If creation is unceasing, how are we to understand Genesis 2:1-3?

@Mike_Gantt

I’m disagreeing with your assessment.

I could decide that the meaning of Jesus’ comment about humans being Gods is a fundamental sentence … rather than a comment about how little the Jewish elders about their own rules. But would that be fair to place so much meaning on just a few sentences?

John 10:33-34
The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.

Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came…

One might even suggest that that over-emphasizing the significance of a sentence ‘here’ and a sentence ‘there’ is the hallmark of petty sectarian differences between denominations in what should be the United family of Christ!

Just as I reject the use of a few lines to justify boycotting Birthday celebrations … I reject the use of a few lines to justify boycotting the immense matrix we know as God’s natural law.

I agree the garden was presented as a sacred space. But the seven day structure of the creation of the rest of the world fits the structure of other ANE temple inauguration narratives, per John Walton.

If I remember correctly from his book, he was arguing that the fact that material creation was created by God was taken as a given by all the ancient people and not questioned. So asserting that God was the (material) Creator was a premise that would be immediately granted. By no “account” I think he means no description of the process or time frame involved in material creation, not no assertion that it was God who did it.

@Mike_Gantt

The dispute over Continuous Creation is a man-made discussion about what some people think is opposed in Genesis.

Compare the fact that the Bible doesn’t attempt to prove your point at all in that paragraph (or anywhere) … vs. the New Testament verse where Jesus defends himself with the scripture “I said, Ye are Gods…”

And yet only the Most extreme sectarian attempt to “make hay” on these words by Jesus.

@Mike_Gantt I appreciate that you genuinely seem to be seeking understanding. I would just caution other people here to not mistake his persistence as trying to insist on a non-existent contradiction (as often happens on these boards). Mike appears to be genuinely wrestling with this.

Mike, I think this comes to to whether or not you think Genesis 2:1-3 is an absolute statement about simultaneously two things:

  1. A promise of cessation of all of God’s creative activity that entirely binds Him.
  2. That we are 100% certain that the seventh day extends till now.

Both interpretations are possible but not corroborated anywhere else. I think this is similar to the statements about Jesus being “alone in the Garden”, but then somehow we have a long detailed transcript of His supposedly private prayer.

In this case, Jesus is “alone” but this is a relative term. In the same way I might say I am “alone at home” even though my wife and kid are in the next room, or that I am “alone in a crowd”. I’d either be making a relative statement about my status of company or using it as an image of how I viewed the situation. A argumentative person pointing out I my pet was there, or that I was not actually alone because I had a phone is missing the point. I have not said anything inconsistent. There is just that must elasticity in language, and without more information we cannot know.

I think that there is sufficient evidence that Genesis 2 is to be taken this way:

  1. Textually, after this statement we see additional creations.
  2. In the cannon, we observe more creations of God.
  3. Traditionally, theologians have positive the special creation of the whale that swallows Jonah.
  4. Scientifically, we observe things being “created” all the time, from a new river, a new star, a new mountain, to a new species.

This is all evidence that it permissible in Scripture to take this cessation in the same way we take “alone in the garden.” It is an entirely true, but relative statement. Creatio Continua is just a statement of the doctrine.

I do not think this derivable from Genesis 2:1-3 alone. One has to look at the surrounding verses to see the initial possibility. The traditional interpretation, the full body of Scripture, and the undisputed observations of nature all make my final interpretation coherent and clear.

Perhaps you do not see it. That is fine. I hope at least you find this plausible.

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I wouldn’t call Gen 1-11 parables as a parable is totally made up. It contains truth that is based on events that did happen (God did actually create) but not at the time indicated (creation is more than 6,000 years ago). Remember I mentioned the difference between history and literal history.

Yes with one more addition. It was a YEC preacher that pointed out that if you take the Bible as a record of history of the earth, half of that history is covered in Gen 1-11. It struck me that why would we have such a detailed history (99% of the Bible) for one half and almost nothing for the other half? That is when I decided that God wasn’t trying to give us history in those first 11 chapters.

And let me add I believe we can trust the truth contained in the oral histories that were recorded we just can’t trust the history, the when it happened part.

