The Proper Interpetation of Scripture

It appears to me that we have lost our way, we Christians, when we ignore our own rules for interpreting scripture. And American religious conservatives seem to have done so.

First, a doctrinal statement: I am a Christian, conservative in theology, and accept the Apostle’s Creed, Nicean Creed, and follow a modified Calvinist theology. I hold to a “once saved, always saved” belief vis-a-vis my brothers in the faith, and hold that the only assurance of salvation is to be found in accepting the gift of salvation through Jesus’ substitionary atonement.

If you agree with me on that, we probably are going to have our first little spat.

While I agree with you that the Bible is the word of God. I disagree that the first chapter of Genesis is to be taken literally because studying it … and it alone … forces you to abandon literalism. Just as Ruth 2:12 forces you to abandon literalism for that passage lest you make God a chicken, so too a careful reading of Genesis forces you to reconsider a literal intent lest you make Moses, the author, an idiot.

Consider first that Genesis was written before science was even invented. Moses was as incapable of writing a scientific account of the creation of the world as he was incapable of writing it in the King’s English. While I fully believe that the Bible is God’s Word, I also believe that God chose to use certain men to convey that word to us. From the majesty of Moses’ culture building books, to the beauty of David’s Psalms, and the varying gospel accounts of the apostles and disciples, we know that God’s story is given to us by those who have been inspired by God. And the proper interpetation of scripture takes that into account; we know the varying views of the resurrection of Jesus are not contradictory, but that the different authors emphasized different things they had learned. And they write from their own perspective, with their own words, albeit inspired by God. We aren’t looking for English texts with detailed descriptions of the structure of DNA written by Matthew, but we do respect his Gospel as God-breathed and inspired.

Secondly, beyond the fact that science wasn’t invented when Moses penned Genesis, consider the reason the Creation is spoken of at all. It certainly is not intended by the author to teach us about the physical world. We are in the physical world, and need only to study it to learn about it. But Genesis is giving us something much more valuable: it teaches us about God, and his relationship to Man.

But those arguments from reason aside, there are plenty of evidences in the text itself that the Genesis accounts are not to be taken as a wooden literalism. Get the Bible ready and turn to Genesis 1:3-5:

Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.

Day one sees the creation of light, and the cycle of light and darkness falling on the face of the earth. If we read through more of the majestic passage of our creation, we see this in Genesis 14-19:

Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”, and it was so. Then God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

The passage itself is a bit confusing, as it seems to have God speaking “lights in the firmament of the heavens” into existence, then making two great lights (the sun and the moon) and then the stars. Taking this verse literally, that’s four individual acts of creation, the lights, the sun, the moon and the stars. But who would think that? We don’t want to be guilty of “wooden literalism”, do we? It is reasonable to infer from the wording that what it really means is that the sun, moon and the stars are all made on the fourth day, and the author is using certain language to convey that, by first telling us what happened, then telling us more specifically what happened in a bit more detail.

That’s the fourth day of “evening and mornings”. Four times the light has divided the night. Where did the light come from on the other “days”?

Are we really saying, as one lay Creationist related to me, that God had Jesus flying around the Earth, and that was the evening and morning, since “Jesus is Light”? That explanation sounds more like a basis for a Thomas Kinkade painting than it does an act of a rational God. Other than the transfiguration, I can’t think of a time when Jesus could actually be used as a night light. Most of us know that the idea that “Jesus is the Light of the World” is a phrase meant to convey that Jesus is the way out of spiritual darkness, not physical darkness. Another explanation I’ve heard is that the element named “light” was created, and would bring day and night even if our sun were gone by the miraculous power of God, but this flys in the face of the idea that Genesis is an account of the physical creation of the world: it either is, or is not, historically accurate in the modern sense.

Like science, the discipline of accurate, fact-by-fact history telling is a modern one. Genesis isn’t a dull textbook; it is something else entirely.

Perhaps its just the musings of an ignorant desert wanderer. Do you really think Moses didn’t know the sun rising brought the light that divided the day and the night? Moses was smart; as one of the Pharoh’s court, he grew up with the best education available. He knew that the sun rising brought the daylight; the ancient Egyptians certainly knew it. He would not have “contradicted” himself in the first two paragraphs of his writing. His audience would not have accepted his account as God-breathed had they looked to it as a literal rendition and found such obvious internal evidences against literalism.

The sun/day issue is an “internal evidence” that the creation account in Genesis 1 is not a history lesson. I personally think it follows the structure of a poem, with contrast being used rather than rhyming (“evening and morning” are repeated at regular intervals in the verses).

This internal evidence should be all we need to abandon the recent idea that Genesis is a history lesson, or, even worse, a scientific account.

Another example:
Refer to Gen. 1:26-27, when God created man. Spoke him into existence just like the rest of creation, “Let us make man in our image” and it was done. No assembly required. Now refer to Gen. 2:7, where God forms man out of the dust of the earth, and then breathed into his nostrils.

Read through Gen. 2:8 – 25, where the creation account has man created first, then trees created out of the ground (2:9), and then He forms every beast of the field to see which animal would be a suitable mate for Adam. Wait, didn’t Moses tell us that all the animals on land were created BEFORE Adam back in Gen 1:25? Man is created last in Gen 1:25, but first in Gen 2:9.

Do you really believe these two accounts of creation are mutually exclusive? That in chapter 1 Moses is lying, and telling the truth in chapter 2, or is it the reverse? Or is there something else afoot here?

The success of the “Left Behind” series of books show that conservative Christians are certainly capable of interpreting scripture in an allegorical sense (it takes work to mesh Daniel, Isaiah and Revelation together like that!) It is not nearly as much work to read through Genesis 1 and 2 and see that the internal evidence is that God Himself doesn’t mean us to take it literally in a historical or scientific sense. Re-read Genesis and answer not the modern question of how we got here, but the ancient and more pertinent question of why we are here.