The question where we came from and where we are going is one of life's fundamental questions. We all ask it at some time, and seriously ... usually when things are going badly wrong and we struggle to understand why. We want to know where we have come from so as to understand why things are as they are, and why we are as we are.
Faced with a criminal, for example, and seeking an answer to the question why he turned to crime, the criminologists enquire into his background, and ask what sort of parents he had and what were the influences that shaped his childhood. Or faced with people whose minds are seriously disturbed, the psychiatrists probe into their history, right back to their infancy, looking for some trauma that may account for their difficulties. Even astrologers claim to explain the kind of personality we have by calculating the configuration of the planets at the time of our birth.
All these enquiries - the serious, the superstitious and the silly - proceed on the same belief: that if we know a person's origins then we can account for them, explain them, understand what makes them tick. When we ask, "Where did I come from?" we are really asking the deeper question, "Who am I?" That is the question to which we shall be seeking an answer as we pursue our way through these opening chapters of the Bible. What is man? What is his real nature and his destiny?
i. Where did we go wrong?
It is worth emphasising that we usually go back in time like this to explain things only when they have gone wrong. Normally we look for the meaning of things in their end, not in their beginning. We look for the purpose a violin bow was made to serve in the music it produces, not in the cat whose gut its strings were made from. We assess wheat by the flour it makes and the bread, not by the seed from which it grew. We look back to the origins of a thing for an explanation only when it has gone wrong. Why won't this violin bow produce the tones it should? We look at the material it is made from and ask where it was made and by whom. When the wheat grains will not crush into fine flour as they should, we try to find what is wrong with it by putting the seeds under a microscope and examining the soil in which it grew.
It is the same with our need to understand humanity. It is because we feel so strongly - so as not even to have to argue about it - that humanity has gone wrong, that we look to our beginnings for some understanding of ourselves.
It is not only the men of the Bible who do this.
Marxism does it. Marxism tries to explain human life by examining its earliest beginnings, when, it tells us, a sort of primitive communism prevailed. All subsequent history is explained as a decline from this primeval bliss into endless class struggles. Human destiny lies in the possibility of climbing out of these struggles and re-establishing a classless society.
Humanists do it. Books like 'The Naked Ape' are attempts to explain mankind by reference to what are held to be purely animal origins, and from the study of animal life deduce a remedy for our human situation.
It is when the design fails that we cry, "Back to the drawing board."
So it is the failure of mankind that leads the Bible writers to take us back to our race's beginnings. A study of mankind as it is will not tell us what God intended when He created us. To know that, we have to be taken back to the beginning, before the time when the fuses blew and wrecked the machinery. This is what these early pages of the Bible do. There we are told that we are no longer as we were when we first left the hands of God. Something has happened to spoil us. To know what we were meant to be and what we really are, we must go back to the morning of our creation, and hear the first words that God spoke to us and to our father Adam. There we shall learn the meaning of our life.
That is the first thing to say by way of general introduction.
ii. Science or theology?
The second is that I shall not waste time arguing the question whether these early chapters of Genesis are in conflict with modern science.
Some sincerely believe them to be literally, historically true just as they stand - even to the creation days being 24-hour periods, and creation itself being dated about 4,004 BC. Others, equally sincerely, with no less regard for the authority and inspiration of Scripture, believe them to be true in a poetic sense. But even if that argument were resolved to everyone's satisfaction, the really important issues would still not have been decided thereby. No-one, I believe, really hears what these chapters are saying until that area of argument is left behind, and they are heard on their own terms. In these early chapters of Genesis, great affirmations are being made about God, about mankind, about the world, and about the way they are related to each other. It is those affirmations I am concerned that we should hear, and it makes little difference to the way we hear them which of the two views we take. It will be our concern not even to argue those affirmations but simply to state them, and in such a way that they stand clear of the whole controversy concerning science and religion. If we succeed in that, they will speak for themselves; they will carry their own persuasion, and no supporting argument of mine or anyone else's will be needed to add weight to them. We shall aim, not to argue, but simply to state the Bible's case.
It is my own conviction that if any literature in the world deserves to be described as inspired by God these chapters do - a conviction that has been borne in upon me as I have sat before them and let them speak to me, and it is that experience I wish to share.
iii. A literary scheme
That leads to a further thing by way of general introduction, which is to enter a plea that these chapters be allowed to speak to us as a whole and in their own terms. They are written to a clear plan. There is as much design in them as there is in the creation they celebrate. The writer has written this material to a scheme, constructed with great care, and if we pay no heed to the overall unity in which all its parts fit together we shall mishear him. To trace that scheme, grasping the plan to which these chapters were written, helps us get the right thinking cap to wear as we listen to him.
Two or three features by way of example will illustrate this.
