It just sounds like a poetic turn of phrase. It cannot be interpreted as a natural process (like evolution) because 1) it was only a timespan of roughly 24 hours, and 2) death and suffering did not exist at that point, which would be required by evolution.
The Bible must be taken at its word. All interpretations are not equally valid. The Scriptures do have meaning that we can know by reading them.
Which gets you to Adam and Eve, not the beginning of the earth. The Bible does not tell us the age of the earth one way or another.
Wait, you’re going to tell me that “Let the earth bring forth” is a poetic turn of phrase, but deny the possibility that the 6 day language is a literary framework? So you pick and choose which things can be poetic and which things can’t, within the same passage, based on your preexisting idea of what happened?
The Bible doesn’t say death and suffering didn’t exist. Adam had the opportunity to bring life to humanity. He failed by his sin. Jesus, the second Adam (1 Corinthians 15), succeeded. Had Adam not failed, there would have been no spiritual death. That’s how Adam brought death to all men (not animals).
Agreed, and by reading the Bible, I don’t think your interpretation is valid. And by binding that interpretation on others, you risk putting a stumbling block before them, which is a serious matter. Be careful.
There is no gap in the record between the start of creation and the completion after the 6th day. It is one continuous narrative. God confirmed this in Exodus 20:11, where he came right out and clarified that his 6 days of work were a template for, and equivalent to, the 6 day work week of the Israelites. Jesus also confirmed there was no gap between the start of creation and the completion of Adam and Eve when he stated, “From the beginning of creation God made them male and female.” in Mark 10:6. This is how you allow Scripture to interpret Scripture, which is the only sound hermeneutic.
Yes I am, based upon the principle of allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture, as I outlined above.
Not based upon my pre-existing ideas–based upon Scripture’s own statements.
It absolutely does. God called everything he made “very good”, and we know from Scripture that God’s nature is not cruel. Romans 5 states that death came into the world through sin. Animal death is still death. As further support for this we see that carnivory was not permitted prior to the fall by way of Genesis 1:29-30; God did permit it after the Flood in Genesis 9:3.
You are free to make that choice. I have given my reasons why I hold to the interpretation I do.
I have no power to bind anything on others. I have made my case from the Scriptures, and you are free to believe whatever you decide is right. That is between yourself and God only.
But Adam and Eve weren’t on day 1, which is the beginning of creation in your view. There’s a gap of 5 days.
Or perhaps the Genesis 1 account is a literary framework and/or a cosmic temple inauguration, and Jesus is referring to the text itself to point out where they can read in the scriptures what he’s saying.
Since the context is marriage, I think Jesus is telling us that God instituted marriage, and we aren’t to get divorced. I think you’d agree with that.
He says nothing about when creation happened, how long it took, or by what method God created.
What you think of as “very good” and what God calls “very good” may be different things.
In Psalm 104:21, it describes God giving lions their prey as something that displays God’s glory. Clearly God doesn’t think it’s evil to give them prey.
There is a pattern in the OT that something is allowed and then something else is prohibited. For example, Leviticus 11 talks about allowing clean animals, then disallowing unclean animals. Did Israelites not eat clean animals prior to that? Of course they did. Similarly, plants are given to eat in Genesis, but there are restrictions - no eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Genesis 9, animals are given for food, but a restriction is given not to eat the blood. While I can understand your taking those verses that way by themselves, when I look at the whole Bible, I don’t think God was saying anything about animals eating other animals. And to defend that view, you have to make up scenarios that fit neither the biblical account nor what we observe about God’s creation.
God made the world very good. It functioned well. The world is still very good. We can see that in the interworkings of all God’s natural processes today. Sin is not good, but God’s creation is still good.
Yes, a gap of 5 days compared to your gap of billions of years. If I say to you, “At the very beginning of my day I brushed my teeth.” You will understand it is no contradiction that in reality I did it 5 minutes after waking up. If, however, I woke up at 7 AM and didn’t brush my teeth until 9 PM, clearly my statement was false.
Yes, the context was a discourse on marriage, but that is no license for you to simply disregard Jesus’ words or put words into Jesus’ mouth like “of mankind” that Jesus did not say. He still said what He said. As part of his discussion on marriage, Jesus decided to back up his statement by appealing to the history of Genesis 1. And guess what? He confirmed that God created Adam and Eve from the beginning, not billions of years later.
The giving of animals for food in Genesis 9 is meaningless without the understanding that they were not allowed prior to that. What you are doing here is not a proper handling of Scripture (in fact it would not be a proper handling of any literature at all).
Death and suffering are not very good. In this fallen world, they have become necessary evils.
