GOOD NEWS IN THE CREATION STORY

James R. Payton, Jr., Ph.D.

May 18, 2021

I know about the redemptive-historical approach to Scripture (creation, fall, redemption, consummation) and used it faithfully in the eight years I served as a pastor. Trained at seminary (Westminster, Philadelphia) in Hebrew and Greek, I worked with those languages as I prepared sermons. I also learned that to treat the Bible well you have to examine scriptural passages “in context,” meaning both the material surrounding a passage as well as when and to whom the passage was given. Then I became a history professor, so I’ve worked in quite different fields the last many years. Among the skills I have had to practice as a historian is reading accounts carefully, examining what is said and not said in them (and why, in both regards), searching for the back story, and (when the record is skillfully written) the subtleties involved in the presentation. Along the way I haven’t forgotten what I learned about expounding Scripture.

And with all that, I am profoundly disappointed in the way the Human Sexuality Report [HSR] deals with the creation story in Genesis.

HSR looks at the early chapters in Genesis the way it is easy to do, as if someone were taking notes at the events and offering a report of what took place. Of course, that’s nonsense: the creation story was revealed long after what it describes happened, and it was presented to people who already had experience of the creation the story describes, and of the impacts the human fall into sin had brought. These ancient people (Israel’s descendants) had lived in the aftermath of God’s response to human sin, as laid out in Genesis 3:16–19, with the death that had befallen their ancestors, their daily struggle to provide food for their families, and women being ruled over by their husbands in particular, by men in general.

In ancient times (and as far as we know, in all early civilizations) women were considered inferior to men. They were chattel, possessions, viewed and treated as “less than” men. This could vary from one group to another to some degree, but females were not considered as “on par” with males. This would have been the situation among Israel’s descendants as the creation story was revealed to them. They had doubtlessly heard stories about how everything got to be the way it was; all ancient peoples had such stories. But we are talking here about what God revealed to God’s people, a revelation that came “after the fact,” to those living long after and in the aftermath of what the story presented.

That makes for a very different way of appreciating the story of creation as God revealed it. In Genesis 1, not only is the male created in the image and likeness of God: so is the female. The female is the male’s equal, not his possession. She and he together receive divine instruction to care for the creation. Together they are to be fruitful and multiply. Theirs is to be a partnership, not a relationship of superior to inferior. This is an exhilarating story, presenting a startlingly different orientation on male/female relationship as God intended it. For people living on this side of our first parents’ transgression, Genesis 1 was a ringing proclamation of good news, of what God wants for his image-bearers.

Genesis 2 carries this exaltation of the female even further. In this chapter the creation of humankind (1:26–28) gets unpacked. And what is the culmination, the crown of this presentation? The creation of woman. The man’s passionate welcome. The declaration that she is with the man—not “less than,” but alongside, as his “helper,” his “partner”—his equal.

HSR treats these chapters in Genesis woodenly, without mention of the context into which this revelation would first have come. That is awkwardly apparent in the dull emphasis that only humankind is distinguished as “male” and “female” (p. 15). HSR makes much of this, asserting that it points to a “binary” structure for created (and unfallen) humankind’s sexuality (p. 17). But how is this even an alert reading of Genesis 2? That story is more deftly crafted than HSR indicates.

According to Genesis 2, God completes the creation of humankind by providing the man with a partner (vs. 18), a woman (vs. 23). The process God follows helps the man recognize his need for that partner—but the man doesn’t yet have a clue about that. So, God brings the animals of the field and the birds of the air to the man, to see what he would call them (vs. 19). The artful presentation invites us to imagine how this transpired: the man names “horse” when he sees stallion and mare; “pig” when he sees boar and sow; “chicken” when he sees rooster and hen; “sheep” when he sees ram and ewe. Whether it was this way or something else, God used the animals to help the man get the point.

What is clear is that the man eventually recognized (vs. 20) that he didn’t have his own partner, suited to him. When God formed the woman and brought her to the man (vs. 21-22), he immediately recognized her as the helper/partner made for him—the same situation he had seen with all the animals he had named. By showing him the animals, God had set him up to recognize, with eager longing, the one who would be his partner, and the man’s “at last!” (vs. 23) is a sexual exultation: here is his partner, the one given him because, as God had said (vs. 18), it is not good for the human to be alone.

So, at the conclusion of the creation story, we have “man and woman” (2:22–23), “male and female” (1:27). And God had helped the man/male to recognize his need for the woman/female by bringing the animals before him.

But HSR claims, “It is of the utmost significance that from the very beginning human beings are described in sexual terms as ‘male and female.’ None of the animals are described in such terms” (p. 16 [emphasis added]). That is technically true; the animals described in the creation story—the ones brought before the man to be named by him—are not specifically designated as “male and female.”

But they are commanded by God to “be fruitful and multiply” (1:22)—which certainly points to the animals being “male and female.” Interestingly, later on—once the basic foundation of HSR’s argument has been laid—HSR acknowledges, “While a biological male/female distinction is assumed with the blessing of the fish and birds on day five (v.22), it is not explicit” (p. 75). Why would it be? Presumably, the first recipients of this divine revelation had figured out how animal reproduction worked; what Genesis 1 presents is the equality of the human female with the human male, something not at all evident in ancient civilizations after the fall of that first human pair.

