In telling the story of divine and human relations, where do you start? I asked a similar question to a family member once and true to their Baptist fundamentalism, they said, “Sin.” At the time, I tended to agree with them until I realized that is not where the Bible starts. The Bible clearly starts with the creation story in Genesis 1.
But before we even get to the creation story, we have to deal with the elephant in the room. If the elephant had not been fed to such an extraordinary level, we could leave the elephant quietly grazing in its proper field, but this elephant is FAT. I am talking about the origin of the creation story, the book of Genesis, or more broadly, the book we call the Bible.
Before modern science, there was not a need in Christianity to doubt the creation story, but just prior to the American Civil War, Charles Darwin published Origin Of The Species, where he presented what became the primary theories behind biological evolution through natural selection. Almost 170 years later, this theory is all but accepted as gospel in the scientific community because the evidence has increased that this theory is true.
Entire books have been written defending both sides of the creation vs evolution debate. Indeed, in the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, the theory of evolution was even debated in court. This is not the place to debate those issues, suffice to say that the theory of evolution has been overwhelmingly supported by scientific discoveries and observable facts. If this is indeed the case, then this creates a problem for someone who is now commonly called today a “Young Earth Creationist” (YEC).
But this is the beauty of the mystery I’ve discovered. If someone gets to the place where they can accept that the Bible’s creation story may not be literally true, it opens the door, just a crack, to greater treasures to be found. Why? Because if the creation story of Genesis is not literally true and one still believes that the Bible is a divinely-inspired book, then it is possible that the creation story in Genesis may have a deeper meaning to it. Perhaps the YECs can accept that there can be truth supposedly hidden in the story that we have to mine out.
This is why we must start here. For someone who may have been brought up to believe their entire life that if one thing in the Bible isn’t literally true, it tears down the whole thing, they may find this as a shock to the system. Can a book that is divinely inspired contain such errors for the sake of encouraging us to mine for divine gold?
First, what is the Bible? The Bible is a collection or canon of sixty-six (66) books total that everyone agrees on. There are a dozen (12) additional books that are also found in the Catholic canon called the Apocrypha. Protestants (the churches that broke away from the Catholic Church during the Reformation in the sixteenth century) reject these books as not divinely inspired. In addition to these books, there is a smattering of books that are not contained in either the Protestant or Catholic canon, but may be found in other denominations’ canons, such as the Eastern Orthodox Church and others. It is interesting at the outset that Christians cannot even agree on the number of books in the Bible, which is a primary source of authority.
As a matter of fact, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Protestants, and Catholics do not even agree on the number of sources of authority. Catholics believe that Tradition, the Church, and Scripture are all authoritarian. Protestants famously broke with the church over Scripture, believing that it should be the only source of authority. Eastern Orthodox Christians believe in a different way, but similar to the Catholic Church. Those in the Anglican tradition follow the via media between the Catholic and Protestant seeing authority as a three-legged stool of Reason, Tradition and Scripture. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodists, believed in his quadrilateral, Reason, Tradition, Scripture and Experience.
Primarily, evangelical Christians follow the Protestant formula of scripture alone being the only source of truth, but many would deviate from Martin Luther’s particular version of scripture alone (“sola scriptura”). What is astounding is that the most ardent fundamentalist will argue in scripture alone as the sole source of authority, but fail to see that even if that were the case, they would still bring their own prejudices to the reading. For the sake of this text, we are assuming the evangelical populist view of the Bible, that it is the only source of authority for the Christian.
But which version? The Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. It has been translated into Latin and the Latin version(s) have been used to translate the Bible into other languages. The first person to translate the Bible into English was William Tyndale, my alma mater’s namesake. In 1604, King James I of England commissioned a new translation of the Bible into English, the King James Version, and after much work, in 1611, the work was completed. Many fundamentalists would tell you that this is the work they read and read only. However, the 1611 version was continuously edited until the 1769 Oxford edition was created by Benjamin Blayney. This is the common KJV used today.
If nothing else, the KJV is a literary masterpiece. Its colorful and florid language is still used in many churches today. And that is okay, as long as you don’t make the leap to say that it is the only version that can be used. But many fundamentalist churches have. This teaching is a relatively new teaching, even compared to the version itself, only beginning to emerge around the year 1930 or so. It began as opposition to a translation of the Bible called the “Revised Version” published in 1885. The reasons for the Revised Version of the Bible are almost obvious. The English language had changed and older manuscripts had been discovered that gave us more information regarding the proper interpretation of the canon. Engaged and educated fundamentalists, an oxymoron if there is one, believed that the newer manuscripts, particularly the Textus Receptus, Greek versions of the Bible created in the 1500s, were the correct translations. This, in an of itself, is not that innocuous. However, this belief soon made the leap from preference to a rejection of all manuscripts not based on the Textus Receptus and then to the acceptance that the KJV was the only “authorized” version that should be used.
Going even further to the extreme came the belief that not only should the KJV be accepted as the only version to be read in English, but that the KJV was “doubly-inspired” and could even be exalted over the original languages of the Bible, a belief that still stuns any measure of intelligence. In the 1970s, David Otis Fuller, the founder of what later became Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, helped to popularize this movement. However, by the 1990s, this belief was becoming less and less prevalent among evangelicals, especially as newer translations were being published. Today, this belief is relegated to a small, but vocal group of independent fundamentalist churches, primarily Baptist, and certain circles in the reformed camp. In 1952, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published and was updated as the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) in 1989. In my opinion, the NRSV is one of the best translations into English of the common era and this will be the version that I will quote.
