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Creation stories - You’ve got to be kidding!


Stuart Manins's profile picture
Posts: 8

03 March 2023, 17:13

You’ve got to be kidding!

The Creation stories in the Jewish Scriptures come from an oral tradition passed down from mouth to mouth over many generations.

7 The time came when the Lord God formed a man’s body from the dust of the ground and breathed into it the breath of life. And man became a living person.

8 Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, to the east, and placed in the garden the man he had formed.

9 The Lord God planted all sorts of beautiful trees there in the garden, trees producing the choicest of fruit. At the centre of the garden he placed the Tree of Life, and also the tree of Conscience, giving knowledge of Good and Bad…

15The Lord god placed the man in the Garden of Eden as its gardener to tend and care for it.

16 But the Lord God gave the man this warning: “You may eat any fruit in the garden except the fruit from the Tree of Conscience – for its fruit will make you open your eyes to make you aware of what is right and wrong, good and bad. If you eat its fruit, you will be doomed to die.”       The Living Bible p. 2

Recently (Feb. 2023) this was read out in our churches as part of the lectionary reading, and it took my attention immediately not because of its wisdom but because of its implausibility. What kind of God would create men and women out of his love, and his love for them, and deny them the means to distinguish right from wrong, and good from bad? It doesn’t make sense of any kind – common, logical or moral. It poses a question almost as puzzling as why preachers keep reading it to us without critical comment.

Following this myth (for it can no longer be considered historic fact) is the story of deception where a serpent (who can speak!) calls God a liar, and Eve (the name Adam gave to his wife) shows her innocence (naivity?) by trying to become wise by eating the forbidden fruit and then tricking Adam to do also.

When the Lord God found them hiding among the trees in the garden and asked them to explain their new behaviour, Adam admitted eating the forbidden fruit but blamed Eve for bringing it to him. What a confusing mess of deception. It links nakedness with shame.

It ends up cursing the serpent “to grovel in the dust… crawling on its belly”; gender and social  inequality between men and women; banishment of humanity from Paradise, with pain, embarrassment, work and fear as punishment.

As with Mickey Mouse stories and Aesop’s fables, imaginative, fanciful narrative can entertain, inform, instruct and guide, even educate us. But never without understanding the important place of metaphor in literature. Congregations are mainly adult audiences and deserve to be treated as adults.   

David Bell's profile picture
Posts: 65

05 March 2023, 20:25

Yes, Stuart, it was an oversight to read the Adam and Eve story to the congregation without also holding some kind of interpretative discussion or exegesis.

That said, I am personally drawn to the Yahwist account of Genesis 2. The Lord God in these stories is just like me—or you. Our hearts and minds are full of myth-making and fact-making. YHWH becomes the mirror to myself. In a sense I can't allow God to be God if I don't allow me to be me.

Anyway, I just presented a very little paper to our most recent Ministerial Synod in which I draw out the distinctions between hormesis, homeopathy (they have same Greek root) and placebo. Maybe that body of literature we call the Bible has to be seen sometimes as building strengths, sometimes magnifying implausibility, and even making things happen in our bodies and indeed the world just by thinking it so. It's in the attachment

  • ministry development online zine.pdf
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