Genesis 1:1-5; 26-27
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Last week I introduced a new sermon series that should take us through the rest of the summer. I plan to spend our time focusing on what holds us together as the Church; I want to look at our shared theology. There is a time and place to discuss what is different, the things that separate one church from another, one denomination from the next. But I feel like it would be good to spend some time looking at the things we can all agree on. That’s why I’ve called this series “Johnny Cash Theology.”
As I mentioned last week, the title comes from a conversation I had with my brother as we attempted to find a radio station we could agree on. In the end, we said, “Everyone likes Johnny Cash.” So we could agree on that.
But I’m not just going to stop there. I’m also going to look at why some people, churches, or denominations might believe something different. I won’t pretend to be neutral; I do have my own opinions and beliefs. But I will attempt to be fair.
I’ll be drawing from the Apostles’ Creed for this series. The Creeds of the early church don’t get into the details that tend to divide us. There is no mention of freewill or predestination, no attempt to articulate any kind of atonement theology, no mention of how old a person should be when they are baptized. Using the graphic I introduced to you last week (from Greg Boyd), the Creeds focus on dogma. The next circle out is labeled “doctrine,” which would include the kinds of things I mentioned above, the things that tend to separate our denominations. Again, we will talk about those things, but our focus will be on the dogma. And the furthest circle is where we find opinions. These things may matter, but they aren’t worth dividing over.
Let’s read together from the Apostles’ Creed, and I will stop you when we get through the portion that I want to cover this morning. This translation can be found in our blue hymnals, number 712. “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” Stop!
That’s right. We will be covering one sentence today. We Christians, along with many other religious traditions, believe that God created the world. There was a time when the world as we know it didn’t exist and some force greater than us made the earth, seas, planets, and galaxies. We call that force God.
It is pretty much universally accepted, even among atheists, that there was a time when this universe did not exist. The thing that divides religious people from the atheists is that we believe God caused this universe to come into existence. Atheists believe that this world came into being through natural forces, like a big explosion. The Big Bang Theory is commonly adhered to by most of the scientific community, and has been the standard explanation for creation for the last century. The theory states that approximately 13.8 billion years ago, there was a small ball of infinite mass and extreme heat called a Singularity. Some sort of explosion caused that ball to begin to break, spread out and expand. This theory explains the origin of the matter in our solar system and the laws of physics we see today, like gravity. And science tells us that the universe continues to expand today, getting larger and larger by the minute.
The Big Bang Theory states that as the particles expanded across the universe, they began to cool, until they reached a temperature suitable for the atomic particles to combine and form stars, planets, and elements required to support life.
I’m going to show my hand here early in the sermon and tell you that I believe in the Big Bang Theory. I trust science. But that doesn’t mean that I am an atheist, because the Big Bang Theory still leaves a lot of questions unanswered, questions like where did the Singularity come from? That little ball of infinite density didn’t just come from nowhere. And even if it did, rapidly-cooling atoms may form molecules that have various properties, but the properties of earth are pretty specific. If the earth was bigger or smaller, closer or further from the sun, it couldn’t support human life. And even though I don’t pretend to understand all of the Big Bang Theory, from what I have read and heard, I can’t figure out where life actually begins. The Big Bang Theory offers an explanation for planets, stars, molecules, and the laws of physics, but no one dominant theory for the origin of life. There are indeed theories about how lightning strikes can form amino acids and DNA, but there is no consensus on the origin of life among atheists.
I believe in a Big Bang, but I believe in a creator who caused that Big Bang to happen. And I believe that the creation accounts of Genesis don’t contradict a big bang. Look at verses 1-2, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
Genesis tells us that the earth was formless and empty. It says that the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. So even before the official creation of the world as depicted in Genesis 1, there was a time when there was something. Something that we would not recognize as the earth. But God brought order to the disorder. Or, if you prefer, we can say that God spoke, and “bang,” the world was formed.
Christians throughout history have believed that God is the creator of the world. That’s our first shared belief in our Johnny Cash Theology series. From the beauty of the mountains, to the openness of the plains, the heights of the redwoods, to the depths of the ocean. From the vastness of the solar system, to the subatomic particles that are so small we can only theorize their presence, God created it all. I simply cannot look at the beauty of creation with all of its complexities and deny that there is a being, a creator, greater than us.
How and how long God took to create it is another issue altogether.
I want to spend the second half of this sermon exploring three different understandings of creation that we find within Christianity. We started with the dogma that God created the universe, now we move into doctrine and opinion on how and how long it took God to create the universe. I’ll draw from Bonnie Kristian’s three approaches to this subject (A Flexible Faith), though we could surely explore many more. The three options I want to look at are: young earth, old earth, and the poetry warfare approach. Let’s start with the young-earth approach.
Back in the 1600’s, an Irish bishop named James Ussher sat down with his Bible and made a timeline based on the genealogies found in the text. Some give the age of the people who lived, such as Deuteronomy 34:7, which tells us that Moses lived to be 120 years old. Other ages he estimated based on the average lifespan and surely other factors. After doing the math and the research, he came up with a date for creation: 4004 BC. According to Ussher, the earth is currently 6,014 years old (don’t forget, there was no year zero). However, many who adhere to the young-earth theory today will say that the age of the earth is closer to 8-10,000 years old.
Those who fall into the young-earth camp tend to also interpret Genesis 1 very literally, that God created the world and all living things in 6 24-hour periods. These Christians are also skeptical of any science that would call a literal 6-day creation into question, choosing instead to defer to the authority of the Bible over any human institution or findings.
