humanity that motivates the covenant in chapter 12 is not the result of some defect in God’s creative work. On the contrary, God made everything just right and set it up to function properly within his purposes. The initial verses we have studied reveal that God alone takes responsibility for imposing order on chaos. He demonstrates his power and sovereignty by bringing the cosmos into conformity with his purposes. He does not accomplish this through battle with cosmic monsters, as the rest of the ancient world portrayed it, but by simply speaking the functions into existence.

The difficulty some have with the interpretation offered above is that it is theological in nature. So, for instance, if Genesis 1:1 is a literary introduction rather than a creative act, then the story really begins in verse 2, when a chaotic earth is already in existence. In the minds of some, this jeopardizes the concept of creation out of nothing and detracts from the all-inclusive portrayal of God as Creator. If the ruaḥ (spirit/wind) of God is an “it” rather than a “he,” the theology of the Holy Spirit and his role in creation may be undermined. If the days of creation offer revelation of functions using ancient ideas of structure in the communication, the door might be opened to evolutionists or the text’s inerrant status might be damaged.

Here we must beware. Just because a given text does not explicitly support a particular belief does not mean it contradicts or undermines that belief. Neither the Old or New Testaments can be construed as allowing for any other creator or for supporting such ideas as the eternality or preexistence of matter.

The lesson to be learned here is the principle of allowing the Bible to say what it wants to say and not impose our imperialistic agendas onto it, squeezing it into our molds. I am not for a moment suggesting that religion and science occupy entirely different realms and never touch; or that evolutionary theory, when it puffs itself up and pretends to offer us a worldview which can take the place of biblical theism, is not something to be fought against; or that Christians ought not to raise questions about the hard evidence which is said to favor a purely naturalistic account of origins. My intention is to make the simple plea for the sovereignty of the biblical text over reader agendas. Our exegesis ought to let the text speak and the chips fall where they may.70

It is methodologically dangerous to construe a text in such a way so as to affirm our beliefs in the clearest possible terms. We must accept the text on its own terms.

Contemporary Significance

WE NEED TO RECLAIM certain important aspects of the worldview that is here affirmed and taught by the text. We cannot allow our culture to lull us into accepting the concept that creation refers primarily to formational history. Like the magicians of Egypt at the time of the plagues, science can offer theories to replicate that. The Bible claims much more for creation. It claims the sovereign work of God, who maintains and sustains the functions of the cosmos and his own purposes within it. As H. C. Brichto rhapsodizes, “The God of Creation is the guarantee of Order, the repudiation of Accident or Chance.”71

The diabolical nature of Evolutionism72 is not to be found first and foremost in its claim that things came into existence in a randomly generated sequence through mutation and natural selection, but rather in the insidious way that it strips the cosmos and everything in it of purpose. Even more subtle is the way that Christians have distorted the text and theology by allowing science to define the roles that we attribute to God and the Bible. Here, before we consider the contemporary significance of the text, we must examine the contemporary significance of the methodology.

Methodology problem: We have let culture/science set the parameters of how we deal with the text of Genesis 1. I have heard a story in several different forms about a mother who was approached by her four-year old with the question, “Where did I come from?” She had not been prepared to give the “birds-and-the-bees” talk so soon, but she stumbled through the best explanation she could devise on short notice that would package this sensitive information for a four-year old’s mind. She was feeling rather pleased with the effort until her son shrugged, turned on his heels, and departed with the comment, “Jimmy says he comes from Indiana.”

The interpretation of Genesis 1 has a long and checkered history. Modern evangelicalism has proponents who, as mentioned above, contend that the chapter is purely a literary formulation that has a carefully articulated theological message. The seven-day structure is seen by these as a convention of literary art rather than an affirmation of historical time periods.

In contrast are those who insist that the face value of the text requires a belief in seven twenty-four-hour days, which in turn mandates a young earth. They believe that between the lines of Hebrew text (or at least the English translations of the Hebrew text) can be discerned a scientific sophistication that addresses the concerns of our modern cosmological questions. They seek scientific validation of the waters above the earth by positing a water canopy suspended in space, and they try to figure out how light could have existed before the sun and moon.

Still a third group looks at the text as containing symbolic language by which a transition may be made between the simplicity of the ancient wording and the theories of modern science. In this view the days represent ages, and perhaps the earth bringing forth animals refers to some aspect of the evolutionary process. Of interest to many of these interpreters is how the biblical text can be understood to reflect our modern tenets of cosmology. They believe that our modern cosmology is flavored by a generous dose of truth, and since God’s Word must also be truth, the two must coincide. They are well intentioned but, I believe, at times misguided as they try to give the Bible’s answer to “Where did we come from?”

In his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll discusses the state of scientific posturing within evangelicalism today and how we got where we are.73 With the advent of Darwinism and its adoption into the secularist agenda, science came to be portrayed as the enemy of the church. The battle against the penetration of secularism became a battle against scientific thinking. This battle was waged on several fronts, with apologists in the vanguard protecting the values of Christianity and arguing its case. This included attempts to refute scientific positions that were deemed detrimental to Christianity as well as proposing theistic scientific views and undertaking an aggressive campaign to harmonize the Bible with scientific findings. As a result, the Bible was forced into a position of dependence on the field of scientific inquiry because it was only used to respond in reaction to the parameters set by the debate. Thus, Noll observes:

The failure of either the proponents or opponents [in the debate over evolution] to question historic Protestant commitments to that bond between Enlightenment notions of science and traditional conceptions of Christianity testified to the deep historical commitment of evangelicals to the scientific enterprise, but also to an unself-conscious commitment to the assumptions of Baconian science.74

This approach has become so pervasive and so ingrained that we no longer realize we are asking the wrong questions. It only distorts the biblical text to try to read science between the lines, as if the text were constructed to accommodate modern scientific understanding. Nevertheless, it also undermines the text to reduce it to a harmless variation of primitive mythological misconceptions. We cannot defend either a totally postponed communication (i.e., one that would make no sense until scientific knowledge had progressed and new models developed) or a symbolic message (e.g., that the waters above the earth really stood for a canopy in suspension) when it would have corresponded to something very different in the ancient audience’s cosmology. These do not take the text at face value, even though the original audience would have been taking the text at face value.

The solution is to understand the worldview through which the text is communicating and focus on that which it seeks to communicate in isolation from our pro- or antiscientific agendas. We should not be asking (1) how the text validates my scientific understanding or (2) how the text describes the scientific system we know to be true; rather, we must ask (3) on what level the text is communicating its message. This does not require scientific apologetics and text manipulation; it requires comparative study. We must come to an understanding of the ancient worldview. Where does this lead?

As discussed in Bridging Contexts, our scientific worldview has established certain perspectives for us of which we are hardly aware. We think of the created world in terms of its physical components, its laws, and its properties. We think of the cosmos principally in reference to its material structure. The Greeks persuaded people that the material structure of the cosmos was discernible. The Enlightenment persuaded people that the material structure of the cosmos was most important. The post-Darwin era has persuaded people that material structure is all there is to the cosmos. Ravi Zacharias similarly observes, “First the world was denuded of transcendence, then the Scriptures were rendered irrelevant, and finally humankind was made nothing more than matter.”75

When the ancients wanted to describe or discuss creation, they had little interest in the material structure or the formational history of the cosmos. Rather, their concerns focused on the functional cosmos. Instead of understanding creation as making things, they saw God establishing a reality continuum. The reality of how we experience the cosmos does not need to be informed by a description of the shape or structure of the cosmos, or its formational history. The text communicates a universal reality—how all peoples throughout time have experienced the cosmos. It affirms that though people have often perceived the cosmos as a threat to their survival, God set up the cosmos to operate this way, and it was just right.

People understood how to interact with the weather long before the development of modern meteorology with its satellites tracking the movement of fronts, pressure systems, and the jet stream. In fact, our understanding of the physical universe is primarily important to us because it can help us understand the functional cosmos. Young earth creationists, old earth creationists, and theistic evolutionists have been locked in an argument concerning who offers the best picture of creation’s formational history.76 Each want to claim that it has a biblical view of creation’s formational history. The problem exists because from a biblical point of view, it is an oxymoron to speak of “creation’s formational history,” in that the Bible’s view of creation is not concerned with formational history. C. Hyers has clearly identified the misguided reactions:

Charles Darwin, in comparing his observations of nature with the biblical accounts of creation, assumed that they were the same sort of statement and declared that the Old Testament offers a “manifestly false history of the earth.” While religious objections have tended to focus on the word false, and many evolutionists—following Darwin—have been inclined to agree that it is false, the central issue is whether the biblical materials are being offered as a “history of the earth” in a sense comparable to the modern meaning of natural history. If they are not, then both the attempts at demonstrating their scientific falsity and the attempts at demonstrating their scientific truth are inappropriate and misleading.77

If we come to the Bible expecting it to discuss creation in terms of material structure, we will be sadly disappointed. As Hyers concludes, we must inquire after the meaning of creation in the creation texts themselves.

We cannot, therefore, use the biblical text to draw conclusions about material structure, nor should we infer from the text what our beliefs ought to be about material structure. We do not need to harmonize our thinking about material structure with the use in Genesis of that terminology, just as we do not have to try to figure out whether the blood pump in our chests has some role in our thinking ability. The face value of the text reveals important truth about God’s creation of the functional or operational cosmos. Obviously, the functions require structures, but we cannot cross-examine the text with regard to structures. We must accept the direction that the text lays for itself. This can be established through an understanding of the ancient mindset.

By distinguishing the text from science in this way, I am not endorsing the argument that science and religion have nothing to do with one another. That argument was articulated by Stephen Jay Gould as follows:

No scientific theory, including evolution, can pose any threat to religion—for these two great tools of human understanding operate in complementary (not contrary) fashion in their totally separate realms: science as an inquiry about the factual state of the natural world, religion as a search for spiritual meaning and ethical values.78

I am not saying that we should abandon all attempts to harmonize science and Scripture. I am saying that we should not expect the text to do that. There is a difference between the role of religion or theology and the role of the text. “Harmonize” is actually a good word. Unfortunately, what we have termed harmonization has often been a masked attempt to make science and the Bible sing in unison. In contrast, our harmonization must allow for some degree of compartmentalization between the role of science and the text.

In our day and age we really can understand this type of compartmentalization and the place that it has. If we spoke of someone building a computer, we would understand that it meant assembling it so that it could operate. We wouldn’t be interested in who manufactured the monitor screen, where the motherboard was constructed, or who wrote the software. The following rendition is not intended to be frivolous or irreverent, though it is offered tongue-in-cheek, hopefully as an enlightening illustration.

In the beginning, Tom built himself a computer. Now this computer was just scattered pieces all over the workbench still in boxes and manufacturers’ wrappers. Darkness was over the face of the monitor.

Then Tom installed the motherboard. And Tom said, “Let this Intel^® chip make my computer run fast and efficiently.” And Tom called the chip CPU. And Tom gave the CPU memory, and he separated the memory into static and dynamic; the static he called ROM, and the dynamic he called RAM. And Tom saw that the motherboard was good.

Day 1

Then Tom said, “Let there be a hard drive to gather the data into one place, and let the floppy drive appear,” and it was so. Tom called the hard drive “C,” and the floppy he called “A.”

Day 2

Then Tom said, “Let there be communication lines.” And Tom separated analog and digital lines. And Tom said, “Let comm links sprout forth after its own kind, fiber optics connected to fiber optics, copper to copper, and wireless to wireless.” And Tom saw that it was good.

Day 3

Then Tom said, “Let there be an operating system to integrate all the functions of the computer. And let it be for allocation and initialization, diagnostics, and retrieval. And let it rule over the motherboard.” So Tom installed the operating system and named the operating system “Windows™.” And Tom saw that it was good.

Day 4

Then Tom said, “Let there be a SETUP program to set the defaults of the system.” So Tom installed the control panel onto the hard drive and made it accessible from the desktop.

Day 5

Then Tom said, “Let there be icons and shortcuts, file structures, and programs.” And he blessed them and said, “Be productive and multiply and fill the hard drive and the memory.” Then Tom said, “Let us install a User Interface through which the system can be managed exactly as he would do it.” So Tom installed Program Manager and set it up to rule the software. And Tom saw that it was good.

Day 6

So on the seventh day Tom finished setting up his computer. And he turned it on and it worked perfectly. So Tom sat down and enjoyed it on the seventh day.79

This rendition illustrates a number of points that have already been made as well as others that will be made in the next several sections of this commentary.80

Compartmentalization can also be seen in the example of a theatrical production. If someone came into a play late and asked the woman in the seat next to him how the play began, he would not expect her to reply with information concerning the construction of the set, the playwright’s experiences, or the casting of the players. This would not be an incorrect answer. It would simply be addressing something other than what was being asked. We must be careful not to make that same mistake with the Bible. If we superimpose this illustration on the cosmos, taking it as the play, science might be seen as addressing the questions about the set, the cast, and the script. Scripture is more interested in the play itself, even though God, the Producer/Director, is the link between the two and was involved on both ends.

It is not therefore appropriate to construe science as the enemy of the faith or of the text. Interestingly, even as many evangelicals have adopted this sort of antagonism toward science, they have delivered the agenda of the text over to scientific inquiry.81 It is not science that is the enemy, it is naturalism. The scientific endeavor by its very nature operates by means of what I would call an “atheistic premise”—that is, it tries to figure out the natural world without resorting to supernatural explanations.82 If we were to assume that something happened without God’s intervention, how would it have happened?

We operate this way in our lives all the time. When we cannot find a magazine, we assume that someone moved it, not that God somehow spirited it away. We rarely factor God directly into our cause-and-effect inferences as we go through the day. Scientists operate the same way, and if they did not do it, we would not call it science. This atheistic premise does not presume that scientists do not believe in God, it only explains how they go about their job.83 The proponent of a naturalist worldview, however, presumes there is no God involved in these processes and that science is all there is. The scientist qua scientist might hypothesize that if life as we know it were to arise from nonlife without God taking a form-imposing role, the scientific concept of evolution offers the best model. The proponent of naturalism says that God was not involved in creation, so evolutionary naturalism should be accepted and taught as truth.

Scientific Creationism took on a significant role in society because even as it declared science as the enemy, it used its own brand of theistic science to make sense of the Bible.84 It claims to take the Bible literally, yet attributes scientific sophistication to terms that could not possibly have had those meanings to the original audience or author.85 The alternative to Scientific Creationism is not to formulate Day-Age theories or to revert to understanding Genesis 1 as broadly figurative poetry, for these both still try to “make sense” of the Bible in reference to our scientific categories. We need to “make sense” of the Bible on its own terms.

It must be understood that the explanations given in the Original Meaning section are not offered as simply a literary reading of the text of Genesis 1. While there is no doubt that the account is characterized by literary artistry, I am not suggesting that the affirmations of the passage are merely to be taken with a literary grain of salt. I am suggesting that the face value of the account—that which is mutually understood by the author and his audience—is focused on God’s setting up a cosmos with carefully established functions.

At the same time, the case of Christianity against naturalism can be capably argued by proponents of intelligent design, such as Phillip Johnson,86 Hugh Ross,87 and Michael Behe.88 They need not engage the interpretation of the text of Genesis but can simply target the logic of the argumentation supporting naturalism. Noll laments that evangelicals who are interpreting the text are often defending the wrong thing.

Millions of evangelicals think they are defending the Bible by defending creation science, but in reality they are giving ultimate authority to the merely temporal, situated, and contextualized interpretations of the Bible that arose from the mania for science of the early nineteenth century.89

We need to defend the teaching of the text, not a scientific reconstruction of the text or statements that are read between the lines of the text. Our best theological, hermeneutical, and scientific minds need to work to forge a new consensus for the relationship between science and Scripture, as was done in the wake of the Copernican revolution, rather than sacrificing more Galileo-type martyrs on the altar of stone-rigid, quasi-scientific presuppositions dressed up as if they were the Word of God.

Theological problem: We have let culture/science set the parameters of how we view God working in the world.

Actively sustaining the cosmos. Is our view of God too integrated into a scientific worldview, or does he transcend it? In our society, even Christians struggle with how to view God as outside of and distinct from the natural processes or natural “laws” that define our “real” worldview. We find little room for the supernatural, and though we may affirm the existence of miracles, there is little that we identify as miraculous. Does God still hold the forces of chaos at bay as he sustains the functions of the cosmos, or have we drawn a scientific circle around God? D. A. Carson describes the philosophical options as involving an open universe, a closed universe, or a controlled universe:

An open universe is espoused by animism. The spirits control most things, and the appropriate thing for human beings to do is to appease the spirits so that they may do the things we want. Science is not possible because nothing is regular: the whims of the spirits are unpredictable, and even the sacrifices do not always work. In a closed universe, everything is explained by cause and effect at a purely material level. Science is possible; God is excluded. A modification of this model is espoused by deism. God set the whole thing up and established the principles of operation, but since then he has been rather removed from the scene, while he lets nature take its course. Science is possible, but there is little need to appeal to God, except for the initial act of creation.

The controlled universe reflected in the Bible, however, has God as both its creator and its sustainer/ruler. He creates in an ordered way, and sustains and rules it in an ordered way, so that science is possible; but he is not bound by what he has created, so he is at perfect liberty to do things another way, with the result that miracles are possible.90

In his book The Human Quest, Richard Bube discusses the sense in which God sustains the universe. We more easily think of God having set up natural laws to sustain the universe, but Bube’s view is more comparable to Carson’s third option. Here is his thesis:

The universe exists moment by moment only because of the creative and preserving power of God.

The emphasis of the . . . thesis is that everything that happens in the world is possible only because God is active at all times in maintaining and guiding the world. In a sense, then, this is a radically different perspective from the traditional one that pictures God as having created the world and its laws at some point in the past, after which they later became essentially self-sustaining except for God’s occasional intervention to cause something special.91

The theological term for this is providence, and it refers to the way God acts through all so-called natural processes, whether in creation, nature, or history. The scriptural premise can be seen in places such as Acts 17:28, “For in him we live and move and have our being.” Bube finds that even though people are not necessarily reluctant to accept this view, they often fail to grasp its implications. So, for instance, he asks focus groups, “What would happen to the world and us if God should suddenly ‘turn himself off?’ ” While some reply that “nothing would happen” or that there might be gradual deterioration, others opine that values like morality or love would disappear. Bube contends, however, that such responses assume that the world is far too independent of God or that he is too far removed from its operation. He suggests that the results would be far more dramatic.

We propose here that a full understanding of the nature of the interaction between God and the world permits only one answer. If God were to “turn himself off,” everything would cease to exist! Without God there are no laws, no world, no us; to attempt to distinguish between physical and spiritual in this case is impossible. Not only do we rely on God as the Creator at the beginning, as the Source of order and purpose in the world, as the personal Father who gives meaning to love and depth to personal relationships; we rely on God constantly for our very existence.92

I contend that the view proposed by Bube corresponds very closely to the ancient worldview, to the Bible’s teaching about God (esp. in Gen. 1), and to the implications of a well-informed theology today; yet we do not live or think this way. Instead, we have juxtaposed God and science so that God is used simply to fill in the gaps that science has left unexplained. This contributes to a constantly shrinking view of God.93 In contrast, Bube illustrates the totality of our dependence on God using the analogy of a television screen.

Personalities appear on the screen and interact with one another according to the laws of the world and of life. They love, they fight; if they step off buildings, they fall (barring children’s cartoons!); if they are cut, they bleed. But what happens if the plug of the set is pulled out? Do the laws of nature in the events on the television screen begin to fail? Do the characters begin to be less loving and considerate? No, when the power is removed—when the plug is pulled—the very source of existence is gone: the personalities on the screen in their life and story context simply cease to exist.94

Another way of pondering this is to think of the cosmos as a symphony orchestra performing a concert. In such an analogy, we would likely be inclined to think of God as the conductor. Bube’s thesis, I imagine, would posit God as the music. How radically would the adoption of such a view affect our perspective and our conversation?

All such phrases as “God intervenes in the natural order,” “God uses natural processes,” and “God works through natural law” are ruled out. The natural order exists only because God is constantly active in upholding it. God does not use natural processes as if they existed without him. God does not take advantage of natural laws to accomplish his will as if the laws existed without him. We see immediately why the question “Can God intervene in a world ruled by orderly laws?” is meaningless. There is no world ruled by orderly laws except that one constantly maintained in existence by the activity of God.95

Making something is a one-time act. But “creation” as the Bible understands it is a perpetual activity. As Van Till puts it, “if God were not at this very moment acting in the capacity of Creator, we would not at this very moment even exist.”96 Controlling the operation of something is an ongoing process. Our modern inclination to overemphasize the theology of Genesis in terms of God making things has allowed us to feel satisfied that our interpretation of Genesis is theologically sound. Turning Genesis 1 into a scientifically configured account of God making things is like taking your towel into the pool with you so you will have it handy when you want to use it. Its ability to be used as it was intended has been precluded by the very act that sought to give it practicality. Our scientific view of the cosmos has caused us to reduce the “Creator” role to the mere task of forming things. In contrast, Van Till presses the point that a biblical theology of God as Creator identifies him as Originator, Preserver, Governor, and Provider of the Creation.97 Our modern theology is more inclined to have him make something and be done with it.

