study . live . teach
In response to my most recent post in my series on “The Evangelical’s Creation Conundrum,” A friend asked my opinion about the Mohler-Collins conversation about Scripture’s teaching on the age of the universe that took place on February 1. Rather than an extensive response, I picked out one of Mohler’s statements that I think is representative of the way young earth creationists sometimes rhetorically distort the debate by forcing us to go all in on a lopsided bet.
Creation was meant to be a place of provision and protection. That’s what the ordering of the six days of creation communicates. But Genesis 1:1-2:3 sets in motion a big idea that drives the whole biblical story from beginning to end. The temple theme is rooted in the seven day structure of creation and opens up the possibility that the author did not use “days” to express length of time, but rather to set up the all important temple metaphor as the lens through which we understand the creation narrative.
I recently got a question from one of my Slovak seminary students,
In the Roháček (a Slovak) version of Num 24:4 we read that Balaam, “fell into a sleep” while the Ecumenical version reads that he was in “a state of ecstasy.” Does this mean that the author is expressing some kind of physical sleep but that during the sleep the person is in a state of (prophetic) awareness?
Walking through the exegesis of this text turns out to be a pretty fruitufl exercise for demonstrating why we need to be careful as we interpret small segments of text.
It’s finally time to turn to Scripture to see what Gen 1:1–2:3 teaches. At first glance the text seems to clearly teach that God created the world in six, twenty-four hour days. But if we look more closely we’ll see there is a very clear symmetry in the text that takes us in another direction. The primary teaching of this text has little to do with when God created and everything to do with why.
If science and Scripture have some superficial conflicts but no deep conflicts when viewed from the ultimate perspective of wisdom, then we need to think carefully about the various claims of science and the Bible that appear to be in conflict. Are these apparent conflicts due to the limitations of the science perspective or due to our interpretation of Scripture? We need to be careful because sometimes our first attempt at finding a deeper unity might not be correct.
Now that we’ve got a good foothold in the Israelite wisdom worldview; that God created the universe to function in an orderly way, and that he created it as a way for us to experience the blessing of being in relationship with him, we can finally begin to triangulate science and Scripture from the vantage point of wisdom. In the end, we’ll discover that while there may sometimes be superficial conflict between science and Scripture, there will always be deep harmony when seen from the perspective of the wisdom worldview.
In the ANE wisdom worldview, god created the world to function in an orderly way. Now that we have that broad concept of wisdom, we can get more specific and look at Israel’s worldview. A great place to start is at the beginning. As we try to understand why “The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom,” we’ll discover that the whole purpose of the physical creation was to mediate our relationship with Yahweh. If we take the physical world out of this context, we’ll never be able to rightly and fully understand the universe.
In the previous post I pointed out that solving the Evangelical’s creation conundrum is like navigating between the Scylla and the Charybdis. Now I want to explain why understanding the wisdom worldview will help us better understand the relationship between science and Scripture so that we can steer unscathed through this treacherous route.
