John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis 1 promises a lot. It offers what Walton calls a “face-value” and “literal” reading of Genesis 1, but one that sidesteps the problems of attempting to reconcile science and the Bible. For Walton, creationist readings and concordist readings that attempt to correlate Genesis 1 with contemporary scientific theory both miss the point and read “modern” questions into an ancient text that was not designed to answer those questions.
Walton’s treatment of the “days” of Genesis 1 illustrates the cleverness of his solution: With young earth creationists, he claims that Genesis 1:1-2:4 describes a seven-day sequence, and that the days must be interpreted as normal 24-hour days (90-91). Yet he doesn’t think that Genesis 1 implies anything at all about the age of the material universe. Christians can rely on science to tell us how old the earth is.
The two main planks of Walton’s argument are, first, his claim that Genesis 1, being ancient cosmology, should be read like an ancient cosmology, and, second, the claim that ancient cosmologies present not a “material” ontology but a “functional” one. According to the “modern” materialist ontology, a thing is when it comes into material existence; on this view, to “create” means to bring something into material existence. According to ancient ontology, though, a thing is when it has been assigned and equipped to play a role in an ordered system; to “create” doesn’t mean to bring something into existence but to give something (that might already exist) its place in an order. For ancients, a thing is “by virtue of its having a function in an ordered system” (24).
Genesis 1, he argues, is concerned with function rather than with material origination. Walton believes that God brought material things into being (96); he doesn’t think, however, that this is what Genesis 1 is about. Overall, it’s about God’s organization of the world as a cosmic temple. More specifically, things are not made de novo in Genesis 1 but are assigned their proper position in that cosmic temple. The sun had been shining for a long time before the week of Genesis 1 begins; what happens during that week is not the formation of the ball of burning gas but the placement of the sun with the moon and stars in the firmament as signs, for appointed times, etc. Pre-existing heavenly bodies are given new functions in relation to humanity. Presumably too human beings of some stripe had existed for a long, long time, but they are assigned a new role as priests of God’s cosmic temple during the seven days of “creation.” That is what it means in Genesis 1 for God to “create” heaven and earth.
Read it all here.