I am planning on having a series of posts where various issues are going to be debated between atheists and Christians, or people of faith. Before I start a series debating theological topics with atheists/agnostics/skeptics I have some questions on the Creation Story for people of all faiths.
I believe that God is the Author of all of creation from the heavens, earth, fish, birds, humans – male and female, light, darkness, sky, animals, trees, plants, sea, other creatures and much more. Do you believe that God made everything within 6 days, what we think of as 6 days? Or do you think that what the Bible calls “days” may be representative of a different time period, different from the time period we attribute to a day at present day?
In 1981 then Cardinal Ratzinger , now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, gave four homilies on Creation in which he identified three principles that the exegete needs to consider when reading the Creation Story. While defending exegetes that go beyond a literalist reading of Genesis, Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco explains how to interpret the Creation Story using Cardinal Ratzinger’s (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) homilies.
First Principle — The difference between form and content:
First, he proposes that the exegete “must distinguish between the form of portrayal and
the content that is portrayed.”
He must keep in mind that the Bible is, first and
foremost, a religious book and not a natural science textbook. Thus, Cardinal Ratzinger
concludes that Genesis does not and cannot provide a scientific explanation of how the
world arose. Rather, it is a book that seeks to describe things in such a way that the
reader is able to grasp profound religious realities. It uses images to communicate
religious truth, images that were chosen from what was understandable at the time the
text was written, “images which surrounded the people who lived then, which they used
in speaking and in thinking, and thanks to which they were able to understand the
greater realities.” In other words, the Catholic exegete is called to respect the text as it
is. He is called to read Genesis as its human author wished it to be read, not as a
scientific treatise, but as a religious narrative that communicates profound truths about
the Creator.
Cardinal Ratzinger’s first criterion for exegesis echoes the teaching of the Second
Vatican Council. In Dei verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, the Council
Fathers taught that,
Those who search out the intention of the sacred writers must, among other things,
have regard for “literary forms.” For truth is proposed and expressed in a variety of
ways, depending on whether a text is history of one kind or another or whether its form
is that of prophecy, poetry, or some other type of speech. The interpreter must
investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed
in particular circumstances as he used contemporary literary forms in accordance with
the situation of his own time and culture.
Moreover, though Cardinal Ratzinger does not provide a theological justification for this
criterion, the Second Vatican Council did. According to the Council, we need to respect
the form of the text because “God speaks in sacred Scripture through men in human
fashion.”
Thus, the exegete “in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate
to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and
what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.”10 In other words, the Catholic
exegete should respect the form of the Sacred Scriptures because in doing so, he
respects the action of God who authored the sacred text without violating the freedom,
identity, and idiosyncrasies of the human authors who wrote in different forms.
Second Principle — The unity of the Holy Bible:
“In his Lenten homily from 1981, Cardinal Ratzinger brings up the same question asking, is the distinction
between the image and what is intended to be expressed only an evasion, because we
can no longer rely on the text even though we still want to make something of it, or are
there criteria from the Bible itself that attest to this distinction?” In response, he
proposes a second criterion for sound Catholic exegesis — the exegete should interpret
a text from within the context of the unity of the Bible. Applying this criterion to the
interpretation of the six-day creation account, we discover that the creation accounts in
the Old Testament — the Hexaemeron is only one of several found in Genesis and in
Psalms — are clearly “movement[s] to clarify the faith” and are not scientific or
historical narratives. For instance, Cardinal Ratzinger notes that a study of the origins of
the creation texts in the Wisdom literature especially reveal that they were written to
respond to the Hellenistic civilization confronted by the Israelites. Thus, it is not
surprising that the human authors of these accounts did not use the image of the six
days to assert their faith in the one Creator God. This image would not have been
appropriate for their time and would not have been understood by their Greek
contemporaries. In contrast, a study of the origins of the Hexaemeron, the six-day
account of creation, found in the first chapter of Genesis reveals that it was written to
respond to the seemingly victorious Babylonian civilization confronted by the Israelites
several centuries before their encounter with the Greeks. Here, the human author of the
sacred text used images familiar to their pagan contemporaries to refute the Enuma
Elish, the Babylonian creation account that claimed that the world was created when
Marduk, the god of light, killed the primordial dragon.Thus, as Cardinal Ratzinger
points out, it is not surprising that nearly every word of the first creation account
addresses a particular confusion of the Babylonian age. For instance, when the Sacred
Scriptures affirm that in the beginning, the earth was without form and void (cf. Gen.
1:2), the sacred text refutes the existence of a primordial dragon. When they refer to the
sun and the moon as lamps that God has hung in the sky for the measurement of time
(cf. Gen. 1:14), the text refutes the divinity of these two great celestial bodies believed
to be Babylonian gods. These verses, and they are only two of many examples,
illustrate the intent of the human author of the Hexaemeron. He wanted to dismantle a
pagan myth that was commonplace in Babylon and assert the supremacy of the one
Creator God. Cardinal Ratzinger concludes: Reading Genesis with Cardinal Ratzinger
Thus, we can see how the Bible itself constantly readapts its images to a continually
developing way of thinking, how it changes time and again in order to bear witness, time
and again, to the one thing that has come to it, in truth, from God’s Word, which is the
message of his creating act. In the Bible itself the images are free and they correct
themselves ongoingly. In this way they show, by means of a gradual and interactive
process, that they are only images, which reveal something deeper and greater.
Third Principle — Christ as the interpretive key of the Holy Bible:
Finally, the second criterion raises another important question: Why should the Sacred
Scriptures be treated as a unity? What is the source of this unity? In response, Cardinal
Ratzinger provides his third and final criterion for interpreting the sacred text: We are to
read the Sacred Scriptures “with Him in whom all things have been fulfilled and in whom
all of its validity and truth are revealed.” It is Christ who unifies the Bible. The entire
Bible is about him. Thus, Genesis has to be read in the context of its fulfillment in Christ.
Therefore, the Holy Father asserts that the first creation account cannot be read without
reference to the conclusive and normative scriptural account of creation which begins:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God …
All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was
made” (John 1:1;3, Revised Standard Version). For Cardinal Ratzinger, it is Christ who
sanctions readings of the sacred text that move beyond a strict literalist reading
because it is Christ who wishes to communicate profound theological truths that
penetrate the human heart and soul: “Christ frees us from the slavery of the letter, and
precisely thus does he give back to us, renewed, the truth of the images.”
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