Beginnings: Seven Days?

The first of my theological reflections. I don’t know how many of you will find this useful, it may not be to everyone’s interest. My posts will be a mixture of news, reflections, theology and random stuff so if these next few posts are not really your thing please stick with me!

Genesis 1 : overcoming hang-ups

Having studied this passage in quite a bit of depth over the past few years, its strikes me as strange how we miss the point of this first chapter of the whole Bible. It is actually an incredible piece of poetry.

Yes -  I believe it is divinely inspired and that it is why it is so powerful. But too often we are guilty of de-valuing this and making it into a modernist document which suits our post-enlightenment worldview, when in fact it is an ancient Mesopotamian poem written by people with a completely different worldview, and points us towards theological rather than scientific truth. Before I get to what I really want to say in my next post, I want to deal with an obvious hang-up. Which is the 7-day creation. The reason I think this is important to highlight is that if we feel we have to take the 7 days literally then we immediately have to reject much scientific study on the age of the universe and already we have a seemingly insurmountable leap of faith to make to engage with the text.

So, let me make this really clear: the focus of Genesis 1 is not on the how, but the who. I am more than happy to leave the how to the scientists, as in my view, science is the discovery of God’s creation. If by faith you want to believe in 7 literal days then that’s fine with me. If on the other hand you want to take the 7 days as metaphorical, then that’s also fine.  The Bible is packed with both historical narrative and incredible poetry and metaphor. Sometimes metaphor is the only way something incredibly complex, like the origins of the universe ,can be explained simply to all peoples.  The tragedy is when we insist on making the Bible a scientific  book rather than the astounding story of God and his dealings with his people through history. There are some Christians who are insisting that a literal 7-day creationism is a core doctrine of the Christian faith and as a result are campaigning for this to be taught in schools etc. I think this often prevents intelligent dialogue between the faith community and the science community, and it’s all because we view an ancient creation poem, packed full of awesome revelation about God, through our Western lens which likes to treat every single part of the bible as literal. The problem is much of the Bible is poetry and metaphor, becuase that’s the only way our finite minds can begin to describe the infinite. We have no problem with thinking the phrase ‘God is our rock’ as a metaphor. If we take it literally then we would be animists. But many of us feel uncomfortable that the Bible could possibly start with poetic imagery and metaphor as our worldview insists that we start with hard scientific facts.

Let’s consider this from another perspective. Suppose God revealed the secret of how he made the universe to an ancient Mesopotamian author/poet – and there were pages upon pages and books upon books of revelation written down and then those books became libraries and libraries became warehouses- and even then this was just the tip of the iceberg.  How could this simply be represented to all people of all ages and generations? Perhaps this could be best represented by an awesome poem which focused on the character of God and summarised the creation into a simple story, millions of years represented by 7 days. Not the last word on the subject  (this would be a ridiculous attempt to limit all of the divine creative genius to a few hundred words) but a theological framework for later people to explore, to discover and wonder at the complexity of the design and beauty and order found in the natural world, for scientists and biologists and zoologists and marine biologists and physicists and astronomists and chemists and anthropologists to spend centuries just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding the unfathomable mysteries of the universe which are stored up in the heart of God.

I hope this may help you to relax a bit and  enable you to receive the incredible revelation of Genesis 1 which I will proceed to comment on in my next few posts.