In this video Conversation, Denis Alexander addresses two prominent barriers for Christians to accept evolutionary creation. The first is Biblical interpretation. When contemporary Christians interpret the early chapters of Genesis literally, they do so out of a desire to take the text seriously. Yet the early church fathers saw these chapters as figurative—and that figurative interpretation did not lesson the important foundational truths taught in these passages. The contemporary literal reading is actually a modern approach to the text in that our scientific mindset inappropriately shapes the interpretation. Since science did not even exist at the time that Genesis was written, an overly literal interpretation can actually cause us to miss the inspired message that the Biblical authors were communicating.

The second barrier is the rhetoric of the New Atheists, who claim that it is impossible to accept evolution while still believing in God. Christians should challenge this. Traditional Christian views are not in conflict with modern science. Instead, they see nature as God's work, with St. Augustine writing that "nature is what God does." As humanity develops a scientific understanding of nature, we will only learn more about the handiwork of God. 

The first video, “10 Questions with Katherine Hayhoe”, introduces the scientist in a brief and lighthearted interview. Hayhoe is presented with 10 questions concerning her personal life and beliefs. When asked, she explains that one thing people should know about Christianity is that having a relationship with the God of the universe is one of the most incredible experiences that a person can have. As the video unfolds, the viewer quickly begins to realize that, despite her unique profession of two seemingly incompatible beliefs, Hayhoe is a remarkably sane and “normal” individual. Her role model, she explains, is her father-- the person who first introduced her to science and showed her that it could be “really cool”. On a more serious note, the scientist admits that being both a scientist and a Christian can be difficult. The most frustrating thing about her position, she says, is the amount of disinformation which is targeted at her very own Christian community.

In the second video, “Climate Change Evangelist”, Katharine Hayhoe delves into deeper discussion of the perceived conflict between climate change and Christian faith. She explains that admitting her identity as a Christian scientist can be uncomfortable. Since evangelicals are the targets of much disinformation concerning science in general -- and specifically the science surrounding climate change -- many people in the church have a misguided view of the subject and do not look kindly at her career choice. One woman encountered by Hayhoe at a church in Texas, for example, believed that global warming was a lie taught in schools to mislead her children. In an effort to realign misguided views like these, Katharine Hayhoe and her husband wrote a book addressing the deep-rooted emotions often associated with climate change. People fear that addressing the climate issue will bring forth changes in the economy and uproot their way of life. However, Hayhoe encourages her viewers to act out of love, as the Bible calls us to do, rather than out of fear. Acting out of love inspires us to consider the poor and disadvantaged people around the globe when we respond to the reality of a changing climate.

In the final segment of this three part video montage, Hayhoe addresses the question of what climate change means. Specifically, she is concerned about how global warming affects people on a personal level. While global warming generally brings to mind melting ice caps and polar bears, its implications are far more widespread, affecting the lives of everyone around the world- from cotton farmers in Texas to public health workers in Chicago. If nothing is done to change current emission levels, the number of days per year which exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, will begin to increase dramatically, and if emissions are increased, many areas will even develop extreme conditions like those seen currently in Death Valley. Hayhoe’s goal is to demonstrate clearly that the only way to preserve the world for future generations is to significantly reduce dependence on inefficient means of getting energy and instead transition to cleaner renewable energy sources.

Editor's Note: These videos first appeared on the Nova program "The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers".

Transcript

My name is David Wilkinson, I teach at Durham University in the department of theology, I used to be a physicist and I still am fascinated by science and theology. I became a Christian at the age of seventeen, and at that point Christian faith was very new and exciting to me. I’d also decided to do a physics degree at university; now I’m not that type of person who built a telescope at the age of four or anything of that sort. I did physics at university, I have to admit, because I was quite good at mathematics and therefore I knew I wouldn’t have to work very hard doing physics. I could spend time doing real things at university, such as cricket and other things-- typically British of course.

