Questions in Genesis

Many accusations are hurled at people who begin to deconstruct their faith. I imagine this is similar no matter what belief system you have followed, but as I come from American Evangelical Christianity, I can say with certainty it’s true here. After I admitted out loud I no longer believed the history recorded in the Bible must be literally factual and the interpretation of various texts required little more than carefully reading the words, people told me I’d been influenced by evil spirits; I was leading my children away from God; and I should no longer call myself a Christian, because I had begun making up my own religion. Deconstruction can be a difficult, scary, and lonely path. Amid the hard and the painful, however, are incredible gifts, like the knowledge that it’s okay to question the cognitive dissonance I’ve lived with for most of my life. 

Deconstructing the beliefs I’d learned from infancy has opened the door to all sorts of questions I’d previously been shamed for asking. In my tradition, we were taught not to question God—which, in practice, really meant an unquestioning obedience to the authority figures who claimed to speak for God. Even those of us who dared ask why, were quickly silenced by scriptural platitudes, like, “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” “God brings all things together for good,” or even “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.” Spiritual bypassing was never a fun time.

I was a child who always had lots of questions. Frankly, I’m an adult who continues to have a lot of questions. While I’m not as excited about some of the answers—and I still sometimes find it jarring to be reminded that most questions do not have a single, correct answer—I appreciate the ability to ask and argue and recognize the importance of working our way to better understanding by using logic and experimentation and all the tools at our disposal.

One of the first challenges to my childish sense of the Bible as a book with all the answers came as I reread the first chapters of Genesis. While I’d known the creation story since toddlerhood, on this particular day, I was shocked to discover not one, but two very different accounts of God creating the world. In Genesis 1, there are seven specific days, each with a particular activity. Day One is the creation of light and the separation of day from night. On Day Two, God divides the water on earth from the water in the sky, allowing for rain to fall. The schedule for Day Three includes separation of the dry land from the sea and the planting of fruit-bearing vegetation. Day Four brings the creation of the sun and the moon. God created all the animals in the sea and the air on Day Five. The animals on the land, including people made in God’s image, were created on Day Six. Finally, on Day Seven, God rested.

Beginning in Genesis 2, however, we read a whole different creation story. In this version, before there are any plants, before rain ever fell to earth, God formed a human from the dust, then breathed life into this person’s nostrils. Having planted a garden for both beauty and produce, along with two trees, one bringing knowledge of good and evil and the other everlasting life, God put the human there to tend the plants. Four rivers watered the garden, and there is no mention of any wild beasts. Not until noting the sole person inhabiting the garden shouldn’t be alone does God create from the same dust all the animals of the land and the sky, none of whom prove to be a suitable companion for the human. So, God does a bit of divine surgery and creates a second person from the rib of the first, finally providing a fitting partner. 

As one of my favorite Bible scholars, Pete Enns, has often said, “They’re not trying to hide it.” These are clearly two different narratives that describe the sequence of creation in two different chronologies. While some pieces might be reconciled (for instance, the description of creating first Adam, then Eve in the second version could be seen as an elaboration of creating multiple people in the first), the two cannot fully be incorporated into one coherent historical record. 

Although I was still deeply involved in Evangelicalism at the time, I was already beginning to see that not all Christians believed in a historical six-day creation that followed the verse-by-verse presentation of what happened between each morning and evening. I wasn’t so sure about the whole Big-Bang-leads-to-evolution idea, since I’d been taught in church those were theories based on the premise of a universe without God. Still, I acknowledged these two differing accounts probably weren’t intended to be literal. And anyway, God’s ways were higher than my ways, bringing all things together for good, as the foolish things of the world shame the wise  . . right?

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