First Creation Story 10/13/09

Adult Study: Myths of Origins
Notes from Session 1 (Oct 13, 2009)

1) What is a Myth?
     a. An academic definition: stories that are not necessarily true that explain the gods, the world, and being human.
     b. My working definition for this series: “Myths are historical fictions used to convey theological truths.”

2) Bible Bookends, Movement, Structure, and Content
The structure of the Bible can be depicted as a movement from Creation to Re-Creation. Along the way, the Bible offers a variety of different types of writing – all serving the purpose of advancing God’s historical work to save the world by restoring it to its created state.

Click “here” to see my visual aid to the discussion that follows. (Image opens in a new window.)

Bookends
The Bible is a collection of books. At each end, it has a “bookend.”
The left bookend is Genesis 1. In Genesis 1, the Bible opens with God creating the world.
The right bookend is Revelation 19. In Revelation 19, the Bible closes with God re-creating the world.

Movement
The Fall (Genesis 2-3), which follows immediately upon God’s creation, corrupts God’s work.
The rest of the Bible recounts a particular history. It is the history of God’s saving work.
So, think of the Bible as the record, the history, of God acting to save the world and restore it.

Structure
From a Christian perspective – that is, from a post-Jesus, or a post-Easter perspective – all of the Old Testament story points to and leads to Jesus. That is, all human history points to Jesus as the incarnation of God’s Word and Will in the world. (Only Christians think this way: it is what defines us.)

Also, from a Christian perspective, all of history since Christ is the history of God’s Word and Will expanding into and transforming the world, leading toward the re-creation of the Garden of Eden. (Again, only Christians think this way: it defines us.)

Content
The Hebrew Scriptures (what we call “Old Testament”) are a collection of books providing a variety of literature: myths, stories, poems, histories, songs, case law, law, philosophy, prophecy, and apocalypse. The Christian Scriptures (what we call “New Testament”) are a collection of books and letters offering: accounts of Jesus’ life and death, formal (what today would be “academic”) theology, practical theology (examples of applying formal theology to specific situations – spiritual case studies), history of the earliest church movement, and apocalypse.

How to Approach the Bible
The problem with reading the Bible accurately is that you have to know what kind of material you are reading. If you are reading a story (for example, the story Jonah and the Whale), it’s a mistake to read it as history. A poem (say, the Song of Solomon) requires a different way of reading than does a section of case law from Leviticus. So we have to use our brains when we come to the Bible.

This is no different than what you do every day. You don’t read a biography of John Adams the same way you read a thriller by John Grisham. And you don’t read a prose novel by Grisham the way you read a book of poetry by Sylvia Plath. For that matter, if you read a popular thriller by Grisham, you bring a different mindset than you’d bring to a “classical” novel by William Faulkner.

So, too, with the Bible: We don’t want to approach the varieties of material in it with one mindset; we want to do justice to the material by understanding what kind of material we are looking at, and approaching that material with the right set of mental lenses engaged.

The Bible is a long, long conversation about what God is doing in the world. The Old Testament spans over a thousand years of working and re-working the books that make it up. The New Testament spans about 100 years of working out the story of Jesus and the early church.

Bible Study
Since Jesus, Christians have been reflecting on and reacting to the whole biblical message. You and I are invited to join that conversation.

Those among us who are Congregationalists believe that each one of us has a direct, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We don’t recognize any human authority who can tell us what to believe and how to practice our faith.

Those among us who are Methodists are heirs to a well-established “class” tradition that encourages individuals to get personally involved in reading and studying the Bible so that the truth of Scripture can be personally validated.

Both Congregationalists and Methodists trust the Holy Spirit to guide and instruct us as we read God’s Word and model ourselves after Jesus. But that only works if we are engaged in a conversation with the Word of God. It does not work if we do not dig into God’s half of the conversation – the Bible.

We gather in churches so that we can listen and respond to God and Christ in a community of people also engaged in listening and responding to God and Christ, and so that we can share with one another what we have heard and seen of God in the world. That enriches all of us.

So come to listen to God’s Word, share your insights and experiences, and learn from others.

3) The Sequence of Creation in Genesis 1
According to the first words of the Bible, at the very beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was “without form” and “void.” And the Spirit of God hovered (“passed to and fro”) over “the face of the deep.”

