Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light.
Lately I’ve been reading the book Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, an area of physics that offers some profound challenges to our understanding of the universe and our place within it. One of his famous quotes from the book says, “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” He points out that the scientist is a part of the experiment he or she is performing and that the results of the experiment are constrained by the questions it is designed to answer. Just the act of asking a questions puts limits on the kind of answers you are able to get. The way the question is phrased can also put constraints on the answer. This is an unavoidable reality, but we are wise to attend to our role in the experiment.
Something similar happens when we read and interpret the Bible. We are part of the interpretation. The questions we ask and the way we phrase them put limits on the answers we will find. Even the task of bringing our questions to the Bible assumes that it was written to answer them. But what if the Bible wasn’t written to answer all our questions? What if the language we use to ask the question doesn’t even make sense in the language of the Bible? I think of Genesis 1 and our concept of creation. Creation means the coming into existence of a universe of time, space, matter and energy. This is what we are imagining when we read Genesis 1. This is what we expect the Bible to talk about because this is what creation means, at least to us. But what if the ancient people understood creation in a different way? What if creation for the ancient Hebrews meant something was given a function and a purpose? What if the ancient mind viewed creation as bringing order to chaos, rather than bringing matter into existence?
Would it surprise you to hear that this is how Old Testament scholars talk about Genesis 1? The Christian affirmation that God created ex nihilo (from nothing) is hard to find in Genesis 1, unless we accept that the formless, watery, chaotic deep of Genesis 1:2 is an ancient way of describing nothingness. And if that is true, then the act of creation described there might just mean something different than we would expect. Perhaps we are at cross purposes when we try to connect the creation account of Genesis 1 with the modern scientific explanation of how our universe came into being. Maybe these two stories don’t run parallel to each other. Maybe they are looking at the same basic event from different angles and with very different lenses.
I believe that asking whether the six days of Genesis 1 are real 24-hour periods, or eras in cosmic history, or whether there was a gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 are all the wrong questions. They are all attempts to map the story of Genesis 1 onto a modern, scientific story of material creation. When we bring these questions to the text, we will get answers, but no assurance that they are the complete, final, or even right answers.
We are part of the interpreting process. The questions, the stories and the assumptions we bring to the text will shape the answers we find. We are wise to allow the Bible to correct the lens we see it through. We do this so that we might learn the truth it is offering, rather than the truth we want to find in it.