Easy. You let Scripture interpret Scripture. We know that God doesn’t need rest in the human sense. We know the Sabbath (which is what this is picturing) was made for man. We know God’s creation is an ongoing process. So I do not take this as saying God’s creation was completed, finished, perfect, and never to be repeated again.

Where do I begin? Creation in 6 literal days 6,000 years ago. The order of creation. Woman being created from Adam’s rib. The two different versions of creation. A talking serpent. Magical trees. God walking in the garden and speaking in an audible voice to Adam.

The actual verse in Genesis couldn’t be referring to Adam and Eve. Gen 2:24 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” A&E did not have a father or mother.

Yes. Paul was working with what he knew.

Edit to add:

Do I trust Paul when he speaks of God, yes. He learned of God from the OT.
Do I trust Paul when he speaks of Jesus, yes. He learned of Jesus from Jesus.
Do I trust Paul when he speaks of Adam, not so much. He learned of Adam from the OT.
Do I trust Paul when he speaks of medicine, no, but I would trust Luke to the extent of his knowledge at that time.

As I have said I have no problems with miracles. Some of them, such as the sun standing still, are only a problem because of the way people interpret what the Bible is saying. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any that I would say are simply false.

Wow this is a record for me but I hope it helps.

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I’ve got one other idea. But it’s not really an idea of it necessarily will help Mike, but it is that the Israelites actually did believe the creation was finished and complete. Much in the same way that you glean from passages like Jeremiah 31:35 where the heavens were perfect and fixed.

And lo and behold Tycho Brahe’s supernova in 1572 caused a stir as he himself was in disbelief as everybody just knew that creation was done. So in this sense, the Israelites were using the best knowledge of their day to tell their story and God didn’t give them any supernatural knowledge that he was still creating her things were still being created - instead speaking to them in for familiar terms and familiar knowledge of their era.

Also, the point earlier about other creation myths including the fact that the gods rested bears large witness to the scriptural account because it explains why the Genesis writer felt compelled to have Yahweh rest and the end of our story. It’s just what the gods did when they were done with it all (culminating in man).

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I share your disdain for sectarianism; however, I have not found its presence or absence correlated with a number of verses cited. Jesus Himself might use a single verse to vanquish His opponents (e.g. Matt 22:23-33) while, on the other hand, sect leaders have been known to quote verse upon verse. Just as “the Lord is not restrained to save by many or by few” (1 Sam 14:6), it seems the devil is not restrained to corrupt by many or by few.

@Mike_Gantt… I’m not talking about sermonizing… I’m talking about building important doctrine on a single Bible verse.

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The fact that he needs you to explain what he might have meant helps to demonstrate why he’s unconvincing to some. Whether the fault lies with his logic (as my comment suggested), or his word choice (as your comment suggests), the point is that there is reason someone might not be convinced by his arguments.

By the way, that excerpt of his I chose was not some random part of the article; it was the main point of the article! One could argue it’s the main point of his book. If you want people to accept that Genesis 1-2 has nothing to do with material origins after 2,000 years of mostly thinking otherwise, you ought to give them some clear prose.

Actually, I don’t hold to either of these views, but I don’t want to belabor the point. I’d rather just move to directly addressing the solution you are offering.

I take your point about “relative terms” and allowing for “elasticity in language.”

As for your four points, they all raise the question of what constitutes a “creation.” In Genesis 1 we see one new thing created after another, but after Genesis 1 we only see more of the same things being created (e.g. more rivers, more stars, more mountains). That, to me, evokes the dividing line of Gen 2:1-3. But I do not want to debate this with you as that, too, could be a digression.

The main thing I want to ask you is this:

Having granted that Genesis 2:1-3 might have a “limited” meaning (a la Jesus being “alone”) what then is that meaning for you - because it can’t mean nothing, right?

And if it means more than nothing, why isn’t that limitation acknowledged in definitions of creatio continua? (I did not limit my research on the term to the one link you gave, and, while I found slightly differing definitions, I did not find any of them acknowledging that Genesis 2:1-3 might impose some limitation, however small, on the doctrine. If this is the case, then has not Genesis 2:1-3 been stripped clean of its primary thrust?

In summary, I need to come up with some reasonable amount of meaning for Genesis 2:1-3; I can’t just let creatio continua make me ignore Genesis 2:1-3, can I? In all that you said here, I did not see where you defined what you think the limited meaning of Genesis 2:1-3 actually is for you. If this solution to the conflict is to make sense to me, I need to understand what you understand Genesis 2:1-3 to be saying. I did not hear in anything you said a way for me to view creatio continua differently - and that’s not necessarily a problem. But if the only thing I am to change is my view of Genesis 2:1-3, what, specifically is that change? What do you see as the passage’s scope in terms of cessation, and what limitation, if any, does this passage place on creatio continua? And if Gen 2:1-3 places no limitation at all on creatio continua, are we not just saying that the latter trumps the former?

(I apologize for the redundancies in this comment, but I erred in that direction to increase the probability that my perception of the dilemma might be better appreciated. Thanks for indulging me.)

I very much appreciate your patience with me. Just a few more clarifying questions, please.

If you’re uncomfortable with “parable,” can you give me some other genres or categories I can use to describe it when contrasting it with the history or facts you see from Gen 12 onward? Based on what I’ve understood you to say, it seems like you consider Gen 1-11 as a mixture of facts and fictions - but I don’t want to use terms that you might feel are pejorative. It just feels awkward saying that Gen 1-11 is “figurative” and having no other way to describe your view.

Again, please refresh me on this distinction. It is not familiar to me.

I’ve already understood you to say that you are not uncomfortable with a talking donkey; what then is the problem with a talking serpent?

Was it then Jesus or Paul whose view was out of sync with 1st-century Judaism? (Since you’ve already told me that you thought Jesus held your view, I’m trying to figure out if you think He held it by divine revelation or if that’s what the Pharisees and Sadducees of Palestine also thought…or something else.)

Lastly, where do you find this view in Jewish or Christian history and how did you come by it?

You are probably aware that the OT verse most often quoted in the NT is Ps 110:1, and, as you are also probably aware, quite a bit of doctrine is based on it. How many other OT verses are there upon which to build the doctrine that Jesus arose to “sit at the right hand of God”?

By the way, I’m not arguing for single-verse doctrines. I myself like to have 2 or 3 (per the 2 Cor 13:1 standard, itself found multiple places in the Bible), and the more verses the merrier. However, I have noticed that God and His spokesmen sometimes attach a lot more importance to a single verse than I would feel comfortable doing - and who am I to say they’re wrong to do it?

Besides, Genesis 2:1-3 is not the only place that speaks of creation the way it does. There are multiple references to God’s rest and completion of creation (as @pevaquark even says above).

Naturally, @Mike_Gantt, I would want to see a list of these multiple references…

I deem you to be too familiar with the Bible to need such help.

Yeah… but they were wrong. Tycho’s Supernova showed that the heavens weren’t fixed. That actually is a huge deal because it means that the Scriptures were either wrong or God simply spoke to them according to their understanding of nature and reality.

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I hope you don’t mind if I jump in here to expand on my earlier comment #74 of this thread; I realized I was so excited I neglected to either quote or @ you, so it may have been easy to miss.

One thing I have been wondering about lately is that if we interpret Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as not referring to the same events, as I believe it makes more sense that they do not, what theological interpretations are lost or less well founded, and must be reevaluated?

Primarily what we need to be concerned about is the fundamental equality and relatedness of the human race. Combining Gen 1 and 2 into the same story provides the interpretation that Adam and Eve are the sole humans from which all other humans descend. We know that our DNA doesn’t look anything like it would if that were true. Fortunately, that’s not the only possible interpretation.

But how do we still know that humans are all equally human, if we are not all descended from only a single couple? We are all declared to be created in the Image of God, and given dominion over the animals. God then cessates His creating, not of individuals or land or sea or new species, but of the capstone of creation, that which it was the purpose of creation to bring into being: humankind, something which could be an Image of God. After Gen. 2, God is not creating any better varieties of human or humans who are more in the Image than other humans, or any who are more in charge of (have more rights to) the fish and birds and other animals and plants. There is a firm line drawn after the initial creation of humankind, that God is not continuing to improve the species in any way significant to how human we consider each other.

I think the idea of God resting is also interesting in that it opens scope for God to not be doing things: there are some things that happen that are not (directly) because of God. This points me to Free Will (or deism, but I’ve never liked deism much) and it makes a great deal of sense that God resting is a necessary component of humankind being able to properly exercise Free Will, and to fully inhabit the Image of God role laid out for them.

I would be very interested to know if this is at all helpful to you in your search for an actual figurative meaning to the verses in question!

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@Mike_Gantt

And as a segue way to your next question. I consider Gen 1-11 as history, but not literal history. By this I mean it is based on something that happened, history, but not on the exact date defined in the Bible, Sunday 23 October 4004 BC by Bishop Ussher’s calculation, literal history. I am not disputing that you can take the genealogies and people’s ages and calculate a date. Just that was not the meaning we are supposed to take from the Scripture. If I remember correctly back when this conversation began you gave me the impression that you took all the trappings of literal history that are used in the OT and made the assumption that you were supposed to take everything as literal history. For example taking Genesis 1 as referring to a literal 6 days of creation.

The talking donkey was the only element of the story that was out of the ordinary. The talking serpent is just one of many elements that are out of the ordinary.

I am pretty sure that Jesus was out of sync with Judaism based on the conflicts He had. I am not sure I would agree that Jesus held my view, but I am not aware of any conflict. I believe that Jesus emptied himself during the incarnation and the Holy Spirit provided what he needed to know when he needed it. Paul was very in sync with Judaism but he holds the record for running from Judaism to Christianity. But I don’t believe he received any divine revelation except what he received during his stay in the desert. And this probably didn’t include any updated information on creation.

To be honest I haven’t looked to anybody to see if I could find it. I came up with it by myself, sort of. Somebody somewhere said something to the effect of “If you find your belief contradicts reality you need to change your interpretation.” And this is actually something I have done in my work (engineering not religion) for many years. I don’t place nature or science above scripture and likewise I don’t place my interpretation above nature or science. This is why I encouraged you to address the age of the earth first. Until you can reconcile the actual age of the earth with the age presented by Scripture you will never have a system of interpretation that survives when compared to nature.

My basic assumptions that got me to where I am.

The Bible is inspired in the original autographs.

The process of producing copies of the originals was not inspired, but this isn’t a major problem as textual criticism allows us to recover the content of the originals.

The process of translation is not inspired.

The interpretation of Scripture is not inspired. There are many difficult problems associated with extracting meaning from Scripture. For one I reject any statement that begins, “A plain reading of X says…”

Theology, which derives from your interpretation of Scripture, is certainly not inspired.

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@Mike_Gantt

What is your understanding of “unceasing creation” and how does this mess up Genesis 1 and 2?

That is a fair point. In the context of Genesis 1-3, I will explain what I think Genesis 2:1-3 means. In other words, why is it that was included in the story versus left out.

I see a few teachings here.

First, I’ll start by using Scripture to interpret Scripture, on key teaching here of the 7 day cycle that concludes with a day of rest in the Sabbath. The narrative tells us something about God’s behavior, which is in turn supposed to tell us something about our nature as images of Him. The purpose of Genesis 2:1-3, therefore, is to tell us something about our nature and God’s desire manner for of our worship of Him.

From this starting point, it is helpful to see what parallels there are between the 7th day of creation and ceasing to create, and the 7th day of the week and ceasing to work. Here are some things that we see explicitly or implicitly mentioned through Scripture about that:

  1. The purpose of Sabbath was to stay at home together with family and in worship and in community. In the same way, we see God enter the created order in the 7th day, from doing grand things out and about in the cosmos. He takes up residence in the Garden to dwell with Adam and Eve.

  2. This is meant as a blessing to God and man. There is something about our flourishing that happens when we pause from the work of grand things to engage in the relationships of home.

  3. There is a cyclical “seasonality” to the Sabbath rest (remember Ecc.). We are made for work. Technically, Adam and Eve work on day 7. But we are also made for rest. Another way to put this, is that the call to exercise dominion over the earth is to “create worlds (society, art, technology, etc.),” but the call to rest is also to “enter into the worlds we create (to these worlds to create life-giving communities).” But we are also supposed to go back and forth between these things. This also suggests Creatio Continua.

