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10

Is All of This Literal?

The elephant in the room for many of you reading up to this point might be the relationship between these stories and the scientific understandings of the origins of life. I tend to read these scriptures with a right-brained, poetic, literary sensibility. So generally speaking, I am not all that interested in whether the stories written by ancient Hebrews are getting the science correct. It isn’t because it is unimportant. Rather, these stories were a sincere attempt to address crucial issues in their lives.

The Garden of Eden is a picture of human beings living in harmony with God and what goes wrong when we reject that notion. Cain and Abel are a picture of our tendency toward using violence to deal with our disappointments and jealousies. The story of the Great Flood underscores this tendency, spiraling out of control and breaking the heart of God. The Tower of Babel is a brief but poignant picture of our inclination to abuse the unique nature that human beings possess. God created us “only slightly less than divine” (Ps. 8:5) with the image of God formed within us. These ancient stories depict a humanity unwilling to be satisfied with the wonder of that nature. It is not enough, it seems, to have the imprint of the imago Dei; we want to be gods ourselves. The first eleven chapters of Genesis are a poetic rendering of the beauty and tragedy of that reality.