скачать книгу бесплатно
1 Atheism. Atheists believe there is no God. Genesis 1 confirms there is.
2 Agnosticism. Agnostics say they do not know whether there is a God or not. Genesis 1 says we accept that there is.
3 Animism. This is the belief that many spirits control the world – spirits of rivers, spirits of mountains, etc. Genesis 1 asserts that God created and controls the world.
4 Polytheism. Polytheists believe there are many gods. Hindus would be in this category. Genesis 1 states there is just one.
5 Dualism. This is the belief that there are two gods, one good and one bad, with the good god responsible for the good things that happen and the bad god for the bad things. Genesis 1 asserts that there is just one God, who is good.
6 Monotheism. This is the belief of Judaism and Islam – that there is one God, and just one person, thus rejecting God as a trinity. By using the word Elohim to describe God, Genesis 1 tells us that there is one God in three persons.
7 Deism. Deists see God as the creator, but argue that he cannot now control what he has created. He is like a watchmaker who has wound up the world and lets it run on its own laws. As such God never intervenes in his world, and miracles are impossible. Many Christians are, for all practical purposes, deists.
8 Theism. Theists believe that God not only created the world but is also in control of everything and everyone he has made. Theism is one step towards the biblical philosophy, but does not in fact go far enough.
9 Existentialism. This is a popular philosophy today, where experience is believed to be God. Our choices and our own affirmation of ourselves is the ‘religion’ followed. There is no creator as in Genesis 1 to whom we have to give an account.
10 Humanism. Humanists reject the concept of a god outside the created world. Although Genesis 1 tells us that man is created by God, humanists believe that man is God.
11 Rationalism. Rationalists believe that our own reason is God, rejecting the indication in Genesis that the powers of reason were given when God created man in his image.
12 Materialism. Materialists believe that only matter is real and do not accept anyone or anything they cannot see for themselves.
13 Mysticism. In contrast to materialism, mystics believe that only spirit is real.
14 Monism. This philosophy underpins much of the New Age movement. It holds that matter and spirit are essentially one and the same thing. The idea of God as an independent spirit creating the world is thus ruled out of court.
15 Pantheism. This idea is similar to monism, in that everything is believed to be God. A modern version of it is called Panentheism: God in everything.
In contrast to all these philosophies, the biblical viewpoint could be called Triunetheism: God is three in one, creator and controller of the universe. This is the biblical way of thinking which comes right out of Genesis 1 and continues through to the last chapter of Revelation.
Style
Let us move on to look more closely at the text of Genesis 1 and in particular the style of the chapter. The obvious point to make is that it is not written in scientific language. Many people seem to approach the chapter expecting the detail of a scientific textbook. Instead it is written very simply, so that every generation can understand it, whatever the standard of their scientific learning.
The account uses only very simple categories. Vegetation is divided into three groups: grass, plants and trees. Animal life also has three categories: domesticated animals, animals hunted for food and wild animals. These simple classifications are understood by everybody everywhere.
WORDS
This simple style is also demonstrated in the words used. There are only 76 separate root words in the whole of Genesis 1. Furthermore, every one of those words is to be found in every language on earth, which means that Genesis 1 is the easiest chapter to translate in the whole Bible.
Every writer has to ask about the potential audience for their work. God wanted the story of creation to reach everybody in every time and in every place. He therefore made it very simple. Even a child can read it and get the message. One of the results of this is the ease with which it can be translated.
The verbs are also very simple. One of the verbs used is especially important to our understanding of what took place. Genesis 1 distinguishes between the words ‘created’ and ‘made’. The Hebrew word for ‘created’, bara, means to make something out of nothing and it only occurs three times in the whole of Genesis 1 – to describe the creation of matter, life and man. On other occasions the word ‘made’ is used instead, to indicate that something is made out of something else, rather in the way we may speak of manufacturing things.
The description of God’s work of creation in seven days is also very simple. Each sentence has a subject, a verb and an object. The grammar is so straightforward that anybody can follow it. All the sentences are linked by one word – for example ‘but’, ‘and’ or ‘then’. It is a remarkable production.
STRUCTURE
Genesis 1 is beautifully structured. It is orderly, spread over six days, and the six days are divided into two sets of three.