  4. The “total” prohibition of work on Sabbath was not absolute but could be violated for many reasons (e.g. to save a life). This flexibility did not in any way impair the relational/spiritual function of Sabbath. If work = create in this parallel, this suggests that the end of creation was not absolute, but in some rare circumstances it might continue. This to supports the notion of Creatio Continua.

  5. There is a fairly clear quality of healthy human relationships. Functional relationships are often characterized by a give and take of partnership in work (e.g. raising children) where retreat to rest (a date night) is fundamentally important. That back and forth is also that to which this passage speaks. We see this too in our relationship with God, though it is hard to express this in a denomination neutral way.

  6. The statement of rest also is meant to highlight that humans are the pinnacle of creation. On creating us, he feels creation, in the most important senses is completed, because beings capable of reflecting Him in relationship with Him have been made. To call this the solitary purpose of creation seems too restrictive (why then is the galaxy so vast?), but humans do appear to be one “end” of creation. This too is consistent with the notion of God creation a new species now and then (Creatio Continua), because this is not really anything as new or transformative as the entrance of humans into the world.

So I would say that Genesis 2:1-3 is put in the narrative primarily as a message about our nature that is mirrored in God. It lays the foundation for the command of rest, and also teaches something truthful about the human experience. I affirm all those teaching, and I think these teachings are fundamentally more important to everyone (personally, historically, traditionally, early Jewish readers, us today in the Church, etc.) than some sort of precise statement of the mechanisms of creation and its limits.

The good news is that the key parts of this message are reliably extracted from Scripture. That is another sign that we are on the right track, and not substituting a private interpretation for the correct one. This is really the plain reading of the passage.

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Does this deny additional meaning regarding God’s creation in the physical world too? If we take the day-age view of six days, there are some more parallels worth mentioning.

In day-age, days 1 - 6 are unimaginably longer (hundreds of million to billions of years) than day 7 (which is less than 10,000 years at most). Consequently, there is quantitatively and qualitatively, vastly more creating happening in the first six days. In fact, one could argue (using creationist terms) that during the 7th day, it is so short we only see “microevolution”, while the other days we see “macroevolution”. Remember, everyone accepts “microevolution” (e.g. antibiotic resistance) during the 7th day.

So perhaps during the 7th day many of the evolution processes are still at work on biological life, and God can still in principle intervene to create things directly or direct evolution as he wishes. However, because the time scale is so much different, this creation is essentially slowed to a standstill compared to the amount of creation that has happened in prior errors.

In this sense Genesis 2:1-3 is an accurate description of the world we see in the evolutionary account. We will see occasional anomalies and elaborations, but God is not creating totally new and different things very frequently (from the perspective of the narrative) at all any more. This might also be seen as Scriptural justification for why we cannot directly observe some of the large evolutionary changes from the past (e.g. the Cambrian explosion, or abiogenesis, or the evolution of a new phyla from scratch).

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If we take Walton’s view that this applies to a 6-literal day of functional creation in the recent past after long age of material creation, the same spiritual meanings can be extracted. Some of the parallels to the scientific account change, but they are still there.

Notably, one would see the same teachings I’ve enumerated in this account. That is the beauty of Genesis. It is quite ambiguous about the scientific details, but manages to be extremely robust in its teaching. Whether one is YEC, OEC, TE, or ID, there is a massive amount of overlap in our readings of the teachings of Genesis. The focus is on the differences, which creates the illusion that there is massive disagreement that is consequential.

However, the focus should be on the common ground, which is substantial and theologically significant. The robustness and commonality of the theology we all extract from Genesis should reduces fear about differences in how our interpretations interface with Genesis, and remind us that science was never its point in the first place.

Alongside this Creatio Continua is just a caveat to this story that the end of creation on the 7th day is not a total end. God still does things in this world (and wouldn’t you agree?).

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Hope that answers your question. I certainly see teaching in Genesis 2:1-3, quite a bit. The fact that I am not caught up on the concordance to modern science helps with interpretation. I’m free to look for the original intent, and what we see in common. This part of the story isn’t just a weird quirk with no significance except to make evolution harder to accept. Rather, it is a way of telling the story to teach important theology, and I want to understand that theology.

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