Looking Beyond the Literal:
How to Read Genesis 1-3 and Why It Matters

John Stern

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Introduction to the Problem: Augustine’s Difficulties with the Genesis Text

Many Christians today think the Bible’s literal meaning is the easiest meaning to discern. Common biblical words such as temple, law and king seem simple to understand. There is a one-to-one correspondence to a concrete and obvious referent, and we can relate to similar concepts today (temples, laws and kings pervade the contemporary world, just as they did the ancient). The exegetical difficulty often lies in the theological symbolism undergirding these terms. For Augustine, however, the literal meaning is often the hardest to ascertain, as he describes in his hermeneutical masterpiece The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Less concrete terms, ones packed with philosophical implications, like glory, light or beginning are difficult to understand literally, where their symbolic and allegorical levels were comparatively easy; many exegetes could suggest metaphorical Christological connections. For example, Augustine begins his work examining the first words of Genesis 1:

Does it mean in the beginning of time, because it was the first of all things, or in the beginning, which is the Word of God, the only begotten Son? And how could it be shown that God produced changeable and time-bound works without any change in himself? And what may be meant by the name heaven and earth? Was it the total spiritual and bodily creation that was termed heaven and earth, or only the bodily sort? And in what way did God say Let light be made? Was it in time or in the eternity of the Word? And what is this light that was made? Something spiritual or something bodily?1

Augustine continues with reams of pages of similar questions, the majority of which remain unanswered. The exact nature of the light, how it differs from the sun’s light, whether it was physical or spiritual, why God did not pronounce it “good” as He did the rest of creation and more are mysterious for Augustine. How God spoke the world into existence, to whom He spoke, whether He spoke audibly or not, in which language He spoke, the puzzling creative efficacy of the words, why He did not create “the heavens and the earth” by words and deem them “good,” how an infinite God can interact with a finite creation in the first place and countless other questions posed enormous exegetical problems for Augustine.

While he could have given clarity to such language with allegorical or figurative interpretations, Augustine concerned himself not with symbols but with literal events. In other words, he is trying to answer the question, as directly as possible, “What actually happened in Genesis 1-3; to what specific events does the text refer?” Today’s readers casually glide past philosophically dense vocabulary and imagine its meaning clear. But where modern readers prefer the most obvious but problematic literal interpretations, Augustine provides a more nuanced, insightful and convincing biblical hermeneutic with countless applications for today’s world.

Augustine’s General Method

Humility

The virtue and skill above all others for Augustine is humility. Many of the scriptures, Augustine explains, concern “obscure matters that are far removed from our eyes and our experience, which are patient of various explanations that do not contradict the faith we are imbued with.”2 The wise student of scripture must first recognize that it speaks of concepts and events distant from common experience, and therefore many different explanations can adequately explain the same complex text. Second, Augustine realizes that an interpreter holding an unyielding stance on a secondary issue will end up all the more embarrassed and mistaken for his obstinacy. Stubbornness only enhances error, where openness minimizes it. He writes,

Let us never throw ourselves head over heels into the headstrong assertion of any one [opinion]. Perhaps the truth, emerging from a more thorough discussion of the point, may definitively overturn that opinion, and then we will find ourselves overthrown, championing what is not the cause of the divine scriptures but our own, in such a way that we want it to be that of the scriptures, when we should rather be wanting the cause of the scriptures to be our own.3

No one has a monopoly on biblical interpretation, and Augustine acutely perceived the tendency of Christians to bicker over controversial issues as causing unnecessary, self-inflicted damage. Augustine has no sympathy for stubborn and dogmatic interpreters.