In Genesis 1:2 we read, ‘Now the earth was formless and empty.’ The development starts in verse 3 and there is an amazing correspondence between the first three days and the last three days. In the first three days, God creates a varied environment with sharp contrasts: light from darkness, sky from ocean, and land from sea. He is creating distinctions which make for variety. On the third day he also starts to fill the land with plants. The earth now has ‘form’.
Then, on the fourth, fifth and sixth days, he sets out to fill the environments he has created in the first three days. So on day four the sun, moon and stars correspond to the light and darkness created on day one; on day five the birds and fish fill the sky and sea created in day two; and on day six animals and Adam are created to occupy the land created on day three. So God is creating things in an orderly and precise manner. He is indeed bringing order out of chaos. The earth is now ‘full’ – of life.
MATHEMATICAL PROPERTIES
It also fascinating to note that Genesis 1 has mathematical properties. The three figures that keep coming up in the account are 3, 7 and 10, each of which has particular significance throughout the Bible. The number 3 speaks of what God is, 7 is the perfect number in Scripture, and 10 is the number of completeness. If the occasions when the numbers 3, 7, and 10 occur are examined, some astonishing links emerge.
At only three points does God actually create something out of nothing. On three occasions he calls something by name, three times he makes something, and three times he blesses something.
On seven occasions we read that God ‘saw that it was good’. There are, of course, seven days – and the first sentence is seven words in Hebrew. Furthermore, the last three sentences in this account of creation are also each formed of seven words in the original Hebrew.
And there are ten commands of God.
SIMPLICITY
The style of Genesis 1 is in marked contrast to other ‘creation stories’, for example the Babylonian epic of creation, which is very complicated and weird and has little link with reality. The simplicity of the Genesis account of creation has not been universally applauded, however. Some have suggested that this simplistic approach is proof that the Bible cannot be considered as serious in the modern era. But there is much to be said in defence of this simple approach.
Imagine describing how a house is built in a children’s book. You would want it to be accurate but simplified so that the young readers would be able to follow the process. You might write about the bricklayer who laid the bricks, the carpenter who worked on the windows, the door frame and the roof joists. You might mention the plumber who put the pipes in, the electrician who came to put the wires in, the plasterer who plasters the walls and the decorator who paints them.
Written in this way the description has six basic stages, but of course building a house is far more complicated than that. It requires the synchronizing and overlapping of different workers for particular periods of time. No one would say that the description given in the children’s book is wrong or misleading, just that it is rather more complex in reality. In the same way there is no doubt that Genesis is a simplification and that science can fill out a whole lot more detail for us. But God’s purpose was not to provide detailed scientific accuracy. Rather it was to give an orderly explanation that everyone could follow and accept, and which underlined that he knew what he was doing.
Scientific questions
Understanding the need for simplicity does not answer all the questions which arise from the Genesis account of creation. In particular we must consider the speed at which creation took place and the age of the earth, two separate but interrelated areas. Geologists tell us that the earth must have taken four and a quarter billion years to form, while Genesis seems to say it took just six days. Which is correct?
In terms of the order of creation there is broad agreement between scientists’ findings and the Genesis account. Science agrees with the order of Genesis 1, with one exception: the sun, moon and stars do not appear until the fourth day, after the plants are made. This seems contradictory until we realize that the original earth was covered with a thick cloud or mist. Scientific enquiry confirms the likelihood of this. So when the first light appeared, it would just be seen as lighter cloud, whereas once the plants came and started turning carbon dioxide into oxygen, the mist was cleared and for the first time the sun, moon and stars were visible in the sky. The appearance of sun, moon and stars was therefore due to the clearing away of the thick cloud that surrounded the earth. So science does agree exactly with the order of Genesis 1. Creatures appeared in the sea before they appeared on the land. Man appeared last.
While scientists generally agree with the Bible on the order of creation, there are still areas of major conflict. These include the origin of animals and humans and a host of associated questions, including the age of the people who lived before and after the Flood, the extent of the Flood, and the whole question of evolution versus creation.
