THE LOST HOME OF GENESIS ONE
Dr. John Walton on the foundations of Biblical creation
by SETH BOLLINGER
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. John Walton here.
Every day that I walked into my high school evolutionary biology class, I had one mission: don’t become brainwashed. Armed with Ken Ham’s Creationist videos and my NIV Study Bible, I felt that it was my duty to learn about evolution only so that I could combat it later. Not only did I believe that evolution conflicted with my view of the Bible, I believed it conflicted with Christianity as a whole. I was confident in my viewpoint that the earth was scientifically created the way it was literally written in Genesis 1—in seven, twenty-four hour days.
What I truly was unwilling to admit was just how weird the Creation story really is.
“I truly was unwilling to admit just how weird the Creation story really is.”
From the first few sentences in the Bible, we are confronted with a unique and confusing passage describing how God created the universe in seven days. Genesis 1, the foundational Creation narrative of the Hebrew Bible, begins with very strange phrases:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. [1]
Reasonably, a lifelong Christian and a non-believer could both approach this passage and wonder, what in the world does this mean? What does it mean for “darkness to be over the face of the deep” when God hadn’t separated light and darkness yet? What were these “waters” that God was hovering over? Keep in mind that these are only the first two verses of the Creation account; as one reads deeper into the storyline, many other questions arise—questions that could shake the foundations of one’s understanding of the Bible.
It wasn’t until my first year of college, when I was taking another introductory biology class, that my own biblical foundations began to crumble. Since high school, I had been introduced to several Christians who saw the Creation story much differently than I did, and didn’t see a conflict between evolution and the Bible. The evidence for evolution presented in BIO 110 was not as silly as I had previously presumed. I was grasping to understand how these new ideas fit within my own biblical worldview—how could I still believe in the Bible as the authoritative word of God and acknowledge scientific origins of the universe from the “secular” world?
“How could I still believe in the Bible as the authoritative word of God and acknowledge scientific origins of the universe from the “secular” world?”
In my pursuit of answers, I had a chance to speak with Dr. John Walton, an Old Testament scholar and professor at Wheaton College and the author of numerous books, including The Lost World of Genesis One. Dr. Walton’s mission is to make people excited about the Old Testament, which he believes most Christians ignore or disregard as unimportant. In this mission, he also strives to maintain theological orthodoxy while deconstructing various views of biblical interpretation. His uniquely inviting yet historically and theologically dense books have inspired many to dive into the world of the ancient Israelites, including me.
At the forefront of our conversation, I wanted to uncover what I, as a twenty-first century Westerner living in the United States, tend to get wrong when I approach biblical interpretation; after all, I knew I had to be missing something. Dr. Walton offered two assumptions which we incorrectly bring to the Bible when we try to interpret it. The first is that we approach the biblical texts with our own modern worldviews and questions.“We often don’t realize that we’ve got to go that cultural distance,” Dr. Walton said, referring to our lack of understanding of ancient cultures. Dr. Walton often likes to mention that the Bible is absolutely written for us, but it wasn’t written to us: it was the Word of God given to ancient Israelites, who lived thousands of years ago in a culture far different than ours.
Dr. John Walton , Old Testament scholar and professor at Wheaton College
“Dr. Walton often likes to mention that the Bible is absolutely written for us, but it wasn’t written to us.”
The second assumption we bring to biblical interpretation deals with individualism. Dr. Walton mentioned that we often want to read the Bible for some kind of personal payoff, almost like a self-help book. This is a me-centric way of reading the Bible, where we ask ourselves how certain verses and stories apply to our lives at this very moment. Dr. Walton suggests an alternative to this method: instead, we should consider reading the Bible as a text to help us understand God’s plans and purposes, and then live our lives according to those ideas.
Dr. Walton offered this anecdote to help understand the me-centric view of biblical interpretation: “Some of us think we’re driving along in our luxury sedan and we see Jesus hitchhiking by the road. We decide to invite him into our car so that he can take us to our best life now, but we’re in the driver’s seat and he’s just the navigator who helps us avoid bumps and potholes.” Instead, we should be willing to abandon our car all together when we encounter Jesus. “We get on His train and we’re on the tracks of the kingdom, and He’s the conductor,” Dr. Walton concluded. This viewpoint causes us to take ourselves out of the picture completely.
The me-centric view of biblical interpretation is also found in our own modern scientific assumptions that we impose on ancient Israelites. We commonly don’t stop to think about our own cosmology, which includes scientific theories about the origins of the universe and our knowledge of astronomy, gravity, physics, and many other scientific fields. Many of us don’t realize how materialistic our worldview is, where we differentiate between natural and supernatural objects and occurrences. The ideas we inherently believe are all a product of our culture and have been built up by hundreds of years of scientific advancement.
The ancient Israelites did not think this way—their viewpoint of the universe differed enormously from our own. It was an ancient cosmology, which would not have known anything about the scientific universe that we understand today. Dr. Walton advises us to interpret the Creation narrative through this lens—the lens which the original readers would have brought to the text.
Rather than being concerned with the material, Dr. Walton concludes that ancient cosmology was focused on functionality or order. In this viewpoint, ancient Israelites wouldn’t have believed that something existed because of physical properties, but because it served a function or purpose in an ordered system.
Dr. Walton offered an allegory to help understand this difference. He compared the material worldview of creation to building a house: the foundation, siding, roofing, electricity, plumbing, and more are all important steps in the creative process of housebuilding. But eventually, somebody needs to be able to flip the switch and allow the house to function as a home. To be a home, the house must be ordered. How is the furniture arranged? What should be hung on the walls? Which room will serve which purpose? The functional idea of the Creation narrative is about a home story, where God orders the cosmos for humanity and for His dwelling.
