Chapter 1
Genesis Part 1
Genesis means “beginning”: the beginning of the universe, life, humankind; the beginning of the children of Abraham; the beginning of the Old Testament and now the beginning of this book. The Bible is full of poetry and story, theology and history. The way in which they blend and balance is the stuff of scholarship. What they mean and how they matter is a challenge to every age and to every one of us.
That includes Jean Sharpin, who will become an important contributor to this book, in her own way, though her use of the term “challenging” was a bit different—a kindly word she used for a book which did not quite hack it in the modern world. When I suggested that the Bible was a book which had changed the course of history, her eyebrows lifted just slightly. “Poetry used to do that,” she said, “Now it’s science.”
“Theology was once known as ‘the queen of the sciences’,” I pointed out.
“That was then,” Jean said, “We live now.”
Jean and I share a love of poetry. We both came to it late, I following a career which centred on the ministry of directing a conference centre, Jean after teaching science (and some philosophy) in an Edinburgh school.
I said I was going to write poems on every book of the Bible. “OK,” Jean said, with her eyebrows firmly in place. “Send them to me, and I’ll read them.” So I did. But I told her she’d need to read some of the book of Genesis for starters which, I’m glad to say, she agreed to do.
In the Beginning (Genesis 1:1—2:3)
Seven days to make up everything
from cosmic dust to humankind.
Six days of speaking, one of resting,
days of seeing all was good
in origin, in process and potential.
Seven days to write a poem, sing
a symphony to keep in mind,
hint of word and spirit dancing,
birling stars and swirling galaxies,
making purpose out of chance.
Who knows what other worlds
may sense of their Creator?
We have this book,
we have ourselves,
we have a new beginning.
Making it up
“I like the idea of God ‘making up’ things,” was Jean’s first comment. “I always thought the Bible was a great work of imagination.”
“Imagination is a great word,” I said, “and we call poets makars. The trouble is, ‘poetry’ is now used for something that is imagination and nothing more. Jews and Christians and Muslims believe that everything started in the eternal mind of God. But we can see and touch creation, which suggests rather powerful imagination.”
“Hmm. I suppose it depends how you make the connection. The poet William Merwin wrote about light flying through the world, unconcerned about whether it actually arrived. Just like Stevenson’s ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive’. All that is just poetry, and you don’t need a Creator to enjoy it.”
“You don’t,” I replied. “But my take on that is God’s generosity. God gives us the freedom to enjoy everything God has made, whether or not we know God’s there.”
“Do you realise you repeated ‘God’ about four times in that sentence?”
“Yes. God is more than just a person, and God is certainly not male or female. That’s our bag. But I admit, at my age, it’s hard to get out of the habit of using ‘he’ and ‘him’ for God.”
“Well, I won’t mind if you slip up,” said Jean. She is nearly as old as me, after all. “But back to business. I used to set sixth-formers the old question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’”
“What did they say?”
“Some said God, some waffled, and one bright kid said that the universe could make itself.”
Nothing Much (Genesis 1)
Nothing is banal—how typical of nothing
that it contradicts itself immediately –
whatever nothing is. But take that contradiction
back behind beginning, creatio ex nihilo:
what clustering possibilities, leaps in
understanding, may lead science and theology
to bed, for ever yoked as yang and yin.
“Well,” said Jean, “At least you don’t agree with Stephen Hawking when he said that philosophy is dead.”1
“No,” I said. “And I suppose, after Ayer tried to reduce philosophy to language games,2 this is the latest attempt to close it down.”
“But you don’t say ‘science and philosophy’ in that poem. You say ‘science and theology’.”
“I could easily have written ‘science and philosophy’. There are different angles on what is true, different kinds of wisdom.”
So what is true, anyhow?
Questions, Questions
Just who are you
to claim what’s true?
And who can say,
“Yes, come what may
I’ll walk my talk
my whole life through?”
Well, why am I
around at all?
And why is there
a world so fair
to meet our need
(but not our greed)?
We humans must
keep questioning
(a trait that shapes
superior apes),
and what we ask
is everything.
To query “How?”
is technocratic:
to query “Why?”
is quite emphatic
that we’re more
than meets the eye.
But over “What?”
and “How?” and “Why?”
the question “Who?”
is what I cry:
not, “What is hot?”
but “Who am I?”
“So how does Genesis answer the big ‘Who am I?’” Jean fired at me. I said I would email her if she made sure she got to the end of chapter 3.
Genesis begins with two creation stories: chapter 1 covers the creation of everything in the universe before human beings, and chapters 2 and 3 are about one man and one woman in a garden and what happened there. Chapter 1 is concerned with animals rather than humans; in chapters 2 and 3 animals are secondary to humans—an obvious sign that we are dealing with theology3 rather than history in the modern sense. Each story uses a different name for God, which is the first hint that the Old Testament has different strands, put together later by Jewish scholars in Babylon (the place of their exile in the seventh century BCE). This is what makes the Bible so much richer than a book by one person could be.
“The book of Genesis simply assumes that God exists,” I said to Jean. “These early stories help us know things that science cannot teach us. Why are we here? Is there anyone to thank for this marvellous world? What is the place of humankind? Is there a basis for marriage? Are there limits to how we should exploit nature?”
“Big questions. I found I had to work things out as I went along—most people do, I think.”
“Yes, I have a friend who knew Latin, and he said it was solvitur ambulando—we work it out on the journey.”
The Bible shows us a way to think and act, and the testimony of Jews and Christians is that this way makes great sense and blesses human life. We prove the truth of the Bible in experience, not in some intellectual way—but we can think about it, and we can talk abo...
