I never thought I'd do this, but to roughly paraphrase Karl Barth, we should never allow current scientific views to determine our approach to the text of Scripture. I think of Genesis 1 in particular, and furthermore, I have in my mind a discussion that I heard about with a lecturer in OT at a Sydney Bible school.
The essential points in discussion were the usual things: Genesis is of a genre that precludes its direct meaning; the creation of the sun is 'out of sequence' therefore we need to turn our ear to 'science' to determine what really happened in the beginning.
Well, what are we to make of this? A theologian whose mental parameters are set, it would seem, not by the Word of God, but by contemporary naturalism. I can't help thinking that Norman Geisler's essay 'Beware of Philosphers' (link to Geisler here) should be required reading for all in the church: each year! Because here we have an example of what can happen when contemporary philosophy bends an approach to scripture away from the Bible's own premises and corrupts its revelation to an obscuration.
The starting point for considering the views expressed (and note, this is just based on a report of the conversation/s I heard, and may not fully reflect or understand the lecturer), is his comment that the creation of the sun on day 4 is 'out of order'.
So who sets the order? Is the Bible internally incoherent, or are the nostrums of materialism used to 'set' the order against which the Bible is out of step? Its a sad day when Biblical exegesis fails to follow the Spirit's revelation, but instead holds it up for comparison against the words of that cultural movement whose starting point is that there is no God!
But it is not just a problem of a brute contest between word and fact (as though people are able to define the starting of the universe, not having been there, and inevitably conforming speculation to prior world view commitments), but one of theological disposition.
It would seem that the lecturer's dispositon is to excise from the Bible any content that he assesses is not relevent to his take on the history of salvation (I assume), as rendered by (a) its seeming disconformity to current culturally established (not scripturally established) beliefs and (b) his possible view that the Bible can only speak to what he says it can speak to (2 John 9 springs to mind: the NSRV gives a helpful rendering).
The failure is one that is long in the tooth for theology, reflecting noetic and cultural influences that extend back to the idealism of Ancient Greece, pre-digested by Plotinus and the German Idealists, for example. This results in regarding the physical world as a 'given' in effect, and its creation not significant to the intercourse of God and man: creator and creature. And as soon as its put in these terms, how ridiculous is the stricture on the Bible's scope: But, no! The Creator gives us the setting for that intercourse. It tells us much about himself, the creation and its relationships. For example, it is a real physical world (these are our bounds) we live in that was very good in conception and execution, for us to revel in fellowship with God and each other, but is profoundly effected by the Fall: that the fall, a moral rent, has had physical effects underscores the importance in God's creation of the physical, the creation as a whole, and influences us in our relationships as its stewards.
Part of the broad river of interpretation that sets the Bible as subservient to modern naturalism has it that for various textual reasons, the Genesian account of creation is less than revelatory, being more metaphorical or symbolic. But if not factual, symbolic of what? Whence the information about the creation, if the creator cannot reliably give it; and how seriously are we to take the credentails of the creator if the only way he can tell us what happened, demonstrating his credentials, is to tell us something other than what happened and the only means he gives of locating it in historical relation to us gives no such information! You may as well use a photograph of a jet plane to travel overseas!
But does the text itself say 'metaphor', 'symbolic' or suggest any other indirect reference system? I don't think so. The simple fact of direct action historical grammar makes this whole passage the very opposite of symbolic. It is concrete: God said, it happened. There is no allusive process here, no playing with vague referents or figures of speech (see note below on chiasmus). The account is a simple list of days (and thus the repetition) and what happened on them: it is a very compressed, economical, and at the same time majestic passage, with very high fact density: it is all about the action and its results with the only adornment being God's judgement of it as 'good' and 'very good'. Compare that with the meandering nonsense of Enuma Elish, for example.
The only reason to say that it did not or could not happen thus is to have other information; but there is no other information from the creator; and contemporary evolutionary speculations, themselves making the naturalist assumption (the universe made itself: an even bigger miracle!), were not foreign to the ancient world. So it is obtuse to claim that God had no interest in giving us real information that grounds his covenant and simply tendentious to maintain that God was accommodating to lesser minds: itself a reference to evolutionary speculation and unbiblical. On biblical grounds the early people would have to write to accommodate our lesser minds, subject of generations of degrading mutations (Just think of the intellectual powerhouse that Adam was, to name the various animals in a day in the first record of scientific activity)!
But back to the sun being 'out of order' (which is a peculiar take on the text, in my view).
The apparent 'problem' I think that our friend sees is that the evening and morning sequence commences from the first word of creation while the sun is provided on day 4 as a marker of times.
How, I wonder, is this a problem? Do we need the sun to 'make' time? I don't think so! Do we need changes in lighting conditions to persuade us that days are passing? Again, I don't think so.
The text indicates, I think, that the HS is not interested in telling us about lighting conditions per se; these are merely markers of time passing and not the time passing itself (to mistake the markers for the time itself is a 'magical' or pagan view, I would think, not a Christian one), but is very concerned with the passing of time, and what time interval precisely is passing. The enumeration of passing days before D4 reinforces how important this is, and that the markers of time (sun moon stars) do not make time, but only serve to mark its passing for us (this implies then that time was made on day 1 as part of the coming to existence of the physical cosmos). The fact that there are no markers before D4 brings our attention to the enumeration of passing days: its an arresting usage and excludes a metaphorical understanding of the time, it is as though the writer wanted to make certain that we understood that he was talking about days as we know them: evening and morning type days. Thereby emphasising that understanding the time period is critical to understanding God, his creation, our history and relationships. Detaching this time from the markers stresses its importance, I think. This is a 'pay attention' moment, and the time must be profoundly significant to be given the prominence that it has been given. If we attempt to develop any other understanding of this passage, I think it immediately implies that we conceive of uncreated things apart from God, a view, an implication, inimical to entry into a biblical world-view.
Two small matters:
1. Some people think that the lighting conditions might vary with some sort of light source and a spinning world giving diurnal change prior to D4; but this is neither required nor implied. Certainly, light was made first; well, one could argue that raw matter was made first (earth without form and void: the subsequent verses clearly set about the filling, so the first verse simply points to the work of the subsequent verses); then light, as representative of the energy spectrum is necessary for all the rest to proceed. No light, no anything else.
2. This doesn't help with an understanding of 'separating light and darkness' which is clearly there to teach us something (as is all Scripture...but it doesn't teach us what we want, as those who accommodate to the world would hope, but what it wants, to correct and rebuke us, and bring us to God for life); maybe it refers to some physical process to do with energy and 'raw matter'; but I'll leave that to others to consider.
On Chiasmus
Some people make much of the chiasmus they find and claim that this, along with the list-like repetitions in the passage, indicate that it is not an account of actual events. However, chiasmus is a structuring device used in many documents, including those we know to be historical, and was common in ancient literature. One possible reason being to clearly delineate the text unit in a language without punctuation or formatting that we use today to structure our texts, the other is that it makes the text memorable for both memorising and oral repetition. The repetition is simply an artefact of the list form and allows a compressed conveying of detail without further elaboration. These days we'd provide a numbered list instead, nicely formatted by our word processor.
See this article by Kay and this also by Kay.
