As one who really came to Genesis via the Hebrew what I see in YECism is a failure to understand either science or the scriptures. They take as history things that are not because they have failed to grasp that the Old Testament, especially Genesis, is written with worldviews and literary types and forms of thought that are alien to us today, and they read Genesis as though it was a friend’s great-grandfather’s diary of events he lived through and is describing, because that’s what it looks like in English. That those literary types are written to standards of truth that differ from ours does not make them erroneous, it makes them different – and that’s all. Our ways of thinking are dominated by science, but taking that worldview and imposing it on the scriptures is the same mistake the Roman Catholic church made when it adopted the Aristotelian worldview and imposed it on the scriptures, thus coming up with bizarre notions such as Mary being born sinless, a doctrine that is actually insulting to her Son, or that the pope is the fount of the church as though no other apostles mattered, and other oddities: imposing a human-invented worldview on all the scriptures is an error if only for no other reason than that it denies that the worldviews actually represented in scripture have any validity – but if they had no validity, God would not have used writers who worked within and from those worldviews.
Some of the church fathers noted that to deny the humanity of the authors God selected risks denying the Incarnation because it inherently rejects the idea that God can work through human flesh. But the inspiration of scripture can only be possible because of the Incarnation: Jesus becoming flesh is what opened the door to the Spirit working in human beings – however crazy that sounds to people bound to thinking of cause and effect occurring in linear fashion in time, though scientists are now understanding that in the quantum world, at the very base of being, cause and effect do not have to progress forward in time, so why should not spiritual matters? Yes, that’s an argument from the lesser to the greater, but Jesus used that very form of argument!
Again, it isn’t about turning anything into “allegory” (a form of reasoning that is actually very rare in the Bible), it’s about recognizing what types of literature the writer’s God chose used. Trying to make their worldviews fit ours strips away meaning from the scriptures; ignoring their worldviews and using only ours denies them the dignity of having had God speak to them in their terms – which is what the Incarnation is all about: bringing the divine to the human in order to bring the human back to the divine.
Genesis is the primary issue – and early Genesis at that – because by the time we get to the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his family the literary types are already converging towards ours. Even so, there are differences in how they wrote and how we would – though those ways aren’t as far apart as they were a millennium ago because our culture has adopted more than a few ways of thinking that are found in the scriptures.
Since the literary types before Abraham are not intended to be history in the way we think of it, there’s no “stripping away history” involved when reading them for what they are. Taking an event and doing what we would call mythologizing it was a perfectly acceptable and valid way of conveying truth back then – not that it is foreign to us; Shakespeare mythologizes in order to make points, and he’s following in the footsteps of the Greek playwrights – and we do not lessen the meaning of the scriptures by reading them for what they are, we uphold them and in so doing we stand with the saints of old and say, “God has spoken to us all!” in words we can understand. Don’t forget that the inspired writer tells us directly that God has spoken in diverse ways; that’s something Paul illustrates when he tells us that a certain story from the Old Testament is an allegory (and we say, "What? because we never saw it that way). Even God does it; He got the point across to Peter that the Gentiles were included and not rejected by an allegory using a sheet full of animals!
To digress a tiny bit, ponder the odd form of literature of the first Genesis Creation account, what I learned to call a “royal chronicle”. One of its odd features to us is that none of the details are meant to be taken literally in themselves, but they are fully intended to be treated literally within the account in terms of setting forth the point of the account – which for a royal chronicle is to proclaim a mighty accomplishment of a great king. So the writer structured it poetically with days,balancing three upon/against (not in the sense of contrary but in the sense of leaning and supporting one another) three, and those days aren’t meant as literal days – except that in understanding what this great king Elohim has done they can be taken literally, and the literal sense and the non-literal poetic reinforce and strengthen the declaration that our great King accomplished the mighty work of creating all things. And at the same time it is a second form of literature because the way the writer built the structure it turns out as an ANE account of establishing and sanctifying and dedicating a temple – which is totally missed in the YEC approach (and in fact has been denounced by a number of YEC advocates) because it is treated as mere history (in one example of idiocy a YEC preacher told me that it can’t be a temple establishment/filling/dedication because it’s history!).
What was new to the people of Israel was the meaning of sacrifice, as that had been mangled beyond hep by the intervening pagan millennia: the pagan concept boils down to “buying off God”, as Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde put it, but the true meaning doesn’t involve buying off God, it involves God offering to be gracious if we offer to Him what He has specified, not because He by nature needs to be satisfied but because by nature He seeks to be a loving Father. The pagan version of sacrifice is akin to groveling and begging, but the YHWH-Elohim version of sacrifice invites us to lift up our eyes to Him and rejoice! It’s really how most of the pagan creation stories differ as well; they maintain that the gods fashioned mankind as slaves or servants and a few of the gods had to save mankind from the rest, while the Genesis accounts declare that God formed us to be His friends.
What was also new was that people couldn’t just pick a place and decide that’s where they are going to make sacrifices (though it kind of looks that way in Genesis) and so draw the gods’ attention to them at that place (which is what the Tower of Babel was really about, forcing the heavens to pay attention of their terms and not those of the gods), but that we meet God at the place and time of His choosing, that He condescends to live among His people in a house in one place (though He originally didn’t choose either the place or even to have a Temple, He in effect humbled Himself and accepted what His chosen king offered). That aimed them toward the ultimate lesson that just as it was just one place and just at appointed times that sacrifices were welcome, it was also in the end and at root one Sacrifice as well!
Of course the entire sanctuary service is an allegory; it’s also much more than that. Paul would say that the lesson of the Temple as allegory is that it isn’t the sacrifices that made the people holy, it was the faith that by bringing those sacrifices to that Temple God would keep a promise a make them holy. Also, the entire sanctuary service is symbol, but it’s more than just symbol (though in the ancient sense the difference is vanishingly minute because the ancient sense of a symbol was something that conveyed
what it portrayed).
But it doesn’t matter whether the Genesis Creation accounts are literal; the Temple and the sacrifices and the meaning God assigned them were very real, and it has to be remembered that while they may on one level be allegory, they were always more than allegory – that allegorizing of Old Testament events was a failure of imagination by the German theologians who set it off, and adopting their views robbed a couple of generations of believers of something basic.
I will say this: the Incarnation cannot be allegory, nor can any part of it, because it is the end of allegory: allegory requires something to point to that is beyond itself, and there is not anything, could not be anything, beyond the intersection of True God and True Man; that Event is what all allegories ultimately point to!
I heard the start of a sermon once that tried allegorizing the Resurrection; I don’t know how it turned out because I walked out and led a friend with me. How a preacher with fourteen years of education, ten of it in seminary and graduate seminary and doctoral seminary, in theology could manage to arrive at the notion that the Resurrection could be anything but real… well, it doesn’t actually baffle me because I’ve read enough of the liberal German theologians to follow the train of (what passes for) thought, but the idiocy of it appalls me.
, as others and I have argued elsewhere.
