How do we decide who has the right interpretation of Genesis 1? What is our job as followers of Christ in a world that is trying to use science against him? What did he do in his own time as he walked on this Earth?

We wrap up our study of Genesis with a frank discussion about how we are supposed to live.

This material was originally presented at the Forest Home Church in the Winter of 2012.

How does this reading compare to our other ways of interpreting Genesis 1? Is this a promotion or demotion of the text? What does it change about our understanding of God’s claims for when and how he made the physical stuff of creation?

This material was original presented at the Forest Home Church in the Winter of 2012.

All the other ancient creation texts taught very similar things about the gods, and mankind’s role in the world. The role of humans was as slaves to the gods. So if the Egyptians were slaves of the gods, then the Israelites were slaves of slaves.

How would such a people experience Genesis 1? Can we recapture that reading?

This material was originally presented at the Forest Home Church in the Winter of 2012.

If a person (regardless of their culture) from the ancient near east had stumbled upon Genesis 1, what would have stood out to them? Would they have recognized themes from Genesis that resonated with them? Would they have understood the type of document Genesis 1 was intended to be? Would it have read like a plagiarism of the other creation texts, or would it have been revolutionary?

The short answer is that they absolutely would have recognized the true nature of Genesis 1, and it would have rocked their world. But we don’t recognize those same things when we read it today.

This material was originally presented at the Forest Home Church in the Winter of 2012.

The concept of a functional ontology is so very different from our own material ontology, that we need to spend more time on this. But it is crucial that we do our best to see the text of Genesis 1 through the eyes of the original audience–ancient near eastern Israelites. The universal picture painted by surviving ancient texts is that they shared the functional view of creation with the rest of their surrounding cultures.

This material was originally presented at Forest Home Church in the Winter of 2012.

What does it mean for something to be created? It seems like an obvious question, but it’s only obvious because we all share the same presuppositions. Did the original hearers of the words of Genesis 1 share those presuppositions? If not, what meaning did they give to creation?

This session was originally presented at Forest Home Church in the Winter of 2012.

Genesis 1 wasn’t written in a vacuum. It was given to a specific group of people in a specific time and place. What were their assumptions about how the world worked? What did they already “know” about creation before Moses spoke the words of Genesis 1?

There are other creation accounts that predate Moses. Joshua 24 tells us that the Israelites coming out of Egypt worshipped the Egyptian gods, so they were familiar with these other accounts. What did they think?

This material was originally presented at the Forest Home Church in the Winter of 2012.

If we want to understand Genesis 1, then we have to make sure we’re setting aside our biases and prejudices. In this session, we dig into some of the things that get in the way of understanding the text.

This material was originally presented at the Forest Home Church in the Winter of 2012.

How do we rightly integrate how God reveals himself through scripture and nature? Augustine claimed that interpreting both is extremely difficult. Most of the attempts to make sense of the two together so far have either demoted Scripture, or Science.

Genesis 1 is the primary battleground for many of these arguments. In this class, we’ll talk about a high, literal reading of Genesis 1 that takes us forward in our understanding of God’s revelation of himself through both books: science and Scripture.

This session is an introductory session. It was first presented at the Forest Home Church in the Winter of 2012.