The Bible’s primary purpose is spiritual edification, the communication of divine fellowship, not the dissemination of information per se. Its job is to effect communion between God and man and is only secondarily to instruct and teach facts. The scriptures are “all expressed in a way designed to nourish devout hearts,” Augustine explains.4 God, in inspiring the sacred texts, deliberately excluded a thorough knowledge of the created order, for that was not His purpose: “Not everything is written in scripture about how the ages ran their course after that first establishment of things, and how various stages followed one another in the management of creatures made at the beginning and finished on that sixth day, but only as much as the Spirit who was inspiring the author judged would be enough.”5

The Bible intentionally excludes a thorough, scientific account of creation, providing instead only what is spiritually necessary for believers. He explains elsewhere, “The Spirit of God … did not wish to teach people about such things which would contribute nothing to their salvation.”6 The creation of the world and God’s initial interaction with it are unrepeatable and complex occurrences, and Augustine is willing to admit ignorance and simply promote a meaning that edifies the church, rather than a literalistic but implausible one.7 Augustine explains,

I have avoided affirming anything hastily in a way that would rule out any alternative explanation that may be a better one, so leaving everyone free to choose whichever they can grasp most readily in their turn, and when they cannot understand, let them give honor to God’s scripture, keeping fear for themselves… since the words of scripture that we have been dealing with can be explained along so many lines.8

Recognizing the many possible interpretations, Augustine humbly allows his readers to adopt the one most suited to them. Modern biblical experts are rarely so humble and forthcoming regarding complex and irresolvable texts.

Hermeneutics and Science

The implications of Augustine’s hermeneutics for ministry and contemporary application are numerous. One of the most notable examples is the interaction between religion and science. A battle rages today over the Genesis teaching of creation. From evolution to the age of the earth, science and faith have pitted themselves against each other, deeply distrust each other and no longer listen to each other. While Augustine knew nothing of contemporary culture wars, his hermeneutic is eminently relevant to our debates today and offers, if we would listen, the beginnings of a solution to one of the most significant barriers to Christian belief today.

The Book of Nature, General Revelation and Natural Knowledge

Augustine affirms the value of every aspect of creation, recognizing that all nature glorifies the Creator. He writes, “All things, after all, have in them a certain worth or grace of nature, each of its own kind, so that in these minute creatures there is even more for us to wonder at as we observe them, and so to praise the almighty craftsman for them more rapturously than ever.”9

The Bible is not the only means of revelation for Augustine. The natural world is as much a product of divine authorship as the scriptures and also testifies to God’s magnificence, though in a different way. Consequently, Augustine has no sympathy for hermeneutics that violate the natural order of Creation or the discoveries of science. He writes, regarding the waters of creation above the heavens,

Nor should anybody … appeal to the omnipotence of God, for whom all things are possible, and say we just have to believe that he can cause even water, as heavy as what we know by our own experience, to spread over the substance of the heaven or sky in which the stars have their place. Our business now, after all, is to inquire how God’s scriptures say he established things according to their proper natures, and not what he might wish to work in them or out of them as a miracle of his power.10

The organization of nature arose by God’s sovereign power, testifies to his magnificence and the teachings of scripture cannot contradict it. Augustine never dichotomized knowledge into the physical and spiritual. He understood that all truth is of God, whether found in the Bible, reason or nature, and points back to Him explicitly, for His glory.11

Time

One of the most hotly contested issues in the Genesis account is the notion of time. Christians are divided over whether the days of Genesis are “literal, twenty-four hour” days, or symbolic epochs of pre-human time. From his reading of the Scriptures, Augustine firmly believed, as today’s science has tended to confirm, that the earth is tremendously old. For Augustine, long before carbon dating or archaeological sciences, the passing of the ages in the creation account reflects a conception of time beyond the scope of our current experience.

The foundation of Augustine’s discussion of time at creation is a recognition of the supremacy of God over time. He writes,

Above all we have to remember … that God does not work by time-measured movements … but by the eternal and unchanging, stable formulae of his Word, co-eternal with himself. And so, let us never think in a literal-minded, fleshly way of utterances in time throughout these days of divine works. [God does not desire that] we remain little children, but that while being babies in malice we should cease to be childish in mind.12

God is outside of time, and does not operate according to human notions of temporality. Furthermore, He expresses His trans-temporal actions, which are necessarily beyond our comprehension, in temporal language. He does this so that we may understand that He is transcendent, not so that we can bind Him to our finite notions of time of space.

