Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Phillip Jensen and Peter Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).
The opening of Genesis is strikingly simple to access and comprehend, yet it raises profound questions of the reader. How then are we to read this extraordinary piece of literature? That is the discussion of this episode.
The Foundations of Genesis Part 2
Reading Genesis
Phillip Jensen: The brothers are going to be talking about more of the world, the universe, God and you, because we’ve been looking at Genesis 1-11, that’s where we’re heading this year. We spent last time talking about the background ideas of how we come to read Genesis, but Peter, you said something about the nature of literature, and I’d like to follow you up more on the assumptions when you’re reading, because you talked about how you approach reading.
Peter Jensen: Do you mean reading anything?
Phillip: Yes, reading anything, and listening, because you said you’re reading and listening are a similar activity.
Peter: They are interconnected, because you’re listening to the author, whether the author is speaking or whether the author is in print and listening respectfully in a sense you want to know what the author is saying.
Phillip: Will you listen to Genesis 1-11 any differently than you would listen to any other author?
Peter: Yes, and no. That is to say, yes, of course. With love of neighbour, I want to know what it is saying to me. On the other hand, Phillip, it is “unique,” maybe too strong a word. It’s got a cultural background, but it stands out, doesn’t it? It is so powerful because it’s transformative. If you have this view of the world, you have a view of the world which transforms your life, but transforms the way you view the world and transforms civilizations. So, Genesis 1-11, I believe, has been fundamental to the development of Western society, for example, but as well as that, of course, all around the world now, when people are reading it, it transforms.
Phillip: But that’s a kind of after-effect, isn’t it? Having seen what it does, I now read it differently. If you started from scratch, you’d just pick up the Genesis 1-11. Is there any reason why you’d read it differently to picking up the Sydney Morning Herald?
Peter: I would. I do. And I have to confess this to all our listeners, I always try to read it in the light of what Jesus did. That is to say, I became a Christian by believing in Jesus. It may not be at that point that I had much of an idea about the Bible as such. I believed in Jesus. Because I believe in Jesus, I take the attitude of Jesus towards the writings, the sacred writings. And in his treatment of the Old Testament and his references to these very passages, he is obviously treating them as what they are, namely the Word of God. Now, when we love our neighbor as ourselves, as we hear, in particular, as we hear the Bible, not least Genesis 1-11, we are hearing the very Word of God himself. And therefore, we treat it in a way of respect and of humility, of worship.
Phillip: Yes, I’m happy and unhappy with the way you put that then, you see, because there are people who actually do worship their book. You’re not talking about worshiping the book as if you would not put another book on top of your Bible.
Peter: No, that’s what I call literalism, a literalistic attitude to the world. It’s the contents of the book, it’s the reality of the book. It is the very word of God. Well, it’s the author of the book who really matters. As William Tyndale once said, “God is his word,” which always causes people to be shocked by that, yet there is truth in it. I am my word. The way you relate to me is through what I say and through what you say. Words are so integral to our relationships, and it’s no accident the God of the universe communicating to or seeking to rule over such puny beings as ourselves, graciously, humbly approaches us with words, with relational ideas, with that which creates relationship. And so, we’re dealing with the word of God.
Phillip: In a week or two we will get a look at censorship and the power of words and the power of God’s word and things like that. Genesis 1 opens up so many topics, doesn’t it? You and I don’t one day come across Genesis 1 and know nothing else at all and then read it. We come in a context where we’ve learned to trust different people. And you mentioned last week the importance of trusting the truth, or as I put it, trusting what’s trustworthy. So, the way I listen to people does connect into the trustworthiness with which I find them. When you meet someone, you trust them. When you find that they let you down, they lie, they deceive, then you trust them less and less. So as a group of people, and this is slightly discriminatory, we don’t trust real estate agents, we don’t trust second-hand car dealers, we don’t trust politicians, we don’t trust journalists, because we’ve kept finding out they’re untrustworthy. But dad, your dad, my dad, I trusted him. Absolutely.
Peter: He would never tell us lies. I always say, when he was playing golf on his own, he’d still count every stroke.
Phillip: How do you know that?
Peter: I would caddy for him.
