A Quote from Andy Crouch
It is hard to
reconcile the definiteness of the Genesis creation stories, where the
first human beings are birthed with the same suddenness as a human
baby, with the story told by archaeologists and anthropologists,
Genesis 1 certainly doesn't require us to think in terms of
twenty-four-hour “days,” since the first two “days” are
completed before the sun or earth are even created. But its hard to
read Genesis 2, where the Creator bends down one day and forms a man
in his own image from the clay, without feeling some dissonance with
the archaeological record, in which human history seems to fade in,
ever so gradually, from the shadows of time. When and whereas there
an Adam and an Eve? Isn't the history of human culture both more
complicated and less sudden than Genesis would have us believe?
I am not personally
persuaded by the valiant efforts Bible-believing Christians have made
to fit every detail of the Genesis creation stories into the story
told by modern cosmology and archaeology. Yet I am not sure the
biblical writers would have been terribly troubled by the failings of
Genesis 1-11 as literal cosmological history. The Garden of Eden,
after all, is described as being at an intersection of four rivers
that ancient people knew had no interaction. Genesis's “primordial
story”--the arc from Garden to Babel—needs to be read not in the
context of modern judgments of archaeological evidence that the
biblical writers knew nothing of, but in the context of ancient
creation myths that the biblical writers were keen to counter with
their own version of the story.
Even so, the stories
in Genesis 1-11 strike me and many well-informed readers as much more
compatible with our modern understandings of cosmic and human
beginnings than most of the creation myths that were circulating in
the ancient Near East at the same time. There are rough parallels
between the sequence of days in Genesis 1 and our best guess at the
gradual evolution in the universe of light, planets, plants and more
complex creatures, with humanity coming very late in the game.
Genesis 2 does no claim, like some other ancient religions, that
humanity is a separate kind of being from the rest of creation, the
offspring of the gods. Instead, we are made from dust—made of the
same stuff as the world around us. This too turns out to be
surprisingly and, for many ancient people, counterintuitively true…
There is something
in us that cannot be reduced to dust—a creative spirit that has the
capacity for speech and meaning, in short, for culture. Genesis
suggests that this cultural creativity, by which we recognize human
beings wherever in time or space we find their traces, is rooted in
something just as real as our material being. From Genesis 1 we learn
that the world is the work of a Creator, already part of a creative
society (“Let us make humankind in our image”) that seeks to
bring into being a beautiful, ordered, meaningful world. From Genesis
2 we learn that our creative spirit did not simply emerge from the
dust but was breathed into us by the same Spirit that originally
hovered over the dark, informationless chaos, speaking a sudden and
decisive word that set creation in motion.
To be sure, we don't
“learn” these things from Genesis 1 or 2 in the same way that we
can “learn” about the big bang from studying data produced by
radio telescopes. Then again, there are many things we cannot “learn”
in that way. The most important things in our life are learned by
trust, not by deduction from experiment.
With their
primordial story, the chapters of Genesis 1-11 already stand apart
from what follows in Genesis 12 and beyond in their form, style and
content. They are less a finely documented history than a story that
invites our trust. In this way they are very much like the other
bookend of the Bible, the book of Revelation—also a story that
stands outside recorded human history, offering us a possible vision
of the cosmos's ultimate destination, something we will never be able
to attain through investigation alone. Are these two bookend stories
about beginnings and endings to be trusted? I believe they are. If
there is some way, in the new heaven and new earth, to have access to
the whole story of this wonderful broken universe, I will not be
surprised if I find that the biblical authors missed some of the
details about how God created the universe and the human race. But I
am confident I will not feel in any way deceived by them—indeed, I
believe I will be unspeakably grateful that, prompted by the Holy
Spirit, they told stories that made the best possible sense of the
world.
And my reason for
extending this level of trust has much to do with the books between
the bookends—the much more historically accessible and verifiable
story of the people of Israel, their exodus from bondage from Egypt
and the eventual arrival of a man who claimed to fulfill all of
Israel's original promise. This story, which makes a central claim to
history especially at its most radical point, the resurrection of
Jesus from the dead, can be tested; it has proven it can be thrusted;
and it gives me confidence that the bookends, no less than the book,
say something uniquely true about our beginnings, and our ending.
From: Culture
Making, by Andy Crouch
(This chapter is
somewhat of a detour in his discussion of culture in scripture. He
titles the chapter “Interlude—The Primordial Story”)
