I seem to be unique in the Evangelical world in thinking that Walton has been over-interpreted on “functional” v “material”. I was reading his “Lost World” stuff early on (because I’d been greatly impressed by a book he wrote, and I bought, 20 years before), and always got the impression he was placing his emphasis on functional categories, not excluding material ones. It’s to do with what ones mind concentrates upon.
So you go into a Gothic cathedral, and talk about it representing the vault of heaven, about the stained glass speaking of God’s light being seen through what is created, and so on - all functional talk. But you’re not denying that the thing is made of stone and has to follow basic architectural pronciples to stay up - it’s just that your concern is the spiritual function.
So granted that Genesis 1 is about God creating the world we see, is it concerned to say how God, as a builder, put it together, or how, as an architect, he wanted it to speak to us? I agree with Walton it’s the latter.
That said, he may very well be guilty of overstating his case (I learned in sociology that proponents of new theories almost always have to to make an impression), thus encouraging people to say “dry land is solid, not ‘functional.’”
I don’t think he helps himself by maintaining an “ancient science” material cosmology apparently hidden behind Genesis, seeming to suggest that they “really” thought of a solid raqia and a goldfish-bowl universe floating in infinite ocean, as in all those Victorian representations of “the ANE cosmos”. It’s ironic, since his old Ancient Israelite Literature in its Cultural Context was one of the first books to point out all the non-parallels with other ANE literature.
But his work enabled me to imagine that the writer of Genesis, and hence his readers, came into the cathedral of the world as those using it for worship, rather than as engineers wondering how the arches were put up.
