...the human being perceives himself, not through reflection and introspection, but in the experiences of the history of the covenant and the promises of his God....The human being has really no substance in himself; he is a history. That is why the anthropology of the Old Testament does not deal so much in definitions as in narratives. (p.257)
These narratives are about the real world; the world we stand in and the world God spoke into existence which God sets in our history by the thorough chronological markers he provides in Genesis. Time, history, is not unimportant in the interplay of God and his creation, it is of the essence because it is in history: what really happened; that we are told who we are, who God is and what is the relationship.
The world we stand in and the world we talk about are the same world. They are not the two different worlds that many theologians, JM included, seem to entertain, but are unified as the only setting of covenant. The creation account brings together what our imagination might want to drive apart, and tells us that there is no other world that is, in our compass, more real than the one created, in which connection is made with God. Creation shows the joint history between God and his creation (us), with the history is established in the facts: the details of action, time and place, which as JM tells us on p. 73 has no corresponding human analogy; so claims that the creation account are parabolic in some way must go by the wayside.
If it is parablic, if there is something else, then God has not revealed to us the basis for our communion that has any meaning in the real world (the only world we know), and its provenance is made uncertain by the mists of unimaginably long periods of time and the uncertainty of mysticism (which is what any parabolic view of the Genesis account results in) removing from our historical experience God's actions and their results in the physical world we know.