Before becoming involved in the detail of such questions, however, it is important to note that there are three ways of handling this problem of science versus Scripture. It is vital to decide how you are going to approach the problem before you do so. You must choose whether to repudiate, to segregate or to integrate.
REPUDIATION
The first approach offers a choice. Either Scripture is right, or science is right, but you must repudiate one or the other: you cannot accept both. Typically unbelievers believe science, believers believe Scripture and both bury their heads in the sand about the other.
The problem with repudiating science if you are a Christian is that science has been right in so many areas. We owe so much of our modern communication to scientific development, for example. Science is not the enemy some Christians seem to believe it to be.
The story of the discovery of ‘Piltdown man’ is a case in point. When a skull from a creature which seemed to be half-man half-ape was discovered at Piltdown in Sussex in 1912, many saw it as evidence of some form of evolution. When it was later found that the skull was actually a forgery, Christians were quick to pour scorn on science. They forgot that it was science which had discovered the skull to be a fake in the first place!
Choosing between science and the Bible thus has problems attached. We should not accept scientific truth unquestioningly, but neither should we be foolish enough to call people to commit intellectual suicide in order to believe the Bible. It is not necessary.
SEGREGATION
The second approach is to keep science and Scripture as far apart as possible. Science is concerned with one kind of truth and Scripture with another. This view claims that science is concerned with physical or material truth, whereas Scripture is concerned with moral and supernatural truth. The two deal with entirely separate issues. Science tells us how and when the world came to be. Scripture tells us who made it and why. They are to be kept entirely separate for there is no overlap to be concerned about. Science talks about facts; Scripture talks about values and we should not look to the one for the other.
This approach has become very common even in churches. It comes from a mindset shaped by Greek thinking, where the physical and the spiritual are kept in two watertight compartments. This kind of thinking is alien to the Hebrew mind, however, which saw God as Creator and Redeemer, with the physical and the spiritual belonging together.
If we take this segregated approach to Genesis we will be forced to treat the narrative as myth. Genesis 3 becomes a fable entitled ‘How the snake lost its legs’, and Adam becomes ‘Everyman’. The book becomes full of fictional stories teaching us values about God and about ourselves, and showing us how to think about God and about ourselves – but we must not press them into historical fact.
Just as Hans Christian Andersen wrote children’s books which taught moral values, according to this approach Genesis has stories with moral truths but no historical truth. Adam and Eve were myths, and Noah and the Flood was also a myth. This outlook extends beyond the Genesis narratives, of course, for once one questions the historicity of one section of the Bible it is a small step to question others also. This approach therefore leaves us with no history left in the Bible: plenty of values but few facts.
As with repudiation, then, the attempt to segregate science and Scripture also has its problems. In fact, Scripture and science are like overlapping circles: they do deal with some things that are the same and so apparent contradictions must be faced. And it undermines the whole Bible if we pretend that it is factually inaccurate but still has value. How then are we going to resolve the problem? Can the third approach help us bring science and Scripture together?
INTEGRATION
In trying to understand how to integrate the two, we need to remember two basic things, both equally important: the transitional nature of scientific investigations, and the changes in our interpretation of Scripture.
1. Science changes its views
Scientists used to believe that the atom was the smallest thing in the universe. We know now that each atom is a whole universe in itself. It was said until very recently that the X and Y chromosomes decide whether a foetus becomes a male or a female human being. Now this view has been overturned. The discovery of DNA has revolutionized our thinking about life, because we now know that the earliest form of life had the most complicated DNA. DNA is a language passing on a message from one generation to another – and because of that it must have a person behind it.
A generation ago most people would have understood that nature ran according to fixed laws. Modern science now asserts that there is a much greater randomness than we ever imagined. ‘Quantum’ physics is much more flexible.
Geology too is changing and developing. There are now many different ways of finding out the age of the earth. Some new methods are claimed to have revealed the age of the earth to be much younger, with 9,000 years at one end of the spectrum and 175,000 years at the other – much less than the four and a quarter billion years calculated previously.
Furthermore, anthropology is in a state of disorder. The prehistoric men thought to be our ancestors are now seen to be creatures which came and disappeared with no link with us. Biology has changed also, and today fewer people believe in the Darwinian concept of evolution.
All this means that while we should not discount the conflicts between scientific discovery and the biblical accounts, we would be foolish to try to tie our interpretation to a particular scientific age, given that scientific knowledge is itself always expanding.
2. Interpretation of Scripture changes
Just as developments occur in scientific understanding, so the traditional interpretations of Scripture can also change. The Bible is inspired by God, but our interpretation of it may not always be. We need to draw a very clear distinction between the Bible text and how we interpret it. When the Bible talks about the four corners of the earth, for example, few people today interpret that to mean the earth is a cube or a square. The Bible uses what is called the language of appearance. It talks about the sun rising in the east, setting in the west and running around the sky. But that, as we know, does not mean that the sun is moving around the earth.
Once we understand that scientific interpretation is flexible and that our interpretation of the Bible may change, we can then seek to integrate science and the Bible and make balanced judgements where contradictions seem to exist.
THE ‘DAY’ IN GENESIS 1
Such an ‘integrated’ judgement is much needed when we come to consider the arguments regarding the days in Genesis 1, a traditional battlefield in the science versus Scripture debate.
The problem of the days described in Genesis 1 and the real age of the earth was heightened by the fact that some Bibles used to be published with a date alongside the first chapter, namely 4004 BC. This was calculated by an Irish archbishop called James Ussher (another scholar went on to claim that Adam was born at 9 a.m. on 24 October!) All this despite the fact that there are no dates in the original until Chapter 5.
Ussher made his calculations based on the generations recorded in Genesis, unaware that the Jewish genealogies do not include every generation in a line. The words ‘son of’ may mean grandson or great-grandson. It is easy to discount Ussher’s date, but we are still faced with a conflict between the apparent biblical assertion that creation took six days and the scientific assertion that it took much longer.
What was meant by the word ‘day’ in the original language? This is the Hebrew word Yom, which does sometimes mean a day of 24 hours. But it can also mean 12 hours of light or an era of time, as in the phrase ‘the day of the horse and cart has gone’.
Bearing these alternative meanings in mind, let us consider the different views of the day in Genesis 1.
Earth days
Some take the word ‘day’ literally as an earth day of 24 hours. This conflicts with the scientists’ assessment of the geological time it would take to create the earth, given its apparent age.
A gap in time
Some suggest a gap in time between verse 2 and verse 3. They argue that after we read that ‘the earth was formless’ in verse 2, there is a long gap before the six days when God brings everything else into being. So the earth was already in existence before God’s work began in the six days. That is a very common theory, found in the Scofield Bible and other Bible notes.
A second way of finding more time is to explain it by reference to the Flood. There have been various books published, notably connected with the names Whitcome and Morris, which have said that the geological data we have all comes out of the Flood, the ‘apparent’ age of rocks the result of this inundation.
The illusion of time
Others suggest that God deliberately made things look old. Just as Adam was created as a man, not as a baby, so some believe that God made the earth to look older than it really is. God creates genuine antiques! He can make a tree look 200 years old with all the rings in it, and he can create a mountain that looks thousands of years old. It is a possible theory – God could do that.
The ‘gap’ and ‘illusion’ views both assume that we take the ‘day’ literally and therefore need to find more time to make sense of the geological record.
Geological eras
Another approach is to take a ‘day’ as meaning a ‘geological era’. In this case we are not talking about six days, but about six geological ages, i.e. days 1–3 are not solar days (in any case there was no sun!). This is seen as an attractive theory by many, but it fails to account for the morning and evening refrain which is present from day 1, or for the fact that the six days do not correspond to geological ages.
Mythical days
We have already seen that some interpreters have no problem with the length of the days because they assume that the text is mythological anyway. For them the six days are only the poetic framework for the story – fabled days – and can be overlooked. The main thing is to get the moral out of the story and forget the rest.
School days
One of the most intriguing approaches has been put forward by Professor Wiseman of London University. He believes the days were ‘educational’ days. God revealed his creation in stages to Moses over a seven-day period, so the record we have is of Moses learning about the creative process in the course of a week’s schooling. Others agree but suggest that the revelations took the form of visions, rather like the way John was given visions to record for the book of Revelation.
