Genesis 1 "In Beginning..."

Hypothesis or Top Down 
In beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.  And Genesis chapter 1 tells us the most significant things about that event.  The traditional presupposition about this account is that God created ex nihilo, or out of nothing and brought forth something that wasn't there before.  This I believed at one time, but now think it proper to say God created ex Deo or out of Himself. 

Moses writes, 'In beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.'  God, who was, is and always will be, was already in action for all eternity, and now cuts into the infinite with the finite--the particular-- creating the cosmos.  In beginning, he is hewing out the universe, which is now distinct from Himself, and conforming it to Himself.  There is nothing outside of Himself, all resides within.  He is binding up the universe with a single verse, and binding His own holy will.  God, who is truly free and unbound, has bound up Creation and thus bound Himself for His own purposes and good pleasure a space-- better yet, space and time-- for His grand drama to unfold.

And God said, "Let there be light!" And there was light.  This is the very first preaching, from the very first preacher.  Creating something new is bound up with preaching it into existence.  In this case, the preacher speaks to God and God recognizes the preacher.  God suffers (allows) the light to come from Himself and confirms its goodness.  Good things last, and last until the end of time.

Our omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Creator moves beyond these three propositions about Himself and communicates understanding in beginning the way Moses has narrated events to us.  Augustine recognized that God could have made the universe in one day, but Moses tells us Elohim slowed to an eternal crawl of seven days to form heaven and earth.  Genesis chapter 1 impresses some important things upon the reader: the God of this account is the God who makes distinctions.  Each of these days is a start and more significantly, a stop.  This account of the universe is distinct from our modern narrative today, which cannot see anything but continuous from the "beginning" of time.  This is a God of personal will, which begins and ends when He so desires.

The narrative also makes an important distinction: there is God, who created heaven and earth, i.e. all things.  God entails the creation and the narrative.  God is outside of the bounds of Creation.  Then we are directed to the Spirit of God, the Ruach Elohim, which is found in particular location; this is not to say the Spirit is localized, but the point of omnipresence is not the focus when it comes to the Spirit.  The point is particularity.  And then we are pointed to "the preacher."

Chapter 1 is a narrative of important dichotomies.  Light and darkness; earth and water.  All these things come about by God's will by first preaching them into being and then seeing them after.  This preaching and seeing comes about no less than in ten utterances of "And God said," and seven, "And God saw."  All the things listed are good, which means they will last throughout time.  This is known by contrast to the 2nd day in which God separates the waters and nothing is said at all!

The God of this account does not create in chaos; this God creates according to His will and pleasure.  One more distinction is to be observed that is worth noting: of all things this God creates man is the only creature or object that is not created by the spoken word.  He is created in silent craftsmanship, broken only by the breath breathed into the man.  Man is both the focus of creation week, and subtly, the thing held in suspense for our unfolding story, between the expanse of heaven.

Do you wonder why God "said," and then He "saw," in that order?  I am going to draw a parallel here to the structure of this commentary.  The "top down" section is heavily based on "hearing" first.  In other words, we begin with certain presuppositions or a creed and then make our deductions-- or what we see-- after our first things.  The following section is based on Newton's "Feigning no hypotheses," which is observation first, declarations later.

Feigning no Hypotheses

We observe these seven days of creation are seven turns of the earth, viewed geocentrically.  The first day of creation the earth is turning against the cosmos, or heaven, in which are set the galaxies and the stars in our galaxy.  This is probably what was revealed upon creating light, which allowed a viewer on the earth to tell time, even though the only viewer was God.  The turning of the earth is constant throughout all of time, save for the fact it slows through tidal friction about one second a year.  This amounts to about 4-6 hours of variance, or less than a quarter of one day in 6000 years.  The turning of the earth is more or less constant.  Thus, years are constant also.  The moon, revolving around the earth gives us an independent variable in the examination of time.  The earth revolves around the sun 365.242199 days/year.  The moon revolves around the earth at 29.54 days per month.  The stars of heaven rotate at 365.25 days per year.  And the planets all have their own interesting revolutions as well.  These are their fixed courses in heaven, and they "cannot be moved."

In the Torah, the day begins with evening and then morning.  In a continuous calendar, the first day after Creation week ought to be Sunday, (or Saturday evening to be precise) and the 1st sliver of the moon ought to be visible indicating Aviv 1.