Each day of creation, therefore, can be thought of as establishing function in an ordered world. On the first day, God separates light, which he calls ‘day,’ from darkness, which he calls ‘night.’ In our modern context, we understand that light could refer to the sun or stars, but for ancient Israel, there was no scientific understanding of what these heavenly bodies were. Instead, day and night were functional, serving as methods to measure time. The separation of light and darkness, therefore, is an ordering of the cosmos that creates the concept of time. [2] On the second day, God separates the waters below from the waters above, signifying the creation of weather. [3] Day three is when God separates the waters from the dry land, an act that functionally would have represented the creation of food. [4] Each day is an act of God ordering His cosmic home, rather than creating a house.
Throughout my own deconstruction of my previous views of the Creation story, this transition from a house story to a home story was very challenging. I often wanted to have a feeling of certainty that the earth was created exactly like Genesis says, and yet this viewpoint leaves open a door for any number of scientific theories, including evolutionary theory, to describe creation. Did this mean that the Bible was ambiguous and didn’t give clear answers? How does this viewpoint relate to the creation of humanity?
In the biblical story, God gives humanity two specific commands: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” [5] On a basic level, Dr. Walton said, these commands are functions that humans are called to carry out, relating to the functional viewpoint of creation. However, these actions must be understood as subordinate to the fact that humans were made in the image of God. “God has created us in his image to work alongside Him to continue bringing order,” Dr. Walton reiterated. This is a foundational idea of creation: that God has ordered the world for good, and that humanity’s original calling is to join him in redemptive work.
This is signified by perhaps the most important day of creation: the seventh day, where God rests. The sabbath day, part of the Jewish custom and weekly ritual, was modeled after the seventh day where God ceased his work. [6] But we often don’t understand what this rest really meant in the Creation narrative. “God’s resting is not disengagement,” Dr. Walton stressed, “it is an engagement. He’s now sitting on his throne to take control.” The seventh day of creation is, in fact, a cosmic inauguration, where the act of creation is finished and God’s ruling presence is established across all of time. The earth becomes His temple, where God’s spirit dwells with His people.
Unfortunately humanity quickly loses access to God’s presence, represented in the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. The grand storyline of the Bible, then, focuses on God re-establishing his presence among humanity, ultimately resulting in the incarnation of Jesus. The “Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” and Jesus establishes the presence of God on the earth as Emmanuel. [7] The theme of God’s presence continues all the way until Revelation 21, where there is no more darkness or suffering, and God’s presence is fully among His people once again. “This is the theme of the Bible,” Dr. Walton concluded, “And if we miss it in Genesis 1, we miss something very important.”
In my journey of understanding Genesis 1, this is a mind blowing revelation. The Creation narrative is not trying to be confined to a scientific account of the universe; it is a foundational story about God’s desire for relationship and presence with his creation. What seems ambiguous to me, a twenty-one year old college student living in 2021, was significantly important and clear to God’s chosen people. God created the universe to commune with all of humanity, and in this, He communes with me.
But still, within this new framework, we must beg the question: can this Biblical account of creation and modern scientific understandings of the universe, such as evolution or the Big Bang, co-exist? Dr. Walton’s short answer: “Yes.”
“Science is interested in mechanisms by its very nature,” Dr. Walton elaborated, “Whereas the Bible is interested in agency; who is the agent of creation and what were his purposes?” Dr. Walton says that scientific theories like evolution, the dominant scientific view of creation, can align with the biblical Creation narrative since it concerns the process of creation, not the purpose. “It’s a house story instead of a home story,” he explained, referring to his previous anecdote.
There are many ways throughout history where Christians have tried to reconcile the biblical Creation story with science. There are figures such as Ken Ham and groups like the Young Earth Creationists, who try to use modern scientific methods to explain that the earth was literally created in a seven day period and is only around six-thousand years old. This was the viewpoint I grew up in, and while it is easy for scientists to laugh at this viewpoint, it is easy to understand how applying a material view to the creation narrative makes sense based on the way we think about the world today.
Dr. Walton’s book, The Lost World of Genesis One, offers a much deeper analysis of how different scientific viewpoints coincide with the biblical Creation narrative. He explains some of his problems with Young Earth Creationism, as well as dissecting theological complications with the theory of evolution. While reconciling science and faith isn’t Dr. Walton’s main focus, I recommend reading through his commentary on the subject in order to better understand this contentious area. It is a very nuanced area, and requires much humility, grace, and open-mindedness across all scientific disciplines.
Throughout my conversation with Dr. Walton, I was struck by how often I have misplaced my foundational ideas of creation in a scientific and materialistic viewpoint. Growing up, I constantly placed the foundations of my faith in a Young Creationist viewpoint, and I was willing to defend these views vigilantly. I’ve seen skeptics of faith place their foundations in evolutionary biology, where naturalism is their guiding principle. The Creation narrative beckons us to build our foundation on something different: relationship.
“The Creation narrative beckons us to build our foundation on something different: relationship.”
By understanding Genesis 1 through the eyes of ancient Israel, we are invited into a story of love, order, and redemption. The story of creation not only shows us the purposeful origins of the cosmos, it draws each of us out of our sinful pasts into a brand new beginning.
SOURCES
[1] Genesis 1:1-2, ESV (emphasis added)
[2] John H. Walton. The Lost World of Genesis One (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 53.
[3] John H. Walton. The Lost World of Genesis One (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 57.
[4]John H. Walton. The Lost World of Genesis One (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 59.
[5] Genesis 1:28, ESV
[6] Exodus 20:8-11, ESV
[7] John 1:14, ESV
SETH BOLLINGER
is a senior from Lancaster, Pennsylvania studying AEM and Marketing. He enjoys listening to podcasts, watching Wes Anderson movies, and constantly aspiring to read more theology books while falling asleep in the process.