Letter to a theologian:
I've read a number of your pieces on the interpretation of Genesis 1, and while I largely agree with the position that you defend (for example, against the so-called 'framework hypothesis'), I cannot recall any conservative theology about Genesis 1.
God created in six days. So?
There's a vast theological richness in these short verses that we need to explicate. The fantasists (who engage in a view that Genesis presents fantasy, not fact) have no theology and can have no theology, because they claim that Genesis tells us nothing in the real world and therefore can mean nothing in the real world. But we do.
For example, the 6 days of creation are vital to our understanding of who God is, what the creation is and our relationship to both.
Above all God working in 6 days is not about duration or lighting conditions, per se, but a demonstration that he is present and active in the world he created for the congress of God and man. He is here, able to achieve his ends, working as we do, with the constraint of time that fixes the tempo of our lives. God shows that he works Real-ly in the space-time-event-material cosmos. He doesn't work in Platonic forms, he doesn't work in symbols, or in some remote unreachable Mt Olympus, but, as Jeremiah teaches. He is hear, and he shows it
Of course, if the days are merely a 'framework' one has to wonder what they are a framework of; because if nothing related happened, then the framework suggests that God tells us what didn't happen to inform us about something unstated that did happen. Worse even than gnostics!
Lots flow from God's domain overlapping his created domain of time and space, where he demonstrates a collocation of persons: he the divine, we the contingent, but loved and in his image. Word is prior to material, minds are real and can know and be known, our from God's word to its result in the production of our world and our experience of our world in consistent rational categories is of a continuous ontology breeding a real epistemic. We can know things truly and act on that knowledge reliably.
