Reading Genesis like the Ancients

It’s always good to try to understand the worldview and culture of the original audience of scripture. It is an important and valuable tool in interpreting the Bible. It can be of great value in developing an appropriate  and plausible interpretation of the Bible. Notice,  I didn’t say correct interpretation -that is much harder to achieve, and  we always need to be humble about what we claim about God.

Sometimes it seems fairly easy. We know that in ancient world  multiple wives were the norm and thus not the scandal ( for most Westerners) that would be today.   Or to understandthat pseudonymuswriting was acceptable in the ancient world. It was not a problem to write something as Paul’s disciple and to put Paul’s name on it. It’s  also important to understand that just because something occurred in ancient times doesn’t make it right. As one of my professors used to say, ” It may not be right but it’s true.”

Other times we can know something about beliefs in the ancient world but have a hard time with the concept. For example:

In the ancient world the sky was a dome that supported the home of the gods and also was the place where water was stored. When it rained, the shutters in the dome opened up and rain fell. ( Gen 1:6-8 and Gen 7:11) See this article at BioLogos for a drawing that shows how ancient people viewed the world.

This is a very different way of imagining the cosmos than most of us have. I have looked for the dome, and I can’t see it.  I’ve stared up at the sky on a summer day and tried to see a dome. I’ve gazed into the heavens at night and tried to see a dome. I thought it would be like that picture where you either see a vase or two faces.  I thought if looked long enough and I would see it.  But I can’t. I am a product of my times and our scientific world view. I can’t view the heavens like the ancient Jews.

So try as I might I simply don’t see the world as the ancients did. The best I can hope for is some level of understanding and recognition that my interpretive framework is different than theirs. Now this doesn’t mean that the texts are uninterpretable.  It does mean I need to be careful and try not – as best I can -to superimpose my quite different worldview on the orginal audience. 

That’s what makes reading Genesis so difficult. As modern people, even if we are not scientists, our worldview is so shaped by science that we have great difficulty adopting, even temporarily another world view. It is almost impossible for us to imagine another way of reading Genesis. For many of us it is either science or fairytale. We cannot conceive another way of interpreting. But for the original audience, this other way was their way.  Modern science didn’t exist. The methods and world view of modernity didn’t exist. Our questions about how, in the language of science, everything came to be were not their questions.

My Biblical literalist friends might claim that Genesis offers a worldview that stands over against scientific materialism.  To say that  Genesis offers a worldview that is at odds with the conventional worldview is correct.  But the other worldview is not science. The other worldview is paganism.  The other worldview is that  multiple gods creating humanity for selfish reasons.  Gods who wanted someone to bring them their food, gods who created slaves. It is a bleak view of the world, where humanity is at the mercy of capricious and selfish gods. 

For most of us,  Paganism isn’t the dominate worldview today. This makes reading Genesis difficult for us. We have difficulty imagining living among people  who have such a different view of humanity. While there are worldview differences between faiths today those differences are not as foreign to us as the  pagan ancient near east worldview was.

So we struggle as we read the text to remember that Genesis isn’t an argument against science. It’s an argument against a pagan worldview.  And ancient people really believed it, it was not a casual albeit entertaining fairytale.  We have to be willing to  acknowledge a third, and for us quite difficult way of reading Genesis. Unless we are willing to try, we will misread the text.   We will in all likelihood misread in spite of our best efforts because of our distance in time and culture but we can lessen the error. But we need to try. So I encourage you, if you have mostly or only read Genesis1-3 as an argument against modern science or as a statement about what physically happened, to try to read it though ancient eyes as a majestic affirmation about the God of Israel. A statement of faith for the people of God, reminding them and the rest of the world who God is, powerful yes, but also caring and involved, holy and loving, trustworthy and dependable.

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Just for clarity’s sake, the professor who said this was a pharmacology professor and not a theology prof.

Just for your information, next week at Deep Church  Ben DeVries from Not One Sparrow is organizing some posts about animals and Christianity. Ben kindly asked me to contribute to the effort. (Thanks again Ben) I’ll put a notice and link here at Conversation in Faith when the posts are available.

Risk in the Garden

We spend  a lot of time here thinking about the early Genesis stories.  I find them endlessly fascinating.  Last week I wrote about the encounter between Eve and the Serpent in the Garden and what we Christians commonly refer to as “the Fall”.