The fact that we have, in this process, sent God to the corner of the cosmos so he will not get underfoot is particularly tragic. Chaos still threatens at all sides. It is not just the chaotic forces of nature (tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, volcanoes, tidal waves, and the like) that appear to rage out of control. International terrorism, nuclear arms available to irresponsible parties, ethnic cleansing, and political upheaval are all part of the chaos of our world. Social chaos reveals itself in unfettered abortion, school shootings, hate crimes, and the decline of morality. More than ever we need a theology that recognizes God’s role in holding in check the chaos of our world as he sustains the cosmos moment by moment.

What would change in our outlook on life if we took this issue seriously? Consider how it would affect our response to Stephen Jay Gould’s comment, “Science and religion should be equal, mutually respecting partners, each the master of its own domain, and with each domain vital to human life in a different way.”98

We have said that text and science are different things. That does not mean that God and nature are different things. If we see the world in terms of science and nature on one side and God on another, we are going to end up with a worldview problem. God will be a God of the gaps,99 filling in only where science cannot. We will end up as practical deists. We have said that science, by current definition, operates on an atheistic premise. That does not mean that nature operates apart from God.100

An excellent illustration of this can be found in the book of Esther, where circumstance takes center stage and God is not mentioned. The fact that circumstance is in focus, however, does not mean that circumstance is all there is. In contrast, if we truly understand Esther, it is not saying that there is no God at work, but neither is it saying that there is no circumstance. Instead, it insists that God works through the circumstance. The only proper view of circumstance is one that sees it riddled with God, or better, that there is no such thing as circumstance apart from God. The only way to understand how God works is to see circumstance as one of his agents. They are not mutually exclusive, and circumstance cannot be seen as independent of God or divorced from him for even a second. There is no such thing as circumstance apart from God.

Nature is much the same. In Esther, Haman had the problem that he saw only the circumstances, but he had no knowledge of the God behind them. His wife intimated that he was missing that important dimension (Est. 6:13); indeed, it was a fatal error. Those who hold a naturalistic worldview make the same mistake in that they only acknowledge the nature side of the equation. The book of Esther serves as an encouragement to those who cannot understand where their covenant God has gone. Where are the great deliverances of the past? Are the plagues, the parting of the sea, the manna, and the angel of the Lord striking down the enemy only things of the past? Where does God fit into the picture?

These are our questions today as we grapple with God’s role in our world. Is God’s hand seen only when there is something that can be called a miracle? Does God only act by intervention? The testimony of Genesis suggests otherwise. There is no nature apart from God. This is poignantly expressed in “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

Earth’s crammed with heaven

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Science, when it accurately portrays nature, is describing the work of God. Whatever natural processes were involved in the origins of matter, God carried them out, and he did so with purpose. Sometimes, undoubtedly, nature was his agent. But he is not limited to the use of a single agent, and whatever he did through other agencies, science has no way of detecting. Because of this, science cannot offer us a complete picture; it can only offer explanations of the possible ways in which nature may have served as an agent of the work of God. Science asks different questions from what the text does, but it does not operate in a realm apart from God.

Our response to Gould, then, is that science and religion are not two separate coins to be kept in separate accounts in separate banks. They are rather two sides of the same coin, distinct though inseparable. In the opening scene of Thomas Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the two protagonists find a coin and are mystified that it keeps coming up heads. As many times as they flip it, it is always heads. When I first saw the play, I surmised that the coin actually had identical pictures on both sides, that there was nothing but heads. In fact, however, it did not; this was rather the first indication that they were in a world that was devoid of logic and reason—a world described philosophically as “absurd.” The same can be said of the naturalists, whose flip of the science/religion coin always comes up “science.” They deduce that the coin has science on both sides. In reality the repeated result of “science” as they flip the coin to find answers about existence only shows the nature of the world they have chosen.

As Christians our theology would be much improved if we could make a slight change in our terminology. Instead of proclaiming that “the cosmos was created by God” (using past tense as if the job is done), we should rather proclaim, “The cosmos is God’s creation.”101 We may thus lay claim to the dynamic role of God in a perpetual act of creation. Additionally, we may see Genesis 1 not as “the story of creation” but as the beginning of the “Story of the Creator.”102

God and time.

Master of time. What is the significance of God as the creator of time? Time was part of a cosmos that was judged as good; yet, because death is in the system, we often consider time an enemy. Even a casual glance at the birthday-card section at the local supermarket shows the recognition of the negative aspects connected with the relentless march of time. We mark the passing of personal time with mixtures of celebration and remorse. Celebration comes when we reach age sixteen and can drive, or when we reach twenty-one and can be considered full-fledged adults. Comedians joke about being perpetually thirty-nine, and during the 1960s the young generation was advised not to trust anyone over thirty. By the time we reach forty or fifty, the black balloons begin showing up. On a social level, each new year is observed as time ticks on, and the changeover of a millennium takes on epic proportions. Time passes whether we want it to or not, forming the parameters of our existence and taking its toll.

On the other side of the ledger, each of us has probably had the sensation of being awakened from a deep sleep and experiencing in our grogginess the total disorientation that comes from not being able to identify the day or time. We find it difficult to carry on existence in the absence of time indicators. Prisoners in POW camps mark the days of their captivity in any way available to them so as not to lose some sense of orientation in time. If the conditions of imprisonment do not afford the ability to observe whether it is day or night, the delivery of meals can become a marker. We need to feel oriented in time.

For good or ill, then, time is our reality. Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 explores this reality as it enumerates the “times” of life. In the world that God has created “under the sun,” we must learn to accept the good times and the bad times as coming from the hand of God, for even the bad times can enrich us as God’s people (Eccl. 7:14). And although he has locked us in time for now, he has set eternity in our hearts (3:11).

Openness of God. We experience God in time. Many of God’s attributes have their reference point in time. For example, faithfulness and patience can only operate within time. As a result, God interacts with us in time. This is an obvious conclusion from the definition of time as a dimension in which cause and effect takes place.103 Christian theologians throughout history have generally seen God’s interactions with us in time as another example of his condescending to our humanity. More recently, however, some have postulated a theology referred to as the “Openness of God,” which considers God to be fully integrated in time and, to some extent, limited by it.

Instead of perceiving the entire course of human existence in one timeless moment, God comes to know events as they take place. He learns something from what transpires. We call this position the “open view of God” because it regards God as receptive to new experiences and as flexible in the way he works toward his objectives in the world. Since it sees God as dependent on the world in certain respects, the open view of God differs from much conventional theology.104

This theology is supported by deriving logical conclusions from commonplace observations about God and his interaction with the world.

An action makes a difference. It brings about something that would not otherwise exist. In the case of specific acts, it brings about something that did not previously exist. To say that God acts, therefore, means that it makes sense to use the words before and after when we talk about him. God makes decisions, and then he acts. He decides before he acts, he acts after he decides. This is so simple that it sounds trivial, but it points to a fundamental truth about God. Not only does he bring about change, but in a significant sense God himself experiences change. After God acts, the universe is different and God’s experience of the universe is different. The concept of divine action thus involves divine temporality. Time is real for God.105

Proponents claim that only this perspective allows God to react to human choices as the Bible suggests he does. There remain some serious drawbacks to this position, however, that make it unacceptable. Not only is it difficult to maintain a robust view of God’s foreknowledge, but there are also philosophical issues that mitigate against placing God so firmly in time. In refuting this view, D. A. Carson, for instance, contends that since our notions of time are dependent on the motions of bodies in the universe and since God created the universe, God must stand outside of both time and the universe on which it depends and be independent of them.106

Carson’s assertions reflect current scientific thought with regard to time. In the late 1960s, three astrophysicists, Stephen Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose, working from the implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity, deduced that “space and time must have originated in the same cosmic bang that brought matter and energy into existence.”107 If time had a beginning, God cannot be within it, for he existed before it. This does not imply that God dwelt in a timeless eternity before his creation of our cosmos (as Augustine maintained), because God’s activity even before our cosmos existed implies sequence and cause and effect. Hugh Ross therefore posits a multidimensional time in which God exists as opposed to the singular dimension of time to which we are limited.

If time were two dimensional, for example, both a time length and a time width would be possible. Time would expand from a line into a plane. In a plane of time, an infinite number of lines running in an infinite number of directions would be possible.108

Ross’s suggestion offers just one way of understanding how God may transcend our time concepts, but even this expanded version may be overly restrictive. We must at times admit that we simply do not have enough categories or a broad enough understanding of the possibilities to figure out how to define God’s existence.

What does Genesis 1 have to contribute to this discussion? It does not assert God’s creation of time as an abstraction any more than it deals with physicists’ light. It does not consider time a dimension and is not concerned with the conditions of God’s independent existence. God’s creation of time in Genesis 1:3–5 affirms only that time is set up to function in the cosmos based on the alternating periods of light and dark that characterize our existence. It is the creation of time for us and offers no statement beyond that.

Breakout Points

THE TEXT OFTEN touches on, rather than teaches on, certain issues. These arise in our minds as we read the text, but we discover that the text offers no information about them. In that sense, they constitute digressions from the text. They should not be the focus of an expository sermon or Bible-study lesson in that they do not represent the focus of the text; nevertheless, they can offer opportunities for fruitful discussion concerning our theology or worldview. I will address these as “breakout points” so as to distinguish them from the Contemporary Significance sections that seek to address issues that the text consciously addresses. These can be nothing more than my reflections, for the text of Genesis has nothing normative to say about them.

For example, in this passage our thoughts could easily wander to the question of our stewardship of time. If time is one of the functions that God has set up in this world of ours, perhaps we should consider carefully the best ways to use our time. In the foreword of Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, he compares the apocalyptic visions of George Orwell (1984) to those of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). One of the comparisons speaks to the issue at hand: “In 1984 . . . people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”109

Our time is filled with those things we love. In the process we can easily lose sight of important things such as service, accountability, and duty, which commend themselves as more responsible discharges of the valuable commodity of time. In his assessment of the role of television in American society, Postman notes that it has “made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.”110 This has inculcated in us an unquenchable lust to be entertained, and we are happy to contribute large proportions of our time to the quest. Postman’s conclusion holds little optimism as it looks ahead to the fate we have chosen for ourselves.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.111

Original Meaning

Day One (1:3–5)

LIGHT. Until now we have been finding in the meanings of many of the Hebrew words the idea that function is more important than physical existence. In verses 3–5 we finally arrive at evidence of this in the very statements of the text. In Genesis 1:5a, the NIV translates, “God called the light [ʾor] ‘day’ [yom], and the darkness he called ‘night.’ ” If God called the light yom, why does the text continue throughout the Old Testament to call light ʾor? It is a question anyone could answer with a little thought: It was not light itself that God called yom, but the period of light. There is a term for the semantic phenomenon that is observed here, namely, metonymy.

