A sermon I recently heard was on Psalm 104, interestingly, described by Spurgeon as the creation in poetry (thereby indicating that at least he didn't think that Genesis 1, etc, could be so described).
I doubt if the sermon giver had given much thought to the creation account and its theological ramifications, as he led us through the half-baked framework hypothesis, which, as I've written elsewhere, does not quite work, and fails as an interpretive scheme.
He then told us that none of the information in the Bible tells us how God created, but that he did. Of course, if God needs a mediating mechanism whereby he creates, then that mechanism stands in his place and is the real creator, determining how things really are. But, not so; the 'mechanism' is God spoke...it happened. Genesis 1 is crystal clear on this.
If the creation account is a metaphor then we need to decide what really happened in the creation...taken at face value, we know, and can trace the trajectory of the creation from God's will to our lives quite clearly. It is linked all the way. But as mere metaphor, then the link is at best, only suggested...and this raises more questions (who is this God who can only suggest at our relationship, a relationship so important, by the way, that it brings us into God's ontological field), at and worst, obscures the relationship completely. Either way, not a good basis on which to build the connections that the Bible makes between creator, creation and creature.
An amusing slip that in the sermon was a reference to 'before the world was know to be round'. I don't think there are any credible documents that there was a time before the earth was thought to be round...its even mentioned, arguably, in Job 26:10, Proverbs 8:27 and Isaiah 40:22. I think he confused Washington Irving's fiction, and how things really are.
