The Torah: Understanding Genesis for All It's Worth
Interview with Christian Minister and Marine Biologist Dr. Dennis Gordon
I’ve always, ever since a child, been interested in nature.
There’s something about the living environment that is beautiful and
interesting and attractive, and it just draws you in. So I went to university
and I eventually majored in zoology, and then I focused narrowly again into
marine zoology. I did my doctorate looking at the anatomy and aging process in
a marine fouling invertebrate.
Faith and evolution
You can’t study fossils for very long without having to
consider the very hard questions. We don’t have the luxury of ignoring the
difficult questions. So I had to confront the issue, what is the fossil record
telling me? I began gradually to see that the evidence for evolution was really
quite compelling and indisputable. It didn’t affect my faith at all. My faith
has grown over the years because in the end my faith is in Jesus Christ, and
one’s faith and commitment to Jesus is a consequence of the action of the Holy
Spirit in one’s life.
Genesis 1
In approaching Genesis, one has to ask the question, is there
more than one way of reading the book? There’s nothing new about that
concept—it’s at least as old as Augustine, who said that we should be careful
how we read the Bible lest we read into it, in fact, what is not there.
The Bible is a remarkable book written over more than a
period of 1000 years by 40 different authors, and it constitutes many different
forms of literature as well. We tend to read Genesis 1 superficially, unaware
of the structure that’s actually in the chapter. It really comes down to the
whole issue of exegesis—the art of biblical interpretation.
Exegesis asks certain questions concerning the Bible. We
want to know, for example, why a particular passage was written. What was the
historical or cultural context? What was the city? What were the issues? Who
was the writer? Who was the audience? Why was it written?
Right context
If we really want to understand Genesis 1 or indeed the
whole book of Genesis, we have to read it in the light of the Exodus. That’s
the context. We take Moses as the traditional author of the Pentateuch, the
first five books of the Bible … . He’s writing this at the time when a people
who were formally in bondage to slavery are now in the process of being
redeemed and on their way to salvation and the promised land.
God, through Moses, is giving them a future in relation to
their present. He’s also giving them a past. How do they come
to be where they are? Moses is connecting Israel with a past as well as giving
them a future. So what is the context of Genesis in relation to their past?
Genesis is divided into two major parts. The first 11
chapters deal with what we might call primeval history, largely based on oral
traditions and things that Moses may have learned when he was taught in Egypt
in an academic way, traditions that may have been communicated through the
patriarchs.
So Moses connects Israel with the ultimate origins—that the
God whom they worship, the God of the Hebrews, is the God who is the Creator.
In Egypt, there were gods of the sun and gods of darkness
and gods for animals and vegetation and rivers and so on. Well, the God of the
Hebrews is the God who created all the things that the pagans worship. The
chief point of Genesis 1 is to show that there is one God, not many.
Carefully crafted
Genesis 1 is a superb piece of literature. It is very
carefully crafted. The pagan creation stories are very complex and convoluted.
Genesis 1 uses some of the language of the pagan cosmogonies, drawing upon a
common tale that people were familiar with, but recasting it to tell a proper
theology about the God of Israel.
What was created on days one through six is the heavens and
the earth. Genesis 1:2 is very interesting, because it says, “And the earth was
without form and void,” and this is in the old King James Version of the Bible.
Formless and empty—that’s the starting condition. It says, “And darkness was on
the face of the deep.” Even before you have the creation of the six days, you
have something that already exists, maybe a watery surface, and the Spirit of
God is brooding over that. That’s your starting point.
It says specifically that it was “formless and empty.” Why
is Moses writing that? He’s writing that because Moses wants to show that the
God of the Hebrews, God of Israel, is able to structure [to solve the
problem of being formless] the cosmos and then populate [to solve the
problem of being empty] the cosmos. The first three days have to do with
structuring.
On day one, God separates the light from the dark. On day
two, he separates the waters above from the waters below, and on day three he
separates the land from the waters. So we have the structuring. So what was
formless (in Hebrew, tohu vav bohu, void and empty) is now
formed.
What God does in the second set of three days is solve the
second problem, of emptiness—God populates each of the realms that he
structured on the first three days. So on the first day we have the separation
of day from night, and what do we populate that realm with, if not the sun and
the moon and the stars? Then on day two we separate the waters above from the
waters below, and what do we see populating those realms, but the birds in the
upper atmosphere and the fish in the sea? Then on day six, the land animals and
human beings populating the realm that was formed on day three, and that solves
the problem of emptiness.
The one true God
Moses is taking elements that the pagans worship and
showing that things that the pagans worship were, in fact, creations of
the one true God. There’s a definite structure in there. A scientific
description is not at all the point of it. The issue is polytheism, many gods,
versus monotheism or one God.
To view or listen to all three interviews with Dennis
Gordon, visit Dimensions in Ministry at https://www.gci.org/media/dimensions. The interviews can
be streamed or downloaded in video or audio format. A downloadable transcript
is also available.
Author: Dennis Gordon