Phillip: Yes, he was a man who was trustworthy and therefore if he spoke you would trust him. Relationships are built on trust. Communication of information is built on trust. So you mentioned, for example, the problem the scientific communities have with journals that turned out not to be trustworthy. It’s a problem because science is always open to being challenged with new information. But it’s more than a problem if people are forging the results, because then you don’t know who you can trust. Every piece of information then has to be tested again. So, if you start off with Jesus and you learn to trust Jesus, because you find him trustworthy, then you come to trust God and his word which then leads you to be trusting Genesis 1-11. So, you read Genesis 1-11 differently than an untrustworthy journal like the Sydney Morning Herald.
Peter: There is another element to this, however, that when—and I think this is true not just of me, but I’ve seen it of many others—when you actually read Genesis 1-11, even as an unbeliever, it very often speaks for the next extraordinary power, and you become conscious that you are in the presence of God Himself. It’s that sort of literature. It has that sort of power. So, although I’ve described my way in through Jesus, yet nonetheless, I think even when I first heard it, I thought, this is of God.
Phillip: What do you do with people who say, well, I read it, and it doesn’t have that effect upon me at all?
Peter: I don’t think they’re idiots or something like this. I do think we’re dealing here with the power of the Holy Spirit, among other things. But in terms of what we would do, I would take them back to the other route and say, well, what does Jesus make of it and what do you think of Jesus? Even so, such people can often see that this is very powerful. As I say, you can be an unbeliever and still recognize the extraordinary beauty and power of this literature.
Phillip: You can certainly see the power in terms of changing the world and having a world view. And I think more and more people are coming to understand that Western civilization is built out of Christian thinking, in particular, creational thinking. But people do have different reactions. And I don’t want to say everybody will read this immediately on their knees.
Phillip: Once you accept that God exists and speaks, then as you read this, you are listening from a point of view of, well, what does God say to me now?
Peter: It’s interesting that that seems to actually get to the heart of this literature. That is to say, it is that perspective which I think helps you to understand the literature better than just disbelief, unbelief, or being disconnected from it.
Phillip: While you are saying that you are reading with that sense that this is God speaking to us now and it has this impact, it’s still time bound, isn’t it?
Peter: Of course, as is all communication, all human communication, and God has kindly spoken to us using our words here. Everything is time-bound in the sense that it arises out of a particular context, thank goodness. I think of this in the New Testament too. I think the Apostle Paul deals with some issues which are long since past. They may seem to be irrelevant to us, like food laws and things like that. But I always see the eternal, if you like, in the particular. That is to say, you can’t get around the particular. You’ve got to be interested in the food laws. You’ve got to work out what that’s about. But as you do, you see the principles that lie behind them. And it is those principles shaped by the particular issue that’s before you, which gives you the ongoing and transformative power.
So yes, of course, Genesis 1-11 is a product of its age, necessarily, and it has certain presuppositions. Genesis 1-11 is written from what people call a phenomenological point of view. In other words, it’s written in such a way that human beings all around the globe can understand it, because it’s written from the point of view of the ordinary person who looks out of the world and see certain things, the stars in the sky, the horizon, the trees, and all the rest of it. You can understand it, because it’s written for you in your language. It’s written simply, but not simplistically.
Phillip: Good, but the simplicity, the phenomenological, still talks about the Sun rising, even though we know that the Sun doesn’t rise. “I saw a beautiful earth revolve the other day”, it doesn’t work does it?
Peter: In other words, we ourselves use phenomenological language, all the traces of it. We don’t use scientific language much to talk to each other. We’re using the language that everyone shares because we’ve all shared the same experience of looking at the world in a certain way. But now it is still culture bound in some way. I remember that there has been an interesting Jewish flavor of it being culture-bound. Of course, you can see the eternal in the particular.
Phillip: There is an interesting book by a Jewish writer, Sarna. I remember him pointing out that in Genesis, it talks about the stars being put in their place to tell humans the time, basically. And he said, this was so contrary to the culture of the age, which was so astrologically fascinated by the stars ruling over. So instead of the astrology view that the stars rule your human destiny, he’s saying, no. God put the stars up there so that you’d know the time of day. It really was unimportant. Now, that’s an interesting insight, but we can’t know that is what the purpose was, can we? It’s an idea. It’s a fascinating idea, but it doesn’t tell you the author was writing against the culture.