In metonymy the meaning of a word is extended to include things closely related to it. When the White House makes a statement, it is understood that the building is not talking but its chief resident, the president. Thus, it is not the physicist’s light that is being named yom; it is the period of light—obvious enough because that is what yom is often used to refer to in the rest of Scripture. But if the word ʾor refers to a period of light in verse 5, what about in verse 4, where God separates the light from the darkness? Again we find “period of light” much more plausible. The physicist’s light cannot be separated from darkness, but alternating periods of light and darkness can be set up.

Still we cannot stop there. If the text means for us to understand “period of light” in both verses 4 and 5, what about verse 3? Semantic consistency, I think, would lead us to believe that when God said “Let there be ʾor,” we must then understand it as “Let there be a period of light.” We conclude, then, that day one does not concern itself with the creation of the physicist’s light, that is, “light” as a physical entity with physical properties. Day one concerns something much more significant, something much more elemental to the functioning of the cosmos and to our experience of the cosmos. On day one, God created time.44 This is the first of the functions God will use to bring order to the chaos of the cosmos: the orderly and regular sequence of time.

If the focus of the narrative is on God’s creation of time, it is beside the point to ask whether or not God also created physicist’s light on day one. Certainly light as a physical entity must exist for time to function in the way that Genesis 1 describes it. But Genesis is not addressing the material structures that allow the functions to operate.

If we were to ask what the Israelite understanding of the physical structures connected with light were that allowed it to exist independently of the sun, we would leave the realm of the Bible’s teachings and moves to inferences from the text concerning Israelite cultural ideas. Such cultural ideas do not enjoy the support of inspiration or authority; they merely exist in the culture of those to whom the text is addressed. Such cultural ideas can often be inferred from the text because the text does not communicate in terms that transcend the Israelite understanding of the natural world (for defense and discussion of this, see Bridging Contexts, below).

In the Israelite view the sun was seen as a source of heat and as a source of light, but not as the source of light. The world was light before the sun came up, after the sun went down, and while the sun was hidden by clouds. The moon was also understood to give off light. “Light” could be better understood in Israelite structural terms by translating it “daylight.”45 One need not be troubled about whether the Israelite concept was that daylight was created before the sun. We must instead understand that the sequence of events in the chapter is according to functions, not according to material objects.

Evening and morning. The “evening and morning” that make up each day has generated confusion for interpreters over the years. Why is evening listed first? Some have identified this as simply a cultural difference. In Western understanding the morning is the first part of the day, whereas in traditional Jewish understanding, evening is the first part of the day. While this is true, I suspect that the traditional Jewish understanding developed because of Genesis 1 rather than vice versa. If that is so, then the order of Genesis preceded the Jewish tradition and must be explained in another way.

An alternative is ready at hand in the context itself. In day one, God set up a sequence of alternating periods of light and darkness. The coming of evening and then of morning marked the first series of transitions and completed the cycle, showing that what God had set up had now taken effect. In other words, on day one there was no morning as a transition, simply God’s creative act of daylight. The first transition after the creation of daylight/time was evening. In the rest of the narrative, God’s activity will take place during the daylight hours, after which the established transitions, represented by evening and morning, will again take place.

The first day. This at last brings us to the discussion of “day” (yom). It can be properly claimed that the seven-day structure and the meaning of the word yom serve as the nucleus around which the theories and problems of Genesis 1 revolve. The idea of creation in seven days serves as one of the main sticking points in the attempts to harmonize science and Scripture. As various harmonizing scenarios are constructed, the amount of flexibility (or lack of it) in the word yom gradually becomes the major issue. So we must begin with a common-sense lexical assessment of yom.

The meaning of a word must be established from its usage. But lexical methodology is more complex than that. When words have more than one meaning, the semantic range (the range of possible meanings) must be classified into logical categories. Some meanings will only occur under certain conditions (e.g., in an idiomatic expression or in a technical usage). Others may require settings with other words (known as collocations).46 All of this must be determined by observing usage.

In the semantic range of yom we must include (1) the daylight hours, (2) a twenty-four-hour day, (3) special days (e.g., day of his death), and (4) a plural use that can refer to a few days or even a year.47 Furthermore, (5) the definite article can be added to yom to make it mean “today,” or (6) a preposition can be tacked on the front and a demonstrative pronoun associated with it to say “in that day” or simply “when.” The important point to be made here is that these categories cannot be merged carelessly. It is not unusual for an interpreter to claim something like, “The word day can mean an extended, indefinite period of time,” and then follow up with a series of supporting references. The problem is that invariably most if not all of those references will be examples of category 6. Unfortunately, one cannot pull the word yom out of that setting and still retain the meaning it has in that setting.

An illustration in English may help us understand. If I were to call up the stairs to my wife that it was time to go, and she replied that she would be ready “in a minute,” it would be futile for me to start the countdown from sixty and expect her to be there by the time I reached zero. Usage has confirmed that in the idiomatic expression she has used, “in a minute” refers to a short but indefinite period of time. I cannot remove the word “minute” from that expression and plug it into my faculty manual where it tells me that classes shall last for 50 minutes, thereby claiming that I now have fifty extended, indefinite periods of time in which to conduct my class. Consequently, though it is true that yom sometimes refers to an extended period of time, that usage is limited to certain expressions and collocations, and its meaning cannot be so glibly transferred to Genesis 1.

We cannot be content to ask, “Can the word bear the meaning I would like it to have?” We must instead try to determine what the author and audience would have understood from the usage in the context. With this latter issue before us, it is extremely difficult to conclude that anything other than a twenty-four-hour day was intended. It is not the text that causes people to think otherwise, only the demands of trying to harmonize with modern science. Perhaps, however, after the functions approach to the text has been understood, the twenty-four-hour day will not be seen as posing the problem it has in the past—but that discussion will have to wait until the end of chapter 1. For now, on day one God created time.

Bridging Contexts

HOW SHOULD WE approach the text?48 As discussed in the introduction, if we are to interpret the text correctly, we must understand what the author would have communicated to his audience when he used the words he chose. Communication assumes a purpose as well as a common ground of familiarity as the arena in which it takes place. Thus the parameters of language and culture provide an essential setting for understanding the nature of the communication. If we read levels of meaning into the text on our own that neither the audience nor the author would have understood or been concerned with, we set ourselves up as the channel for the text’s authority. Since God’s process of inspiration utilized the author, I believe the author’s intention is our most important authority link. We must be willing to accept that it may not have been his concern to defend the ideas that our culture asks us to defend. For instance, the top question on our minds cannot be, “Can I use Genesis 1 to defend the New Testament teaching of creation out of nothing?” Instead it must be, “What points was the author trying to communicate?” I will refer to this as taking the text at face value.49

Interpreters of the twentieth century have been obsessed with trying to solve “the problem” of Genesis 1—the problem being identified as how to retain the integrity of the text in light of what is known or declared by the world of science. While some attempt (1) to construct an alternate science, others address the problem by contending (2) that the text is theological, not scientific, or (3) that it is poetic/figurative, not literal.

But if we take the text at face value, none of these approaches works. Regarding (1), the science that is reconstructed represents today’s sophisticated scientific principles and concepts. It has nothing to do with the face value that Israel would have understood, because it is simply reading our science between the lines. We will return to this in more detail below. Regarding (2), most interpreters acknowledge that Israel saw no distinction between theological and scientific. These were integrated into a worldview that saw most of what we call scientific as fully contained within the theological realm. Regarding (3), we must likewise admit that to Israel the ideas expressed in Genesis 1 are not just poetic expressions standing in for more sophisticated realities. The fact that they display poetic qualities does not demonstrate that they are figurative. In contrast to all of these, I intend to argue that if we want to understand the face value of Genesis 1, we must clarify the distinction between a functional and structural approach.

We live in a world far different from the world of the Old Testament. We must recognize the elements that distinguish these two worlds and make appropriate adjustments to our expectations. In our world, we believe reality is described most accurately in scientific terms. Mythology in the ancient world played the role that science plays in our modern world—it contained the explanation of how the world came into being and how it worked.

The mythological approach attempted to identify functions of the natural world as a consequence of purpose. The gods had purposes, and their activities were the causes of what humans experienced as effects. By contrast, our modern scientific approach identifies the functions of the natural world as a consequence of structure and attempts to understand cause and effect based on natural laws that are linked to the structure, the composite parts, of a phenomenon.

Much of the change in our world we attribute to personal agents. But change is also attributed to natural causes, many of which are labeled natural laws. A thunderstorm is explained in terms of atmospheric pressure, convection and moisture. A dead battery is explained in terms of the law of entropy. The ancient Israelites, in contrast, perceived only personal causality. All change in the world was attributed to personal agents—to either humans (and animals by personification) or the gods. Natural events, for example, were manifestations of divine activity. Nature was not a causal agent, but rather the effect of divine agency.50

Because our scientific worldview is keenly interested in material structure and natural causality, we often go to the biblical account looking for information on its physical makeup and laws. In this area, however, the biblical worldview is much more like its ancient Near Eastern counterparts in that it views function as a consequence of the purpose of divine agency.

We must, of course, be careful how we use the comparative material from the ancient Near East. Many parallels can be identified between ancient Near Eastern mythology and Old Testament passages and concepts, and these will be discussed as we proceed through the commentary. This is not to suggest, however, that the Old Testament is to be considered simply as another example of ancient mythology or as dependent on that literature. As discussed in the introduction, mythology is a window to ancient culture just as science is a window to modern culture. Perhaps “mirror” would be better than “window” in the sense that both mythology and science reflect the worldview and values of the cultures that forged them.

For ancient Israelite culture, many of the writings we find in the Old Testament performed the same function as mythology did in other cultures—they gave them a literary mechanism for preserving and transmitting their worldview and values. Israel was part of a larger cultural complex that existed across the ancient Near East. There are many aspects of that cultural complex that she shared with her neighbors, though each individual culture had its distinguishing features. When we seek to understand the culture and literature of Israel, we rightly expect to find help in the larger cultural arena, whether from the mythology, wisdom writings, legal documents, or royal inscriptions.

The conclusion, then, is that we can often identify the questions the text addresses by familiarizing ourselves with ancient literature rather than by letting our culture dictate what questions the text addresses or how it answers questions. Once we stop pressuring the text to address our issues, we may find that it is easier to identify the text’s issues. As an example, we cannot feel free to try to transform “in the beginning” into either a scientific statement or a theological treatise. It is not a covert reference to the Big Bang any more than it is proof of creatio ex nihilo. If interpreters are free to transform text, text is stripped of its ability to transform lives. Consequently, we are motivated to explore the face value of the text.

Function, not structure, as the face value. The face value of Genesis 1:3–5 does not offer a description of the piece of our material cosmos that physicists know as light with all of its physical properties and functional operation. What carries much more importance for the biblical author and in the ancient world in general is the affirmation that God created time. I have referred to this as a contrast between function (or purpose) and structure. As the comments in the Original Meaning section show, this focus is evident through the early verses of Genesis 1 as the author moves us from a chaotic (nonfunctional) condition through the setting up of the functions that will establish an ordered, operational cosmos.

