Review of The Lost World Of Genesis One, Part Fourteen

It’s time to continue my ongoing review of John H. Walton’s book The Lost World of Genesis One (and to express my gratitude to IVP for sending me a gratis copy). Proposition 14 makes a point with potentially wide ramifications, namely that it is inappropriate to distinguish God’s roles as creator and sustainer too starkly. Walton recommends (p.119) avoiding two extremes: deism (God creates and is done) and micromanagement (God’s creation is eternally ongoing/repeating). Perhaps what struck me most is that the difficulties of both extreme viewpoints are not only related to creation, but to one’s notion of divine action more generally. Positing grandiose miracles at any point in the past, whether to start the cosmos on its path or to create a people by liberating them from Egypt, and then denying that God continues to act in similar ways, leaves one with a sense that the viewpoint is at best arbitrary, and at worst an attempt to assert the facticity of scriptural narratives without explaining why such spectacular interventions no longer occur. The other extreme of having God in control of every event and occurrence seems equally difficult, not only because it seems so counterintuitive with respect to our sense that we have a measure of freedom to act and choose, but also because science seems able to account in a comprehensive way for much that happens in our world, without a need to invoke supernatural agents as part of the process.

As I’ve said more than once, I find metaphors from panentheism helpful in thinking about transcendence in relation to our current scientific understanding. But ultimately, while science, logic, reason and concern for consistency may suggest the inadequacy of certain traditional images and metaphors, it doesn’t provide any direct indication of what new images and metaphors might do better justice to our sense of transcendence and mystery. It is also worth asking whether there can be better metaphors, or whether the point is not rather that all metaphors and symbols of the divine are inadequate, and their inadequacy is simply felt more or less strongly in different historical periods, in different cultures, and in relation to developing scientific understandings.

Walton explores the Biblical metaphor of divine temple construction with the help of an analogy, the construction of a university campus, which may be complete (although my own experience is that it may be ready at some stage to open for business, but it is unlikely that a stage is ever reached at which the possibility of further construction can be altogether excluded), but the point is not to finish building but to build so that the ongoing activities of the university may then take place and continue.

Just as the cosmic temple is a metaphor, the metaphor of temple has been applied to the church, and Walton concludes this chapter with an intriguing suggestion, namely that it might be appropriate for the church to reinstate the annual celebration/reenactment of creation that many scholars think was celebrated in ancient Israel, perhaps using Genesis 1 as a key text in the event.

Science has allowed us to explore and penetrate the mysteries of our universe in many ways, far beyond the understanding anyone had at any point in the process of the composition of the Biblical literature. And so, while clearly many have had great success at reading modern science (not to mention modern pseudoscience) into the Bible, Walton is right to emphasize that the Biblical authors had no more scientific information than their contemporaries. So what, then, should modern Christians do with the creation story in Genesis 1? Perhaps, as Walton suggests, use it to inspire celebration rather than as an alleged explanation. Viewing the universe as “creation” has long been understood by theologians as having to do not with how we explain its origin but how we relate to and respect its current existence. Science is the place to look for explanation, but it also presents us with data that, even when understood, evoke responses of awe and questions about meaning. To the extent that religion offers something to complement science’s perspective, it should be celebration, awe, recognition in the midst of this metaphorical cosmic temple that experience Christians often refer to by using the metaphor “the presence of God”, as well as guidelines and encouragement for living in meaningful ways therein.