“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
Genesis 1:1-3, NLT
I love Genesis 1 and one of the cool things about being a Christian is you get to spend a lifetime in wonder, worshipping God, and meditating on Scripture and the mysteries of the universe. Indeed, just last night, a friend and I met at a local brewery to contemplate and discuss, among other things, the stars, newborn life, and even the origin of our desire to please God.
In my very sheltered and fundamentalist church upbringing, when you read Genesis 1 it was primarily a defense against evolution, as well as a description of a “sudden” creation” in which “the heavens and earth” were created in seven literal, 24-hour days. If you didn’t believe this, you were a “liberal,” defined as someone who was seriously deceived and possibly not even a Christian. Further, the perception was that literal, “sudden” creation was the only view that Christians held for most of history and that it had only been since Darwin and the Scopes Monkey Trial that pure, “biblical” Christianity had been polluted.
Although I’ve written elsewhere about How I Changed My Mind about Genesis 1 and Science, I was struck recently, in reading through Augustine’s Confessions, with just how inaccurate this perception was. Although it may surprise you as it surprised me, here is what Augustine—who lived 1600 years ago—believed about those who read Genesis 1 in a Ken Ham/ Answers in Genesis kind of way:
“There are those who… when they come to, God said: Be it made and it was made, they think of these words as words that had a beginning and an end, sounding in time and passing away, so that the moment they had passed away there existed immediately what they had commanded to exist. All this they imagine and much more of the same thought through their material thinking. Such people are still like infants with minds barely existent…”
Augustine’s Confessions, Second Edition translated by F.J. Sheed (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co, 2006), 281.
What Augustine meant by “infants with minds barely existent” is “literally, ‘animal-like infants,’ a reference to the ‘carnal’ way in which some people fail to understand the allegorical depths of Scripture.” (See 1 Cor. 3:1-3).[1]
Yet, he is not fully disparaging of this literal, ‘sudden” creation approach. He goes on to say:
“Yet… on the utterly simple language of Scripture their [again, those who believe in “sudden” creation] weakness is upborne as on a mother’s breast: and their faith is built up unto salvation in that they see and hold as certain that God made all… which their senses look upon with such marvelous variety.”
Augustine’s Confessions, Second Edition translated by F.J. Sheed (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co, 2006), 281.
What Augustine is saying here is that “Those who believe in a literal, ‘sudden’ creation may not understand Genesis 1:1-3 correctly, but they still get the most important thing: “God made all” and is to be adored and worshiped because of it.
Believe it or not, Augustine believed that our understanding of the Bible should be informed by the best, mainstream science of our day (see here). However, rather than treating Genesis 1:1-3 as a science textbook, he used the passage primarily to celebrate what the Triune God does in our hearts through Christ. Here’s an example:
“…the earth invisible and formless… which would have remained dark according to the aimless drift of its spiritual formlessness if it had not been turned to Him from whom comes whatever is life, and by His illumination it became living and beautiful… For in us there is a distinction between the time when we were darkness and the time when we became light… over the dark and storm-tossed waters within us He moves in mercy… ”
Augustine’s Confessions, Second Edition translated by F.J. Sheed (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co, 2006), 292-298.
In other words, dear friends, just like Jesus created and transformed this “formless and void” earth (Col. 1:16), he still takes our empty, aimless, and spiritually formless lives, breaths life into them, and makes them into something living and beautiful.
And that’s something to praise God about no matter what your view of Genesis 1 and science is!
[1] Augustine and many others of his era believed in “typological exegesis,” which, at times, they definitely overused (e.g. see the pervasive use of it in Book 13 of the Confessions)! The belief they held was this: “Biblical types and figures are possible because God, who knows all past, present, and future as present, is able to orchestrate incidents and incidentals in such a way that an event or person can function as a living ‘word’ or sign of another event or person.” See Augustine’s Confessions, Second Edition translated by F.J. Sheed (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co, 2006), 290.