Review Of The Lost World of Genesis One, Part Eleven

It is time to continue my blog series on John H. Walton’s book The Lost World of Genesis One. Proposition 11 is that his viewpoint advocated thus far in the book, summarized under the heading “Functional Cosmic Temple”, “offers face-value exegesis” (p.102). His focus is on the recovery of what the author intended, acknowledging that unless one does so one faces the difficulty that the same grammatical constructions may be used in different contexts with different connotations. The understanding we give to a text should not be one that it would have been impossible for either the author or the earliest readers to understand.

In this context, Walton emphasizes the changing nature of scientific understanding of the cosmos (p.105). Walton could well have said that the interpreter who weds the text to the science of the age will cause it to end up a widow in the next. But I don’t think Walton does sufficient justice to the fact that, while there are varying degrees of certainty in different scientific disciplines and fields, often correlating precisely to the amount of relevant evidence and our technological ability to test various theories, science has made so much progress that whatever changes are made in the future are likely to represent improvements rather than simply the overturning and abandonment of our current understanding. Be that as it may, I think it is helpful for pragmatic reasons that Walton does not connect his understanding of the text to any particular scientific understanding. Many of his conservative Evangelical readers, his primary audience and the one that most needs to hear his points, are often indoctrinated to be suspicious of if not downright hostile to current scientific understandings. And so it is best that Walton makes his case about the Biblical text and our understanding of it independent of questions of science.

Walton is absolutely right to emphasize that the attempt to make the text speak modern science – whether young-earth creationism and flood geology or Big Bang cosmology and evolutionary biology – is a mistreatment of the text. “The most respectful reading we can give to the text, the reading most faithful to the face value of the text – the most “literal” understanding, if you will – is the one that comes from their world not ours” (p.106).