1. The work of the first three days of creation - the separation of light from darkness, of the waters in the clouds from the waters in the seas, of the sea from the land - is not to be understood in isolation from the later work of God when He brings a flood upon the earth. The work of those first three days of creation is undone: the rain clouds blot out the sun's light so the earth is plunged back into darkness, the waters that were separated to make a zone of safety for man flow back together and the land disappears beneath the sea, so the very chaos out of which God fashioned the earth again overtakes it.
This adds a whole dimension of solemnity to the effect of sin and judgment upon our life. It is not simply that our fellowship with God is broken off but the very fabric of the world is threatened.
2. In the same way we must read the 'Constitution' God frames for human life in ch. 1 in the light of the 'Revised Constitution' He delivers after the flood in ch. 9. We are fond of quoting 1:28, "God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Bear rule over ... every living creature.' Then God said, 'I give you for food every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree with seed-bearing fruit. And to all ... creatures ... I give every green plant for food.'" But after the flood God revises that constitution - and we are prone to ignore the revised version. Now God says, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth," (that, He had said before) but now He does not say, "Bear rule over every living creature." Instead He says, "The fear and the dread of you will fall upon ... every creature that moves." That is not what He had said at the beginning. And He says now, "Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal; and from every man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man." That is not what He had said before, either.
A sombre note sounds now beneath the cheerful tones of the first draft of the constitution. A sinister element has invaded the arena of God's creation. Our 'constitutional rights' have been amended. You might say that all of life is lived now 'under the first amendment', and we blunder badly if we fancy we live under the first draft of God's charter for us, and not under its revised edition.
3. Again, we almost always stop at the end of ch. 4 in our statement of the Fall. But the full story of what happened when we blew the fuses is not unfolded until we reach, in ch. 11, the story of the tower of Babel. Chapter 3, which is occupied with Adam and Eve, only spells out the consequence of their fateful action at the individual level; ch. 4, with its story of Cain and Abel, tells us what followed at the level of our neighbour relations, (not only do we hear God ask of Adam, "Where are you?" but we also hear Him ask of Cain, "Where is your brother?"), and later in the chapter with its story of Lamech and his clan, what happened at the level of our social relations. Finally in ch. 11 there is spelled out what has happened in consequence of the Fall at the level of national and international relations.
It is with those later affirmations in mind that we must hear these early statements. We must do our author the simple courtesy of hearing him on his own terms. We must have the good sense and the humility to acknowledge the story line to which he has written them, and not blindly or arrogantly impose some story line of our own upon it. Almost all the dispute about these chapters arises because we insist on bringing to their understanding a twentieth century scientific mind-set. That is both a discourtesy and a foolishness.
It is foolish, for example, to try and trace in the sequence of six days in Genesis 1 the sequence of the geological ages in the earth's remote past, or to identify a 'gap' between part one and part two of v. 1 to allow for the prehistoric era when dinosaurs roamed the earth. That is to bring a 20th century mentality to the understanding of these pages which is foreign to the Hebrew writer's mentality, to impose a mind-set which does not belong, and which the language will not sustain. What he wrote is a Celebration of Creation; it is a lyric, not a timetable; a hymn, not a science thesis. Why should we insist, because we hold these chapters (rightly) to be divinely inspired, that it is science which God was here inspiring? He inspires poetry as well as science. Why should the writer's inspiration not be understood quite differently? It might as easily have come, as it would to a poet, by observing a sunrise from some cliff top overlooking the sea - it would yield the same sequence of 'days'. Sitting through the darkest hour of the night, the hour before the dawn, the first thing he would observe, before the sun climbed visibly above the horizon, would be the diffuse light that presages the dawn. The first objects its rays illumine, before they angle down to the surface of the earth, are the clouds in the firmament of the sky; the waves of the sea are the first objects to flash in the growing light, and then mountain crests. As the golden lip of the sun kisses the horizon, life begins to stir in the world about him: fish ripple the surface of the sea, the dawn chorus of the birds breaks out around him, and soon the animals are stirring from their lairs. Last of all, man emerges from his home to go about his daily toil, and the poet reflects upon his appointed place in this marvellous scheme of things. (See Note below)
Why should the framing of these verses not have been inspired by such an experience, rather than by any scientific interest? It is not my contention that they are, of course. I am simply illustrating the fact that we may tacitly impose a story line of our own upon the material without bothering to enquire what the author's mind-set was.
But even so, that is not the point. What our author set himself to do was to prepare a statement of the truth he had been taught by God about the real nature of the world, and of humanity, and of God Himself, and of the relations in which all three stand to each other so that we might understand our life in the light of it; and we must allow him to set his own parameters to the framework of his thesis.
To the affirmations he makes we turn next.
Note:
I owe the thought to H. Wheeler Robinson, "Inspiration and
Revelation", Oxford at the Clarendon Press 1953, p. 21 (from Procksch
p. 455).
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