In a previous post I attempted to canvas some of the headline lessons that Genesis 1 has for us. Here I’d like to look directly at Genesis 1 and ask what it does. That is, why is Genesis 1 important in the Bible, given the Bible's grand span of the history and destiny of the relations between humanity and God.
The answer to this question is basic to the lessons that we are able to gain from Genesis 1, but I decided to reverse what might be the natural order between the two and deal with the more dominating question second.
Genesis, in identifying our creator, and in that by implication setting our basic relationship, and the scope of who we are, shows us (that is, doesn’t merely tell us, but shows us) our connection to our creator, God as well showing our life-context.
To do its work the creative events must be describable, if they happened, and if they happened, to make any connection between us and God, they must have happened in terms that we can understand and that are consistent with the reference frame for events in our life-experience; otherwise no sense could be made and no communication would occur. Thus our connection to God would be incommunicable and the story of our relationship be reduced to fantasy.
Thus Genesis describes creative events that can be communicated, and indeed are communicated such that it shows us in terms that make sense in our world-experience, how our world has its connection with God’s ‘world’. It shows us that there is a connection and it is one that is ‘denominated’ in terms that are definitionally valid in our life-world.
The linkage is more than a curiosity, thought. It very importantly, makes salvation significant, and indeed workable, and makes the incarnation both astonishing, and credible, from a theological point of view. The incarnation depends on the basis of connection between God and humanity that is given in Genesis 1. The currency remains the same between both creation and incarnation, and salvation becomes a response in its terms of the creation to the creation being marred by the choice of people-made-in-God's-image.
One of the points that comes from this is that the events of Genesis 1 must occur in time that is the time we are in, and is reportable in the terms that we would report it in. The ‘time’ of Genesis 1 refers to time as the universal denominator of actions, events and relationships: if something really happened, it can be given a location in time that is definitive and can be set on a line that it shares with our time: that is, it happened some quantifiable period before our time. If this is not possible, then the event, etc, did not, and could not have happened in time; and its reality has to be questioned at best, set aside (and therefore nullified and rendered void) at worst.
All God’s actions are denominated in time that thus has to make sense to our experience of time, and are communicated in time words and grammar that can be directly understood in terms that we would use them and use them to make communicable sense. Deny this and the whole game goes up for grabs.
That the events of creation are set on the same timeline we are on, they bring with them an ontological continuity with our contingent status; indeed they show our dependency and ground us, not in speculative ideas that avoid the test of history (that is, did they happen or not), but in events within our historical envelope and at least conceptually, within our life-world.
If these events happened outside our timeline; are therefore not reliably communicable in terms of that timeline, then there is a fatal disjunct between us and God and there is neither an ontological with God, nor a viable explanation of our dependency, nor any content in the ark: creation-fall-salvation-new-creation.
In Genesis 1 God shows us who he is and who we are in relation by the actions and events that bring us into being. If this is not true on the timeline we are on, then it is difficult to see how it has any truth value at all.
The way God makes this communication is not to weave a web of intrigue and mystery, but to tell it as it was: to relate the events that occured in the manner in which they occured, denominated by that which is common to our experience and is universal to all possible experience: time as we know it, and not a fantasy time that would unseat the veracity of the communication and detach the events from our horizon of experience and comprehension.
But more significantly (!) the basis and rationale for salvation that would be provided by the ontological unity between our contintency and our God that is welded in Genesis 1 would collapse to a mere speculative possibility and not be a concrete fact of existence. The very point to salvation that is in the creation (that is in existential-physical event relationships) would vanish, and we’d be left with a mere ethical contrivance, a piece of religious decoration at best.
Unfortunately much reference to Creation, when examined, reduces the work of Christ to this as it removes creation for this world and makes it some sort of religious mystery, with the real stuff given in a completely differenlty founded notion of origin in a material world that can make itself and thus is independent of God, and is necessary rather than contingent. This story makes all to be within creation, including notions of God, rather than having God external to and independent of his creation.
Thus, if Genesis 1 is not taken in its own terms, the whole becomes a house of cards and collapses as soon as ‘when’ is denied as a question that can be sensibly asked. And not only ‘when’ of a calendar, but ‘when’ of the sequence of dependency that is built up and demonstrated in Genesis 1 (and then, 2, of course) with God telling what is by showing what he did.
