Quotes about Genesis

the point about God's authority is that the whole Bible is about God establishing his kingdom on earth as in heaven, completing (in other words) the project begun but aborted in Genesis 1—3.

In Genesis, and indeed for much of the Old Testament, the controlling image for death is exile. Adam and Eve were told that they would die on the day they ate the fruit; what actually happened was that they were

The "goal" is not "heaven," but a renewed human vocation within God's renewed creation. This is what every biblical book from Genesis on is pointing toward.

Genesis 1 and 2 are about the construction of a temple, namely, the heaven-and-earth creation in which God wants to dwell, with humans as the 'image' in the temple.

a Christian worldview is not reductionistic. It does not reduce reason to something less than reason, and therefore it does not self-destruct. A Christian epistemology (theory of knowledge) starts with the transcendent Creator, who spoke the entire universe into being with his Word: "And God said" (Gen. 1:3). "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1).

In the beginning, God . . ." These are four thunderously important words. They really do change everything,

Noah got drunk, which led to his grandson Canaan being cursed (Gen. 9:25).

The imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth." — GENESIS 8:21

Seeing the similarities between these two stories should discourage us from expecting the Adam story to contribute to contemporary scientific debates about human origins (let alone guide those debates). Likewise, the similarities between Genesis and Atrahasis suggest that the biblical account cannot be labeled "historical," at least not in any conventional sense of the word.

a literal reading of Genesis is not the firmly settled default position of true faith to which one can "hold firm" or from which one "strays." Literalism is a hermeneutical decision (often implicit) stemming from the belief that God's Word requires a literal reading.

God's act of salvation in Exodus hearkens back to God's act of creation in Genesis, when God separated the waters on the second and third days of creation. Saving Israel is a divine act of "re-creation.

It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Genesis to expect it to answer questions generated by a modern worldview, such as whether the days were literal or figurative, or whether the days of creation can be lined up with modern science, or whether the flood was local or universal. The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship.