Pope John XXIII, before he was elected Pontiff, served as a diplomat. One evening, he was introduced at a function to a rather scantily clad woman. “Here”, the future Pope said to her, “Why not take a bite from this apple?” The lady looked at him quizzically. He responded, “If you eat it, perhaps, like Eve, your eyes will be opened and you will realize you are naked!”
The Old Testament readings at Mass these days have been selected from Genesis. They deal with the origins of man and woman, nakedness and fig leaves, good and evil. There are several things we as Catholics need to understand about this book, and one of them is this:
The first three chapters of Genesis deals with the creation of the world from a poetic perspective.
Now, before anyone asks, I want to get one thing straight: the Bible contains real history. The Gospels, for example – biographies of the life of Jesus, who truly lived and died and rose again on planet earth. The Acts of the Apostles – the history of the early Church. There are, of course, many historical books of the Old Testament as well.
A key to biblical interpretation is this: understand the genre that you are reading. You don’t read poetry (Like the Song of Solomon) as you would a historical narrative. The problem with Genesis is that it is a hybrid of history and poetry (the first three chapters on Creation).
Catholics don’t run into the same sort of problems that some non-Catholic Christians do in dealing with creation from a scientific perspective (i.e. the young-earth theory, creation in six literal days, etc.). We see no conflict between faith and science. Some of the greatest scientists in the world were Catholics. A great number of craters on the moon, for example, are named for Jesuit scientist-priests who discovered them.
Science only describes how things work in God’s creation. But it can’t tell you the whys – the reason for our existence, and that of everything else. Genesis 1-3 does exactly that, using poetry. Genesis 1-3 is not a scientific document, or a documentary on how God created the universe and humanity. We know that it isn’t, for one simple reason (and there are more): the writer or writers of Genesis weren’t there, “in the beginning” to take notes!
But poetry can also communicate God’s truth, just as history can.
Christopher West, who has written so extensively on Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, has a great way of explaining this: He says that there’s a big difference between what an optometrist (a scientist) tells you when looking in your eyes, and what your lover tells you when doing the same thing – unless, of course, you’re in love with your optometrist! But what both are seeing is true – just from different perspectives.
The writer of Genesis was a lover who sees the deep truths of why God made the world – and us. It was so that we could be in relationship with him.
As someone who returned to taking their faith seriously because of exposure to apologetics and creation science, I must take issue with this constant downplaying of Genesis as merely poetic.
Can Genesis be seen with a poetic tinge? Sure. I’ve not doubt the writer wanted to make the account more meaningful than some mere reiteration of events. But as C.S. Lewis once said of anyone wishing to see the Scriptures as merely something poetical, it’s pretty terrible poetry.
The Genesis story of creation can be seen as both a literal account of history that is not in conflict with REAL scientific facts, as well as carrying poetic and symbolic meanings. In Judges, Deborah sang a song recounting the Israelites victory over their enemies. Despite being a song it is retelling a real factual event with real factual details. Our Lord’s Crufixion carries so much meaning in its events. But just because it does, that does not make it simply a poetical account not to be taken seriously. It is history and poetic and filled with symbolism. It can be all three because God is awesome like that. He writes and infuses these things into the real historical record of mankind. Much like Protestants, Catholics can also fall into the trap of taking an ‘either/or’ approach to the Scriptures, particularly Genesis, when it can be ‘both/and.’
The Creation account in Genesis is obviously not meant to be a scientific document. But it does speak of things that can be verified and tested scientifically. Anyone trying to downplay Genesis as being simply mere analogy will run into problems when they realize that God Himself reiterates in Exodus that He created the world in 6 days and because He did it in 6 days and rested on the 7th, the Israelites must also do likewise and observe the Sabbath. Christ reiterates that at the beginning of creation man and women were created for each other, not billions of years later. Would anyone wish to say that God or Christ are lying or ignorant about creation? Even the idea that Adam and Eve did not really exist and are not the parents of the entire human race is a condemned heresy.
Catholics, like the vast majority of people have been tricked into believing that Darwinism, Materialism and Biological macro-evolution, and Old-Age dating methods are scientific facts. They are not. They are atheistic and materialist philosophies that have nothing to do with real science. Old age dates and belief in macro-evolution (that less complex organisms can gain complexity mysteriously and therefore evolve into something other than and higher than what they are), are superstitions based not on evidence, but biased interpretations of emperical data to fit a biased materialistic worldview.
The Genesis record can be defended scientifically. The weight of scientific evidence sides with the universe and time having a definite beginning, creation ex-nihilo and purposeful design. There are plenty of places and resources where people can look these things up and learn form them. Sadly many of them are Protestant and even secular resources when Catholics ought to be at the forefront of this.