If it is true that the author of Genesis is communicating to his audience about God’s creation of the functional cosmos, we might expect to get little information concerning the structural cosmos (i.e., matter per se). It is fruitless to ask what things God created on day one, for the text is not concerned about things and therefore will not address itself to that question. In other words, the text of Genesis is not discussing what H. Van Till has called the “formational history” of the cosmos.51 This demonstrates the radical contrast between the terms in which the Israelites thought about cosmic origins and the terms in which we think about them. When we ask the question “How does the cosmos work?” we seek an answer that discusses physical laws and structures, matter, and its properties. In our worldview, function is a consequence of structure, and a discussion of creation therefore must, of course, direct itself to the making of things. In contrast, when an Israelite asked “How does the cosmos work?” he or she was on a different wavelength, because in the ancient worldview, function is a consequence of purpose.

This functional perspective is not only reflected in the text and context of Genesis but can be seen as the basic perspective of the ancient world in general. The wealth of Egyptian tomb paintings affords us ample opportunity to observe how they portrayed the cosmos.52 As the sky goddess, Nut is portrayed arching her body over the disk-shaped earth. She is often supported by the hands of the god of the air while the earth god, Geb, lies prone at her feet. Note that this is not their scientific representation of structure. The Egyptians did not believe that one could go step on Nut’s toes or throw a rock and hit her knees. Rather, the portrayal communicates important truths concerning what the Egyptians believed about authority and jurisdiction in the cosmos. These are functional truths, not structural truths. They represent what the Egyptians believed about reality. The cosmos functioned by means of the gods playing out their roles. J. P. Allen expresses it as a difference between physics and metaphysics:

Unlike classical Newtonian physics . . . Egyptian explanations are more metaphysical than physical. They are concerned primarily with what lies beyond physical reality. There are other differences as well. The Egyptian documents reflect a subjective rather than objective view of reality: concepts are expressed not in terms of mechanical forces and physical elements but in human terms, as the wills and personalities of sentient beings (the gods). And none of the Egyptian sources is the record of scientific or philosophical speculation for its own sake. All serve some practical end, whether the worship of god or the attempt to secure a successful afterlife for the dead.53

Whatever the physical structure of the heavens was, it was of little concern to the Egyptians. A later Egyptian text54 lists eighteen “creations,” only one or two of which refer to structural components (e.g., sweet water). The remainder are things such as summer/winter, birth, sleep, remedies, dreams, wealth/poverty, and succession of generations.55

The texts of Mesopotamia also offer a clear picture of the tenets of their cosmology. For Mesopotamia, cosmogony (origins of the cosmos) was intertwined with theogony (origins of the gods). When Enuma Elish speaks of one generation of cosmic gods giving birth to the next generation of cosmic gods and thus bringing the cosmos into operation, it is not offering its ideas concerning the material origins or structure of the cosmos. Instead, as the names are given, jurisdiction is established and the cosmos begins to function under the guidance of its divine overseers. It is not just that these peoples had a different concept of structure from ours; rather, they do not view creation as a structure issue. To describe creation is to describe the establishment of the functioning cosmos, not the origins of the material structure of the cosmos. Structure was irrelevant. L. Bronner summarizes this nicely:

The primary purpose of these myths was to explain the world and how it functioned to the men of their generation. This is in fact what ancient mythology has in common with modern theology. It endeavored to explain the meaning of life and the mystery of the universe to mortal man. It aimed to help him face up to the challenges and the perplexities of life. These polytheistic texts explained the secrets of the universe by claiming that there were opposing forces continuously at war with one another in the world. As Wright put it: “The primary purpose of the stories about the gods was to explain the world and how it works.”56

Generally in the ancient world, the assignment of functions is connected to the giving of names. Enuma Elish picks up its account when nothing yet had a name. Egyptian literature identified the creator god as the one who pronounced the name of everything.57 In this way of thinking, things did not exist unless they were named:

It was believed that the name of a living being or an object was not just a simple or practical designation to facilitate the exchange of ideas between persons but that it was the very essence of what was defined, and that the actual pronouncing of a name was to create what was spoken.58

Genesis follows the same pattern of thinking as we see the importance of God’s naming those items that he has made functional. Consequently, we can conclude that Israel’s worldview differed from her neighbors in the areas of theology and cosmogony (origins of the cosmos), but not in the area of cosmology. We operate in similar ways when we attempt to adopt the theology of the Bible to the Big Bang theory. Scientifically, we conform to a consensus view, but add our own theological twists to conform to the Bible as well.

Does Genesis 1 tell us anything about structure? If the focus of Genesis 1 is functional, is there anything that can be inferred from the text about structural origins, material creation, or formational history? There are only two possibilities regarding the incidental structural details in the text. On the one hand would be the idea that they reflect the “old-world science” the Israelites shared with their neighbors. This would have included a flat disk-shaped earth with mountains holding up the several levels of sky, each with solid elements such as floors and ceilings.59 The sun, moon, and stars moved across the sky in determined patterns, and there was water in heaven’s chambers that came down as rain as well as waters surrounding and running under the earth that made up the cosmic seas. There was a second level of earth that constituted the netherworld, the abode of the dead, through which the sun passed during the night.

On the other hand, if Israelites did not believe something like this, it could only be because God had revealed a different reality that transcended this old-world science. If God did not reveal realities such as the earth’s being spherical or the earth’s rotation and revolution around the sun, the Israelites would have had no means to arrive at those conclusions.

For some readers, the first option might seem theologically treacherous and likely to undermine the authority of text, but let us examine the options and their implications carefully. With regard to the second option, the evidence is strikingly clear. There is not a single example of God revealing scientifically transcendent information to the Israelites.60 In fact, the evidence is to the contrary. Consider the following four examples:

1. In Genesis 1:9 the “water” is gathered “to one place” so that “dry ground” appears. The ancient, classical, and medieval worlds all agreed that there was only one major landmass on earth. The Israelites understood this as a description of the world as they knew it, not of a scientific Pangea that preceded the onset of continental drift.

2. When the elders of Israel have their encounter with the God of Israel in Exodus 24, he is portrayed as standing in heaven on a pavement of sapphire (v. 10), exactly like that portrayed in Mesopotamian cosmology.61

3. The movements of the celestial bodies and the understanding of weather all are described in terms similar to that in the rest of the ancient Near East. Windows of heaven are not replaced with low-pressure systems and the movement of the jet stream.

4. When God wants to talk about the human intellect, he does not take time to inform his inspired authors that the true organ of thought was the brain. There is no Hebrew word for brain, and neither the Israelites nor any of the other ancient peoples knew what the brain was for. The Egyptian priests who mummified bodies carefully preserved all of the important internal organs in canopic jars, but they pulled the brain out with a hook through the nostrils and discarded it as so much trash. For the ancients, the representation of the heart as the seat of intellect and emotions62 was not simply figurative speech, as it is for us. They knew of no other reality.

Does God relinquish the authority or credibility of the text when he speaks of the heart as the seat of the intellect? Of course not—he is simply communicating in terms that his audience understands, as any effective communicator does. He is not misleading them about physiology, for he is not discussing physiology and is offering no revelation on that subject. In the creation narratives I contend that he likewise does not discuss material structure and therefore offers no revelation on that subject. One may as well try to reconstruct human anatomy, or our ideas about it, from a Picasso abstract painting.63

One could perhaps claim that the Israelites had only a primitive knowledge of science but that the ambiguity of the language left room for scientific sophistication (as is assumed by those who construct a new science based on the text). This does not help us. The authors were using words that their audiences understood. The view that God inspired the use of words to be construed in certain ways by the audience even though he meant something else does not save his reputation. If the authority of the Bible means anything to us, we must assume a level of integrity to the communication. It had authority for the original Israelites, so it could not mislead.

Science’s structural focus is not the only way to express truth. The very fact that the Bible’s ability to use Israelite modes of thinking poses such a problem for us demonstrates how significantly we have been influenced by certain aspects of our culture. We have been persuaded to believe that truth about origins can only be packaged in scientific terms; that the only cosmological reality is a scientifically informed reality; that if a cosmological text operates outside of the scientific realm, it ceases to be truth. We too easily accept the dictum that the only absolute is science.64 This presupposition causes us to think that the Bible’s authority would be jeopardized if its revelation fails to address origins in terms that reflect our worldview. This modern arrogance that insists that revelation must be packaged in our terms to be true betrays us, because even scientific thinking is in constant flux. Del Ratzsch describes the situation this way:

Science is a complicated, historically shifting interplay among nature, theories, data and a host of often-unstated nonempirical principles that shape our thinking, evaluating, theorizing and even perceiving. Since the parts are so interwoven, changes in one part frequently have consequences for the content and contours of other parts. Parts do change over time—theories are replaced, shaping principles alter, and so forth. And sometimes entire systems involving all three components are overturned and replaced by others.65

As a result, if God were going to ensure that his revelation was culturally and scientifically accurate and modern in its communication, he would have to issue periodic revelation updates.66 So, for instance, if his revelation took the form of eighteenth-century understanding, it would have to have been totally revised by the mid-1900s. Then in the post-Darwinian era, it would certainly be obsolete. By our day, very little would be able to stand up to scrutiny. The solution to this problem must be for us to realize the validity of a reality other than a scientific, structurally oriented one for the communication of truth. N. Postman has observed that “truth” is often perceived by the hearer on the basis of the way that it is expressed:

The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the “truth” is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.67

Postman was not speaking of pluralism or denying the existence of absolute truth here, and neither am I. The phenomenon he observes can perhaps best be illustrated by the obsession of society today with political correctness as the essential garb in which truth must be clothed. Enjoying even a more distinguished reputation for being the ultimate garb of truth is the rhetoric of scientific description. We must recognize this as a cultural bias. For example, can the truth of the relationship of the earth to the sun be reflected only from the vantage point of assuming a position in outer space (where most of us have never been) and imagining a time warp so as to view the earth moving around the sun? Is it false to speak of the sun simply as rising and setting?

Why should it be supposed that men in the twentieth century have any fundamental advantage over previous ages just because men lately have refined the capacity for abstract thought and scientific technology? Why should it be assumed that “historical development” has escalated modern men to a height from which we can look down upon those who preceded us? Once we surrender the proud notion that people in the twentieth century, and especially people whose roots are in the West, are better off than the generations that have gone before, the door is opened for a poetic and philosophic sharing of the riches of human creativity from the dawn of history to the present. Indeed, when modern men are emancipated from contemporaneity, they may discover dimensions of existence shared with all men and all times.68

Are we so presumptuous as to think that inspired text, to be “true,” must somehow incorporate our view of science into its discussions of origins? C. Hyers has referred to this way of thinking as “intellectual imperialism” even as he demonstrates the bankruptcy that it produces:

One of the consequences of intellectual imperialism is that instead of bringing all knowledge under its dominion, it reduces knowledge to its own dimensions. It is imperialistic in aspiration but reductionistic in result.69

Truth cannot be held hostage to such reductionism. It can be validation of a perspective as easily as it can be a validation of physical laws or structures. Consequently, I could contend that it is true that the sky is blue, even though I cannot get a slice of it for laboratory analysis. In C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace is in conversation with Ramandu, who has identified himself as a retired star. When Eustace comments that in his world a star is a huge ball of flaming gas, Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” This is precisely the sort of distinction that is important in the reading of Genesis.

