Review: Christian Interpretations of Genesis 1

Vern Poythress. Christian Interpretations of Genesis 1.  Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, September 20^th, 2013. 32 pp.

4 out of 5

Purchase: Westminster | Amazon

This is another work in the “Christian Answers to Hard Questions” series published by Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing.  Here the author Vern Poythress looks at how Christians should interpret the first chapter of Genesis.  Although the author is a New Testament professor I think Poythress is more than capable to write on this subject given his expertise in hermeneutics, linguistics, science and theology.

The book begins with a survey of various views concerning Genesis 1.  Poythress include lesser known views as well; for instance there is the Local-Creation Theory that sees the original creation being described in verse 1 while verse 2 describe devastation specifically in the Ancient Near East while verses 3 to 31 describe God’s re-creation locally of those devastated area.  Prior to this I have not even heard of this view.

After laying out the various views Poythress then proceeded to discuss principles for evaluation of the various theories.  I enjoyed his discussion about authority and in particular the issue of science and the Bible.  I thought it was quite nuanced although I wished he could have talked more about hermeneutics.

The booklet then evaluated the theories in interpreting Genesis 1.  Poythress organized the evaluation by grouping weaker theories together before he delivered longer discussions to more plausible theories.  I really enjoyed Poythress pointing out problems with the weaker theories; he reasons and handled Genesis 1 well in this regards.  However I do think in regards to the views he sees as more plausible he does not land strongly on any one conclusion.  He does take a more critical view of Young Earth Creation but I think the issues he bring up does not conclusively rule it out which Poythress would also agree.  I think some of the problems he pointed out for the Young Earth Creation view is not as problematic as he might think; for instance he pointed out the tree records indicates that trees have existed for 12,000-26,000 years.  Taking these tree ring studies as true I think it does not rule out Young Earth Creation since various Young Earth Creationists hold to various duration of when the world has been around.  Moreover Poythress has not scratched the essence of the literal six day creation doctrine that is the essence of the Young Earth Creationist’s position.  I was also disappointed that Poythress didn’t handle the Hebrew grammatical and syntactical argument from Genesis 1 from the observation of ordinal versus cardinal Hebrew numbers with the word “yom” (day).

Even if one disagrees with this booklet I think the charitable and informed way that the author wrote this makes it beneficial.