Wednesday 17th July 2013

Professor John Walton is the Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College in the US, and one of the world’s leading scholars on the historical background and context in which the Book of Genesis was originally written. He will be speaking in Sydney, this Friday and Saturday, in an event jointly sponsored by the Centre for Public Christianity and Gospel Conversations. He’ll be back again on 2nd and 3rd August.

John Walton took the time to speak with Eternity ahead of his trip. In the first part of this interview, he talked with us about what he’ll be speaking about on the first two dates, which is material he’s written about in his books, The Lost World of Genesis 1, and the forthcoming The Lost World of Adam and Eve.

What are the mistakes that the average Christian person in the pew might make when they open up the Bible and start reading Genesis 1?

Well, the mistakes that they make are that they want to read Genesis to answer questions they have. They want to read it as a modern document, because they have modern concerns and modern issues. They have scientific questions, sometimes they have theological questions. They look to Genesis to answer their questions, instead of trying to read it for what it is. As a result, they often don’t take account of it as an ancient document. And that has the potential of not only imposing a foreign view on the text, it also has the potential of twisting the text and as a result missing the actual authoritative message that it has.

In your own words then, what is Genesis 1 to 3?

Genesis 1 is an account of origins.

The question is, what origins is it talking about? We often believe that it’s an account of material origins, of the cosmos, because we believe in a world that prioritises material. We live in a world where we have questions about science and faith, and science and the Bible. And we live in a world where we easily think about things in material terms.

So, we keep thinking it’s an account of material origins. I try to suggest that it’s an account of the origins of the cosmos being ordered for human beings, created in God’s image, for the cosmos to function for them, and that order is connected to it being sacred space. It’s an account of the origins of sacred space. Because it talks about the idea that God is going to come and dwell here with us. And that’s the most important theological issue going on.

And how would that have been understood in that Ancient Near East context?

Well the way they communicate that in the text is when they talk about God resting.

God resting always bothered us anyhow, because we say ‘God doesn’t need to sleep!’ And then we say, ‘What is this resting doing in an origins account, and in a cosmology?’ That confused us! Because we’re not familiar with the ancient world, the roles of temples, and the nature of divine rest.

We don’t think about God resting as having anything to do with sacred space. But in the Ancient World, everybody knew that the deity rests in a temple and the temples are built for a deity to rest in, and that temples are the command centre of the cosmos. And that’s why deity is there. It’s not to sleep, but to rule.

With that reading of Genesis, as the world itself as God’s temple – does that have implications for the current discussions of climate change and ecology?

Yes it does, if the main theological emphasis of Genesis 1 is that this is God’s place. If God is dwelling here, then we get the idea that our care for it is absolutely vital. Sometimes I use the illustration of a bed and breakfast. It’s someone else’s house, and they invite you in as guests. And that’s what’s happened in the cosmos: God has made it to work for us, just like someone who has a bed and breakfast sets it up to work and function for their guests. They’re going to relate to their guests who come.

It would be inappropriate then to come into a bed and breakfast and trash the place! We’re in God’s place and we’re honoured guests, and he’s given us a role here. The role is subdue and rule in Genesis 1, which I see as a concept of expanding sacred space. But it also involves caring for sacred space. In Genesis 2:15, it says Adam was there to work and keep the garden: those aren’t agricultural tasks, they’re priestly tasks. So he’s got responsibility for sacred space.

How does this contrast with the views of the other cultures around the time it was written?

On one level, it fits very well. Everyone understood cosmology as an order-bringing, organising kind of task. They don’t talk about the manufacture of material objects; that’s not part of their cosmology. They all thought of the idea that there’s a temple building text or element connected to a cosmology. They understood that once a deity ordered it under his control, then he takes control, and he goes into his temple from where he rules. In that sense there’s a lot of similarity of rule, of deity, of temples, of organising: those are common ways of thinking.

At the same time, there’s some clear distinctives. First of all, in the ancient world, they believed the gods made the cosmos for themselves. They did not have people in mind, they didn’t even imagine people to be part of that. They made the cosmos to work for them. As time went on, they believed the gods had needs, so as time went on, the gods said we’re really tired of working so hard to meet our own needs so here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to create some slave labour.

That’s very different from Genesis! The picture of God being in charge, and God ruling, and sacred space. In the Garden of Eden, God plants a garden of food for people, instead of people giving God food from the garden. God makes it work for them, and they’re vice-regents and stewards, instead of in the ancient near east where they are slaves and labourers. It’s the same general ideas, but it’s all turned on its ear in terms of the message it’s giving about human beings and their relationship to God.