The next option we will call the Old Earth Approach. This approach attempts to reconcile both science and theology, taking seriously the words of the Bible and the findings of the scientific community. Scientific research estimates the age of the earth to be around 4.5 billion years old. I have no idea how they arrive at that number, but I know that the scientific method is more than just a series of guesses. So the question arises, how can a Christian believe the Bible and trust in science?
Many old-earth advocates will point out that we don’t need to take the word “day” to mean a 24-hour period. For instance, before we had alarm clocks, wrist watches, and cellular phones, how did people mark the beginning and end of a day? By the rising and setting of the sun. The sun comes up and with it we begin a new day. The sun sets and we conclude the day. Or perhaps we would measure a day from one sunrise to the next.
Now let’s consider the order of events in the creation narrative. Day one, God separates darkness from light, making day and night. Day two, God separates the water from the sky. Day three, the water and the land are separated and all the plants are created. Who knows what was created on day four? The sun, moon, and the stars. Day five, fish and birds are created. Day six animals, including human beings, are made. And it is us humans who hold the privilege of being the only aspect of creation to be made in God’s own image.
Knowing that days would have been measured by the rising and setting of the sun, do you see any issues with the way this is laid out? The sun isn’t created until day four! How do you measure a day without a sun? With this in mind, old-earth Christians begin exploring how we can interpret Genesis 1 while being both true to the text and scientific findings.
One option lies in the flexibility of the Hebrew language. For instance, there is no definite article before “beginning” in the Hebrew. So while we traditionally translate this verse as “In the beginning,” it is just as appropriate to say, “In a beginning.” This is the beginning of something, but maybe not the beginning of everything.
Furthermore, many have noted that the Hebrew word for day, “yom,” can be interpreted as an era. Yom isn’t just a reference to a 24-hour period, but also an undefined chunk of time. We do this in English as well when we say things like, “Back in the day, I used to be able to run a mile in five minutes.” Which day was that? October 24, 2002? To think of the yom as eras rather than actual 24-hour periods allows flexibility in the dating of the origin of the earth.
A final approach of the old-earth adherents worth noting is often called the gap theory. The gap theory states that there is a big chronological gap between verse 1 and 2 of Genesis chapter 1. We start with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” but then there is a big bap in the history. We can slide things that don’t fit into our biblical timelines into that gap of billions of years.
The third and final approach to reading Genesis 1 responsibly is what Bonnie Kristian calls the Poetry and Warfare approach. She writes, “But what if the creation story in Genesis 1 isn’t about history, science, and time at all? What if it isn’t talking about a literal week of creation or a long, gradual process that may or may not include evolution? What if it’s actually poetry about God’s unparalleled power and his loving plan for humanity?” (pg. 43)
Like the other options, I believe that the Poetry and Warfare option has its shortcomings. But what I like is that this approach doesn’t try to make the biblical text say something it was never intended to tell us. I don’t think Genesis 1 was intended to be a history book, or a science book, and this approach does well to not try to force an answer from Genesis 1 that it was never meant to answer.
First, to call Genesis 1 a poem isn’t to say that it isn’t true. The Psalms are essentially poems, as are other parts of the Bible. To call it a poem does not take away from its authority. And the repetition of phrases suggest that this could be a poem. At the end of each day we find the phrase, “And there was evening, and there was morning—the (first…sixth) day.”
This seems to be a poem or a song of triumph. Triumph over whom? Over the competing stories, narratives, and gods of the day. You see, there were many different creation stories; it seemed like every religion had its own story of how the world came into being. We need to remember that the Torah wasn’t officially written down in its current form until the Babylonian Exile, and the Babylonians had their own gods and their own creation story. (I shared this a number of years ago with the church as well.)
According to the Babylonian creation story, the goddess Tiamat is seen as the creator who rules over the seas. However, there is a power struggle among the gods, and Marduk kills Tiamat. Marduk then takes the body of Tiamat, cuts in in half, and forms the heavens and the earth out of her divided body.
Now compare that story to what we find in Genesis 1, and imagine you are an Israelite living in Babylon during the exile. Where the Babylonian gods form the world through violence, warfare, and dismembered body parts, your God simply speaks them into existence. And remember that Tiamat is the creator in the Babylonian story, she is the goddess who rules over the seas. Now recall what we find in verse 2, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
The Babylonians believe Tiamat is the goddess of the waters. But look who is hovering over the waters. It is none other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. According to the Poem Warfare Theory, Genesis 1 isn’t about science or history. It is a reminder to the Israelites that though they are in captivity, their God is ultimately the one with all the power.
So which is the right way to read Genesis 1? Should we read it literally, as 6, 24-hour periods, putting us in the young-earth camp? Or should we try to reconcile science and scripture by realizing that there might be more going on here linguistically than meets the eye? Or perhaps this was never about science or history, and instead was meant to be a story of God’s “unparalleled power and his loving plan for humanity?”
I don’t know, and I really don’t care.
If one of these explanations is helpful for you to connect better with God and your neighbor, that’s great. But this topic falls into the areas of doctrine and opinion. Sure, I have my opinions, and I bet you do too. And no matter which camp you find yourself in, I’m glad to call you a brother or a sister.
This is Johnny Cash Theology. What can we agree on? Johnny Cash Theology is not so concerned with how God created the world. Johnny Cash Theology is mostly concerned with who created the world.
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