Creation

Question 2a)

Is all this Bible stuff real? (pt 1, Creation)


Answer 2a)

Many of our world religions hold some sort of writing or canon in which they base their faith upon. The Muslims use the Koran, the Jews use the TaNaK (mainly the Torah), the Mormons the Golden Tablets and of course the Christians use the Bible. The followers of these faiths will generally allow their sacred writings to be the final authority on the way they live their lives and the way they think about the world. When a group of people put so much faith in ancient documents, we come to ask, “How real is your canon?”

Although I do not know very much about the writings of other religions, I understand the Bible to some extent and wish to discuss it a little more in depth. Now as we journey into some of the arguments for why the Bible is trustworthy and real, I just want to remind whoever is reading this that there are many more arguments to be made on all sides (Jeff Lim you punk ass haha). I don’t speak for all Christians either because there are many ways in which people in Christianity read their Bibles, this is just my take. Is there a way of proving anything to be 100% real? I don’t think so but there are evidences that overwhelmingly give one side more credibility than another. So here we go.


Creation


I think one of the major areas of theological dispute today is our reading into Creation. Is the Genesis Creation account to be taken literally or is it not? Let’s imagine that these next few lines are me writing a letter to a friend:

Sup homie? How’s it hangin’? Damn man, I haven’t seen you in a minute. Hope all is going well. Heard you were talking to that chicken-head again, what’s up with that?

Now let’s imagine that someone gets a hold of this letter a thousand years from now and begins to decipher it. The first thing that they might come to recognize is that I’m writing to a house. And I’m asking the house, “how’s it hangin’?” so this must be talking about the door hinges. And I as the writer must be very attached to this house because I seem to have problems with not having seen it in a span of 60 seconds. And apparently in the year 2010, people believed that their homes would talk to them and this particular house I am writing to was talking to a decapitated chicken’s head.

If I as the writer am to understand that this is how his letter is going to be read in the future, I’d either be very angry or extremely amused. We all know that this letter is written to a friend and the intent is to see how they are doing. The friend is probably talking to some girl who the writer is not too fond of and he is curious on what’s going on. To get to a point where we understand what’s being written, we must go back in time and observe the way in which the people used the language, the political and social atmosphere, the way certain genres are used, etc. To read the Bible, we must do very similar things.

I do not read Creation literally rather I find that it is a genre through which the author is trying to tell a story. However, it does not mean that Adam and Eve aren’t actual people. When one is to examine the different writing styles and story telling methods of the Ancient Near East, we see that there are several different Creation accounts which have similar points as the Judeo-Christian story. Assuming that Moses is the main author of the first five books of the Bible, assuming that the Israelites were in Egypt as oppressed people, we can see that God would use Moses to speak to the Israelites in a language in which they understand. They had several different creation stories and God would use these stories to speak to His people to tell them their place in the cosmos. There are definitely more points to the argument but I do not have the time to go over all of them nor do I have the patience to do the full research. In the meantime, this brief clip will explain the point I’m trying to make a little bit more. [incase the video doesn't work, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o26Ad-WdjOw]




The one part he didn’t explain was that in ancient times, the final thing that was placed into a temple was the image of the deity. In the Judeo-Christian Creation account, the final thing that is made in the Earth (God’s temple) is man who bears the image of God. This is mindblowing because the other creation accounts actually do not give man a high dignity but rather he is the result of murder, god’s hating work, etc. A professor stated in one of my classes that Christian IS humanism (for more reasons that creation of course).




As you can tell, I don’t believe that Genesis is a scientific account of how the Earth came to be but more of a story to tell us our place in the vast universe. By no means am I knocking on people who view a literal 6 day creation or a 6-time period creation but I feel that the Genesis Creation account being a genre of story-telling makes more sense. So you can see that if you read it from the point which I do, it leaves open the option of evolution, intelligent design, etc. Now I just want to make sure that no one thinks that I necessarily believe in evolution but I do feel that at this point it is the best explanation we have for the way the Earth came about. In 50 years we might have a better explanation, who knows? Although our different sides debate and disagree on the how, I think what we can come to do is agree on the who, which is God. I am not a deist, I believe God was in the midst of it all with His hand on every little detail.

I hope in this post, you can see that you don’t necessarily have to believe in the traditional Creation account to believe that the Bible is real. There are other ways of interpreting it which make it very legitimate. The key though of the Bible’s authenticity and reality is not Creation but the reality of Jesus Christ which we will go into in the following weeks. I hope this at least makes you, the reader, think a little.


*** If this post doesn’t make sense, I’m sorry. I’m working through this myself these days and I am wrestling like a mad man.***