Reading the Creation Story
Oct 26th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 9 Comments |
As I mentioned before, I’ve written a book (*Stewie’s making fun of Brian’s novel-writing begins to play in background*) on reading the first three chapters of Genesis. In my second post on Creationism, I said I would talk about the right way to read the Bible’s account of Creation.
Here’s the approach I work with in my book (woo! my book!):
There is a fundamental human need to understand life in terms of stories (that’s why we buy novels and go to the movies). Myths fill this need. A myth is a story that reveals truths about the world (including the human part of it). Truths, as opposed to facts (see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) are statements about how things always are. (Facts are about how things were at a specific time and place).
Any story that reveals truths can be used as a myth to bring out the basic structures of a person’s life. A story is a myth when it helps you understand your world. Whether they are fiction (e.g. the Greek Myths) or factual (e.g. Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon) is largely immaterial. “Myth” is a name for the function some stories can play, not a genre.
Scientists, not realizing that myth is a function, made myths seem illegitimate (and lead to the backlash-craving for myth currently focused on Tolkien, Shyamalan, Rowling, Paolini, etc.). But C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien have done a lot to bring myths back to life, to show their truth-fullness and function.
It seems to me, however, that people don’t separate the questions of whether (1) the Genesis Creation Story reveals truth, and (2) whether it is true. They mean the same as “Fictional Story” when they say “Myth.” But it is possible to read Genesis 1-3 while asking, “What do you have say?” instead of, “What do you have to say about what happened?”
You just have to get comfortable with stories. You have to remember how it feels to simply live with a story without labeling it “fact,” “fiction,” or “lie.” Remember how it felt to watch The Lord of the Rings? Remember having discussions about the characters’ motives, whether the Wizards are human, where the Ent-Wives went, why the Elves have to leave instead of fight? That’s the head-space you have to get into to read Genesis 1-3.
What I do in the part of my book on Genesis 1 is to help us enter that head-space. I tell us a story about us. We encounter a mysterious book, simply entitled “The First Story.” It has a strange illustration on its cover. We puzzle over it, and work our way through its first chapter carefully, noting its patterns, its development, the picture it’s painting.
And in the process we begin to see things we, in the real world, have never seen before in the Creation Story (and couldn’t, because we’d never found a way to ask the right questions, and to not ask the wrong ones.)
I’ll talk tomorrow about what those things are, and how seeing them might help us either re-enter the debate with Science legitimately (for the first time), or avoid the debate altogether.
Out of curiosity, in your book, did you interpret the whole Tree of Knowledge bit? I’m curious to see what your interpretation would be of that. The only one which makes any sense to me are variations of Maimonides’s interpretation, but I don’t think that’s a particularly popular position within Christianity.
I don’t know Maimonide’s reading. He’s one of the guys I would have studied had I had more time to work on Medieval Philosophy (and here at CUA is the place to do that kind of thing).
Yeah, actually, I work my way verse by verse through the first three chapters, so I had to deal with the Tree. I had a lot of fun with it, because, as with everything else, I saw things in it that I had never seen before.
I didn’t speculate on the reasoning behind including it, but I do have a very firm opinion on why its fruit was “forbidden” and the punishment “set” at “death.”
Perhaps I can get into that in my post this evening. Hmmm…
(I enjoy answering questions without answering them, it seems. How politician-like of me.)
[...] listing the three kinds of Creationism, the three groups-of-issues surrounding Creationism, and the approach you have to take when reading Genesis’ Creation Story, I promised to say what reading Genesis 1-3 will show [...]
[...] already dealt with the first, “How to understand what Scripture says,” here and [...]
Micah,
That’s an interesting proposal concerning whether something “(1) reveals truth” vs. “(2) is true”. (In the latter I take you to mean are the details “literal” or just simply communicative.) I’m not sure I understand exactly here what you are trying to communicate, but if I understand you correctly, then I am at least open to this possibly being the correct approach. Take for example Christ’s use of parables in the New Testament: the parable/story need not be “true (2)” in order to “reveal truth (1)”. In other words, often the actual events and details of the parable could be “fiction” and yet the parable still “true” in the sense that it “reveals truth”. Is this a fair analogy to the approach you are describing?
Indeed, except that I would claim it is possible to approach a story without asking whether it is fact or fiction.
To ask whether a story that refers to things that are not present to you “is true” is to ask whether it matches other stories about the same objects/events. And I propose that we should just read the Creation Story for itself before asking whether it fits other stories about the beginning of the world (like the Evolutionists’ stories).
Even 6-Day Creationism is another story, in that it adds a lot of scientific argumentation and claims about things the Creation Story doesn’t mention.
(For example, the length of the Days is usually set at “24 hours.” But the Earth’s rotation is slowing down, so wouldn’t it make more sense to say “6-Day/23 hour Creationism”? Or, as I suggest, shouldn’t we just leave all that stuff aside for the moment, and read the story?)
[...] first was discussed here and here, and the second was discussed [...]
[...] Recently, The Wife and I have been watching G4, and while I don’t own any gaming systems, I’ve begun to wonder whether creating, exploring, and participating in worlds/stories through gaming isn’t somehow the same as that which happens in reading fiction, telling stories, watching movies, or using myths. [...]
Hey, Micah,
I just dropped in to peruse your many writings. I’m working my own Website now. It’s about guitars and art.