Part 2 - Wrestling with Creation Stories
The crossroads I found myself in February 2015 was not a surprise to me, for the journey had started a couple decades earlier while I was a student at Seattle Pacific University. I entered as a freshman in the fall of 1987 and after a year of indecision I started working toward a B.A. in Christian Education from the School of Religion. This was a natural step for me, as I had been a leader in my church youth groups through middle and high school, and I had experienced what I felt was a calling from God to enter full-time Christian service while I was in 11th grade.
One of the first classes I took was “Old Testament Survey”. In this class I was given a fire-hose of information about the several hundred pages of scripture that starts with Genesis and ends with Malachi. It was in the first couple days of this class that I was shown something I had never noticed in the first 3 chapters of Genesis. My professor showed us how there was not ONE creation account, but there were actually TWO. We noted that the Hebrew word used for “God” or “the LORD” was different in the two creation accounts. And perhaps most importantly, we were asked to create a chart of the order of all the things God created and compare the two accounts side by side.
Genesis 1 has six clear days of creation, and it clearly delineates what was created on each day. All the animals are created on day 6 and humankind is created after all the animals, “both male and female God created them”. Genesis 2-3 tells a very different story in tone and in content. Most importantly what my OT professor wanted me to notice was that in this second creation story God creates Adam, and then notices Adam is lonely, so God creates the animals, trying to find a suitable companion for Adam. Finding none, God finally creates Eve.
It had never hit me before, even though I had read these chapters so many times. First, that there were two very different tellings of the Creation story, and second, that the chronology of Creation did not align perfectly in the two stories.
At this point in my life, having gone to church every week since I was a young child, I had a rather simple understanding of the Bible. It was all true. It all happened, just as described. I’m not sure I ever heard anyone actually teach me this view of the Bible, but it’s what came naturally to me from my Sunday school and youth group leaders at my Presbyterian church. What I was holding in my hands was “The Word of God”, and since the author of the book was God, it was all completely accurate in everything it said.
But what I noticed here in Old Testament Survey was a problem. It couldn’t all be exactly true. Either Adam was created after the animals (as in Genesis 1) or he was created before the animals (as in Genesis 2).
There it was, right there in the first day of a “Read through the Bible in a Year” plan. Whatever it meant that this book was “The Word of God” could not mean “This book is completely accurate about everything it says.”
At the time I don’t think it caused me a huge amount of problems. I was a busy student with a full social life and a few other classes calling for my attention. But whether I recognized it or not, this was to be the first step on a long path of wondering, questioning, and seeking better answers about what exactly the Bible is.