Considering God’s Pattern for Creation

W. Robert Godfrey’s book God’s Pattern for Creation: A Covenantal Reading of Genesis 1 is a short, fairly easy to understand book that wrestles with some of the issues regarding the interpretation of Genesis 1.  Godfrey, from Westminster West, focuses on the theological and is not trying to integrate the scientific.

Godfrey was a student of Meredith Kline’s, and the book (mostly) teaches the Framework Hypothesis (FH).  He has some mild critiques of the FH, but the vast majority of what he says fits quite well within the FH.

My beloved professor, Roger Nicole, jokingly called his friend Meredith Kline “covenant crazy.”  It is appropriate that Godfrey’s book focuses on a covenantal approach to Genesis 1.  He sees it as a covenant prologue of sorts for the Exodus generation (and all who follow).

“It is a covenant history focusing on what the people of God need to know about their God and themselves.”

Godfrey often frames God’s act of creation as preparing a suitable environment for humanity.  God is also revealing who we are and what we are supposed to do.  God subdues the chaos (tohu) and fills the void (bohu), even as He overcomes the darkness (the 3 problems Godfrey highlights in verse 2).  The creation mandate is to fill the earth & subdue it.  As God’s vice-regents, Adam and Eve were to act like God on God’s behalf.

“Genesis 1 presents creation as the progressive ordering of the earth to be a home for man in fellowship with God and to teach man how he is to bear God’s image.  Genesis 2:4-4:26 begins with the creation of man in fellowship with God and then presents the formation of a place for man to live.”

Godfrey is also highly dependent on Calvin’s method of exegesis (his principle of accommodation- God speaks so we’ll understand).  While Calvin does not do it with his work in Genesis, he often recognized that many historical accounts in the OT were not in chronological order, but in topical arraignment.  He attempts to take Calvin where Calvin did not go.  And this, I think, is the weakness of the book.  He argues that Days 1 & 4 were the same day since sometimes Hebrews were not as concerned about chronology as we are.

“If we conclude that days one and four seem to describe the same activity of God from different perspectives, then we must conclude that the days of creation in Genesis 1 are not simply chronology.”

He mentions some textual markers that seem to point him that way.  But the whole reading of Genesis 1 seems to focus on chronology in a way those other texts don’t .  This would be why Calvin doesn’t go there with this text.  And why I don’t either (To go against Calvin is [usually] neither right nor safe, to hijack Luther’s declaration at Worms) .

“In order to tell us about creation, God uses images and language that we can understand.  But much of the language must be figurative.”

So, Godfrey is putting forth a figurative framework for this covenant document.  He does not deny the historicity of the text, only that it is meant to be understood as taking place in chronological order.  (He affirms the historicity of the events- God really created the universe and humanity.)  Oddly, this leads him to argue, at times, for ordinary providence in the process of creation would would seem to indicate special providence to me.

He brings this back to the modeling purpose of Genesis 1:

“The days are actual for us but figurative for God.  They are not a timetable of God’s actions but a model timetable for us to follow.”

That may sound strange at first.  But God worked for 6 days, during the day.  Man is to work 6 days a week, primarily in the light, to fill and subdue the world for Christ.  I’m not sure why it has to be figurative for God, the most straightforward way of read it is that he actually did it this to model it for us.

You don’t have to agree with all that Godfrey asserts (I certainly didn’t) to find the book helpful for understanding the big picture of Genesis 1.  He does not tackle some of the tough questions some people would like him to tackle (age of the earth, evolution etc.).  That is okay.  Those questions were really outside of his purpose.  Godfrey affirms that Genesis instructs us truthfully, if not in detailed fashion.  But that can be a slippery slope.