Today we start in earnest this new series exploring how the relationship between God and God’s people changes over the course of the Biblical story. We’ll start at the beginning, with the creation stories. Now, if you were around for the series on Genesis 1-11 you’ll no doubt remember that the creation stories are most likely among the newest pieces of the Old Testament and therefore reflect a later stage of Israelite/Jewish religious history. But to my mind, this actually makes the story of the Bible all the more compelling. It means that these stories ‘at the beginning’ offer us a hint of where the larger narrative would go.
Genesis 1 offers a zoomed-out perspective on creation. This is a transcendent, omnipotent, and universal God, who speaks creation into existence and has total control over the elements. The battle among the gods so common in Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) creation stories (including Israel’s own earlier stories, if the glimpses we get in Psalms 33.6-9; 74.12-17; 104; and Job 26 are any indication), is nowhere to be seen, and the mighty divine rivals are simply parts of God’s intentional and good creation. God divides the primordial chaos into an inhabitable world, then fills it with plants, fish, animals, and finally humans. The story shows these humans to be the pinnacle of God’s creativity, to whom is given a special, two-fold vocation:
- to be God’s representatives on earth (created in the ‘image and likeness’ of God)
- to govern the animals on God’s behalf (to have ‘dominion over them’) (Genesis 1.26-31)
We also get a sense of this ‘high anthropology’ (that is, a basically positive understanding of humanity) in the second creation story, found in Genesis 2-3. This story zooms in, and offers a more intimate perspective on creation, and a more immanent, finite, and local vision of God. This is a God who works with his hands, who walks and talks, and who doesn’t always seem to know what’s going on. Here we see humanity’s role as God’s deputy play out in Adam’s naming of the animals.
But this version of the story quickly takes a dark turn, and the first humans allow themselves to be deceived and sin and its natural consequences enter the world. While the story doesn’t go nearly as far as the later Augustinian traditions about ‘the Fall’ and ‘Original Sin’, it remains that this has big consequences for humanity, namely that our assertive disobedience to God brought greater understanding of the world, but with it, compromised relationships with each other, the world around us, and God. Our original created vocation to be God’s representatives on heart is still intact, but our ability to live it out is greatly impaired.
By placing these stories side-by-side at the start of the Scriptures, the editors of Genesis offer us a flexible understanding of God that bridges the infinite and finite, the transcendent and immanent, the universal and local. As we’ll see in future posts, this balance is not to last. This God is in relationship with the created world, with humanity deputized to be God’s representatives within it. The ‘fall’ distorts but does not eliminate either this relationship or this calling. The rest of the first section of Genesis shows a consistent pattern of false starts for humanity trying to figure itself out in relation to God.
In the next post, we’ll turn to God’s new beginning in the call of one Mesopotamian pastoralist named Abram.
Matthew Root 