God is the free Lord over time, the inventor of time, and is able to interact with it however He wishes. Peter’s second epistle recognizes that “with the Lord a thousand years are like a day.” Why then should pious believers, in the name of faithfulness to the scriptures, insist that a day must be just a day, as they themselves understand it (2 Peter 3:8)? The Bible itself explains that God’s time does not follow human conventions or understandings, and so we must not read the creative act of God, albeit expressed in temporal language in order to accommodate our creaturely limitations, as a literal account that corresponds directly to our finite notions of time. Augustine then explores the meaning of “day.” He suggests that “day” could figuratively refer to the passing of all the epochs of prehuman time. He explains, “Day here [could be] the name for the whole of time, [with] the roll of all the ages included in this word.”13 The biblical writer, and the Holy Spirit who inspired him, was not interested in teaching scientific truths and could have referred to the ancient passing of the prehistoric eras in the simple word “day.”

Augustine offers this interpretation because the literal word “day” corresponds to the earth’s rotation relative to the sun, but the sun had not yet been created when the first three Genesis days transpired. For Augustine the days of Genesis are but one “day,” that is one period of time. The notion of a literal day as we understand it has no meaning before the sun existed. Therefore, “throughout all those days there is just the one day, which is not to be understood after the manner of these days that we see measured and counted by the circuit of the sun, but in a different kind of mode which has to allow for those three days that were mentioned before the fashioning of these lamps in the sky.”14 Consequently, the Genesis writer must be referring to some other passage of time or some other kind of event.15

He ends his discussion of time with a further plea for humility, recognizing the impossibility of precise knowledge of those primordial events. He writes,

In this earth-bound condition of ours we mortals can have no experiential perception of that day, or those days which were named and numbered by the repetition of it; and if we are able to struggle toward some understanding of them, we certainly ought not to rush into the assertion of any ill-considered theory about them, as if none more apt or likely could [arise].17

Whether Augustine is right or wrong in his interpretation of the Genesis “days,” Christians should, for the sake of love, unity and humility, concede that there is a possibility that the Genesis text can be read metaphorically and refuse to alienate non-Christians over the insignificant issue of the age of the earth. Whether God desired to make the earth in a literal instant, week, millennium, or five billion year period—whatever these temporal terms would mean before the sun existed and time as we know it began—is of trifling importance to the church’s mission. The Bible’s cherished truths remain intact even if parts of it are read metaphorically.

Evolution

Of course, Augustine knew nothing of Charles Darwin or of the modern notion of the evolution of species. Nevertheless, his discourse on Genesis offers fascinating foundational principles for contemporary Christians wrestling with evolutionary thought. The relevant discussion in Augustine’s work is over the question of the first phase of the moon, which was apparently a subject of great debate in Augustine’s day. Many contended that the moon had to have been created full because God could not have made anything imperfect. But Augustine contends that God is the author of all things in their actual natures, whether He chooses to perfect them at the beginning or to cause them to develop into their completed state. However God chooses to make a part of creation, even through incremental steps of improvement, is His own right. Is a tree, Augustine asks, imperfect when it is a mere seed in the ground, unable to bear fruit? Does God not have the right to bring about the tree’s development however He chooses?

Additionally, Augustine continues, God formed the earth itself by a process, first making an unformed earth with His spirit hovering over the chaos and later making it ordered and habitable. “These people,” he asserts, “do not complain about the earth, which God made when ‘in the beginning he made heaven and earth,’ that it was invisible and shapeless, and is only later on the third day rendered visible and [formed] into shape. So why do they wrap themselves in the darkness of the questions about the moon?”17

Genesis affirms that the earth itself was initially “formless and void,” and that God, seemingly, had to improve upon it through the ordering of the waters and the piecemeal addition of living creatures. This is akin to the miracle of Jesus in which he heals the blind man by two successive steps, the first of which appears ineffectual (cf. Mark 8:24). Furthermore, Augustine adds, “If God were to make anything imperfect, which he would then himself bring to perfection, what would be reprehensible about such an idea?”18

Who are we, His creatures, to proclaim that God cannot create by a process, if He so chooses? I do not wish to affirm that Augustine, if he were alive today, would believe in evolution; I merely use his teaching on creation as a foundation for a discussion of the subject, recognizing that the popular notion that everything must have been made initially perfect is a fallacy for Augustine.

