Teaching Genesis

Since I have made myself a slave to the Southern Baptist Sunday Bible Study Literature, I will be teaching Genesis for the next six months. HMMMMMM. This is causing me a lot of cognitive dissonance, because I am having to walk the line between being too literal and too liberal, between getting caught in an actual six-day creation and giving the impression that we can just make the text mean anything we want it to mean. My first job is to minister to the class, the second is to stay true to the text--and those aren't as mutually exclusive as they sound. If anyone else reads this blog, this could be a good discussion.

This week we study the fall (at least following the literature means we move fast through everything). Again, there is a fine line between overinterpreting every action of Adam and Eve and God into some sort of dramatic allegory and missing the point of what's going on. And the scholars don't always help. One I read, which seemed sound otherwise, said that Adam and Eve were the true race of men as distinct from the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, who weren't real humans and had just come about as some part of God's earlier creation and God let them die off. I'm appalled at that line of argument. I prefer to give a much earlier date to the first humans (50,00-100,00 years), see Genesis 3 as a picture of something more than one couple did, see Neanderthals and other earlier humans as descendants (in chronology as well as ability) from the first humans created directly and specially by God, than I do to make up some alternate creation that God had to dispose of. Job talks about the ancients; he as an ancient had a sense that many generations had lived before him, and Job is believed to be contemporaneous with Abraham. Thus, there were many more years before Abraham than literalists want to admit. I don't think we benefit from trying to make the text say things it doesn't say.

This is, of course, heresy to some. But back to the fall. The fall is about the difference between shame and guilt. More on that tomorrow. However, I've always said I will err on the side of conservatism if I have to err. I would rather believe in a special creation I can't fully grasp and that may seem mythical to me than to believe in a random universe.

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