The Genesis Debate by J. Ligon Duncan, et al.

Over the last century, the debate over the interpretation of Genesis 1 has intensified within the evangelical community. The chief question of Christians committed to the veracity of Scripture is: what does the Scripture say about the days in Genesis 1. Three theories have emerged as the primary views within the evangelical community. The 24-hour view holds that the days refer to literal successive 24-hour periods. The day-age view argues that the days in Genesis 1 are indefinite periods of time. The framework view holds that the author of Genesis never intended to describe how God created the world nor reveal the duration or sequence of creation.

The 24-Hour View

J. Ligon Duncan and David W. Hall defend the 24-hour view. Many who adhere to figurative views admit that the ordinary meaning of day is a 24-hour period. Duncan and Hall assert there are no good reasons to interpret the word in an extraordinary way. For example, opponents of the 24-hour view often point out that the sun and moon were not created until the fourth day of creation and use this as an argument in favor of a non-literal view. Another example, many proponents of a figurative reading of the days of creation appeal to the seventh day as indicative of the figurative meaning of “day” in Genesis 1. They do so in two ways. One they claim there is no end to the seventh day because the text omits the phrase “there was evening and there was morning.” Two, they claim that Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4 confirm a non-literal reading.

As with Genesis, the rest of the Pentateuch and the rest of Scripture affirm the creation in six 24-hour days. One of the strongest arguments in favor of the 24-hour period is the fact that God commanded Israel to imitate the pattern he sat down in Genesis 1 by working six days out of the week and resting on the seventh. Exodus 20:8-10 states, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” This passage does not suggest that the days are anything other than 24-hour periods. Both the original audience and history of interpreters before the 19th century understood the passage to refer to ordinary days.

When this passage is reiterated in Exodus 31:12-17, it takes on heightened importance because the finger of God inscribed the tablets of stone. According to verse 18, “and he gave to Moses, when he finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God.” The divine inscription is clear. Verse 17 states, “it is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.”

Duncan and Hall go on to demonstrate that throughout Scripture God's supernatural work of creation is considered sudden. Each day God spoke and what he commanded was instantaneously so. The view that God brought creation about over long drawn-out periods of time fits no pattern in Scripture. Duncan and Hall repeatedly insist that the only justification for re-exegeting the text is extra-scriptural. The history of interpretation confirms that the church favored normal creation-days until the onslaught of certain scientific theories.

Duncan and Hall conclude by briefly responding to a couple of common objections. First, if the sun was not created until the fourth day, how could there be a literal evening and morning during the first three days? Duncan and Hall noted that the first thing that God did on day one was to create light. We are not told what the source of light was; however, it did allow for a pattern of morning and evening to begin and end each day. The exact same pattern occurred after the sun was created as a special source of light for the earth. In other words, light could well have emanated from non-solar sources that measured each day, and the source of light for the earth was modified on the fourth day. Therefore, there is nothing substantial in the argument that the sun was not created until the fourth day.

Second, how could all the activity described in Genesis 2:5–25 have taken place on the sixth day? On that one day, according to Genesis 2:19, God had Adam name every living creature. Many argue that this alone could not be done in a single day. However, Adam at this point had an unfallen mind. It is entirely possible that with such a mind that he would have been capable of performing mental functions at a faster speed than we are capable of in our fallen condition.

The Day-Age View

Hugh Ross and Gleason L. Archer defend the day-age view. Their view rests upon the conviction that God has revealed himself in both the words of the Bible and the works of creation. The day-age interpretation considers the days of creation as literal six sequential, long periods of time. Thus, the Genesis account can be integrated with scientific data. According to the day-age view, the seventh day of creation continues still, and it will continue until the final judgment. For now, God has ceased to miraculously intervene in preparing the planet for human habitation.

Ross and Archer address the creation-day controversy. While science should not determine our exegesis, we should not ignore science in our exegesis. If there are ways of interpreting Scripture that do not conflict with science, we should not be afraid to prefer them. The day-age view offers such a reconciliation of Genesis 1. Not only is there scriptural support, but there is also credibility for secularists.

Ross and Archer contend that the day-age view is a literal interpretation, and they support their sentiment with linguistic data. While the word “day” in Hebrew can refer to a 24-hour period, it also often refers to an age. An important example is in the Genesis account itself. After depicting the six days of creation, the author introduces a more detailed human orientation account of creation by stating, “In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” (Genesis 2:4). It is apparent that the author is referring to a period of time. If “day” can refer to a period of time here, there is no good reason to insist that only a 24-hour interpretation is the literal meaning.