However what happened for me as I began to study physics at Durham University was that my new-found faith and this new area of science began to enrich each other, and Kepler of course once said that science is thinking God’s thoughts after him. And I think what was happening in hindsight was that as I was encountering the God of creation in and through Jesus, so what God had created became more and more valuable, more and more interesting to me, just as when our children brought back drawings and paintings from their school class. They weren’t great pieces of art but they were put on our kitchen walls because we knew the person who had created them, and because I was being introduced to the God of creation, so the science itself began to live for me.

Another thing was that the science at university level, particularly as one starts to explore relativity and quantum theory, cosmology, is that as John Polkinghorne would say, “It breaks the tyranny of common sense.” This isn’t a mechanistic world of Isaac Newton and those theologians who think that every question is wrapped up. This is an exciting open world of exploration and questions, of freedom both for God to work and the universe to explore. And this became more and more fascinating to me as time went on. My faith enriched my science, and my science enriched my faith. Now that wasn’t always a process where there were easy questions to answer; there were often difficult questions. But I have to say that continually, the science and the faith have gone together and have enriched each other.

My own particular interest then over the years has been how one takes the issues of science and faith and communicates them to folk who aren’t Christians. As I go around the world these days, I find many people who are fascinated by some of the questions that modern science raises, questions such as the intelligibility of the universe. How can our minds understand the universe back to such an early stage? The fact that the universe is very carefully balanced, fine-tuned for the existence of life. The question of human significance in such a vast universe. The sense of awe and wonder as you look not just at the vastness of the sky but also the fact that underneath the complexity of the universe are rather simple, elegant, beautiful laws. And I find that many folk, whether they are people of religious faith or not, find themselves drawn in by these questions that say “Is there a deeper story to the universe? Are these pointers to something that goes beyond science?” I don’t believe that they can prove God in any way, but I do think that they are pointers towards a God who in Christ is the best explanation for all of these different areas.

Off camera: “Let me ask you one question here: you mentioned John Polkinghorne. You studied with him, I believe. Would you tell something about your relationship to John Polkinghorne, and you might begin by saying, ‘John Polkinghorne was my mentor or whatever’. Just a few things about your relationship with him.”

Wilkinson: One of the most important things for me in the science/faith relationship has been those mentors, those great men and women of faith and science who have helped me along the way. Those have been many for me. One of the key people for me in this area has been Sir John Polkinghorne. John was teaching theology in Cambridge, having retired as head of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, trained as an Anglican priest, and then started to teach theology just as I arrived in Cambridge also to study theology. And what I found in his thinking was a commitment to the rigor of science, and someone who not only philosophized about science but had a feel for science as a working scientist, but someone who’s prepared to take that science and contemporary science and use it in theology today.

If I have one criticism of my fellow theologians from time to time it’s that they’re often stuck in the physics of the 19th century rather than the 20th and 21st centuries. They’re still dominated by this clockwork universe, whereas Polkinghorne and others have taken seriously that the universe is very different. And Polkinghorne with many others have spent time with me answering my questions, being gracious to the type of questions I’ve wanted to push, but they’ve impressed me by showing integrity both towards Christian faith and to science by holding the two together and not compromising on either.

Today's video features pastor Brian McLaren and is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In today's video, Brian McLaren discusses the value of considering Scripture in light of the cultures that surrounded them. The Biblical writers were aware of the myths of the power nations that surrounded them, but flipped their stories on their heads to reveal truth about God. The myths of cultures like Babylon declared that the world was built on a foundation of violence and humans meant to be slaves to the gods and their leaders, but the Bible tells that the world comes from goodness and that humans are made for more than servitude but to truly know God.

As we noted in our response to the June article in Christianity Today “The Search for the Historical Adam,” the evidence for gradual creation is overwhelming, with more studies supporting the evolutionary process being published each year. We’ve looked at many of these evidences: from fossils, from comparative anatomy, from genetics. Today, we’d like to highlight for our readers a compelling video from the annual TED Conference featuring geneticist Svante Pääbo. You may remember Pääbo from his efforts to extract and sequence DNA from 30,000(+) year old Neanderthal bones (we mentioned his work here).

In this eighteen minute video, Pääbo covers a lot of ground, noting several lines of genetic evidence for the evolution of modern humans from earlier hominids in Africa, as well as for the interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals. We’ve covered some of this data before, but it’s particularly compelling to hear it described by one of the scientists leading the field of study.