Giving them prey is a blessing to God’s glory, yes, but that is in the context of an already fallen, cursed world. Genesis 1:29-30, compared with Genesis 9:3, makes it very undeniably clear that God did not give lions prey to eat in the original “very good” created order.
A great deal of animal characteristics are devoted to predation, both for predator and prey. Dentation [ I get that it is not just a matter of sharp teeth ], claws, speed, camouflage [ often extraordinarily elaborate ], digestive system, poisons and venoms, positioning of eyes [front ways for stalkers, sideways for grazers, topside for crocs ], expelling substances for defense such as skunks and the octopus. Some predators are obligate. It is very difficult to imagine what vegan versions of many animals would even look like.
Question is, in your theology, were they created as such? Were they re-created at the fall, and if so, by whom?
As your example makes clear, to judge whether something is reasonably close to the beginning, we need to know both the time since the beginning and the total time that is in view. After all, 14 hours since wakeup seems too long a span before the teeth brushing, even though you accept 5 days after the beginning as still being the beginning of creation.
The question is, how long is creation? According to Exodus 20:11, which you have appealed to, it is exactly six days long. So you are arguing that God’s creation of humans on the last day of creation could be considered the beginning of creation. I don’t think that’s reasonable. If your interpretation is correct, Jesus should have said that God made them male and female from the end of creation.
Of course, there are obvious ways to make better sense of Jesus’ words as they are written. Creation may simply be a way to refer to the world in its present state (much like cosmos), as opposed to an event. Or, as others have said, Jesus may be referring to human creation, as the context of divorce suggests. This also avoids reading Jesus as claiming counterfactually that all created things were made male and female. He’s just talking about people. And from the beginning of human creation, humans were male and female.
The problem, perhaps, is that once we make Jesus’ words no longer contradict Genesis (by placing at the beginning of creation what Genesis 1 places at the end of creation), they also don’t contradict science. But should that really be a problem?
The Hebrew of Gen 9:3b reads (literally), “as greenness of herbage I gave to you all.” There is only one verb, and it’s in the Perfect tense, usually used for past tense (can’t get into tense vs. aspect here; in contrast the verb in v. 9a is Imperfect, which usually means non-past). But the point is there is no distinction verbally between what God did in the past (with green plants) and what he’s doing in the present (with everything). Translations that such a change are interpretations not obvious in the Hebrew.
PDPRICE has done a great job here and refreshing conversation. Yet this is a accurate point about predation influence on bodyplans. YES everything got morphed at the fall and soon after constantly. Yes eyes got shifted about or created like the tuatara eye on the head case. Creation ended at the sixth day. All further development was within a biology closed system. in fact one could study the ways it morphed itself by its own mechanisms. Remember before the fall humans would of had no immune system. So its great how things changed to prserve biology from death.
But the Biblical writers would not have known that. They knew nothing about “red blood cells”. They would have taken it that worms bleed. So if you are arguing that eating other creatures is OK as long as they don’t bleed, then you will have to argue that the writer of the Bible thought that no worms were eaten before the Fall.
And by the way, Augustine was not the only early Father to have doubts about mechanical literalism when reading the Bible. Origen was another. Origen was the creator of the great Hexapla, and was one of the greatest Biblical scholars of the early Church.
Also, Augustine was the great systematizer of the doctrine of the Fall for the West. Both Catholic and Protestant theology followed largely in his footsteps. It’s not as if he is some unauthorized theological quack. It is unwise to assume that he didn’t understand the nature of life before and after the Fall. You are too quick to dismiss him. He might be wrong, but just as you should hesitate to assume that Einstein made an error when coming to a conclusion in physics you don’t happen to like, so also you should hesitate to assume that Augustine blundered regarding Genesis because he reaches a conclusion in theology you don’t happen to like.
Note that in God’s words to Cain, the verb is in the passive, without an agent. Note also that the Hebrew word for “earth” does not mean “all of nature” or “the universe.” So even if God is the agent of the curse, it does not follow that the whole universe is cursed. The plain sense of the narrative in Genesis 3 is that only the man, the woman, the serpent, and the soil undergo any change. A truly “literal” reading of the Fall story would deny any universal “fall of nature.” But then, literalists have always been only selectively literal, so it’s nothing new that they would go far beyond what Genesis 3 says or implies, where their theological agenda requires it.
Finally, let me echo Joshua’s recommendation of Jon Garvey’s first book. Garvey deals thoroughly with both the Scriptural and traditional cases for a “fall of nature,” and shows that they rest on shaky ground. And Garvey is no modern liberal, but theologically quite conservative.