The compromise of many Catholic leaders and apologists with secular and atheist philosophies that has them downplaying the Book of Genesis in favor of materialistic cosmological and biological evolution has undermined the Gospel and led to a loss of many many many many many souls. To believe in the evolutionary worldview is to believe that God purposely used a process where creatures gradually evolved through death, struggle, disease, suffering, bloodshed, destruction, survival fo the fittest etc. etc. Thus these are not the consequences of sin. But rather they are things instituted by God Himself, therefore it is not man but God who is the author of death and suffering prior to man ever existing and therefore prior to sin. And this rubbishes the Passion of our Lord as if to make it out that Christ died to free us from something God purposefully created and used Himself. Thus God Himself created something that is not good and this is a blatant contradiciton of who God is. Thus the whole message of the cross makes no sense. This is precisely why atheists devoted to evolutionary ideas reject Christianity.
There is no conflict between the Catholic faith and science. But that’s because what is passed around as being ‘science’ these days is not science and is flawed. The Genesis record and 6 day creation can be defended and should. It is plainly explained in the Scriptures and is not contradicted by empirical and observational science. And you can read Genesis as a literal historical account and lose none of its beauty and symbolism.
There are plenty of apologetics and creationist materials and articles on this matter. The genre of Genesis is also historical literature. I highly recommend Catholics to learn about them. The writer of Genesis wasn’t there in the beginning to take notes. But he sure as heck did speak face to face with God and God informed him what to write and inspired him to write what he did, so he was taking notes from someone who was there! The scriptures themselves attest to this! I’ll tell you who else wasn’t there at the beginning. Modern scientists. And they’re not in the habit of talking to God, who was there, and who informed us of what He did in Genesis and Exodus and the Gospels.
I hope I didn’t come off as rude. But it really does pain me to see how many within the Catholic Church have compromised with modernism and all kinds of heresy. I see rejection of Genesis as a truthful historical account as one of them. Defending Creation can be such a great witnessing tool too that can bring many to the faith who are held captive to false philosophy and false science.
I would be more inclined to call Genesis “myth” than “poetry,” though one can include the other. But Genesis isn’t quite the same genre as the Song of Songs.
In any case, it seem to me that modernism has destroyed the capacity of many (both atheists and believers) to appreciate this fundamental way in which every culture (including our own) has tried to pass on its deepest truths. Without myth, the kinds of things we think we can know get terribly limited so that whatever is not within the purview of the scientific method becomes meaningless. This poverty has lead many into new ageism, conspiracy theories, and other such things because it is so inhuman. People want a grand narrative! Myths always have been and always will be the best ways to convey deep truths to large audiences. In fact, in this way they function much like parables so preferred for public teaching by our Lord.
Of course they are not to be read as history, but that is exactly the point. There are truths deeper than history.
Johnno and Brett,
Thank you so much for interacting with the material. I really appreciate your taking the time to not only read, but comment! As to a response for both of you guys, here goes:
Johnno: You’ve said a lot of things here, and issues you raise so important that I think I’m going to write a bit more about this in a future post or posts. I thank you for what you’ve written, because it’s really inspired me to write more on this issue! In fact, I wanted to say more in this post, but I wanted to keep the length down to, well, something appropriate to a blog post, and not an article or an academic treatise. But the first thing I want to reaffirm (and I say reaffirm because I made a point of explicitly saying this in the post, just in case anybody got the wrong idea): I do believe the Bible contains real history, and this includes Genesis as well. The bulk of Genesis, of course, consists of material on the history of the Hebrew people.
Just as you said that exposure to apologetics helped you take faith more seriously, it was the apologetics of history that made me do the same – specifically, the historicity of the life of Christ, including the historicity of his miracles, and most importantly, the historicity of his Resurrection. So, I’m pretty big on historicity in the Bible (just read some more of the posts I’ve done)! Obviously, I believe in Creation, and I also believe in creation ex nihilo. I also believe (for reasons I’ll explain later in a post) that it is through one set of parents that original sin entered the world. I adhere to the teaching of the Magisterium of the Church, and if I ever said something that contradicted official Church teaching, I would be more horrified than anyone, and would correct my error right away!
But as far as I can see, I didn’t contradict Church teaching at all here, and what’s more, I never talked about some of the positions that you may be implying (and I say may, because I’m not sure) that I have taken up here. I didn’t say a word about evolution. For the record, I don’t subscribe to the theory of macroevolution either. I think it’s very flawed and without any convincing evidence. I think scientists like Michael Behe have more than damaged the credibility of Darwinian theories of evolution. More on this topic later.
