John had a lot of good things to say, but he failed in the manner that most analysis of Genesis 1 fails, although he did touch it lightly: the theology that Genesis 1, the days of creation in particular, gives us.
I'm glad that he didn't avoid the obvious calibration of the days as normal earth days: the 'evening and morning earth frame of reference' type of days. That is their most obvious feature. However, I can't see them spaced out, their numbering and grammatical structure do not permit this. Other references, in Exodus, also preclude this.
So, what do the days do, theologically?
Three things
1. They place God's creating action in history, in the history that we are in. This establishes the basis, in real tangible terms, for fellowship between we his creatures in his image and himself (cf Gen 3:8a).
2. They thus show God present and active in his creation: he is not a God far off; not a God who is uninvolved but at the same time a God who is separate from and prior to the creation. He is not merged into the creation, which theistic evolution is in danger of requiring, destroying his identity. Nor is he the deist god, anonymous, remote, aloof.
3. To identify God and set the frame of reference for our understanding of the creation as those who are to govern it: his creative sequence shows dependency order, is done with rational causality, he shows evaluative summaries each day. His creating is nothing like the rational shipwreck of Enuma elish and other pagan fairy tales: unhistorical, disconnected and irrational, to repeat. The creation is propositional in nature: it shows wisdom and knowledge that we use, also propositionally, in governing the creation. (Prov 3:19, 20)
This also helps us answer Augustine's question as to why did God not create in an instant: this would also be a non-historical event. it would not show God at work and thus frame his identity and connection with us. Taking God thusly out of history would de-personalize him and destroy any intimacy between him and us. He would be then either not separable from the creation, or not identifiable with it.
Finally, it is worth noting that God, in direct speech reiterates the creation event in Exodus 31:12ff; interestingly this follows the 'skilled craftsmen' passage.
As to the age of the earth: pagans have almost universally held to very long ages of cosmic existence, and this would frame pagan stories, placing them in timeless de-historicized nowhere land.The purpose, as in modern long ages (care of Lyell and Hutton), is to keep the creator out of time and out of mind. OTOH, the timed genealogies in the Bible do what genealogies have always done in the ancient world. They show connection. Ours with God, and the timing shows the closeness of the creation and the history of the Creators' acts to our life-world experience of him.
Metaphysics - Another three things.
A few more aspects of the significance of the days as describing real historical events are also worth mentioning: as the days of creation place God in not only history, but as an actor in the creation per se, and an actor who acts wholly in terms of his own nature; they thereby provide a real, concrete ground that anchors our metaphysics.
A. In a truly 'real' creation, spoken into existence by the God who is, we have certainty of knowledge, at least as possibility: there is knowledge that truly reflects what is in the material world, and is unfolded in the history of redemption. I alluded to this above, but our epistemology is thereby grounded in who God is. For this reason, we have confidence that (modern) science can be fruitful in the pursuit of material truth.
B. Similarly for our conception of being. The actual days framing a real history, imply quite directly that we truly are: the Creation does not elude us by being metaphorical or symbolic, it does not deceive us as illusion or absorb us into pantheism, it does not confound us with the shadow game of Idealism. It founds our true being: it secures an ontology by which we can work to a structural understanding of the external reality and our existential experience of it. We are grounded in the infinite person-ness of the creator. A far cry from Sartrean recursion that we are merely grounded in our ephemeral selves.
C. Our meta-ethical grasp of value in relationships and actions also spring from who God is: Love. Love is only expressed in true relationship and the primal act of relationship toward us is God mediated only by his word showing his domain overlaps ours: God and man together (thus going on in contextualizing and grounding the Incarnation).
So we are guarded against being seduced by both the religion of nature (paganism and its offspring) and the religion of the denial of nature (exilic religions that reduce our life-world to metaphysical illusion).
Flowing from this, as in God's image (the only information we have being in the creation account), our words, acts, and affections have real significance in history and interpersonally. They ramify through history meaningfully.
Because if the 'days of creation' are not really real as set out in Genesis 1, then something else happened in our history, and it is this something else that grounds our....everything. Alas, the alternatives then before us must reject that God acts in real days and overturn the great message it gives: God and man together in his Creation. Genesis 3:8a again.
