Category: Genesis

Luke records these words of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke 10:21, “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned and have revealed them to infants.  Yes, Father, because this was Your good pleasure.”

Christ applies this to the message of the gospel that the seventy have brought to Israel.  The wise rejected the gospel.  The simple believed it.  But even among those simple persons who hear the gospel and believe, Christ’s words ring true.  The simple, those who approach with a child-like faith have an easier time understanding the basic truths of scripture than the wise.

There are thousands of simple Christians who over the last two thousand years have opened their Bibles to Genesis 1 and have gloried over the work that God did there in that passage. Unless their leaders had taught them differently they had no reason to question the glory that is revealed in that passage.  Right there, in the very first words of scripture, God proclaimed the mighty works that he had done. The simplest fool had access to the knowledge of these great works. We rejoice and praise God that he has given this faith to these infants.

But God hides this truth from the wise.  Even the wisest Christians such as Augustine had a hard time simply accepting the propositions that Genesis 1 proclaims.  Today, wise men such as N.T. Wright, Robert Godfrey, and Kevin Vanhoozer have the same difficulty.  This is amazing since it is hidden in plain sight, in a very simple record.  The words God gives are easily accessible.   They are hard to understand relative to our ability to qualify and quantify what God is actually doing. It’s hard to understand what God is doing scientifically.  They are not hard to understand in the sense that Genesis 1 is full of clear propositions that refer to specific works of God.

This is truly amazing. God gives simple Christians a better understanding of Genesis 1 than the wisest Christians of our age.

(Full disclosure, I believe that Genesis 1 is history. It is literary history but this doesn’t mean that it is not describing a situation, which we could recognize if we were there during the 6 days of Creation.)

Vanhoozer wants to argue for “theological literality.” He means that Genesis 1 should me read literarily as well as literally. We need to read Genesis 1 as literature teaching us theological truths about God. Augustine and Calvin read Genesis 1 in this way.  They both looked at the text and not only read the actual words but found in those words something of deeper significance. They found the all-sovereign God, who has almighty power to create the world through his word.

Vanhoozer takes another step.  This means that  Creationists who are trying to read this passage literally, that is, emphasizing the fact that each part of the passage has a historical referent are looking at this passage the wrong way.  They are not enjoying and dwelling in the literary nature of the text. They are treating the biblical statements as scientifically verifiable statements.

I agree. To an extent.  We have a false dichotomy in our society today.  Literal is set against literary.  We forget that writing history is a literary venture.  More importantly, we forget that the Bible is a type of literature.  We need to re-discover the world of internal biblical symbolism.  God is telling a story that is rich in detail and color.  We need to see how the stories of the Bible develop, as well as discovering the themes that are embedded in those stories.  When we do so it enriches our reading of the whole Bible.   The Bible is not science, it is literature.

At the same time, Vanhoozer exercises the folly of modern theology.  He thinks that he can jump from a literary hermeneutic to a denial of the historical nature of the days of Genesis.  This is his quantum leap. He moves from a literary reading to the possibility fo denying a historical reading (a phenomenological reading).  We can read Genesis 1 as a 6-day event but he argues that this is an unimportant doctrine.  He values other interpretations as well, as long as they emphasize the literary nature of Genesis 1. The important doctrine is the doctrine of “creation out of nothing” and the “sovereignty of God.”

He believes that this hermeneutic will not affect the reading of the rest of scripture. Unfortunately, the historical details of Genesis 1 have just become a 3rd order doctrine.  This won’t affect the rest of scripture? The conclusion I come to is that as long as one can find a literary explanation for the passage, the historical details are up for discussion. When we study the gospels, we can appreciate their high literary structure.  Does this mean that their historical nature may be questioned?

We could imagine that Vanhoozer would say that the important thing in the gospels is that Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification.  Therefore, we don’t  need to worry if people deny that he was a Jew.  We don’t need to worry whether Pontius Pilate was a real person.  The 12 disciples of Jesus are symbolically significant. Whether he actually had 12 disciples? We don’t know.

Vanhoozer foolishly separates doctrine from history.  He becomes just like the men he is arguing against.  Creationists often deconstruct the text to one important element; scientifically verifiable facts.  Vanhoozer deconstructs the text to his favorite element: “theological literality.”  He loses the fullness of a text that is both historical and yet is designed by God in order to beautify the internal structure of the story of scripture. He fails to fully appreciate the theological literality of the Genesis text.

“If one argues, on whatever grounds, that the long life spans of the patriarchs are impossible or that the narratives themselves report nonhistorical, secondary episodes, then clearly one cannot say anything very meaningful about either chronology or history.  To reject the only data available is to reject any realistic hope of reconstructing early Hebrew history.  In line with the historiographical principles followed in this book, the biblical record stands on its own merits unless there are unassailable external factors that militate against it.” (Merril 96)

For the greater part, I agree with this quote by Eugene H. Merril.  I would argue that “unassailable external factors” are not really a problem.  Perhaps we will find a better text of scripture at some point, but that is a matter of the biblical record itself, not “unassailable external factors.” However, he is right.  We will lose history if we question the bare “facts” that are given in scripture.

Yet Merril has already undermined his own position. Concerning the genealogy from Shem to  Abraham, Merril says, “Clearly, Shem preceded Abram by many more years than a strict reading will permit.” (Merril 43) He gives two reasons. The first reason: Abram lived to a good old age of 175.  If he had been aware that Shem lived to 600, this would not be said.  The 2nd reason is that there would not have been enough time for people to lose the fear of God. He gives these reasons so that he can question the numbers given in Genesis 11.

These are not “unassailable” external factors. In Genesis 6, God said “his days shall be 120,” usually understood to mean that man’s life will be limited to 120 years.  It takes a while for this to come into effect.  Abraham could have been happy for 175 years in light of this truth.  Besides he could have been comparing himself to his contemporaries.  Further, Moses is probably writing or editing this for an audience that doesn’t live that long anymore either.  They don’t live near as long as Abraham did.  They would see an Abraham that had definitely been blessed with a relatively long life.

As for the question of people losing their fear of God so quickly, this does not seem to be that uncommon in the history of God’s people.  We need only think of the book of Judges, where the people repeatedly fall away every forty years or so.  We can think of Adam, where the next generation is involved in fratricide.

Besides, there is evidence that the fear of God is not completely gone.  Melchizedek is a God-fearer in Genesis 14.  Abraham tells Abimelech “there is no fear of God in this place,” which suggests there were other places that might have had some fear of God left.  Merril makes a huge assumption when he says everybody has lost the fear of God. It is an assumption based on silence, not the witness of scripture.

The greatest foolishness is that Merril has already undermined biblical chronology before he starts.  He stands firm on the great ages and the events that surround the patriarchs, but he has undermined that position before he got there.  He has questioned the ages given to the men of the genealogy of Genesis 11.