This language is painting a picture. Read it carefully and you will see that in the ancient Hebrew sense of things, at the beginning was water – the deep. God created the world out of that cosmic ocean through a series of actions. Here are the days of Creation as recorded in Genesis 1:

Day 1: God separated the Light from the Dark and called the Light “day” and the Dark “night”.
Day 2: God created a “firmament” – a sky barrier – to separate the waters above the firmament from the waters below the firmament.
Day 3: God caused the water below the firmament to withdraw so dry land could appear. And God called the dry land “earth,” and the waters “sea.”
Day 4: God created the sun, moon and stars and set them in the firmament to rule the day and the night.
Day 5: God created the birds, fish, and creeping land creatures.
Day 6: God created the animals. God created “man” in his image, male and female.
Day 7: God rested, thereby creating Sabbath.

Discussions
     1. 7 Days of Creation     We discussed the fact that the Hebrews who wrote this story never considered it literal history, and no rabbi or Jewish scholar would argue that God literally created the world in 7 24-hour periods. They wouldn’t even go along with the “each day is like a thousand years to God” approach of some Christians. Rather, the Hebrews were interested in asserting that God created the world, and they were interested in the question of why God created the world. The how and how long didn’t interest them.

     2. Poetic Structure     We also discussed the parallelism in the first 6 days of creation.
          a. Note that God separates light from dark on day 1, but creates the sun, moon, and stars on day 4.
          b. God creates the firmament to encapsulate the waters below the firmament in preparation for creating a “space” which we call the sky, on day 2, then creates birds of the air and fish for the waters on day 5.
          c. God creates the dry land and vegetation on day 3, then fills the earth with animals and human beings on day 6.
          d. Note also that on the first 3 days God creates by “fiat.” That means, all God has to do is say “Let there be…” and what he speaks blinks into existence. But on the second 3 days, God says what he wants, then goes out and “makes” them and “places” or “causes” them to go where he wants them. So the second set of actions involves “God’s work” while the first set of actions only require “God’s declaration.”

In all of this we see a kind of parallel structure between the first 3 days and the second 3 days. In each instance we can correlate an “action” by God in the second 3 days that fulfills and completes the “declaration” of God in the first 3 days.

That kind of parallelism is an ancient Hebrew method of emphasizing something important. In this instance, the emphasis is on God’s creative act: God creates light and dark, then sun & moon; God creates a sky in the midst of water, then birds to fly in it and fish to swim in it; God creates dry land and vegetation, then animals and humans to walk it. The focus is on God creating, not the 7 days it took to create the world .

3. Man
We discussed the implication of God creating “man.” “Man” is not a Hebrew word, but an English equivalent, intended to indicate “humanity” or “humankind.” It is gender-neutral in Hebrew, and is meant to be in English, too, though it has lost that character in recent decades. And that’s good, because in human culture thinking of men and women as “man” has tended to erase “woman” as an independent, active person with the full integrity of a created being. However, Genesis 1 does not erase woman, nor cause her to be absorbed into man. Rather, God created humankind in His image, male and female He created them.

4. Created in God’s Image
We discussed the biblical statement that humankind was created in God’s image. What is that image? I suggested three conceptions of what it means to be created in the “image of God” advanced by various theologians:
     a. we have the Spirit of God breathed into us, giving us a status different from any other created thing;
     b. we have imagination, allowing us, like God, to imagine something that doesn’t exist and to imagine a means to bring it into existence; and,
     c. we have the ability to create and destroy, as does God. Our challenge is to know when and how to destroy and create in order to build up the earth, rather than tear it down.

5. Dominion
That fed into a discussion on humankind being given “dominion” over the earth and the things in it. Because dominion has often led to abuse, some are leery of the notion that we have dominion. But, in fact we do have the ability to dominate the world, and our responsibility is to use our god-like powers to imagine, destroy, and create in good ways.

We also touched on a range of other topics and issues.

4) How the Cosmos looked to the Ancient Hebrews
Click “here” to see my clumsy sketch of how the cosmos was conceived by the ancient Hebrews (and a lot of other ancient peoples, too). This is a representation of the world as Genesis 1 describes it having been created by God.

 

If you were in attendance, and want to add to my outline of our meeting and discussions – especially if something in particular stood out or occurred to you in the course of the evening - please use the comment box (below) to share your viewpoint. Thanks!