The purpose and message of Genesis 1:3–5. As indicated in the introduction, Genesis 1 as a whole is intended to show that the miserable condition of humanity that motivates the covenant in chapter 12 is not the result of some defect in God’s creative work. On the contrary, God made everything just right and set it up to function properly within his purposes. The initial verses we have studied reveal that God alone takes responsibility for imposing order on chaos. He demonstrates his power and sovereignty by bringing the cosmos into conformity with his purposes. He does not accomplish this through battle with cosmic monsters, as the rest of the ancient world portrayed it, but by simply speaking the functions into existence.

The difficulty some have with the interpretation offered above is that it is theological in nature. So, for instance, if Genesis 1:1 is a literary introduction rather than a creative act, then the story really begins in verse 2, when a chaotic earth is already in existence. In the minds of some, this jeopardizes the concept of creation out of nothing and detracts from the all-inclusive portrayal of God as Creator. If the ruaḥ (spirit/wind) of God is an “it” rather than a “he,” the theology of the Holy Spirit and his role in creation may be undermined. If the days of creation offer revelation of functions using ancient ideas of structure in the communication, the door might be opened to evolutionists or the text’s inerrant status might be damaged.

Here we must beware. Just because a given text does not explicitly support a particular belief does not mean it contradicts or undermines that belief. Neither the Old or New Testaments can be construed as allowing for any other creator or for supporting such ideas as the eternality or preexistence of matter.

The lesson to be learned here is the principle of allowing the Bible to say what it wants to say and not impose our imperialistic agendas onto it, squeezing it into our molds. I am not for a moment suggesting that religion and science occupy entirely different realms and never touch; or that evolutionary theory, when it puffs itself up and pretends to offer us a worldview which can take the place of biblical theism, is not something to be fought against; or that Christians ought not to raise questions about the hard evidence which is said to favor a purely naturalistic account of origins. My intention is to make the simple plea for the sovereignty of the biblical text over reader agendas. Our exegesis ought to let the text speak and the chips fall where they may.70

It is methodologically dangerous to construe a text in such a way so as to affirm our beliefs in the clearest possible terms. We must accept the text on its own terms.

Contemporary Significance

WE NEED TO RECLAIM certain important aspects of the worldview that is here affirmed and taught by the text. We cannot allow our culture to lull us into accepting the concept that creation refers primarily to formational history. Like the magicians of Egypt at the time of the plagues, science can offer theories to replicate that. The Bible claims much more for creation. It claims the sovereign work of God, who maintains and sustains the functions of the cosmos and his own purposes within it. As H. C. Brichto rhapsodizes, “The God of Creation is the guarantee of Order, the repudiation of Accident or Chance.”71

The diabolical nature of Evolutionism72 is not to be found first and foremost in its claim that things came into existence in a randomly generated sequence through mutation and natural selection, but rather in the insidious way that it strips the cosmos and everything in it of purpose. Even more subtle is the way that Christians have distorted the text and theology by allowing science to define the roles that we attribute to God and the Bible. Here, before we consider the contemporary significance of the text, we must examine the contemporary significance of the methodology.

Methodology problem: We have let culture/science set the parameters of how we deal with the text of Genesis 1. I have heard a story in several different forms about a mother who was approached by her four-year old with the question, “Where did I come from?” She had not been prepared to give the “birds-and-the-bees” talk so soon, but she stumbled through the best explanation she could devise on short notice that would package this sensitive information for a four-year old’s mind. She was feeling rather pleased with the effort until her son shrugged, turned on his heels, and departed with the comment, “Jimmy says he comes from Indiana.”

The interpretation of Genesis 1 has a long and checkered history. Modern evangelicalism has proponents who, as mentioned above, contend that the chapter is purely a literary formulation that has a carefully articulated theological message. The seven-day structure is seen by these as a convention of literary art rather than an affirmation of historical time periods.

In contrast are those who insist that the face value of the text requires a belief in seven twenty-four-hour days, which in turn mandates a young earth. They believe that between the lines of Hebrew text (or at least the English translations of the Hebrew text) can be discerned a scientific sophistication that addresses the concerns of our modern cosmological questions. They seek scientific validation of the waters above the earth by positing a water canopy suspended in space, and they try to figure out how light could have existed before the sun and moon.

Still a third group looks at the text as containing symbolic language by which a transition may be made between the simplicity of the ancient wording and the theories of modern science. In this view the days represent ages, and perhaps the earth bringing forth animals refers to some aspect of the evolutionary process. Of interest to many of these interpreters is how the biblical text can be understood to reflect our modern tenets of cosmology. They believe that our modern cosmology is flavored by a generous dose of truth, and since God’s Word must also be truth, the two must coincide. They are well intentioned but, I believe, at times misguided as they try to give the Bible’s answer to “Where did we come from?”

In his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll discusses the state of scientific posturing within evangelicalism today and how we got where we are.73 With the advent of Darwinism and its adoption into the secularist agenda, science came to be portrayed as the enemy of the church. The battle against the penetration of secularism became a battle against scientific thinking. This battle was waged on several fronts, with apologists in the vanguard protecting the values of Christianity and arguing its case. This included attempts to refute scientific positions that were deemed detrimental to Christianity as well as proposing theistic scientific views and undertaking an aggressive campaign to harmonize the Bible with scientific findings. As a result, the Bible was forced into a position of dependence on the field of scientific inquiry because it was only used to respond in reaction to the parameters set by the debate. Thus, Noll observes:

The failure of either the proponents or opponents [in the debate over evolution] to question historic Protestant commitments to that bond between Enlightenment notions of science and traditional conceptions of Christianity testified to the deep historical commitment of evangelicals to the scientific enterprise, but also to an unself-conscious commitment to the assumptions of Baconian science.74

This approach has become so pervasive and so ingrained that we no longer realize we are asking the wrong questions. It only distorts the biblical text to try to read science between the lines, as if the text were constructed to accommodate modern scientific understanding. Nevertheless, it also undermines the text to reduce it to a harmless variation of primitive mythological misconceptions. We cannot defend either a totally postponed communication (i.e., one that would make no sense until scientific knowledge had progressed and new models developed) or a symbolic message (e.g., that the waters above the earth really stood for a canopy in suspension) when it would have corresponded to something very different in the ancient audience’s cosmology. These do not take the text at face value, even though the original audience would have been taking the text at face value.

The solution is to understand the worldview through which the text is communicating and focus on that which it seeks to communicate in isolation from our pro- or antiscientific agendas. We should not be asking (1) how the text validates my scientific understanding or (2) how the text describes the scientific system we know to be true; rather, we must ask (3) on what level the text is communicating its message. This does not require scientific apologetics and text manipulation; it requires comparative study. We must come to an understanding of the ancient worldview. Where does this lead?

As discussed in Bridging Contexts, our scientific worldview has established certain perspectives for us of which we are hardly aware. We think of the created world in terms of its physical components, its laws, and its properties. We think of the cosmos principally in reference to its material structure. The Greeks persuaded people that the material structure of the cosmos was discernible. The Enlightenment persuaded people that the material structure of the cosmos was most important. The post-Darwin era has persuaded people that material structure is all there is to the cosmos. Ravi Zacharias similarly observes, “First the world was denuded of transcendence, then the Scriptures were rendered irrelevant, and finally humankind was made nothing more than matter.”75

When the ancients wanted to describe or discuss creation, they had little interest in the material structure or the formational history of the cosmos. Rather, their concerns focused on the functional cosmos. Instead of understanding creation as making things, they saw God establishing a reality continuum. The reality of how we experience the cosmos does not need to be informed by a description of the shape or structure of the cosmos, or its formational history. The text communicates a universal reality—how all peoples throughout time have experienced the cosmos. It affirms that though people have often perceived the cosmos as a threat to their survival, God set up the cosmos to operate this way, and it was just right.

People understood how to interact with the weather long before the development of modern meteorology with its satellites tracking the movement of fronts, pressure systems, and the jet stream. In fact, our understanding of the physical universe is primarily important to us because it can help us understand the functional cosmos. Young earth creationists, old earth creationists, and theistic evolutionists have been locked in an argument concerning who offers the best picture of creation’s formational history.76 Each want to claim that it has a biblical view of creation’s formational history. The problem exists because from a biblical point of view, it is an oxymoron to speak of “creation’s formational history,” in that the Bible’s view of creation is not concerned with formational history. C. Hyers has clearly identified the misguided reactions:

Charles Darwin, in comparing his observations of nature with the biblical accounts of creation, assumed that they were the same sort of statement and declared that the Old Testament offers a “manifestly false history of the earth.” While religious objections have tended to focus on the word false, and many evolutionists—following Darwin—have been inclined to agree that it is false, the central issue is whether the biblical materials are being offered as a “history of the earth” in a sense comparable to the modern meaning of natural history. If they are not, then both the attempts at demonstrating their scientific falsity and the attempts at demonstrating their scientific truth are inappropriate and misleading.77

If we come to the Bible expecting it to discuss creation in terms of material structure, we will be sadly disappointed. As Hyers concludes, we must inquire after the meaning of creation in the creation texts themselves.

We cannot, therefore, use the biblical text to draw conclusions about material structure, nor should we infer from the text what our beliefs ought to be about material structure. We do not need to harmonize our thinking about material structure with the use in Genesis of that terminology, just as we do not have to try to figure out whether the blood pump in our chests has some role in our thinking ability. The face value of the text reveals important truth about God’s creation of the functional or operational cosmos. Obviously, the functions require structures, but we cannot cross-examine the text with regard to structures. We must accept the direction that the text lays for itself. This can be established through an understanding of the ancient mindset.

By distinguishing the text from science in this way, I am not endorsing the argument that science and religion have nothing to do with one another. That argument was articulated by Stephen Jay Gould as follows:

No scientific theory, including evolution, can pose any threat to religion—for these two great tools of human understanding operate in complementary (not contrary) fashion in their totally separate realms: science as an inquiry about the factual state of the natural world, religion as a search for spiritual meaning and ethical values.78

I am not saying that we should abandon all attempts to harmonize science and Scripture. I am saying that we should not expect the text to do that. There is a difference between the role of religion or theology and the role of the text. “Harmonize” is actually a good word. Unfortunately, what we have termed harmonization has often been a masked attempt to make science and the Bible sing in unison. In contrast, our harmonization must allow for some degree of compartmentalization between the role of science and the text.

