Genesis 5-8

As a Christian and a pastor I have often been asked: “Do you interpret the Bible literally?” My response is that I interpret the Bible literarily. By that I mean that the Bible is filled with all sorts of literature: history, poetry, apocalypse, parable, short story, even, as Frederick Buechner suggests, a bit of comedy, tragedy, and fairy tale. To understand the Bible therefore, one must interpret each type of literature in the Bible differently. If I try to read the entire Bible as history, I am going to run into problems, especially when it comes to reading the first eleven chapters of Genesis. If one tries to read Genesis 1-11 as history, then one gets into all sorts of squabbles over the days of creation, young versus old earth theory, the historicity of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark. And one must deal with questions like: “Who did Cain marry?” or “Did Methuselah really live 969 years?” I believe that reading Genesis 1-11 in this way leads to countless adventures in missing the point. I, along with the majority of Bible scholars (and other literate folk like C. S. Lewis), do not believe that the first eleven chapters of Genesis contain historical narrative. These chapters contain, among other things, what one might call myth, or if you prefer, saga. These are stories told about the origins of things, even stories borrowed from non-Israelite people groups, but the Israelites re-told these stories in such a way as to make important points about the God whom they served.

Reading Genesis 5-8 in this way I find that one repeated four-word sentence stands out more than all the rest. It is this statement: “Enoch walked with God.” This simple statement is preceded by a genealogy that tells us about a number of different men who lived, who fathered children, and who died. Enoch did more than that; Enoch used the dash between his birth date and his death date to walk with God. What better epitaph could anyone hope for? I certainly hope that one day someone will say of me: Will walked with God. That would be more meaningful to me than anything else anyone could say about me.

What does it look like to walk with God? Perhaps the author or authors of Genesis answer that question, in a way, with the story of Noah. If nothing else, the story of Noah teaches us that sometimes walking with God means doing things that look crazy to the rest of the world. Sometimes walking with God means going against the flow. I wonder: what crazy thing might God be calling each one of us to do in 2014?

There is only one C. S. Lewis reading attached to this section of Scripture in the CSL Bible. From that reading, from Lewis’ book Miracles, I liked these two sentences the best: “We find ourselves in a world of transporting pleasures, ravishing beauties, and tantalizing possibilities, but all constantly being destroyed, all coming to nothing. Nature has all the air of a good thing spoiled.” That is a good summary, I think, of what it feels like to live in a fallen world. However, thankfully, that is not the end of the story.

Comments

Slow John said…

I love your satement:"I believe that reading Genesis 1-11 in this way leads to countless adventures in missing the point." Well said.

4:14 PM

Will Vaus said…

Thanks John! I like your photo.

5:59 PM

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