In the latest issue of Creation magazine there's an article by Andrew Kulikovsky "Common Errors". He refers to the errors usually made by people who attempt to read an evolutionary world view back into the Bible, specifically, Genesis 1, of course.
One of the errors he mentions, and a typical one (see this article on John Dickson of the Centre for Public Christianity for discussion of this type of error), is the assertion that Genesis 1 gives us a theological rather than an historical account. Bruce Waltke, Bernard Ramm and a few others are cited in this connection.
The trouble with this view is that it supposes that 'theological intent' can exist detached from the setting of theological interchange where meaning is made (the real world, and recursively, the world resulting from the creative work set out in Genesis 1). Thus theology is 'carried' by history, in the Bible; it does not exist in some other world detached from this one: a kind of theological upper storey (to use Francis Schaeffer's analogy) that doesn't have feet on the same ground that our feet are on.
Andrew makes this very point, quoting Graeme Goldsworthy (Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture), "The fact is that the whole Bible presents its message as theology within a framework of history".
Theology is connected through history (that is the recount of events in space and time) with the domain of life concerns that dominate our thoughts, feelings and hopes. It is in and makes sense in our world because it is us in our world who are subject of God's salvific communication. If this were not so, there would be no tangible congruence between theological statements and our possible apprehension of them. They would reduce to the nonsense of Zen koans.
A further question one would have to ask of this error, is its basis: how do its exponents know that certain parts of the Bible are 'theological' and not historical, when the explanation of the historical is typically the source of theological information, as God explains the significance of events (especially those set in historical narrative language, like Genesis 1). It is only history that makes theology meaningful. History is the domain of relationships between actors, people, agents; and God the creator in relation to us is on this plane: relationships that have actual reality do not exist outside of historical circumscription, because then they cease to be relationships and the very point of God's creating would evaporate. This is the great theological error that is made by those who want to think that theology and history exist in separate worlds.