This week I want to offer another perspective, from John Sanders book, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence,(1998, InterVarsity Press). It’s a facinating book. Some will find it disconcerting or even troubling. But for others what Sander’s writes will be very helpful. It’s a serious book, but one does not need to be a scholar to understand it.

I’ll insert my disclaimer here, I have not finished Sander’s book yet. In the first part of the book Sanders presents the biblical evidence for his belief in a God who risks. I have read this part and his comments on Genesis are what I want to share with you today.

Providence, for Sanders, is “the way God has chosen to relate to us and provide for our well-being.” (11).  God could be a God who controls everything. God could create a world where nothing happens that God does not control. Where whatever happens is God’s will. This is a very common viewpoint.

Sanders, among others, suggests that God chooses another way. God chooses to be a different kind of God. Sanders says that God is not as interested in power and control as God is in community and true relationship.  In this model God “enters into genuine give-and-take relations with his creatures.”

The portrait of God developed here is one according to which God sovereignly wills to have human persons become collaborators with him in achieving the divine project of mutual relations of love. Such an understanding of the divine-human relationship may be called “relational theism”. By this I mean any model of the divine-human relationship that includes genuine give-and-take relations between God and humans such that there is receptivity and a degree of contingency in God. In give-and-take relationships God receives and does not merely give. (12)

With that background let’s think about the early chapters of Genesis.

God has given all creatures the space, the freedom, and the ability to be truly different from God. God is God and the rest of us are not. We are what we are, humans. Image bearers of God but not gods.  At the same time God has provided boundaries for us. Within the boundaries we have all that we need. The boundaries provide a safe and good place for us. To be outside the boundaries is not a good place for humans. Humans are not created to live apart from God but rather to live trusting and honoring God.  God establishes this relationship of trust and care and provides all we need to thrive.  Sanders writes, “God sovereignly places humans in an environment for their good and expects them to respond appropriately.” 

God expects us to respond appropriately but does not coerce us or force us.  Here is the divine risk. By giving us real freedom, we could decide against trusting and obeying God. Certainly, as Sanders points out, God has stacked the deck in his favor. It really doesn’t make any sense for humans not to trust God. We have been abundantly cared for.

“God leaves enough space for trust to develop, but this also allows space for doubt.” (47)

With the rejection of the divine wisdom, the implausible possibility occurred. There was not good reason to reject God’s blessing and provision. There was every reason in the world to trust the wisdom of the Creator for the well-being of the creature. There is never a good reason to sin, only rationalizations. When God inquires of the humans why they have done this, they respond with lame excuses. After all,what reason could possibly be given for rejecting divine grace? Sin is fundamentally irrational; there is no cause for it given the goodness of God’s creation. In light of this Paul Fiddes suggests that human sin was “something strange to God” in that it was not planed. Now God has to adjust his project in response to this horrible turn of events. (47-48)

Sander’s approach moves us away from the trickster God  concept. This idea that God puts that tree in the garden to tempt us, like candy in front of a kid. Why would  God allow us to fall into sin?  If everything is under God’s control then it seems that God sets us up to fail.

In Sander’s reading, God sets us up to be truly distinct creatures, truly free to make our own decisions. But God also gives us every reason to trust, every reason to be all that we were created to be.  God sets us up to flourish, to grow, to love.

People have spent alot of time wondering why when Adam and Eve, who have been told they will die if they eat the fruit, don’t die. Sanders suggests, as did my friend last week, that God’s grace prevails. God changes God’s mind. God does not give up on us. There are consequences yes, severe ones. But God continues to take care of Adam and Eve and all the rest of us. God remains committed to to us in spite of the stupid choices we make.

The idea that Adam and Eve’s choice was unexpected was a new way of thinking about this story for me. But it opens up some dimensions of the story that I find helpful. I don’t this this reading limits God’s majesty or glory. God is still the creator of all that is. But it is a way of understanding how this all powerful God decides to be and can be in real relationship with creation.

I’d like to know, what do you think?

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For those of you who have an interest in campus ministry, the Presbyterian Bloggers Unite site has posts by a variety of folks (including me) on the topic.