In our day and age we really can understand this type of compartmentalization and the place that it has. If we spoke of someone building a computer, we would understand that it meant assembling it so that it could operate. We wouldn’t be interested in who manufactured the monitor screen, where the motherboard was constructed, or who wrote the software. The following rendition is not intended to be frivolous or irreverent, though it is offered tongue-in-cheek, hopefully as an enlightening illustration.

In the beginning, Tom built himself a computer. Now this computer was just scattered pieces all over the workbench still in boxes and manufacturers’ wrappers. Darkness was over the face of the monitor.

Then Tom installed the motherboard. And Tom said, “Let this Intel^® chip make my computer run fast and efficiently.” And Tom called the chip CPU. And Tom gave the CPU memory, and he separated the memory into static and dynamic; the static he called ROM, and the dynamic he called RAM. And Tom saw that the motherboard was good.

Day 1

Then Tom said, “Let there be a hard drive to gather the data into one place, and let the floppy drive appear,” and it was so. Tom called the hard drive “C,” and the floppy he called “A.”

Day 2

Then Tom said, “Let there be communication lines.” And Tom separated analog and digital lines. And Tom said, “Let comm links sprout forth after its own kind, fiber optics connected to fiber optics, copper to copper, and wireless to wireless.” And Tom saw that it was good.

Day 3

Then Tom said, “Let there be an operating system to integrate all the functions of the computer. And let it be for allocation and initialization, diagnostics, and retrieval. And let it rule over the motherboard.” So Tom installed the operating system and named the operating system “Windows™.” And Tom saw that it was good.

Day 4

Then Tom said, “Let there be a SETUP program to set the defaults of the system.” So Tom installed the control panel onto the hard drive and made it accessible from the desktop.

Day 5

Then Tom said, “Let there be icons and shortcuts, file structures, and programs.” And he blessed them and said, “Be productive and multiply and fill the hard drive and the memory.” Then Tom said, “Let us install a User Interface through which the system can be managed exactly as he would do it.” So Tom installed Program Manager and set it up to rule the software. And Tom saw that it was good.

Day 6

So on the seventh day Tom finished setting up his computer. And he turned it on and it worked perfectly. So Tom sat down and enjoyed it on the seventh day.79

This rendition illustrates a number of points that have already been made as well as others that will be made in the next several sections of this commentary.80

Compartmentalization can also be seen in the example of a theatrical production. If someone came into a play late and asked the woman in the seat next to him how the play began, he would not expect her to reply with information concerning the construction of the set, the playwright’s experiences, or the casting of the players. This would not be an incorrect answer. It would simply be addressing something other than what was being asked. We must be careful not to make that same mistake with the Bible. If we superimpose this illustration on the cosmos, taking it as the play, science might be seen as addressing the questions about the set, the cast, and the script. Scripture is more interested in the play itself, even though God, the Producer/Director, is the link between the two and was involved on both ends.

It is not therefore appropriate to construe science as the enemy of the faith or of the text. Interestingly, even as many evangelicals have adopted this sort of antagonism toward science, they have delivered the agenda of the text over to scientific inquiry.81 It is not science that is the enemy, it is naturalism. The scientific endeavor by its very nature operates by means of what I would call an “atheistic premise”—that is, it tries to figure out the natural world without resorting to supernatural explanations.82 If we were to assume that something happened without God’s intervention, how would it have happened?

We operate this way in our lives all the time. When we cannot find a magazine, we assume that someone moved it, not that God somehow spirited it away. We rarely factor God directly into our cause-and-effect inferences as we go through the day. Scientists operate the same way, and if they did not do it, we would not call it science. This atheistic premise does not presume that scientists do not believe in God, it only explains how they go about their job.83 The proponent of a naturalist worldview, however, presumes there is no God involved in these processes and that science is all there is. The scientist qua scientist might hypothesize that if life as we know it were to arise from nonlife without God taking a form-imposing role, the scientific concept of evolution offers the best model. The proponent of naturalism says that God was not involved in creation, so evolutionary naturalism should be accepted and taught as truth.

Scientific Creationism took on a significant role in society because even as it declared science as the enemy, it used its own brand of theistic science to make sense of the Bible.84 It claims to take the Bible literally, yet attributes scientific sophistication to terms that could not possibly have had those meanings to the original audience or author.85 The alternative to Scientific Creationism is not to formulate Day-Age theories or to revert to understanding Genesis 1 as broadly figurative poetry, for these both still try to “make sense” of the Bible in reference to our scientific categories. We need to “make sense” of the Bible on its own terms.

It must be understood that the explanations given in the Original Meaning section are not offered as simply a literary reading of the text of Genesis 1. While there is no doubt that the account is characterized by literary artistry, I am not suggesting that the affirmations of the passage are merely to be taken with a literary grain of salt. I am suggesting that the face value of the account—that which is mutually understood by the author and his audience—is focused on God’s setting up a cosmos with carefully established functions.

At the same time, the case of Christianity against naturalism can be capably argued by proponents of intelligent design, such as Phillip Johnson,86 Hugh Ross,87 and Michael Behe.88 They need not engage the interpretation of the text of Genesis but can simply target the logic of the argumentation supporting naturalism. Noll laments that evangelicals who are interpreting the text are often defending the wrong thing.

Millions of evangelicals think they are defending the Bible by defending creation science, but in reality they are giving ultimate authority to the merely temporal, situated, and contextualized interpretations of the Bible that arose from the mania for science of the early nineteenth century.89

We need to defend the teaching of the text, not a scientific reconstruction of the text or statements that are read between the lines of the text. Our best theological, hermeneutical, and scientific minds need to work to forge a new consensus for the relationship between science and Scripture, as was done in the wake of the Copernican revolution, rather than sacrificing more Galileo-type martyrs on the altar of stone-rigid, quasi-scientific presuppositions dressed up as if they were the Word of God.

Theological problem: We have let culture/science set the parameters of how we view God working in the world.

Actively sustaining the cosmos. Is our view of God too integrated into a scientific worldview, or does he transcend it? In our society, even Christians struggle with how to view God as outside of and distinct from the natural processes or natural “laws” that define our “real” worldview. We find little room for the supernatural, and though we may affirm the existence of miracles, there is little that we identify as miraculous. Does God still hold the forces of chaos at bay as he sustains the functions of the cosmos, or have we drawn a scientific circle around God? D. A. Carson describes the philosophical options as involving an open universe, a closed universe, or a controlled universe:

An open universe is espoused by animism. The spirits control most things, and the appropriate thing for human beings to do is to appease the spirits so that they may do the things we want. Science is not possible because nothing is regular: the whims of the spirits are unpredictable, and even the sacrifices do not always work. In a closed universe, everything is explained by cause and effect at a purely material level. Science is possible; God is excluded. A modification of this model is espoused by deism. God set the whole thing up and established the principles of operation, but since then he has been rather removed from the scene, while he lets nature take its course. Science is possible, but there is little need to appeal to God, except for the initial act of creation.

The controlled universe reflected in the Bible, however, has God as both its creator and its sustainer/ruler. He creates in an ordered way, and sustains and rules it in an ordered way, so that science is possible; but he is not bound by what he has created, so he is at perfect liberty to do things another way, with the result that miracles are possible.90

In his book The Human Quest, Richard Bube discusses the sense in which God sustains the universe. We more easily think of God having set up natural laws to sustain the universe, but Bube’s view is more comparable to Carson’s third option. Here is his thesis:

The universe exists moment by moment only because of the creative and preserving power of God.

The emphasis of the . . . thesis is that everything that happens in the world is possible only because God is active at all times in maintaining and guiding the world. In a sense, then, this is a radically different perspective from the traditional one that pictures God as having created the world and its laws at some point in the past, after which they later became essentially self-sustaining except for God’s occasional intervention to cause something special.91

The theological term for this is providence, and it refers to the way God acts through all so-called natural processes, whether in creation, nature, or history. The scriptural premise can be seen in places such as Acts 17:28, “For in him we live and move and have our being.” Bube finds that even though people are not necessarily reluctant to accept this view, they often fail to grasp its implications. So, for instance, he asks focus groups, “What would happen to the world and us if God should suddenly ‘turn himself off?’ ” While some reply that “nothing would happen” or that there might be gradual deterioration, others opine that values like morality or love would disappear. Bube contends, however, that such responses assume that the world is far too independent of God or that he is too far removed from its operation. He suggests that the results would be far more dramatic.

We propose here that a full understanding of the nature of the interaction between God and the world permits only one answer. If God were to “turn himself off,” everything would cease to exist! Without God there are no laws, no world, no us; to attempt to distinguish between physical and spiritual in this case is impossible. Not only do we rely on God as the Creator at the beginning, as the Source of order and purpose in the world, as the personal Father who gives meaning to love and depth to personal relationships; we rely on God constantly for our very existence.92

I contend that the view proposed by Bube corresponds very closely to the ancient worldview, to the Bible’s teaching about God (esp. in Gen. 1), and to the implications of a well-informed theology today; yet we do not live or think this way. Instead, we have juxtaposed God and science so that God is used simply to fill in the gaps that science has left unexplained. This contributes to a constantly shrinking view of God.93 In contrast, Bube illustrates the totality of our dependence on God using the analogy of a television screen.

Personalities appear on the screen and interact with one another according to the laws of the world and of life. They love, they fight; if they step off buildings, they fall (barring children’s cartoons!); if they are cut, they bleed. But what happens if the plug of the set is pulled out? Do the laws of nature in the events on the television screen begin to fail? Do the characters begin to be less loving and considerate? No, when the power is removed—when the plug is pulled—the very source of existence is gone: the personalities on the screen in their life and story context simply cease to exist.94

Another way of pondering this is to think of the cosmos as a symphony orchestra performing a concert. In such an analogy, we would likely be inclined to think of God as the conductor. Bube’s thesis, I imagine, would posit God as the music. How radically would the adoption of such a view affect our perspective and our conversation?

All such phrases as “God intervenes in the natural order,” “God uses natural processes,” and “God works through natural law” are ruled out. The natural order exists only because God is constantly active in upholding it. God does not use natural processes as if they existed without him. God does not take advantage of natural laws to accomplish his will as if the laws existed without him. We see immediately why the question “Can God intervene in a world ruled by orderly laws?” is meaningless. There is no world ruled by orderly laws except that one constantly maintained in existence by the activity of God.95

Making something is a one-time act. But “creation” as the Bible understands it is a perpetual activity. As Van Till puts it, “if God were not at this very moment acting in the capacity of Creator, we would not at this very moment even exist.”96 Controlling the operation of something is an ongoing process. Our modern inclination to overemphasize the theology of Genesis in terms of God making things has allowed us to feel satisfied that our interpretation of Genesis is theologically sound. Turning Genesis 1 into a scientifically configured account of God making things is like taking your towel into the pool with you so you will have it handy when you want to use it. Its ability to be used as it was intended has been precluded by the very act that sought to give it practicality. Our scientific view of the cosmos has caused us to reduce the “Creator” role to the mere task of forming things. In contrast, Van Till presses the point that a biblical theology of God as Creator identifies him as Originator, Preserver, Governor, and Provider of the Creation.97 Our modern theology is more inclined to have him make something and be done with it.

