What Is Genesis?

This sponsored post is part of the Patheos Book Club. Check out the Book Club for more posts on this book, an interview with the author, and for responses from other bloggers and columnists.

Christians continue to talk about Genesis, to debate Genesis, and to write books about Genesis. Fellow Patheos blogger Peter Enns, for instance, got some evangelical undies in a bunch with his 2012 book, The Evolution of Adam, The: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins.

The latest book on the scene is by fellow evangelical, Karl Giberson. Giberson is a scientist, not a biblical scholar, and this book is more poetic than prosaic. In Seven Glorious Days: A Scientist Retells the Genesis Creation Story, Giberson uses the seven-day creation account in Genesis 1 to retell the scientific origins of the cosmos. In other words, he uses Genesis as the framework for a scientific narrative.

In general, I think we need a lot more of this. That is, creative retellings of biblical accounts. It’s related to what people in my field call “theo-poetics.” It’s not about literalism, but about inspiration. It allows the Bible to do what it was meant to do: inspire our imaginations, stoke our passion, and, as Giberson writes in his chapter on the Seventh Day, communicate the Creator’s love for us.

We are, as Giberson nearly sings at the end, more than simply meat puppets, a collections of flesh and bones with nerves and a brain stem. We are creatures uniquely (at least as far as we can tell) capable of love:

“If the Spirit of God is everywhere at work in our open-grained universe, that means that every event since the beginning of has occurred in the presence of God. The history of life on our planet has unfloded with the real option of divine interaction. Events, as they occurred, may have been drawn by God toward fulfillment of divine purposes.

“Such possibilities open the door to a different kind of world — one with a real direction to unfolding patterns like the big bang and evolution — and not just in the sense of more complexity or more diversity. If life unfolds in the presence of the Spirit of God, that trajectory may reveal a purpose — a reason why the world is as it is.”

Yes, just imagine.