Seven Days that Divide the World 2

Last updated on: September 12, 2011 at 6:30 am by Scot McKnight

Seven Days that Divide the World 2 2011-09-12T06:30:18-05:00 Scot McKnight

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One of the most interesting books I read in the last few years is Wheaton professor John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. Reduced to two points, Walton argues that Genesis 1 is not about the origins of materials (like creating light out of nothing) but ordering of materials into functions so they fit into God’s ordered system for the cosmos; that’s the first point of his book. The second makes clear what this “order” is all about: the cosmos is designed by God to be God’s cosmic temple. So, the book argues Genesis 1 is about a “functional ontology” and the created order is designed to put everything in its proper place of God’s cosmic temple. It’s an impressive, wide-ranging, and suggestive study. John Walton’s got a big academic book, which was behind this more popular version, coming out very soon from Eisenbrauns so many of the concerns or questions will be answered when we can all read the fuller explanations of each point.

Until then though some will be offering criticisms, including John Lennox, professor in Mathematics at Oxford, in Lennox’s new book, Seven Days That Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis and Science. I began a series on Lennox’s book a bit ago and want to jump to an appendix in the book because it takes on Walton and, since I just taught Walton’s book, I wanted to see what Lennox had to say.

In essence, he doesn’t agree with Walton. I’m not persuaded his first major criticism, dealing with Walton’s points about function, are as clear as he could have been but I will do my best to present Lennox’s study as clearly as possible.

What do you think of Lennox’s criticisms of Walton? And, what do you think of Walton’s two big points above?

Lennox thinks Genesis 1 is better explained as the creation of materials and not just the “creation” or establishment of functions of previously existing matter. Then he discusses several items — “heaven and earth” and “great sea creatures” and “human beings” — and says these are matters. But I’m not sure he sees what I see in Walton when it comes to the meaning of function. Walton sees a tapestry in which each item must be understood in terms of the whole, while Lennox wants to separate the items and see each in its own verse. A big distinction for Walton is “functions” in Days 1-3 and “functionaries” in Days 4-6, so that to say “human beings” are material misses the point that they are the culmination of the functions as those who are the functionaries, esp for what is created on Day 3. By atomizing the elements it appears to me Lennox misses the tapestry into which the items fit. The big picture is cosmic temple; the items are designed within that system; humans too.

It is true that Walton’s book does not establish or develop in detail what bara/”create” meant when he says it concerns not so much materials but functions, and I saw that when I read this book — but at that time I knew John had a bigger book in the works (and it was the basis for this one) and I said, “I can wait to see if he can prove that.”

Then Lennox pushes Hebrews 1’s and John 1’s creation expressions into Walton’s thesis, and concludes that Walton’s thesis for Genesis 1 doesn’t fit the overall creation theology of the Bible. Well, I’d say — even as a NT scholar — I’d want to be careful about pushing either John 1 or Hebrews 1 onto the page of Genesis 1 because there’s no reason they authors all need to be talking about the same thing. So, for me, those two texts don’t count. What does count, is what Genesis 1 means in the ancient near east. Lennox offers nothing by way of rebuttal from that world.

Nor is Lennox convinced of the cosmic temple hypothesis: he doesn’t think Walton establishes his case for Genesis 1 being the creation of the cosmos as a cosmic temple. Folks connect Genesis 1-2/3 to Exodus 39. He pushes Walton for not citing sufficient evidence, and again — yes — but Walton’s got the big academic approach coming out. Oddly, Lennox doesn’t like that Walton uses Isa 66:1-2 since it comes from a later date, which didn’t stop Lennox from using Hebrews 1 and John 1 against Walton in the previous point. It’s methodological and it’s historical. 1 Kings 8:27 is mentioned too, and Lennox is unpersuaded. Lennox then says these texts press materiality, but again — if one says the cosmos is a temple — we are not talking materiality so much as functionality since it functions as a grand metaphorical perception of the cosmos itself. Lennox flat-out surprised me when he said God doesn’t actually take up residence in the temple at the end of Genesis 1, but instead it is humans. Isn’t the whole point that humans are “images” and at least in part God’s representatives, and then isn’t the point that God dwells among us by setting up humans as his presence?

Lennox’s next point is about the significance of the seventh day and here is where I struggled most with what Lennox was on about. Walton emphasizes the focal point of God dwelling among us (through the image-bearers, what I call eikons) on the seventh day, and Walton sees Days 1-7 as the inauguration of God’s dwelling among us. Lennox scatters questions that don’t matter to what Walton is saying here. He wonders which days and which weeks and what inauguration means … connects this to Sabbath and says that it was materiality. Well, what I see in Walton is a week that comes to completion in the 7th day, and it is the “first” week of all — the primal week — and that’s what inauguration means.

His next concern has to do mostly with whether or not God revealed to Israelites cosmological details that were unknowable at the time. I agree with Walton in the main; it gets me nervous to see some people read the Bible suggesting that God revealed things to ancient Israelite about cosmology that no one understood then — and sometimes haven’t understood until our time. But Walton says that nothing updated their scientific understanding, and this perhaps overdoes it … and it might just be easier to say “What is in the Bible is in accordance with contemporary perceptions of the cosmos.” He seems to set Lennox off to prove that at least somethings transcended ancient perceptions, which really in the end doesn’t change whether or not Genesis 1 is ancient cosmology. Lennox explores the conclusion of Edwyn Bevan and Andrew Parker, who concluded divine inspiration of Scripture through study of history and science and an uncanny accuracy in the Bible.

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