What I was trying to say had nothing much to do with specific scientific theories about how God created the world and got it to this point; I’m not a scientist and don’t pretend to be. All I was trying to say was that, even if it could be proven that God used a macroevolutionary process to get us to where we are now (and, again, I don’t think that he did), such a view would not at all conflict with the tenets of our faith, as long as one didn’t postulate that God didn’t superintend the process. Strictly speaking, the only heresy that would be involved would be to say that such a process could have occurred without God. Recent popes, when speaking on the relation of faith and science, have made this very clear. If Creation really did take place in six literal days, great! It wouldn’t affect my faith at all. But the faith of some fundamentalist Christians who hold to a literal six-day creation model would be shattered if it could be definitively proved that wasn’t the case. Such a worry just doesn’t exist for a Catholic, and that’s not because we don’t take the Bible seriously, or salvation history seriously, because we do.
As far as the position I was actually taking, which was that the first three chapters of Genesis are what I call a “poetic” (Brett, I’ll get to your point in a sec!) account of Creation, I take the same view as Pope Benedict himself, who is a far greater biblical theologian than any of us could ever dream of being. I would suggest reading the book “In the Beginning” (Eerdmans), which is actually a collection of his homilies on the creation accounts in Genesis, preached while he was still known as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Some of the future posts that I want to do on this topic will highlight his take on all this, and I think you’ll really appreciate what he has to say. Just to give you a bit of a sneak preview: Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out that the Creation accounts (and remember, there is more than one) in Genesis 1-3 were written to respond to and reject erroneous concepts about Creation that were common among other peoples at the time the biblical accounts were written. It is utterly brilliant stuff, and I can’t wait to write about it. He also reminds us that it is only the revelation of Christ which really explains what happened “in the beginning” (see John 1:1). I hope these future posts that I’m planning will speak to some of the other issues you wrote about, too.
Back to what I was talking about in the post, which was only Genesis 1-3, which is of a different genre than the rest of the book: we now come to Brett’s point. Brett, the reason why I used the term “poetry” (and maybe I ought not to have), rather than “myth” when speaking of Genesis, is that a lot of people today equate the term “myth” with “lie”. Why? Because they don’t understand the term in the sense of a metanarrative, like you were talking about. As I alluded to above, Cardinal Ratzinger highlights how Genesis 1-3 gives us the true metanarrative on Creation, one that is in no way in opposition to truth, historical or scientific or otherwise.
Best regards to you both!
You’re exactly right about people thinking myth = lie.
It is a great tragedy.
Have you seen Cardinal Schonborn’s book “Chance or Purpose”? Ignatius Press. Quite good in my view.
I just ran across “Darwin’s Pious Idea” (Eerdman’s) and am looking very forward to reading it.
I look forward to your future topics on this subject. Sorry that I jumped to the conclusion that you might have been giving indirect support to evolution. But I should also stress that just as I jumped to that conlusion, many other people will also automatically see it the same way, that to think of Genesis as ‘poetic’ or ‘mythical’ is because the Church has conceded to secular science consensus opinion about macroevolutionary beginnings, and thus use this ‘escape hatch’ to undermine and question and reinvent and reinterpret other articles of faith. Thus the faith becomes subject to secular scientific disciplines, and thus human opinion to decide what is fact and fiction and what is moral and immoral. It goes far beyond the misunderstanding of ‘myth = untrue/inaccurate fiction.’
Keep up the good work on the blog!
Brett, I don’t believe our culture has forgotten how to understand and appreciate myths. Though it largely has misunderstood the ancient understanding of ‘myth’ and thus disregards things labelled ‘myth.’ It still very much clings to and believes in ‘myths’, in their own understanding of the word, without even realizing it! So in fact what has actually happened is not that they disbelieve myths, but rather that they have completely replaced the Christian myth with one of their own! A myth perpetuated by the modern scientific consensus that runs amock and throughout our media, culture, and now defines our laws, morality and the conduct of the state & human beings.
I highly recommend reading an essay by C.S. Lewis called ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ He excellently expounds upon and exposes this far better and more eloquently than I could. I might be freely available online to read, but if you’re in the mood for a book, I highly recommend picking up a collection of his essays in one called ‘The Weight of Glory.’ My copy has the essay ‘Is theology poetry?’ in it.
I’ll also recommend ‘The Grand Miracle’ which is a another good little book that’s a collection of his essays and speeches. While he speaks from the perspective as a follower of the Church of England, pretty much everything he has ever spoken of is practical for Catholics to reflect on.
Let us say that instead of being born a Catholic, you instead were born in Japan and were taught a different religion. Do you believe that you would have the same faith in the Bible as you currently do? To me religion is a creation of homo sapiens because there are so many of them. Maybe it is time to unify all of mankind wiith a brand new religion for everybody. To me the concept of god is the answers to all the unanswered questions, nothing more. It seems to work so far.
I appreciate the redenmir that rather than complain when things change in unhappy ways, its right to be thankful that they did something well for so long, and look for the new opportunities to carry on that are given to us. This post was good to read today. Thanks!