Quotes about Genesis

The beginning seems to be more than half of the whole.

Out of one man a race of men innumerable.

What we have seen in the last two chapters is that the most foundational thing you can say about marriage is that it is the doing of God, and the ultimate thing you can say about marriage is that it is for the display of God. These two points are made by Moses in Genesis 2. But they are made even more clearly by Jesus and Paul in the New Testament.

Paul makes the point most clearly that marriage is designed to be the display of God. In Ephesians 5:31—32 he quotes Genesis 2:24 and then tells us the mystery that it has always contained: "'Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

Like most Christians, I believe the Genesis account of creation is a description of six different stages of creation, each of which may have taken eons of time.

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And . I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And , but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time [Childhood].

Opponents of this view often point out that it is not rooted in an exegesis of Genesis 1:26—28, the central biblical text that discusses the imago Dei. Indeed, it is frequently argued that the view that the imago Dei refers to the soul is more influenced by Greek philosophy than by Scripture. More specifically, it is argued that the traditional emphasis on reason as one of the hallmarks of the imago Dei is a distinctly Hellenistic, not Hebraic, notion.

The "days" of Genesis 1 are part of a literary structure that serves to support the theological claim that Yahweh-God alone is Creator-King! They are not meant to satisfy modern curiosity as to how long it took God to create the world.

The literary framework view not only avoids this problem but actually explains it. The order of the days is not meant to reflect the chronology of creation. It is rather meant to express thematically the problems of darkness, watery abyss, formlessness, and void expressed in Genesis 1:2. 4.

Disagreements over the interpretation of Genesis 1 are not new. Early church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine wrestled with this issue hundreds of years ago. However, the debate within Christian circles over the age of creation has intensified during the last 150 years, largely in response to the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Genesis 1 and the scientific evidence. The literary framework interpretation can easily be reconciled with any contemporary scientific theory of origin one chooses to embrace. Yet at the same time, reconciliation is not necessary. Genesis 1 has no bearing on science, for it is strictly interested in theology, not science.