However, our goal at The BioLogos Foundation isn’t just to make the Church aware of the fascinating and convincing scientific evidence for gradual creation. As we have said before:

BioLogos exists to help Christians think carefully about the ramifications of these new data in light of long-standing traditional ways of viewing human creation. We have some re-thinking to do, but it can be done and will be done within the context of a Christian faith that is fully orthodox and thoroughly evangelical. Any time we draw closer to truth, to God’s truth, we have nothing to fear. There is still much to learn, but we can look back at what we have learned with awe—absolute awe.

It is truly amazing that we know so much now about our early days. For example, Africans do not have DNA which is specifically derived from Neanderthals, whereas people in the rest of the world do carry a small amount. This confirms the picture of human history derived from studying fossils. Neanderthal bones have not been found in Africa, so it isn’t surprising that their DNA is not there either. The fact that non-Africans have some of the DNA found in Neanderthal bones confirms that which geneticists knew from other studies: we have two distinct groups of human ancestors—those who left Africa in ancient times and those who stayed.

God chose to reveal himself and to begin working with a distinct sub-group of ancient humans, those descended from Abraham and Sarah. To Abraham, God made a marvelous promise. Drawing his attention to the stars above, God said that someday Abraham’s descendents would outnumber the countable stars in the universe. And so it came to be. Indeed through our adoption into the family, we are all children of Abraham. The God of Abraham is our God too and each one of us is one of those stars too numerous for Abraham to count.

Sometimes, it seems that we are uncomfortable with the notion that God made us through a gradual process that included apes in our family tree. It is almost as though we would prefer dirt to apes. Perhaps, in at least some cases, this is due to an inadequate appreciation for the fact that God loves, really loves, all of creation, not just us. As special as we know we are, we can’t read Psalm 104, Genesis 1, Genesis 9 (where the covenant is not just with Noah but with all living creatures), or Job 38-41 without being reminded that all living creatures are God’s creation (see here). The Neanderthals, the Denisovans, Homo erectus, and the australopithecines were God’s creation too! Still, we modern humans have been singled out. We’ve been called out.

True our family tree, as Pääbo shows here, is intriguing. But let us never forget, that the most important thing about this tree is that God is the vine which exists at its core, and we are called to be the branches which bear fruit. The fact that many of us have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, some of us have Denisovan DNA, and others have neither is interesting, but it is really just a side issue for people of faith. As a result of God’s visit to Abraham, followed eventually by God’s taking on flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, we can all know God as our heavenly Father. We are children of God and as such, we are God’s representatives. We are called to image God. We are called to love God. And we are called to love each other and to deeply respect all that he has made.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

Video transcript

I think there are sometimes a couple of biblical images we struggle to lay hold of. In the New Testament we find when we talk about life, we have the idea of living or ‘bios’. In other words, we talk about how we are alive. But Jesus talks about the fact of “coming to life “ when we know him. That doesn’t suddenly mean that our heart starts beating. It means that there is this whole side to us which was dead… which wasn’t alive and is now… that has actually sprung to life. And we run into complications maybe if we reduce all of these things into exactly the same categories. Now you can have the same issues with ‘death’ too. That word is used in many ways, and different words are used to try and signify various different things.

Now what is interesting is that if you go back into the Genesis account, it says “now do not eat this [apple] or you will surely die”. There is a whole chain of events that happens when Adam and Eve decide they want to walk away from God. The first thing that happens is that they cover themselves up. There’s like a psychological alienation that comes. They are no longer happy with the way they are. The next thing that happens is God steps into the garden, they run and hide. There is spiritual alienation. The voice that was once welcoming where they went, they now find themselves cut off from that. Then there is a social alienation that comes as a result of turning away from God. They start blaming each other. There is a vocational alienation that comes as a result of, of course, judgment. That which was meant to be home for them, all work become labor, and we could keep going.