A chief issue hindering discussion of the creation-day controversy is death and extinction before Adam. It is sometimes argued that day-age adherents violate the doctrine that death entered the world through Adam's sin because death that must have been present millions of years before Adam. However, when the apostle Paul speaks of this doctrine in Romans 5 we read too much into the text to apply it to the entire animal kingdom. If we are going to read this far into the text, we could easily include all vegetation. Should we force the awkward conclusion that God designed all animals and humanity to eat nothing? The death that Paul refers to need not be a physical death, but spiritual death. Genesis 2 may imply this because God told Adam he would die on the day he ate from the tree (Genesis 2:17), yet Adam physically lived for a long time after his sin.

Ross and Archer give several other arguments that compel them to adopt the day-age view. On the sixth day of creation, God had Adam name the animals. The text suggests through this process of naming Adam discovered that none of the animals was an appropriate companion for him (Genesis 2:20). The process of naming the animals must have taken more than a day. It is more natural to conclude that the day of human creation referred to in Genesis 1 is not a 24-hour period.

Another argument is that Hebrews 4 teaches that we are still in the seventh day of creation on which God rested. Hebrews 4:4-11 suggests that God is still resting from his works on the previous six days. People can enter this rest if they do not resist God's will as the Israelites did in the Old Testament. What concerns the day-age view is the fact that the seventh day on which God rested apparently covers all of human history. Thus, we have good reason to conclude that the previous six days of creation were also long periods of time.

Several passages of Scripture expressly teach that God's days are not like our days. For example, the author of Psalm 90:4 states, “for 1,000 years in your sight are like yesterday when it is passed, or like a watch in the night.” A number of passages teach that the earth is very old. For example, Habakkuk 3:6 declares that the mountains are “ancient” and the hills are “age-old.”

Some argue that the word “yom” only can refer to an indefinite period of time if an ordinal does not precede it. Since Genesis 1 numbers the days, this entails that the author intended us to understand distinct 24-hour periods; however, this is not a grammatical rule of the Hebrew language. Hosea 6:2 proclaims, “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.” While the apostle Paul alludes to this as a typology of Christ’s resurrection, most commentators agree that Hosea was referring to epochs, not 24-hour periods. If so, this is a clear instance of a Hebrew author enumerating epochs. In addition, some argue that the author of Genesis 1 would have used the word of “olam” instead of “yom” if he wanted to refer to epochs. Post-biblical Hebrew used “olam” in this sense, but the term in the Old Testament has the connotation of something “forever” or “perpetual.” Since the author of Genesis is referring to temporary periods of time, it seems natural for him to use “yom.”

Finally, some argue that since the Sabbath day rest commanded in Exodus is 24-hours, the original Sabbath of God's rest and so the other days in Genesis 1 must have been 24-hour periods as well. However, what is important in Exodus is not the length of the Sabbath but the idea of the Sabbath. For instance, sometimes the Sabbath refers to a four-year (Leviticus 25:4). What is significant is a period of rest, not the length of rest.

The Framework View

Lee Irons with Meredith G. Kline defend the framework view. The framework view is that the biblical author was interested not in providing his audience with the literal chronology of how creation came about but in providing a literary framework within which the author could effectively express the Hebraic conviction that one God created the world. The author’s intent was thematic rather than chronological. Biblical authors frequently emphasize the thematic community over the historical. For example, it is a well-known fact that some gospel authors group Jesus sayings and deeds by theme rather than by the order in which they occurred historically. As a result, the order of events in the Gospels differs, just like the order of events in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 differ. This would be of concern only if the authors intended to provide an exact account of how things happened historically. If their concern was thematic, then the contradictions are inconsequential.

The first exegetical argument for the framework view begins with the observation that the days form a framework consisting of two parallel triads. The creation week is divided into two groups of three days with the seventh day acting as a capstone. Within each three-day grouping, four creative acts of God are identified by the phrase “Let there be…” Most significantly, the creative acts in the second group mirror the creative acts in the first group. That is: day four mirrors day one; day five mirrors day two; and day six mirrors day three. The first set of three days addresses the problems of darkness, the deep, and the formlessness of the earth. God addresses these problems by creating spaces within which things may exist. The second set of three addresses the void problem. God solves this problem by creating things to fill the spaces he created in the first three days.

