Staying Faithful to Genesis 1

Richard Mouw: Staying Faithful to Genesis 1

... I don’t mean to be flippant about the issues. How we understand the Bible’s authority in all areas of life, including scientific investigation, is a supremely imporant topic. But on these particular issues, the notion of staying faithful to the orthodoxy of the past simply does not ring true. The fact is that those defending a “literal” Genesis on age-of-the-earth issues are more rigid than those 19th century stalwarts—Hodge, Warfield, Kuyper, Bavinck—whose theological formulations they typically hold up as the benchmarks of Reformed orthodoxy.

While I was reviewing the discussions of the present-day controversies, I came across a report of a survey of preachers about how they treat the first chapter of Genesis. The findings were instructive. It turns out that pastors who take a more literal approach to the creation account  preach on it much less than those who do not hold to a literal interpretation. There is a lesson there. The literalists hold to a “scientifically accurate” Genesis 1 in which, it turns out, they can’t really find much to preach about. ...

Comments

[John]

In a now multi-cultural world, and one in which two thirds of the worlds human population is not Christian, why just focus on the Genesis "creation" story, and the usual dim-witted reductionist interpretations of it.

There are quite literally hundreds of "creation" stories now available to anyone with an internet connection. Stories from every known culture, and time and place. All of which are our now common inheritance.

And what if the real purpose of "creation" stories is NOT to explain how human beings, and the world altogether came to be.

But to provide a means by which we can transcend our dreadful fear saturated mortal seriousness, by providing a means to enter into an enchanted open-ended psychic relationship to everything.

Such enchantment was the nature of traditional entirely oral story-telling.