Of the sixty-six (66) books in the Protestant canon of Scripture, they are divided into two parts, the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament contains thirty-nine (39) books that cover the history of the Jewish people, among other things, all the way up to around 400 BCE. The New Testament contains twenty-seven (27) books that begin with four gospels or versions of the story of Jesus Christ and also contains letters written by several apostles, most prominently, the Apostle Paul. Traditionally, Paul wrote thirteen (13) letters, although modern scholarship doubts the authorship of some of those. The book of Hebrews is sometimes attributed to Paul, but the letter never claims an author and many doubt it’s Pauline authorship. Officially, the writer of the book of Hebrews is unknown.
The first five books of the Old Testament are called the “Torah” or "Pentateuch." These five books lay out the basic teachings of Judaism. Genesis, the first book of the Torah, covers the time from creation until the end of the life of Joseph. The creation story begins with different parts of creation being created on each day of the week, beginning with Monday. Creation takes six days and on the seventh day, it is said that God rested (Genesis 2:2)
Toward the end of that story, on the 6th day, we get to the creation of humankind, the only creation made in the “image of God.” What does this mean? Functionally, it means we are somewhere near the top of the food chain. We’ve been dominion over the earth and dominion carries with it the idea of stewardship. Whether some Bible-believers want to believe it or not, the Bible does say that we should all be environmentalists, to some degree. That probably does not mean the extreme that some environmental organizations represent, but it does mean that we should pay attention to what the world, the earth, ha’aretz in the Hebrew, is telling us.
For years, members of the evangelical and fundamentalist community have wanted to pit the story of creation in the Bible against science. What that community has massively failed to understand is that these two things are not polar opposites, they work together. Science, being what we can observe in the world, can point us to the answers of how to better take care of the world. Here is also where we see the beginnings of the issues of some of the sacred cows of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity.
In fundamentalist Christianity, there is rarely any room for the middle ground. The argument over the creation story is just the start of many examples of this. Fundamentalists will argue that the only way that the creation story should be taken is literally. In other words, each of the “days” in the creation story is a literal twenty-four hour day. The Hebrew word for “day” is yom. One of the more infamous proponents of the literal twenty-four hour -day belief is Ken Ham and his ministry, Answers In Genesis. Ham argues that the word yom was never used in any other context but a 24-hour day. This is very much stretching this to the limits of use as he also includes the uses of “day” in biblical poetry, where interpretations depend on the meaning of the writer. What Ham fails to mention is that the Hebrew word for “day” is used in extrabiblical Hebrew literature for non-literal 24-hour days.. If context is really the thing that Ham wants to use to make this argument then he should include the entire context of the word, not just its use in the Bible.
So should one take the creation account in the book of Genesis literally? Based upon the preponderance of evidence that science has provided us, the answer to the question is an emphatic no. The Theory of Evolution has a massive amount of evidence to support its premises and conclusions that directly contradict the Bible. So what do we do with the creation account in Genesis?
The Bible is a collection of books that is full of different genres. The Bible is filled with historical narratives, poetry, apocalyptic stories, and, as we mentioned earlier, letters (epistles) from the apostles to the early church. Genesis in particular is a mishmash of genres because parts of it were passed down orally from one generation to another until someone finally decided that it needed to be written down. The creation story falls into the genre of myth. As we use the word “myth” today, it often comes with the assumption that the stories are not true. That is not necessarily the case in this ancient genre. Myths are “stories that convey and reinforce aspects of a culture’s worldview: many truths.”
Evangelicals love CS Lewis. If Protestant Christianity had Saints as other traditions, he would be “Saint Clives.” CS Lewis is primarily known in Christian circles as a Christian apologetic, but his day job was as a literary professor at Oxford. Lewis wrote extensively on biblical myths. He believed that myths are stories that reflect some deep truth. While some myths are not true, Christianity is a myth that actually happened. Regarding Genesis in particular, Lewis was comfortable describing Genesis and the creation story as a myth because it conveyed the truth about the origin of the universe, human rebellion, the nature of evil, and how humans relate to God. He writes, “Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley.”
Myths do not have to be literally true in order to convey truth. I believe that is what we have in Genesis. Adding to that weight of evidence, another account of creation is started in Genesis 2:4, further showing that these oral stories were placed in written form around six thousand years ago. The date on which these stories were recorded bears no resemblance to when the world actually began. Even if the stories were literally true, the fact that they were written down six thousand years ago would have no bearing on the date of creation, thus the YEC’s claims of the earth only being six thousand years old, especially with the weight of scientific evidence, appears to be preposterous.
The biggest takeaway from all of this is that stories do not have to be literally true in order to convey truth. The standard for literal truth in written form is a relatively modern concept. We simply cannot hold the writers of the Bible to a modern standard which they were not even trying to achieve.
What does this say about the rest of the Bible? It means that the Bible may contain factual errors in it, but that does not mean that those errors pollute the whole document. We have a responsibility to glean from the text what we can; to mix my metaphors, again, we need to mine for gold. This view of the Bible will be useful later as we uncover the doctrine of original sin and try to uncover what exactly is meant by “hell” in the Bible.