God days
The final possible interpretation is that these were ‘God days’. Time is relative to God and a thousand days are like a day to him. It could be understood from this that God was saying that the whole of creation was ‘all in a week’s work’ for him.
This serves to emphasize the importance God attaches to mankind in the scheme of creation, since human life can lose all significance if you take geological time as the only measure. For example, imagine that the height of Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames Embankment in London represents the age of the planet. Place a 10 pence piece flat on top of the needle and a postage stamp on top of that. The 10 pence piece represents the age of the human race and the postage stamp civilized man. Man is seemingly insignificant from a chronological perspective.
Maybe God wanted us to think of creation as a week’s work because he wanted to get down to the important part, us living on planet earth. Out of all creation it is we who are most significant to him. He spends such little space in Genesis detailing creation and so much on mankind.
This theory can be extended. The seventh day has no end in the text, because it has lasted centuries. It lasted all the way through the Bible until Easter Sunday, when God raised his son from the dead. All through the Old Testament there is nothing new created; God had finished creation. Indeed, the word ‘new’ hardly occurs in the Old Testament, and even then is in the negative, as when in Ecclesiastes we read, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. So God rested all the way through the Old Testament.
There is, therefore, a strong argument for seeing the days in Genesis 1 as God days – God himself wanted us to think of it as a week’s work.
Man at the centre
Turning to Chapter 2, it is immediately obvious that there is a great difference between this and Chapter 1. There is a shift in style, content and viewpoint. In Chapter 1 God is at the centre and the account of creation is given from his point of view. In Chapter 2 man is given the prominent role. The generic terms of the first chapter give way to specific names in Chapter 2. In Chapter 1 the human race was simply referred to as ‘male’ and ‘female’. In Chapter 2 male and female have become ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’, two particular individuals.
God is also given a name in Chapter 2. In Chapter 1 he was simply ‘God’ (Elohim), but now he is ‘the LORD God’ (as translated in English Bibles). When we read ‘the LORD’ in capital letters in our English Bibles it means that in the Hebrew his name is there also. There are no vowels in Hebrew, so his name is made up of four consonants, J H V H, from which the word ‘Jehovah’ has been coined. This is actually a mistake, because J is pronounced like a Y and V is pronounced like a W. In English pronunciation the letters would therefore be Y H W H, from which we get the word ‘Yahweh’. In the New Jerusalem Bible that word is included just as it is – ‘The Yahweh God’. We saw earlier how the English word ‘always’ conveys the meaning of the Hebrew (the participle of the verb ‘to be’) and it is a helpful word to bring to mind when thinking of God.
Chapter 2 explains more of the relationship between man and God. Chapter 1 included the reference to male and female being made in his image, but in Chapter 2 we see God interacting with man in a way which is unique among all the creatures he had made. There is an affinity between human beings and God that is lacking in every other part of his creation. Animals do not have the ability to have a spiritual relationship with God as humans do. In that sense, humans are like their creator in a unique way.
But we are also told of the differences between God and man, for although man is made in God’s image, he is also unlike him. This is an important truth to grasp if we are to have a relationship with God. The fact that he is like us means that our relationship with him can be intimate, but the fact that he is unlike us will keep the relationship reverent and ensure that our worship is appropriate. It is possible to be too familiar with God on the one hand, or overawed by him on the other.
The importance of names
The name God gave to Adam meant ‘of the earth’ – we might call him Dusty. Later in the chapter the woman too is given a name: Eve, meaning ‘lively’.
It was normal for names to be descriptive, or even onomatopoeic (like ‘cuckoo’), so when Adam names the animals he uses descriptions which then become their name. Names in the Bible are not only descriptive, they also carry authority in them. The person who gives the name has authority over whoever or whatever receives the name. Thus Adam names all the animals, signifying his authority over them. He also names his wife, a feature still remembered today when the woman takes the man’s surname when they marry.
This chapter also includes names of places. The land is no longer merely ‘dry land’: we are told of the land of Havilah, Kush, Asshur and the Garden of Eden. The water is named too. There are four rivers mentioned, and the Tigris and Euphrates are still known today. This puts the Garden of Eden somewhere near north-eastern Turkey, or Armenia, where Mount Ararat stands and where some believe Noah’s ark is buried.
Human relationships