It’s revolutionary in the theological sense – not in the cosmological sense. Cosmology is about order, and things like that. All of this is very important to understand what claims the Bible is making.

Because that’s how we start to evaluate science, for instance. For example, can I believe what science is telling me? Whether it’s about the age of the earth, or evolution, or human origins, or genetics, or whatever. People who take the Bible seriously say ‘Does the Bible speak on these things?’

So we have to ask the question, what claims does the Bible make? If we don’t understand that clearly, then we’re really not going to do a very good job understanding what scientific ideas would be acceptable to us. We have to investigate the text clearly to know what claims it’s making. And that’s what all of this gets into. If we read the text as an ancient text, rather than a modern scientific treatise, it’s going to change how we read the claims of the text.

Does that reading bring you into contrast with those who read Genesis as God having created the world in seven, literal twenty-four hours?

It really has to do with the idea of what sort of account it is. After all, when we start talking about the age of the earth, the cosmos, all the material of the cosmos, created in seven twenty-four hour days, we’ve already decided that it is a material account. And most people make that decision without thinking there might be another alternative. And so, I’m asking the question: wait a minute, even before you get into the question, let’s talk about what kind of account it is.

Now I feel I’ve got sufficient evidence put together, that it is not an account of the material origins of the universe. If that’s so, then the seven days have nothing to do with material origins, and nothing to do with the age of the earth. At that point, the length of the days becomes an academic matter.

How about human origins? How does our understanding of human origins fit in?

It’s the same kind of issue. We want to know what the Bible claims. I’m a Bible guy. And what the Bible claims, I’m going to stand up for, I’m going to embrace, regardless of the ramifications. That’s my commitment and conviction.

But still, because that can be so significant in how I respond to things around me, I really want to be sure that I’m reading those claims correctly. That goes with something like human origins. I’m going to want to know: does the Bible, in its authority, claim that there was material discontinuity between Adam and any other creatures? Does the Bible claim that Adam is the first human being, and that there are no other human beings, and that we are all descended from Adam?

If it does, okay! But does it claim that?

Those are things that many Christians have assumed that the Bible does claim. If it does, that’s fine, but I want to read the text very carefully. I want to read it as an ancient text. I want to read it in the context of the whole of Scripture. I want to read it so I understand what the Hebrew words say. I want a close reading, hermeneutically, theologically. So that’s my basic approach, and I go into Genesis 2 with that task, and try and understand what the text is claiming.

And what do you think it claims?

The forming accounts – the forming of Adam from the dust of the ground, the forming of Eve from Adam’s side – are archetypal. They make comments about all of us. Not comments uniquely about those two individuals. By the way, I believe they are real individuals with a real past.

But the question is: does the forming account describe them uniquely and how they were formed, or do they describe all of humanity, and something about all of us?

The latter is the one that I feel is supported by the text. So I try and demonstrate how all of us are formed from dust. All of us, not just Adam. All of womankind is formed from the side of all humankind, not just Eve. And in that sense, they are archetypal statements. As archetypal statements, they would not offer any information about the material origins of those two people, any more than they would offer the material origins of you or I.

That’s where I focus my attention on: human origins. If that’s true then, if the Bible is not giving an account of material human origins of those two people, then the Bible doesn’t offer a claim about material origins. If the Bible doesn’t have just such a claim about material origins, then we’re a little bit more at liberty to examine what science tells us. That doesn’t mean that what science tells us is right, by default, or without argument. But it does mean that the Bible is not standing in the way of considering those scientific claims.

It’s just coming at it from a different angle.

Right. So the Bible is not telling us about material origins in Genesis 1: so we’re free to examine the scientific evidence. The Bible is not talking about material human origins in Genesis 2, in my opinion, and therefore we’re free to consider what science has to offer. We might not like it, we might think it’s lousy science … but that’s not the question. At that point we’re considering science for its own merits, rather than cutting off that conversation right from the start, by saying ‘Sorry, the Bible tells me differently.’

Professor Walton will be speaking at Robert Menzies College, in North Ryde, on Friday 19th July at 7pm on ‘Can we trust Genesis 1?’, and Saturday 20th July from 9am-4pm on ‘Genesis and Sacred Presence.’ Go to the Gospel Conversations site for more information. He’s also speaking at Ridley College, Melbourne on the 29th July. Part two of the interview will be published before his next series of talks in early August.