The Uncreation
God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Genesis 1:31 NASB
All that He had made – Gutenberg destroyed the Bible. Oh, yes, he printed it in German, but in the process he forever changed that way we understand the Bible. As a result of printing the Bible in layman’s language, we shifted the Holy Scriptures from oral transmission to textual reading. We lost entirely the feeling of the Bible as a vocalized message. We stopped thinking of the Bible in terms of prophetic tradition and started thinking of the Bible as a collection of books. We stopped listening. We put it on the shelf for easy reference, not as a voice crying the wilderness.
This means that the text of Genesis stopped being a story. It became a thesis about the divine mechanics of creation. We no longer heard the sub-woofer tones of the rolling deep, the supersonic shrill of the tear in the fabric of time, the voice of God bringing order out of chaos. Instead we tried to make yehî ‘ôr (“Let be light”) into proto-Big Bang theory. And with the help of the completely naïve creationist rebuttal to Scopes, we made Newton and Einstein into Hebrew sages.
Let it go! The Bible isn’t a scientific manuscript. It’s a record of a verbal, vocal, prophetic tradition. The purpose of the Bible is not to provide you with answers. It’s to educate you about how God feels.
“The fundamental thought in the Bible is not creation, but God’s care for His creation.”[1]
The unimaginable, unbelievable, undeniable message of the Bible is that God cares! No other ancient deity gave a rat’s ass about human beings or, for that matter, anything else. God’s rivals were self-absorbed sociopaths incapable of having any concern for the despicable creation. If anything, men were annoyances, or slaves, whichever served their purposes. This attitude is reflected in ancient despots who, descendants from the gods, had no regard whatsoever for the lives of the peons, the minions who served them. YHVH is the only God who cares.
Every cosmology has a creation story. In fact, some of the themes of other ancient cosmologies parallel the Hebrew account. But none of them express intimacy between the Creator and His handiwork. None of them float on a sea of compassion. None of them are baked with empathy. When the world rises from the chaos, God looks upon it and pronounces the most important words ever voiced: “It is good.”
Topical Index: good, creation, prophecy, Genesis 1:31
[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 264.