The fact that we have, in this process, sent God to the corner of the cosmos so he will not get underfoot is particularly tragic. Chaos still threatens at all sides. It is not just the chaotic forces of nature (tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, volcanoes, tidal waves, and the like) that appear to rage out of control. International terrorism, nuclear arms available to irresponsible parties, ethnic cleansing, and political upheaval are all part of the chaos of our world. Social chaos reveals itself in unfettered abortion, school shootings, hate crimes, and the decline of morality. More than ever we need a theology that recognizes God’s role in holding in check the chaos of our world as he sustains the cosmos moment by moment.

What would change in our outlook on life if we took this issue seriously? Consider how it would affect our response to Stephen Jay Gould’s comment, “Science and religion should be equal, mutually respecting partners, each the master of its own domain, and with each domain vital to human life in a different way.”98

We have said that text and science are different things. That does not mean that God and nature are different things. If we see the world in terms of science and nature on one side and God on another, we are going to end up with a worldview problem. God will be a God of the gaps,99 filling in only where science cannot. We will end up as practical deists. We have said that science, by current definition, operates on an atheistic premise. That does not mean that nature operates apart from God.100

An excellent illustration of this can be found in the book of Esther, where circumstance takes center stage and God is not mentioned. The fact that circumstance is in focus, however, does not mean that circumstance is all there is. In contrast, if we truly understand Esther, it is not saying that there is no God at work, but neither is it saying that there is no circumstance. Instead, it insists that God works through the circumstance. The only proper view of circumstance is one that sees it riddled with God, or better, that there is no such thing as circumstance apart from God. The only way to understand how God works is to see circumstance as one of his agents. They are not mutually exclusive, and circumstance cannot be seen as independent of God or divorced from him for even a second. There is no such thing as circumstance apart from God.

Nature is much the same. In Esther, Haman had the problem that he saw only the circumstances, but he had no knowledge of the God behind them. His wife intimated that he was missing that important dimension (Est. 6:13); indeed, it was a fatal error. Those who hold a naturalistic worldview make the same mistake in that they only acknowledge the nature side of the equation. The book of Esther serves as an encouragement to those who cannot understand where their covenant God has gone. Where are the great deliverances of the past? Are the plagues, the parting of the sea, the manna, and the angel of the Lord striking down the enemy only things of the past? Where does God fit into the picture?

These are our questions today as we grapple with God’s role in our world. Is God’s hand seen only when there is something that can be called a miracle? Does God only act by intervention? The testimony of Genesis suggests otherwise. There is no nature apart from God. This is poignantly expressed in “Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

Earth’s crammed with heaven

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Science, when it accurately portrays nature, is describing the work of God. Whatever natural processes were involved in the origins of matter, God carried them out, and he did so with purpose. Sometimes, undoubtedly, nature was his agent. But he is not limited to the use of a single agent, and whatever he did through other agencies, science has no way of detecting. Because of this, science cannot offer us a complete picture; it can only offer explanations of the possible ways in which nature may have served as an agent of the work of God. Science asks different questions from what the text does, but it does not operate in a realm apart from God.

Our response to Gould, then, is that science and religion are not two separate coins to be kept in separate accounts in separate banks. They are rather two sides of the same coin, distinct though inseparable. In the opening scene of Thomas Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the two protagonists find a coin and are mystified that it keeps coming up heads. As many times as they flip it, it is always heads. When I first saw the play, I surmised that the coin actually had identical pictures on both sides, that there was nothing but heads. In fact, however, it did not; this was rather the first indication that they were in a world that was devoid of logic and reason—a world described philosophically as “absurd.” The same can be said of the naturalists, whose flip of the science/religion coin always comes up “science.” They deduce that the coin has science on both sides. In reality the repeated result of “science” as they flip the coin to find answers about existence only shows the nature of the world they have chosen.

As Christians our theology would be much improved if we could make a slight change in our terminology. Instead of proclaiming that “the cosmos was created by God” (using past tense as if the job is done), we should rather proclaim, “The cosmos is God’s creation.”101 We may thus lay claim to the dynamic role of God in a perpetual act of creation. Additionally, we may see Genesis 1 not as “the story of creation” but as the beginning of the “Story of the Creator.”102

God and time.

Master of time. What is the significance of God as the creator of time? Time was part of a cosmos that was judged as good; yet, because death is in the system, we often consider time an enemy. Even a casual glance at the birthday-card section at the local supermarket shows the recognition of the negative aspects connected with the relentless march of time. We mark the passing of personal time with mixtures of celebration and remorse. Celebration comes when we reach age sixteen and can drive, or when we reach twenty-one and can be considered full-fledged adults. Comedians joke about being perpetually thirty-nine, and during the 1960s the young generation was advised not to trust anyone over thirty. By the time we reach forty or fifty, the black balloons begin showing up. On a social level, each new year is observed as time ticks on, and the changeover of a millennium takes on epic proportions. Time passes whether we want it to or not, forming the parameters of our existence and taking its toll.

On the other side of the ledger, each of us has probably had the sensation of being awakened from a deep sleep and experiencing in our grogginess the total disorientation that comes from not being able to identify the day or time. We find it difficult to carry on existence in the absence of time indicators. Prisoners in POW camps mark the days of their captivity in any way available to them so as not to lose some sense of orientation in time. If the conditions of imprisonment do not afford the ability to observe whether it is day or night, the delivery of meals can become a marker. We need to feel oriented in time.

For good or ill, then, time is our reality. Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 explores this reality as it enumerates the “times” of life. In the world that God has created “under the sun,” we must learn to accept the good times and the bad times as coming from the hand of God, for even the bad times can enrich us as God’s people (Eccl. 7:14). And although he has locked us in time for now, he has set eternity in our hearts (3:11).

Openness of God. We experience God in time. Many of God’s attributes have their reference point in time. For example, faithfulness and patience can only operate within time. As a result, God interacts with us in time. This is an obvious conclusion from the definition of time as a dimension in which cause and effect takes place.103 Christian theologians throughout history have generally seen God’s interactions with us in time as another example of his condescending to our humanity. More recently, however, some have postulated a theology referred to as the “Openness of God,” which considers God to be fully integrated in time and, to some extent, limited by it.

Instead of perceiving the entire course of human existence in one timeless moment, God comes to know events as they take place. He learns something from what transpires. We call this position the “open view of God” because it regards God as receptive to new experiences and as flexible in the way he works toward his objectives in the world. Since it sees God as dependent on the world in certain respects, the open view of God differs from much conventional theology.104

This theology is supported by deriving logical conclusions from commonplace observations about God and his interaction with the world.

An action makes a difference. It brings about something that would not otherwise exist. In the case of specific acts, it brings about something that did not previously exist. To say that God acts, therefore, means that it makes sense to use the words before and after when we talk about him. God makes decisions, and then he acts. He decides before he acts, he acts after he decides. This is so simple that it sounds trivial, but it points to a fundamental truth about God. Not only does he bring about change, but in a significant sense God himself experiences change. After God acts, the universe is different and God’s experience of the universe is different. The concept of divine action thus involves divine temporality. Time is real for God.105

Proponents claim that only this perspective allows God to react to human choices as the Bible suggests he does. There remain some serious drawbacks to this position, however, that make it unacceptable. Not only is it difficult to maintain a robust view of God’s foreknowledge, but there are also philosophical issues that mitigate against placing God so firmly in time. In refuting this view, D. A. Carson, for instance, contends that since our notions of time are dependent on the motions of bodies in the universe and since God created the universe, God must stand outside of both time and the universe on which it depends and be independent of them.106

Carson’s assertions reflect current scientific thought with regard to time. In the late 1960s, three astrophysicists, Stephen Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose, working from the implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity, deduced that “space and time must have originated in the same cosmic bang that brought matter and energy into existence.”107 If time had a beginning, God cannot be within it, for he existed before it. This does not imply that God dwelt in a timeless eternity before his creation of our cosmos (as Augustine maintained), because God’s activity even before our cosmos existed implies sequence and cause and effect. Hugh Ross therefore posits a multidimensional time in which God exists as opposed to the singular dimension of time to which we are limited.

If time were two dimensional, for example, both a time length and a time width would be possible. Time would expand from a line into a plane. In a plane of time, an infinite number of lines running in an infinite number of directions would be possible.108

Ross’s suggestion offers just one way of understanding how God may transcend our time concepts, but even this expanded version may be overly restrictive. We must at times admit that we simply do not have enough categories or a broad enough understanding of the possibilities to figure out how to define God’s existence.

What does Genesis 1 have to contribute to this discussion? It does not assert God’s creation of time as an abstraction any more than it deals with physicists’ light. It does not consider time a dimension and is not concerned with the conditions of God’s independent existence. God’s creation of time in Genesis 1:3–5 affirms only that time is set up to function in the cosmos based on the alternating periods of light and dark that characterize our existence. It is the creation of time for us and offers no statement beyond that.

Breakout Points

THE TEXT OFTEN touches on, rather than teaches on, certain issues. These arise in our minds as we read the text, but we discover that the text offers no information about them. In that sense, they constitute digressions from the text. They should not be the focus of an expository sermon or Bible-study lesson in that they do not represent the focus of the text; nevertheless, they can offer opportunities for fruitful discussion concerning our theology or worldview. I will address these as “breakout points” so as to distinguish them from the Contemporary Significance sections that seek to address issues that the text consciously addresses. These can be nothing more than my reflections, for the text of Genesis has nothing normative to say about them.

For example, in this passage our thoughts could easily wander to the question of our stewardship of time. If time is one of the functions that God has set up in this world of ours, perhaps we should consider carefully the best ways to use our time. In the foreword of Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, he compares the apocalyptic visions of George Orwell (1984) to those of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). One of the comparisons speaks to the issue at hand: “In 1984 . . . people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”109

Our time is filled with those things we love. In the process we can easily lose sight of important things such as service, accountability, and duty, which commend themselves as more responsible discharges of the valuable commodity of time. In his assessment of the role of television in American society, Postman notes that it has “made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.”110 This has inculcated in us an unquenchable lust to be entertained, and we are happy to contribute large proportions of our time to the quest. Postman’s conclusion holds little optimism as it looks ahead to the fate we have chosen for ourselves.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.111