These days are highly ordered and show planning and purpose.  The first three days are like foundations being laid out for further adornment.  The last three days are in direct correspondence to the first three days as to with what they are adorned.  The mysterious use of the week as a division of time is paralleled nowhere in creation.  Some might say it relates to the month, however, a three-week month of ten days apiece would be closer than four weeks of seven.  At any rate, it is a given proposition in the grand narrative.

Prelude to a Fugue

YHYH

YHWH

AHYH

What is the Bible?  Can this be answered in one word?  Can this be answered in propositional form?  The Biblical narrative, bound up with propositions about reality, defies us to call it something in one word.  Allow me to "call a spade a spade" with my own attempt: the Bible is a scandal. Nay, it is The Scandal.  Ah! Two words.  The Holy Scandal.  Okay, so three words!

And so also is this commentary a scandal.  Every post demonstrates the syncretism I am accused of perpetuating.  But I have separated them out so people can easily see the two ways I approach the Bible.  It is precisely the wedge that is causing the "conservative/liberal" dichotomy today.  I placed them side by side so the reader can be assured that I am not trying to be disingenuous in my exposition.  But perhaps by the end this commentary will be justified as to its orthodoxy.  Or I will be revealed to be a syncretist.  It will be a nail-biter, I assure you... =)

So what is the heresy already?  In the first part of every post I start with "Deductions," in which I hope to be a Christian commentator in this blog.  What does this mean?  It means that I am unpacking the Bible as a biased expositor giving account to all things--deducing from first hypotheses, that is to say the Church's three ecumenical Creeds.  The commentary will be unmistakably Trinitarian; however I will blunt the Christian edge in the Torah and the Prophets for the fact that such a propositional assertion about God appears late--precisely because it is a revelation. There, that wasn't so bad.

Now for the scandal: the second part of every post reads as "Feigning no hypotheses," because I attempt to read the Bible as from the outside, or "neutral observer," as opposed to the above which is someone who reads "from within."  This is the modernist move, put into full force by Newton and others in the Rennaisance who stopped using the approach given by theologians and used a bottom up approach by observation.  One cannot be both, so the accusation goes.  Or perhaps more pertinent to the discussion, one cannot judge the narrative of the Bible according to "universal principles" that even God must obey or that indefatigably defeat all opposition.  Will I be absolved or found guilty of this accusation?  I assure you I, like you, am perched on the edge of my seat with baited breath waiting for the sentence to my crimes of paradigm.

Perhaps I will end up being a chimera of St. Thomas Aquinas and Sir Isaac Newton.  Please God let that be a Lutheran!  But if not I will just accept that I cannot necessarily figure it all out.  At any rate, let us put some things on the table.  The Bible is holy, or separate, from all other accounts of reality.  It is the public witness of a peculiar God who, though hidden, is identified by associating with a particular people who bear witness to this God.

The Bible is an account of how God created all things, what went wrong, and how God has seen fit to remedy the situation.  In this way the Bible is a record of the Divine Service God has performed for man.  Because the Church is the means by which this God performs this service to us, the Bible becomes the raw material upon which the Church draws to perform this service.  In other words, preachers of the Word of God use the Bible as "sermon notes."

The Bible should be understood as a technical reference for professionals.  A doctor has a "physician's desk reference," but this does not imply that the book was written for laity and the practice of medicine stems directly from the book alone.  It is a creature of the practice of medicine.  So also, the Bible is a creature of the Church, and is properly handled by the called servants of the practice of theology.  This is not to say people cannot possess the Bible; it is merely to distinguish between its ontology as a desk reference and, say, something for personal devotion.  The mere fact of the cost of possessing one codex of the NT for many years would be cost-prohibitive, therefore it cannot be understood as something that was developed for private individuals.

The Bible is often times a book written in shorthand.  This has to be the case because of the nature of an account of all things demands brevity or else all the trees in the world would be consumed for need of paper.  One might argue that everything said in the Bible are the most important or central points in the narrative.  Sometimes the text itself requires that we bring something to the text or read something behind the text.  But above all we must not lose what the text is saying primarily.

The backbone of the bottom up part of this commentary I will be using the chronology by E.W. Faulstich.  It will frame that discussion as well as the Book of Concord, and hopefully after this I will remain a Theologian of the Cross.  Followers of this blog will notice that I am going to edit the posts over time as I add new ones.  For example, this preface has been changed once since I started.  I hope readers will be able to make sense of the way I understand the Bible since my growing understanding has hamstrung me from making clear propositional statements about the Bible.  So I hope that this commentary helps.

Your narrator,
Mark Robert Opheim