The essential teaching of the doctrine of creation is that God is the creator and the author of all things as they presently are. But how He chooses to carry out the perfection of nature, whether all at once at the beginning or through a natural process of change and improvement, is His own prerogative. To deny this is to limit the freedom of God, as if He were bound to create according to human preferences. Augustine did not argue that the moon was not made in its full phase, and nor do I argue that God made man by means of evolution. I only argue that if God made humanity by such a process, who are we to object? Does Genesis definitively teach that God could not have done so? The church should carefully consider whether it is worth alienating non-Christians over this issue, and how many unbelievers would be open to Christ if the church accepted merely the possibility of a divinely-ordered evolutionary creation.

Conclusion: Freedom from Fear

Augustine shows that faithful readers have at their disposal numerous possible interpretations of a given text. It is only out of fear and insecurity that believers stubbornly safeguard the literal text, afraid that a long chain of cherished beliefs will tumble down a “slippery slope” of metaphor, following directly on the heels of an allegorized Genesis account. This fear is unwarranted and only cripples the church’s ministry and mission. Sometimes allegory is truer to the Bible than literalism. Humble, sanctified creativity, following the proper guidelines of hermeneutics such as authorial intent, contextual fidelity and the rule of faith, is not only acceptable but necessary.

To dogmatically cling to the most obvious, superficial referent of the text is not pious or holy. It is lazy and assumes a staleness of the Bible, as if God’s word only posited truth in the most simplistic language possible. It strips the scriptures of their majesty. God has given us Genesis partially to teach facts about the creation but just as much to inspire awe and wonder at the divine creative act and to make us realize, as Augustine did, that we will never know with certainty the mystery of human origins.

Furthermore, believers need not fear when scientific discoveries emerge. All truth is of God. God is the author of all knowledge, and to fear that the discoveries of nature will overturn our faith is to doubt the sovereignty of the Creator God in making all things as a testimony to Himself. We should study the natural world since it brings us to a fuller knowledge of God.

Most importantly, Christians should demonstrate the humility of Christ in all things, especially the reading of their sacred books. How could Christians ever presume to interpret the oracles of God perfectly? The church today desperately needs to hear Augustine’s insightful exhortation to humble submission to the Bible and to God:

For the present we ought always to observe the moderation required of serious devotion to the truth and not commit ourselves rashly to any one opinion on such an obscure subject, in case perchance the truth may later on lay bare some other answer which can in no way be contrary to the sacred books either of the Old Testament or the New, but which we all the same detest out of love for our own error.19

John Stern ‘05 is from Brunswick, Maine. He was a Religion major and is now studying at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.
  1. 1.1.2-1.3.7, pp. 168-171.
  2. 1.18.37 pp.185-186.
  3. Ibid.
  4. 1.20.40, p. 187.
  5. 5.8.23, p. 287.
  6. 2.9.20, pp. 201-202.
  7. Consequently, Augustine explains in his City of God, that confusion over the Bible is actually helpful. The Bible’s truths are not naturally but “spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14), and their purpose spiritual edification, even through ambiguous texts. “Obscurity is beneficial, whether the sense of the author is at last reached after the discussion of many other interpretations, or whether, though that sense remain concealed, other truths are brought out by the discussion of the obscurity.” City of God, 11.19. He loves the Genesis text because it is “darkly expressed in order to put us through our paces.” Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1.19.39-1.20.40, p. 186-187.
  8. 1.20.40, p. 187.
  9. 3.14.22, p. 229.
  10. 2.1.1, p. 190. Later, explaining Psalm 136:6, he writes, “Nobody may understand the literal sense of the words ‘who founded the earth on the water’ in such a way as to conclude that the weight of the waters was placed under the weight of the earth to support it as if that were the natural order of things” (2.2.4, p. 192).
  11. Augustine notes that faith and biblical exegesis should be informed by science, but also, were he around today, would likely affirm that science rests on its own foundation of faith; but that is a discussion for another setting.
  12. 1.18.36, p. 185.
  13. 4.26.43-4.27.44, p. 267.
  14. Ibid.
  15. Augustine, not surprisingly, interprets the consecutive days and evenings of Genesis 1 spiritually; he understands the literal referent of the days of creation as a reflecting, pulsating, cyclical adoration beaming back and forth from Creator to creature and back again.
  16. 4.26.43-4.27.44, p. 267.
  17. 2.15.30, pp. 209-210.
  18. Ibid.
  19. 2.18.38, p. 215.

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