264 - The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science

The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science

By Conrad Hyers

Atlanta, John Knox, 1984. 203 Pages. $11.95.

A worthy attempt to contribute to the creation-evolution debate as related to the creation "stories" of Genesis, Hyers' book seeks to interpret the texts according to their literary genre rather than from a "modern point of view," be it that of the modern scientist who may believe in evolution, the "scientific Progressionists," or the conservative Christian "creationists." Chapters I and 11 are concerned with the treatment of revelation in Genesis, while chapters III and IV give an interpretation of Genesis 1. Chapter V deals with the different types of literature that the Genesis accounts incorporate and discusses the proper meaning of "myth." Chapters VI and VIT take up the interpretation of Genesis 2 and 3. The final chapter is really extraneous to the argument as well as to the book, but it does show the consequences of much of Hyers argument.

Hyers' exposé of the creationists' stance in Chapter I is done with a good deal of profundity, sensitivity, and even humor. He surveys the similarities to the "mythic-like" and "saga-like" (my terms) materials of Genesis in relation to their analogues among Israel's neighbors with competence and skill. He also alludes to mythological interpretations of "events" from more modern cultures in an attempt to show both the universality and the usefulness of the genre of myth in explaining the otherwise inexplicable.

The difficulty I find in all of this is that Hyers fails to differentiate between myths qua myths and the Genesis use of "urmythical" materials. Thus, he tends to interpret the materials, be they from the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the literature of Egypt under Ptolemy IV in relation to their "Urforms" rather than according to their Genesis context. The procedure, interesting as it is in itself, fails to take into consideration that mythical materials, like writings or oral accounts in general, take on meaning according to use. Hence, all myths are not

265 - The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science

equal. Hyers also fails to emphasize that when the Genesis redactor "circumcised" these materials into the faith-expression of Israel, he so qualified and transformed them that they became quite other than they were in their "primal contexts." In Genesis, they take on new content and new meaning as they are reset in the story that accounts for the beginning of things in relationship to Yahweh, the God of Israel.

Commentators such as Walther Eichrodt, Gerhard von Rad, and Claus Westermann, like Hyers, point out that the raw materials of Genesis 1-3 are common to the Middle Eastern civilizations of which Israel was one. However, the motif materials of Genesis 1-3 form but the beginning of the whole creation story, Genesis 1-11, and they are misinterpreted if they are abstracted from their Genesis context. Thus, the creation stories of Genesis 1-3 are not accounts of creation as such. Rather, they form the introduction to Israel's understanding that from the beginning the God of Israel is the sovereign God. The story begins with all things, including humankind, coming into being. It includes the history of the race through the generations and leads to Abraham and the beginning of Israel. The whole account is a confessional statement that the personal God of Israel, whether "Elohim" (the God of the gods) or "Yahweh," is and has been the God of the whole world and the whole of humankind from the beginning. It is a present witness to this God who is responsible for all things in heaven and on earth and who continues to command humankind "to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it" even in a world subject to sin.

It would seem somewhat ironic that when Hyers interprets the stories incorporated into the Genesis account as mythological explanations of the way the world was created, he comes close to falling into exactly the same trap that he rightly accuses the creationists and the scientific progressionists of having fallen into. His reading of the Genesis "creation stories" in relation to the order-chaos debate (the Yin-Yang model and male-female relationships, with the priestly materials representing the so-called male Yang tendency-masculine, rational, ordered, and regulated-and the Yahwist materials representing the female Yin characteristics-the creative, immediate, spontaneous) eisogetes modern themes into the Genesis material that are questionable in relation to both the ancient literature and to today's scientific understanding that Hyers seeks to address.

It is true that the order-chaos theme is of interest to modern cosmogonists. However, as Mircea Eliade has pointed out, even in the primal myths, the struggle with chaos is seldom connected with creation. Capra's The Tao of Physics and Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters to the contrary, there is little that is explained in modern physics on the basis of the Yin-Yang paradigm. Niels Bohr's adoption of the Yin-Yang symbol for his family crest may mislead in this regard. Bohr used the symbol not with any reference to order-chaos but rather as a reflection of his own theory of complementarity that explained the existence of the two non-compatible orders of nature that had been identified by Werner

266 - The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science

Heisenberg's theory of indeterminacy. In the same vein, Hyers' discussion of male-female differentiations in this context as well as at the end of Chapter VI, where he defends the Genesis accounts against feminist interpretations, would seem in the first instance foreign to the Genesis mind although perhaps not to ours. To question materials in terms of problems strange to them may well create problems where none exist.

Likewise, Hyers' attempt to analyze the Genesis account on the basis of the differentiation of intellect and will falls flat in view of Johannes Pedersen's demonstration that such a dichotomy is foreign to the Old Testament mind. So, too, the game theory to which Hyers alludes is, I'm afraid, without consequence here. As Manfred Eigen, Nobel laureate in biology and his assistant, Ruthold Winkler, have shown in Das Spiel (English translation, The Rules of the Game), in a game, as in nature, order comes about not because of chaos but because chance plays a positive but non-predicable role in the mix. Likewise to suggest, as Hyers does, that the universe which results from creation is simultaneously meaningful and meaningless, purposeful and purposeless, is both to disregard the epistemological inference that chaos, or non-order, is definable only in relation to order and to set aside any canons of reality whatsoever. The end of that journey is ultimate subjectivity, inevitable solipsism, and consumate anarchy. Back to tohu wabohu.

It was in fact the re-emphasis of the Genesis account of creation, understood as an ordering creatio ex nihilo, that served to rescue Renaissance science from just such a neo-platonically influenced hermetic order-chaos understanding for which Hyers pleads. In the seventeenth century, the recognition that the God of the Judaeo-Christian faith insured order served to free the world from the caprice of chaotic powers, whether of the heavens above or as integral to the world below. Thus science, which is an order-seeking and ordering activity, could develop.

This is not to condemn Hyers' work entirely. His documentation of the cultural situation of Israel among cultures of the Middle East shows that Israel was a part of the world. Its faith did not fall from heaven, as it were, but was formed and expressed in relation to its own Sitz im Leben and by using materials that were at hand. Its faith, however, formed under the impress of the present but transcendent personal and sovereign God, transcended its cultural situation and transformed the common material in terms of which that faith was expressed. It is in the light of science, which seeks order but does not absolutize its findings, and in consideration of the scientifically-guided theological investigation of the Genesis account of creation, that both creationism and scientism must be judged as being wrong-headed. Hyers would seem to be quite right about that.

HAROLD P. NEBELSICK

Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky