Tag: genesis 1

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Creation, Day Two: in Which Not Much Happens?

And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”  And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse.  And it was so.  And God called the expanse Heaven.  And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.  Gen. 1:3-5

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Compare Gen. 1:3-5 with this account from the annals of Babylon:

According to ancient Babylonian mythology, the earth began with a battle between Tiamat, goddess of the ocean, and the children she produced by sweet-water Apsu, god of rivers.  One great-grandson of this line was Marduk (see Jeremiah 50:2), god of the four winds and a hell-raiser from birth.

So, one day Marduk was approached by his father Ea and grandfather Anu to lead an army against Tiamat, who had been busily mating with monsters in order to produce a race of giant snakes, raging bull-men, etc.  Her plan was apparently to wipe out her progeny by Apsu.

Coldly blinking all four eyes, Marduk was unmoved by the possible fate of his father and grandfather.  But he agreed to take the job, on one condition: that all the deities of Mesopotamia declare him to be their chief.  What was in it for him?

My own utterance shall fix fate instead of you—

            Whatever I create shall never be altered!

            The decree of my lips shall never be revoked, never changed.

Ea called a counsel of the gods, which degenerated into an all-night drinking party.  The carousing deities built a throne for Marduk and granted him all the powers his little ol’ heart desired.  Also: May your utterance be law, your word never falsified.

Equipped with these bona fides, a formidable war-chariot, and his own mighty presence, Marduk set out

Marduk defeats Kingu for Babylon’s top spot

at the head of his army, and the mere sight of him shocked the assembled monster-sons of Tiamat.  Marduk plowed right past them to get to his great-grandmother, whom he challenged to single combat.

She accepted.  Big mistake.

It was hardly a contest; after pinning her down with his net, Marduk blew her up with the four winds and sent an arrow into her belly, then split her down the middle and defeated the rest of the enemy gods while standing on her corpse.

The body turned out to be incredibly useful:

He sliced her in half like a fish for drying:

Half of her he put up to roof the sky,

Drew a bolt across and made a guard to hold it.

Her waters he arranged so they could not escape.

East and west originated from two of her ribs, and her liver served as the pole star for the remaining gods.  Her spittle became rain and fog, and from her eyes sprang the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates.

The gods were impressed—Marduk earned that throne and crown!  What next?

Blood I will mass and cause bones to be.   I will establish a savage, ‘Man’ shall be his name.

He shall be charged with the service of the gods that they might be at ease.

The raw material for this slave-race called “Man” came from the body of Kingu, Tiamat’s hybrid son, whose blood seeded the first humans and passed down through the generations.  Rebellion is thus in humanity’s blood, from that day to this, but their fate is fixed to serve the gods forever.

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Almost all the ancient mythical traditions place the creation story in a setting of conflict.  The recurring themes—father against son, clan against clan, chaos resisting order—indicates something very unstable about the human psyche, but I can only give it a sidelong glance for now, while marveling how peaceful the Genesis story is in comparison.  God is not in conflict with anyone as he goes about calling forth.  On the first day, with the creation of light, all the raw material is in place: the direction of time, the periodic table of elements, the two basic forces of gravity and nuclear energy.  Particles are quivering, atoms are dancing, molecules are awaiting form.

We expect an explosion, but on the second day not much appears to happen.  In fact it’s hard to get a grip on what actually is happening, as you will soon discover if you try to explain it to young children.  When they get older they will come to understand “atmosphere” and water vapor, and water being held in a canopy (one meaning of the word expanse) until the time of the flood.  This is both good theology and good natural history, but as it relates to creativity, and creation itself, there may be something equally significant happening on Day Two.

First God pours out energy.  Then he begins to arrange it, which starts with making distinctions.

To the ancients, no property was more basic than water.  They were on to something:  Water comprises about 80% of earth’s surface and 80% of our bodies, and even in the driest desert there is no life without it.   The oldest civilizations saw water as a given.  No one made it; it was just there.  Apsu and Tiamat, the primeval deities of Mesopotamia, were the sweet and salty blend of waters that gave rise to the Fertile Crescent.

Water nourished; it also destroyed.  All ancient cultures passed around flood stories, as though a memory of watery devastation was burned into their collective consciousness.  No life exists without water, but for life to exist it must separate itself from water and establish itself on the banks—that’s why so many creation accounts are a record of struggle.  Water was the elemental force which must be overcome.  Water was the primeval chaos, which must be escaped.

Even in the Bible, throughout the Old Testament “the sea” is a threat to order, an elemental force that must be contained: This far may you come, and no farther (Job 38:11).  The visions of Revelation return to that image, for where does the beast of chapter 13 emerge but the sea?  And most intriguing of all, when the heavens and earth of Genesis 1:1 are cleared away for the new heaven and earth of Revelation 21, “the sea was no more.”

What does Day Two say about creativity?  The verb may be more important than the nouns: God separates.  He makes distinctions: heaven and earth, here and there.  The Hebrew word usually translated “Heavens” has no precise English equivalent; it’s used to refer both to sky and to everything that appears in the sky, including clouds, stars, and common sparrows.  But it directs our attention.  Look up, look down, look left and right.  Here we have opposites, here we have direction and location.  Just as “in the beginning” signals rudimentary time, separating waters from waters gives form to rudimentary space.

Imagine God as the primeval real-estate agent: “Location, location, location.”  Every work starts not only sometime but somewhere.  The second day turns out to be as vital, thrilling, and potent as the first, for in cleaving the restless water He establishes length, height and breadth.  The four-cornered canvas of darkness receives its first brushes of paint, and we now know left from right, here from there.

Creation, Day Three – The Story Takes Root

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  1. Look up other ancient creation stories (such as Mayan, Greek, Norse) and compare with the Babylonian and Genesis stories.
  2. If you have to live in only two dimensions, which would you choose?  Height-width, heigh-depth, depth, width? (See Edwin Abbott’s classic novel Flatland for an idea what you can do with two dimensions.  Actually, not much.)
  3. How important is it to make proper distinctions in politics, relationships, and art?  For example, what’s wrong with these statements:
  • Love is love.
  • Advocates for border security are anti-immigrant.
  • Modern art is ugly.

 

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In the Beginning–What Creation Means for Human Creativity (Part I)

The popular term, which began as a joke but lingered as a classic understatement, is THE BIG BANG.  It all began, they tell us, from a point infinitesimally small and dense.  That point experienced an unimaginable burst of energy, and here we are!

With some explaining to do.

Here’s another way to say it: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The first ten words of the Bible are infinitely small compared to the universe, but also infinitely dense, like the first instant of the Big Bang.  Its meaning spirals out like the arms of a galaxy.  Is it a summary statement of the rest of the chapter?  Or is it one side of the “gap”?*  Or does this verse establish the setting and protagonist of the story, in a manner similar to

Marshall Kane squinted as he stepped into the dusty sunshine of Dodge City’s main street.

There’s a character, an action, and a place.  But the first three words of Genesis establish something else: something vital, something we take so much for granted we don’t think about it.  In the beginning sets out the phenomenon of forward motion.  In other words, Time steps out and makes History.

In the beginning, God created the beginning.

What happens when I try to imagine timelessness.

There was no time before this, because there was no “before” and no “this.”  We can’t understand it; we must accept it, as children answer their catechism question: God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable.**  Some atheists pose the question, Who made God? as though it were unanswerable.  We laugh: No one!  A being who is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable doesn’t have to be “made.”  But when we try to think through what that means, we stop laughing.

We can’t go there, to the place where God existed infinitely.  We can’t let go of time.  We have no way to even think about timelessness; those categories don’t exist in our imagination.  Genesis 1:1 establishes that we can only go forward.  We can’t go back, because there is no “back.”***

Neither science nor philosophy can say what happened before time—the words what and happened and before are meaningless outside a time matrix.  If there was a great explosion of matter from energy, we are part of it, and our minds still ring, however faintly, with the echoes.  Strangely enough, the human mind seems to hold within it an idea of something—actually, Someone—who is responsible for all we see.  All cultures at all times have passed on their notions relating to what sort of being this might be, and how he/she/it might have existed before everything.  After thousands of years of speculation, the possibilities boil down to three.  Which are

  • God existed as that incredibly dense point, and now inhabits the universe in every particle.
  • God existed as an unimaginably powerful Force, which arose somehow from eternal matter with which he (she/it) shaped the universe.
  • God existed as a relationship of three “persons,” co-equal, co-eternal, none before the other, whose mutual love is so dynamic and powerful it must find expression.  As a painter uses vision and craft to create an image, an author uses action and character to produce a story, a musician uses mood and tone to write a sonata–so God, using the relational dynamic of himself, tossed out the heavens and planted the earth.

NOTE: Since this is an investigation rather than a mystery story, I plainly state my preference for Theory 3.  Not only does the Bible report it, but all creation supports it, as we shall see.  Also, most intriguingly to me, it’s the theory we could not have made up.  Of all religions and philosophies, only one proposes a Trinitarian deity.   In only one does this odd, difficult, troublesome doctrine appear—which, once accepted, explains so much.

We still want to know a few things, such as, do “the heavens” include Heaven, or does it just mean “space”?

In the Genesis context, probably the latter.  With the creation of space (the heavens), there must of necessity be something not-space, and that’s Heaven.  How do we picture it?  Not accurately, for these are truly things too wonderful for us.  Still, for reasons yet to be explored, our minds are tirelessly forming pictures of things we can’t understand.

Suppose, rather than an ever-expanding sphere, the universe is hollow.  We can never see the end of it because like a ring it does not “end.”  It’s like a balloon that expands as we blow it up, with solar systems and constellations and galaxies strung along its surface, spreading apart as the universe grows.  The air in the balloon is not, strictly speaking, the balloon, but it defines its shape and keeps it whole.  That’s Heaven.

Or the balloon exists in an atmosphere, a negative space that hosts it without being it.  That’s Heaven.

Or, as ancient sailors believed about the earth, the universe is a flat plate you’ll fall off if you sail too far.  Beyond the edge is Heaven—a mystery, but also our destiny.

All we know is that it’s eternal, beyond time and space, and the angels are there.  I don’t make a fetish of angels, but they are persons of interest—the only extra-terrestrials we know of, whose story touches ours at several telling points.

But more of angels later.  For now, as the Bible directs us, we should turn our attention to our own homey, comfortable, mysterious, terrible, and beautiful planet.  What happened on the first day of creation?

Here are my thoughts: Where Does Darkness Come From?  Creation, Day One.

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Questions to think creatively about:

  1. Have you ever heard the expression, “land before time”? Can time exist without space, or vice versa?  Why or why not?
  2. Do you believe in God? No, seriously: do you find yourself sometimes not believing, even though you call yourself a Christian (or other “faith tradition”?)  Can belief exist alongside unbelief?  Is your faith mostly intellectual, or mostly emotional, or both?
  3. “There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment.  And yet it eludes us completely.  All the sadness of life lies in that fact.  In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passing through our head.  Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant” (Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, p. 25).  What does “now” mean to you?  Does it seem as elusive as Kundera describes?  Do you find that “sad”?
  4. Next week, we’ll think about “Let there be light.”  But if God is light, where did the darkness come from?

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* The “gap” theory of biblical creationism proposes that Gen. 1:1 takes place during an indefinite, but very long, period of time, after which the earth takes shape during a series of six twenty-four hour days.

**Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q&A 4

***Time travel is theoretically possible (though unlikely), but only if we go forward—there is no credible mechanism for traveling backwards, wormholes and time tunnels notwithstanding.