Daniel's Random Musings...

Last night, as I was trying to sleep, I remembered an embarrassing moment from my childhood.  I was in 8th grade or so and sitting in English class.  The teacher, one of my favorites and a friend of my parents, knew me pretty well.  She knew we didn’t have a TV (no good fundamentalists do, to use the No Real Scottsman fallacy) and that I read everything I  could get my hands on.  On multiple occasions, I’d read as many as 40 paperback books in a week.  In fact, my mom started up the library…

I'm often accused of not paying attention to what the text of Genesis 1 says and, instead, basing my beliefs on other things.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  So I thought I'd walk through the first day and explain what I see it saying when I read it.

The ESV says this about the first day:

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day,…

I've mentioned in the past that there are so many different understandings of Genesis that we shouldn't pretend that it "clearly" says what I think it means and everyone else is just "twisting" it for unsavory purposes.  I thought I'd lay out the interpretations that I'm familiar with just to see how many I can come up with.  They are numbered just to keep a count, not to reflect any kind of order.

1. Literal calendar week about literal, material creations.  Happened roughly…

In my last blog, How I Study Genesis, I discussed how I approach Genesis and the assumptions and expectations I have when I do so. But I have been asked what I get in a macro and micro level from it. So I thought I would bore you (or maybe frustrate you) with an answer to that question.

I think many today are down in the weeds when it comes to studying Genesis. And that comes across with the…

Much disagreement exists about what Genesis 1-3 says and means by what it says.  And I believe that it is often viewed as the “other people” that don’t see it the same way we do are distorting the clear text, compromising with the world, denying inerrancy, doubting God, and other accusations that are less than helpful in this discussion.  So I thought I’d lay out why I read Genesis the way I do and how that isn’t a bad thing.

How we understand something we read is based in large part…