So when we talk about “death” the picture, to me, seems to be much bigger, much fuller. I can’t think of a more comprehensive view of possibly what it could mean. And so I think we need to again break away from a straight forward, in fact, mechanistic understanding. In no way do I think that impoverishes either or understanding of the gospel or of the cross. As a matter of fact, it enhances it. It makes the work of the cross even more incredible and it makes the idea that God is looking for redemption from us more complete. We are not talking simply about the idea of physically living forever because that’s clearly not what it means. We know that we are going to physically die. All of us. But when you think about it in terms of what that means psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, socially, vocationally and so on it becomes a huge picture. The text is teaching us something which is real, which is true, which is there. I think we just need a bigger more sophisticated handling of the text, than a reductionist one that I think actually impoverishes or understanding of The Fall, the cross, redemption, the ‘coming again’ and so on.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In today’s video, theologian Chris Tilling, New Testament Tutor for St Mellitus College and St Paul's Theological Centre in London, discusses biblical genre and the relational truth of Scripture. Tilling notes that when we read the Biblical text, we bring our own presuppositions and assumptions to the text (what theologians call “eisegesis”). The genre of the text is central to how we understand the Bible. For example, we read poetry very differently than we would read a phone book.

The text often contains clues to how it was intended to be read. The rhythmic nature of Genesis 1 and 2 hints to the hymnic and poetic functions of the text. The Gospels, on the other hand, parallel ancient biographies, which were concerned with historic events in a way symbolic theological accounts were not.

Ultimately, Tilling notes, it boils down to the questions that we ask of the text. The author of Genesis was not asking biological questions but theological ones. To stay true to the text, we too must be asking the theological questions, because theological truth is always more than information; it is transformation . The Truth (capital T) of Christian theology is relational truth which addresses us, which has us as the objects. That Truth is a person. That Truth is one to whom we relate. What kind of truth are we talking about?

Transcript

Dr. Chris Tilling: “The crucifixion is detailed in the gospels. We assume that the suffering of the cross, that the physical agony, is the main focus of the crucifixion. This may tie in with various theological commitments, but it also ties into our own world view in various ways. Yet, when we actually go to the gospels, they focus more on the shame of the crucifixion, and less on the pain of the crucifixion. So there is an example where it is just a subtle difference, but it does illuminate how we read a text or how we misunderstand a text.

Now, to come to the question of historicity—what it means to write history—we have particular presuppositions about what makes history work. Today, we would prefer (to a greater or lesser extent) some kind of unbiased, impartial observation of evidence, but what we are actually doing is what scholars would call eisegesis: we are bringing our own presuppositions and assumptions into a text and reading it in light of that as if it were in the text. One way of responding to that is to point to the centrality of genre in understanding the Bible. We read poetry in a way that is very different to the way we read a phonebook, and there are clues in a text as to how the text should be read. So with Genesis—the rhythmic nature of Genesis one and two—the almost poetic and hymnic effect it would have played in the liturgy of the earliest Jewish lives. There is liturgy of life, there is the snake which eats dirt, there is God walking in the garden…it seems to me that there are clues here that it should be read in a theological way.

When you get to the gospels, however, the closest parallels that we have for the gospels is ancient biography—they seem to look like the way ancient biographies were written. In other words, they were concerned with what was happening in a way that a symbolic theological account would not. So, the genre of the different parts of the Old Testament will determine to what extent there was historical factuality involved. It boils down, ultimately—though we might not like to put it so sharply—it boils down to the questions that we are asking. The author of Genesis was not asking the kind of questions that we are often asking in a biological sense. These were theological questions that were being asked, and our questions, if we want to stay true to the text, likewise, need to be theological…because truth is always more than information, it is transformation. It isn’t just about things that we can look at and that we can put in a test tube—small “t” truth if you like. Capital “t” truth is relational…is the truth which addresses us, which speaks to us, has us as the objects. That truth is the subject. Jesus Christ speaks of himself as the truth, the way, and the life…that truth is a person, that truth is one to whom we relate. What kind of truth are we talking about?”

Last week we debuted the first clip from the documentary “From the Dust”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith.

To help foster such dialogue, we are including several discussion questions with each clip from the film. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to watch this video with your friends, your church, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward. We have more discussion questions that go with this transcript and we'd be happy to send them to you to foster further conversation within your church or small group setting.

Editor's Note: The full documentary is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. You can order the film here, and learn more about the project here.

"The Book of Genesis" Transcript

Dr. Alister McGrath: “The Christian church has always wrestled with the interpretation of Scripture, realizing both how important it is and also sometimes how difficult it is to get it right. Certainly, the opening chapters of Genesis have been a topic of much debate throughout Christian history.”

Dr. John Polkinghorne: “The Bible is very important to me, but it is very important to recognize that the Bible is not a book. The Bible is a library. It has all sorts of different kinds of writing in it—It has histories, it has stories, it has poetry, it has prose. When we read Genesis one, we have to figure out, what am I reading? Am I reading a divinely dictated textbook to save me the trouble of doing science, or am I reading something, in fact, more interesting and profound than that?”

Dr. John Walton: “We have to approach Genesis 1 for what it is. It is an ancient document. It is not a document that was written to us—we believe the Bible was written for us like it is for everyone of all times and places because it is God’s Word—but it was not written to us. It was not written in our language. It was not written with our culture in mind or our culture in view.”

Dr. Alister McGrath: “It is not about the authority of Scripture, it is about the interpretation of Scripture. What method of interpretation do I use in the case of each individual passage?”

Dr. Karen Strand Winslow: “Biblical scholars urge people to take a literal, plain reading of the text…but I think in the controversy between theology and science, literal is often used to mean scientific, as if it is scientific, and that is a whole different story.”

Dr. John Walton: “We are inclined by our culture to think of the creation narrative as an account of material origins because we think about the world in material terms. For us, that is kind of what is important about origins. People come to Scripture thinking that they need to integrate it with science and so, they want to either read science out of the Bible or they want to read science into the Bible. That is not the way to do it because inevitably you end up making the text say things that it never meant to the ancient audience.”

Dr. Chris Tilling: “We are importing meaning into the text; we are bringing our own presuppositions and assumptions into a text and reading it in light of that as if it were in the text. Now, there is a sense in which we all inevitably do that, but there is also a sense in which we need to be aware when the times that we do that are damaging to the reading of the text.”

Dr. Nancey Murphy: “When I was a kid and the film industry was still relatively new, it was possible to depict people from two centuries ago as modern Americans dressed up in togas. As the film industry has gotten more sophisticated, they have gotten better and better at creating human figures that actually look and behave and think as they probably would have in the past. So, we Bible readers ought to be equally sophisticated and recognize that someone who was writing three thousand years ago, which is very hard to imagine, that these people must have been very different from us, with very different concerns. They certainly had very different understandings about how material things worked.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “One of the benefits of understanding the historical circumstances of the Bible is that we are reminded of how incredibly old this literature is. Let’s understand it in view of what we could even remotely expect of the Biblical writers to say.”

Dr. Nancey Murphy: “We can understand what our own creation stories are saying better, if we know what the creation myths were that were known at the times that those stories were written—for instance, to realize that a lot of the Genesis stories were written as a counter measure against the other cultures’ creation stories. That throws an immense amount of light on what parts of the story we are supposed to be paying attention to.”

Dr. Chris Tilling: “The Gilgamesh epic, for example, has a flood narrative and so forth, and so it wants to reflect creatively and theologically in light of those creation myths; it is going to be something recognizable.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “Genesis one shares theological vocabulary with the other stories—it just sort of takes things and turns it on its head.”

Dr. Nancey Murphy: “If one creation myth talks about the earth being created as a result of the battle between gods, we know to look in our creation stories to say, ‘wait a minute! Is violence intrinsic to the very creation of the universe?’ We find very clearly written that no, it is not.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “It’s Israel’s declaration that Yahweh is worthy of worship. It is a potent and counter-intuitive theological statement in the ancient world where people say, ‘That is totally different from anything we have ever seen.’”

Dr. John Polkinghorne: “The stories of the ancient world were not so concerned with minute, literal accuracy as we are today. People wrote not to give you sort of a factual, journalistic account of what is going on, but to tell you the significance of what was happening.”