Specifically, on day one God created light which address the darkness problem. On day two God created the heavens, which addresses the deep problem. On day three God created dry land and vegetation, which addresses the formlessness problem. Thus, by the end of day three, the first three problems have been addressed: darkness, the deep, and formlessness. The second set of three days addresses the lack of things to fill the spaces God has created. Day four fills the space created on day one; day five fills the space created on day two; and day six fills the space created on day three. Specifically, on day four God creates the lights to fill the skies that he created on day one. On day five God creates fish and birds to fill the water and the earth that he created on day two. In addition, on day six God creates animals and humans to fill the dry land that he created on day three.

The second argument in the exegetical case for the framework view takes its name from Meredith G. Kline's 1958 article, “Because It Had Not Rained.” In this article, Kline argues that Genesis 2:5-6 establishes the principle of continuity between the mode of providence during and after the creation. Both the 24-hour view and the day-age view have a difficult time explaining how plant life could survive for a day or an entire age without the sun. The framework view not only avoids this problem but also actually explains it.

One question still remains: what exactly is the nature of the day-frames? The answer to this question is provided by the third exegetical argument: two-register cosmology. The upper-register is the invisible dwelling place of God and his holy angels, which is heaven. The lower-register is called earth and includes the whole visible cosmos from the planet to the stars. We must remember that the upper-register is a part of creation too. The invisible realm is not co-eternal with God. The upper and lower registers relate to each other spatially, not as different locations, but as different dimensions of one cosmos. At each point in the creation narrative, the upper-register has been replicated in a lower-register analogue, imbuing the lower-register with meaning and imagery of the upper-register. The upper-register consists of heaven, spirit, fiats, divine counsel, and God's rest. Respectively, the lower-register consists of earth, the deep, fulfillments, man as image, and Sabbath ordinance. The contention is that the evenings and mornings are examples of lower-register language being used to metaphorically describe the upper-register. In other words, the temporal framework of the creation narrative does not belong to the lower-register but the upper-register, although it is linguistically clothed in the humble characteristics of the lower-register.

Decisively demonstrating the upper-register nature of the creation narrative is the upper-register nature of the beginning of the creation narrative. Proverbs 8:22-31 defines the beginning of Genesis 1:1 as the time prior to the progressive fashioning of the world described in the subsequent six days of creation. The point is that in the beginning cannot be a general time reference to the entire six-day creation, for Proverbs 8:22-30 explicitly places the events of the six days after the beginning. “In the beginning” refers to the absolute initial point that marks the interface between God's self-existent eternity prior to creation and the moment when the creation sprang into existence. Therefore, it cannot be interpreted as an ordinary, lower-register statement. “In the beginning” belongs to the upper-register. Just as the initial point of the creation narrative is a part of the upper-register, so is the conclusion of the creation narrative. The creation narrative concludes with an upper-register day of rest for God.

Irons and Kline conclude their positive exegetical case by briefly responding to two objections. Some have argued that the theory undermines the motivation of the Sabbath commandment in Scripture. The command to rest on the seventh day presupposes the importance of the chronological, not simply logical, orders of days in Genesis 1. This precedent makes perfect sense; however, even though chronology is not the point in Genesis 1, God did rest when his work of bringing order out of chaos was complete. That is the point of both the Genesis and the Exodus passages. Some object to the framework view because there are no other examples in Hebraic literature of “day” being used as a structural theme. In all metaphors, words are employed to make a comparison between a literal referent and a metaphorical referent. For example, the work “fox” in the sentence, “Go and tell that fox…” (Luke 13:32), denotes a small carnivorous mammal of the dog family. In this context, “fox” is being used as a metaphor to describe something about Herod. In saying that Herod is a “fox,” Jesus is not saying that he is a small carnivorous mammal, but that he has a “fox” like, crafty nature. It is unnecessary and misleading to argue that this unique usage may be explained as an instance where the word “fox” has a different meaning. The metaphor succeeds in conveying meaning precisely by comparing Herod to a literal “fox.” To search for secondary meanings of the term “fox” is to miss the point of the comparison between Herod and the fox’s crafty nature. Likewise, in Genesis 1, if we were to argue that “yom” has a figurative meaning here denoting an indefinite period of time or some such meaning, the metaphorical element would be lost.