Peter: It depends what you mean by know here. I mean, I can’t know that you’re in the room in the end. I might be making it up. But all our knowledge is always open to question, open to challenge, but it’s persuasive and plausible given what we also know about the cultures of the day. Now, one of the reasons why Genesis is so powerful is that throughout history and even now, a vast number of people in this world believe in the spirits, believe in the gods, polytheistic or animistic. They believe in a world which is ruled by a whole clutch of forces beyond us so that if you fall sick, you don’t say, has a mosquito bitten me, you say, who has done this to me? Who in the next village so hates me that they have put a spell on me and I’ve fallen sick? That may sound primitive to us but it’s natural. It’s a way in which human beings have thought for millennia and many people still think that. Now, the Bible is written into that sort of world and the Bible has said, no, there is one God, and his will rules all things. You see, an animistic way of thinking says who and why, who has done this and why. A biblical way of thinking says ”the Who” is God and “the Why” is his will. Now, that is liberating. It so liberates you that you are then able to ask, what is this thing I am looking at and how does it work? The answer to the questions Who? and Why? helps you to ask the questions of objects in themselves.
Phillip: But you see, part of what I love about the Bible and its interrelationship with culture is, yes, it is expressed in a particular culture at the time. But it’s nearly always expressed in opposition to the culture at the time. And so, it is not culturally controlled.
Peter: No, and bear in mind the culture of the time is not just the culture of that time, it is an expression of typical human culture right through time.
Phillip: Let me push it further on a couple of other things. Genesis can’t tell us everything in 11 chapters, can it?
It has a focus, that is, I’m not going to find E=mc2 in Genesis, am I?
Peter: No, for a good reason, because God wanted us to discover that for ourselves as part of being His image bearers in the world. But yes, I agree with you. I think Genesis 1-11 has got to be read as highly selective. Many, many questions are not answered in Genesis 1-11. Famously the question is, where did Cain get his wife from? I don’t know what the answer is, the Bible doesn’t tell us what the answer is, and it’s not important. If it were the Bible would have told us.
Phillip: The Bible is selectively helpful to us.
Peter: That is part of its genius. It’s very focused, and it increases its power when it doesn’t tell us details, which we don’t need to know.
Phillip: You said we don’t need to know, but what if we want to know?
Peter: We are the image bearers of God, and part of the business of being image bearers of God is to discover what the world’s all about.
Phillip: But it’s about this world, isn’t it?
Peter: Yes, so it doesn’t tell us those things because we’ll discover them, and they are not the most important things. Is that what you mean?
Phillip: Yes, but it’s also the other side. It’s not made up fairy stories. Its focus is, to some extent, about how the world operates or how we operate in the world. It’s not about myths. Now, myths have lots of different meanings, but it’s not about animistic myths. It’s about real people, real places, real times, isn’t it?
Peter: Yes, I believe so. In the last hundred years in particular we have been looking at the Bible as a whole, but also Genesis 1-11 in particular, with a new literary point of view, a positive one, not a negative one,It may be that what we’re dealing with at some places in Genesis 1-12 is more parabolic. If so, then I would say that it’s a parable of true events. It is a parable that has arisen out of true events, but the whole aim of the parable is to help us to focus on what really matters in the real events.
Phillip: Now, at this point, I want to say that Genesis 1-11 is unique. And our job is to read it, to understand it, rather than to impose upon it categories by which we can, to some extent, reduce the answers to our questions and avoid the problems. We have got to just say, this is what Genesis says. We talk about Genesis 1 being written by Moses. Moses wasn’t there. It’s not eyewitness history. It can’t be eyewitness history. But it carries within it the information that we need to know to live. So I’m going to read that part you were referring to, Genesis 1:26-28.
“But then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish, the sea, the birds, the heavens, over the livestock, over the earth and every creeping thing. So God created man in his image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. God blessed them. God said to them, be fruitful. Fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish and the sea and the birds and the heavens.”
That is, God tells us what we need to know. Part of what he tells us that we need to know is that we have responsibility to find out the rest, to find out what we need, to control it, to rule over it. That’s a key part. And that’s why science comes out of it, isn’t it?
Peter: There is one God who controls all things and is utterly consistent. That gives you the who and the why. If you deny that, then in the end you won’t be able to do the what and the how of science either.
