A More Helpful Way to Read the Creation Story
How did the world come into being? This is a question that humanity has been wrestling with for our entire history on this planet. It’s natural for us to wonder where we came from. And not just about the origin of one of us, but the origins of all of us—of everything!
To answer this question, Christians turn to the beginning of the Bible, to the book of Genesis. And there, in the very first line in all of Scripture, it says, “In the beginning…”
That sounds like a good place to start.
However, what comes after those three words has become the subject of some of the biggest debates between different streams of the Church, between biblical scholars, and between the Church and the scientific community. Why? Because they all want to know what the creation account in Genesis 1-2 is actually saying about the world, its creation, and our place in it as people. And if we can understand that, then maybe we can understand the purpose and value of our world.
Maybe we can even understand our own worth a little better.
Is It Literal or Figurative?
Some people read the creation account and interpret it literally, meaning that they believe Genesis 1-2 gives a literal (or mostly literal) line-by-line description of how God created everything. The most literal views hold to a literal 6-day creation, at which most of the scientific community scoffs. And the claims by literalist readers continue to build from there.
On the other side of the interpretation aisle are those who believe that the creation account was entirely symbolic. Some say Adam and Eve were not historical people but were instead characters created to symbolize all of humanity. Others will argue that each “day” of creation represented long undetermined amounts of time during which creation took place and continued to develop–even over millions of years.
And the debate goes on and on with no real end in sight.
A big part of why this has led to such serious debates is because the original Hebrew text of Genesis is poetic, but not typical Hebrew poetry. It’s also a narrative but not your typical Hebrew prose. It’s a mixture of recognizable but unusual Hebrew literary genres and styles. And if we’re going to take reading and understanding the Bible seriously, we have to wrestle honestly with the genre of literature we’re reading.
So what do we do with this? How can we understand what the Bible is actually telling us about the world, its creation, and our place in it as people? Which side do we take in the debate? Can we ever hope to understand what Genesis is trying to tell us?
Let’s try to think about this in a different way. The creation account is not a purely literal historical account. But it’s also not just a work of fiction.
It’s a story.
Think about the last time you told a story about your life to someone. Did you give a perfect historical record of everything that was going on in your life, about others involved, or about what was happening in the environment around you? Of course not! That would be stale and not worth telling. If you tried to tell the story with that level of factual accuracy, the reason you were telling the story in the first place would disappear.
Recent research in neuroscience shows that the human brain is wired for story. Our minds take all the information that comes our way and organize it into some form of narrative so we can remember it better. For example:
Ticket. Bicycle. Bear.
Your mind probably immediately tried to sort and organize those three random and unrelated words into some form of narrative that makes sense. That’s because your brain is wired for story.
Whenever we tell a story, it’s never a static, perfect, or neutral recounting of events, exactly as they took place. The story is told from our perspective, based on our experiences, emotions, and knowledge we had at the time. We sometimes embellish certain aspects for effect. Other times, we change how we tell the story—such as leaving out details, emphasizing one part over another, or even changing the order of details depending on the setting or situation we’re in. None of this makes the story I’m telling any less true; it simply means that I’m telling a story to communicate something more than a list of factual details about a historical event to you--something deeper for you to connect with.
You see, I think that we’re going about this debate between a literal or figurative reading of Genesis 1-2 all wrong! I think both sides are approaching the creation account from the wrong starting point because the Bible is not a modern, Western fact book that gives us tidy little bullet points in a classroom presentation. It’s an ancient Eastern book, whose authors intentionally hid truth within the text so that you had to ask questions and wrestle with it to get to the truth. And for a person in the ancient Eastern world, the journey to discovering truth was just as important as the truth itself.
I believe that the author of Genesis is actually telling a story. It probably involves real historical details, but they’re not trying to provide a purely historical account. The author is telling a creative story, using some factual details, to communicate truth. And that truth is hidden in the text for us to find. But the text leans heavily on the side of poetry, so we have some digging to do to find it.
I’m not saying that the events did not happen. I’m also not saying that people should stop researching the text to figure out if it does provide for a literal 6-day creation. I’m just saying that these are secondary details that we’ve been fighting over for far too long. And these arguments may be blinding us to what the author could actually be trying to tell us!
The main purpose behind the biblical creation story is to teach us about who God is, what he’s like, and who we are as his created people.
If we approach reading Genesis 1-2 this way, then we will soon realize how insignificant all those debates over secondary issues and claims are in comparison to the beauty and wonder of seeing ourselves, those around us, our world, and even God rightly!
In part 2 of this series, we’ll take a look at how reading the creation story this way completely changes how we see God, but more importantly, how it sets the stage for the rest of the story of Scripture!