Dr. Ard Louis: “And so what we see is that there are these really interesting structures in the Genesis text, which suggest that it is not describing the creation process as this is the order in which it happened. Rather, it is taking that story and emphasizing theological points. It talks about days; there was morning, there was evening—but the sun and the moon are not created until the fourth day. So why, for example, did the writer of Genesis put the sun and the moon on the fourth day? It is a very strange thing to do, and it is not as if it is only moderns who realize ‘Oh dear! Something is wrong.’ People at any time of history would have realized that that was an unusual way of writing down a journalistic account. And, of course, the reason most likely is that people of that day worshipped the sun and the moon, and the Israelites were always being drawn away that way, and the people around them were doing that. And so, what the writer was saying is, ‘no, I am going to demote these things to the fourth day. They are not the first thing to be created; they are something to be created somewhat later.’”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “This is simply the sort of language that people use to refer to concrete events, but to invest those events with their theological significance.”

Dr. John Walton: “We are well aware that people have to translate the language for us. We forget that people have to translate the culture for us, and therefore, if we want to get the best benefit from the communication, we need to try to enter their world, hear it as the audience would have heard it, as the author would have meant it, and to read it in those terms.”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “There is a distinction which is there in Scripture between heaven and earth. But the thing about heaven and earth is that they are supposed to overlap, and have an interesting, interlocking, interplay with one another. They are never supposed to be far apart.”

Dr. John Walton: “In the ancient world, they didn’t have a line between supernatural and natural. God was in everything. You couldn’t talk about God intervening because you can’t intervene in something you are doing—and to them, God was doing it all. That kind of functional aspect was very important to them.”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “In Genesis, God makes heavens and earth, and it appears that humans are in the world, but God is around as well because the heavens and earth have not split apart.”

Dr. John Walton: “The temple and the cosmos were all blended into one. If we used a modern metaphor it would almost be like the temple was the oval office. It is kind of where all the business is done, where all the work is run. It is the hub of activity and control, and when Deity took up his rest in the temple, it wasn’t for leisure or relaxation…it was to settle down to the work now that everything is set up and ready to go.”

Bishop N. T. Wright: “Telling a story about somebody who constructs something in six days, it is a temple story. It is about God making a place for himself to dwell…and this is heaven and earth. What you do with that is, the last thing is you put an image of this God into the temple. Suddenly, instead of Genesis one being about ‘were there six days or were there five or were there seven or were there twenty-four hours…,’ it is actually about when the good Creator God made the world, he made heaven and earth as the space in which he himself was going to dwell and put in humans into that construct as a way of both reflecting his own love into the world and drawing out the praise and glory from the world, back to himself. That is the literal meaning of Genesis. To flatten that out into, ‘this is simply telling us that the world was made in six days’ is almost perversely to avoid the real thrust of the narrative.”

Michael Ramsden: “If this is an inspired book, if this really is, you know, something where God is revealed and can speak through it, it shouldn’t surprise us that we find multiple layers of depth.”

Bishop N.T. Wright: “Genesis is one of those books like a Shakespeare play or like a Beethoven symphony or something where you can describe what it sort of literally says. Here is a Beethoven symphony; here are the notes, ‘Duh, duh, duh, duh.’ Then, you think, ‘well, that doesn’t actually catch what is going on in this’, and you want to use bigger language about the opening of Beethoven’s first symphony. This is an amazing statement about the power of empire and the fate of man…and goodness knows what! You still have got to play the notes. This world was made to be God’s abode, God’s home, God’s dwelling place. He shared it with us, and now he wants to rescue it and redeem it. We have to read Genesis for all it is worth. To say, either history or myth is a way of saying, ‘I am not going to study this text for what it is worth. I am just going to flatten it out so that it conforms to the cultural questions that my culture today is telling me to ask…and I think that is a form of actually being unfaithful to the text itself.”

Dr. John Walton: “The account in Genesis one is not intended to be an account of material origins. If that is so, then the Bible has no narrative of material origins, and if that is so, we don’t have to defend the Bible’s narrative of material origins against a scientific narrative because the Bible does not offer one. We can let the text be what it is and take it for what it is. That is the most literal reading that you could have.”

In this week’s video, John Dickson, biblical historian and senior research fellow in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University speaks with Greg Clarke about how to read the text of Genesis 1.

Clarke begins by noting that there are many questions people have about how to read the first book of Genesis and asks Dickson both how we should interpret it, and why is this is such an emotional issue.

Dickson responds by pointing out that for many people who take the Bible seriously, “it says that that the earth was created in 6 days and that’s it, either you are faithful or you are not.” On the other hand, he notes that for skeptics like Richard Dawkins, the text of Genesis 1 is devoid of scientific thought relative to creation, a point that is used as evidence to support their belief that Christianity is ridiculous.

Both readings are literalistic, says Dickson, and misunderstand the basic genre of Genesis. He offers a distinction between the ways of reading. A literal interpretation asks: what was the author actually trying to convey? A literalistic reading, in contrast, asks what the writer actually says. It is a genre question.

For example, readers usually understand the genre of the parable and accept that it may or may not be a true story. The point though isn’t that something happens in a concrete way, but that the parable is trying to convey a message. Similarly, a proper reading of Genesis 1 relies on an understanding of its genre—and most scholars agree that it is very clear that the text is not an example of historical prose.

Instead, there are numerous literary elements found in Genesis 1. These include things like parallelism, rhythm, and number symbolism. These literary devices are so prominent in the text that it would have been “quite clear to an ancient reader that the author is trying to convey something through the artistry of literature” says Dickson. Therefore, to read Genesis 1 literally instead of literalistically is to be sensitive to the original intent of the text.

In this video Conversation, senior biblical fellow Peter Enns asks Rev. N.T. Wright to respond to a common question of readers concerning the historicity of Adam. Specifically, Enns asks Wright to respond to the question of how Adam functions theologically in the Old Testament and whether a historical Adam is central or important for that “Adam theology” that is brought up later in Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he describes Christ as the “new Adam.”

Wright describes the first half of the letter to the Romans as offering a big-picture summary in that it returns to the project of Genesis 1 and 2 and announces that the original plan is back on track. In the Old Testament, redemption was to come through Israel—the people of Abraham—but Israel let God down.

In Romans, Paul says that Israel remains the solution. For Paul the significance of Abraham’s family is not who is this family, but what was this family supposed to do. Israel’s mission or promise will be fulfilled through the Messiah, Christ Jesus, and will be offered to all those who believe. Thus, the historicity of Adam is not central to the theology, it what Adam represents—which ultimately is revealed through Christ, who shows his faithfulness by keeping the original covenant between Israel and God the Father.

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In this video Conversation, senior biblical fellow Peter Enns asks Rev. N.T. Wright to respond to a reader question about science and faith. Specifically, the reader asks, “If you take Genesis in a non-literal fashion, especially the creation stories, why take anything in the Bible literally—such as the Gospels? Do you take the Gospels literally?”

Wright responds by first unpacking the meaning of the word “literal” as it relates to the act of reading and interpretation.

The word literal, like the word metaphorical is a word that refers to the way that words refer to things, he notes. But we often confuse the word literal with the terms concrete and abstract—that is, the first meaning something that is actual, physical and the latter, referring to something transient, like an idea. One can refer metaphorically to something concrete (e.g. “my car is an old tin can”), or one can refer literally to something abstract (e.g. Plato’s Theory of Forms).

So when we ask if Genesis can be taken literally, that doesn’t settle the question of what it refers to. This should be an open question, Wright says, when we read any text: what does it refer to and how does it intend to refer to it? When it says in the Gospels, “Jesus was crucified,” the literal reading refers to a concrete event. But when Jesus tells a parable, the literal reading points to an abstraction or a metaphor—though it may have a concrete application.

Wright then considers what the writers of Genesis intended to do by the creation story and points out that in context, telling a story about someone who constructs something in six days is a temple story. It is about God making heavens and the Earth as the place he wants to dwell and placing humans into that construct as a way of reflecting his own love into the world and drawing out the praise and glory from the world back to himself. “That is the literal meaning of Genesis,” says Wright, “and the question of the formal structure has to sit around that as best it can.”

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