HSR doesn’t pick up on that, though—and it has a strange notion of what made the creation “good.” In Genesis 1, after the stages of creation, God “saw that it was good” (vss. 10, 12, 18, 21, 25), and at the end of it all, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (vs. 31). Why was it “good,” though? What made the creation God had made “good”?

According to HSR, with all God had done, “The result is a creation that is good because it is orderly” (p. 16 [emphasis added]).

That’s an astoundingly dull response to the wondrous, many-splendored story of creation.

There’s nothing special about a story ending with order. That’s how stories work: a problem or confusion or issue gets worked through and, at the end, you have more order than at the beginning. To “praise” the story of creation because of the “order” it presents is faint praise, indeed. There’s nothing special about that: every story moves toward “order.”

Of course, the creation story presents the coming of order: out of nothing you have all kinds of somethings. Day and night, seas and dry land, plants and fruit-bearing trees, and swarms of living creatures are all explicitly mentioned. The plants and trees, the living creatures—birds and sea creatures, cattle and creeping things and wild animals—all these, in their respective “kinds,” respond to God’s creative call.

So, order has a place in the creation story: a flowering bush is not a pear tree, and a bear is not a goat is not a lizard. The “kinds” indicate distinctions—and with all that, there is order.

But when you get into the story of creation in Genesis 1, you’re drawn to wonder, as you contemplate what God has made. Consider the enormous variety of plants and fruit-bearing trees. Listen to the call of the nightingale, the howling of the wolf, the roar of the lion, the whinnying of the horse, the braying of the donkey, the clucking of the chicken, the chirping of the cricket—all raising their voices in praise of the Creator. Taste the apple, pear, orange, pomegranate, peach, tomato. See the lights shining in the skies, the humpback whale, the hopping rabbit, the soaring eagle, the fluttering butterfly, the scurrying squirrel, the dolphin, the snail.

Looking at, hearing, tasting what all God made in the creation story and immediately thinking “order!” is like looking at a Rembrandt or Van Gogh painting and saying that this masterpiece is “good” because the canvas was pulled tight and the corners of the frame are square. It would be like saying that what makes Handel’s Hallelujah chorus “good” is that folks stand up for it.

Saying that the creation is good “because it is orderly” is less a way to read Genesis 1 than it is a conclusion to an argument looking for a starting-point.

If HSR can convince that “order” is the key to creation’s goodness and that a male/female human sexuality binary is fundamental to that order (p. 17), then anything other than that orderly male/female sexuality is a manifestation of “dis-order”—a consequence, a result of the fall into sin. According to HSR, the unfallen, created intention of God for all humanity is a strictly binary heterosexual orientation; any other sexual orientation, consequently, is “to be interpreted as a result of the fall, which in many ways has distorted God’s good creation” (p. 74).

HSR made much of how God’s creative activity keeps apart “those things that do not belong together: light from darkness, the waters above from the waters below, water and dry land” (p. 16). This is pointed out just before stating (as we saw above), “The result is a creation that is good because it is orderly” (p. 16). Binaries are important to this orderliness, for HSR: light from darkness, sea from dry land, and distinctions between birds flying above the earth and sea creatures and land animals, male and female. Anything outside of or apart from these ought “to be interpreted as a result of the fall, which in many ways has distorted God’s good creation” (p. 74), according to HSR.

But the creation story is not nearly that tidy or binary. Yes, God separated light from darkness and designated them Day and Night (Gen 1:4–5). But is twilight a result of the fall? Must dawn and dusk be seen as consequences of our first parents’ sin?

And God separated the dry land and the waters (Gen 1:9–10). What are we to make, then, of swamps and marshes? Are they results of the fall?

God said, “let birds fly above the earth” (Gen 1:20) but distinguished them from “wild animals of the earth” (Gen 1:24). Are bats, then—wild animals, but they fly—consequences of the fall? And what, then, would we have to say about ostriches and emus?

And as for fish (and other sea creatures) “with which the waters swarm” (Gen 1:21): what do we make of flying fish? Are they post-fall disorders occasioned by human sin? And what about penguins—birds that don’t fly but swim in the sea?

None of these is a result of the fall: they all come from God’s creation and are “good,” too. The specific wording suggestively adopted in the creation story highlights the breadth of God’s handiwork, embracing in creative act what lies between the polarities explicitly mentioned. But all this “between,” not-specifically-stated stuff doesn’t fit into the “binary” structure HSR makes so much of in the “orderly” creation story. HSR doesn’t even acknowledge these creation anomalies that don’t fit their “binary” emphasis—at least, not while HSR is laying the foundation of its argument.

But after HSR has laid that foundation and consigned what doesn’t fit into the binaries into the category of “dis-order,” HSR comes around to admit “betweens” that don’t fit into that binary structure: “light and dark are the extremes of the spectrum of daylight that also includes dawn, dusk, and various degrees in between” (p. 76 [emphases added]). So, light/Day and darkness/Night constitute a spectrum? A spectrum with “various degrees in between”? Might other of the “binaries” HSR has made so much of in the creation story also constitute a “spectrum”? We have already seen the answer to that, with swamps and marshes, bats and penguins, and all the rest we noted above.

And what about the family of fish known as “sparidae”? Some of them begin life as females but transition into males; some begin life as males but transition into females; some begin life and remain throughout their lives “intersex.” Are sparidae all a result of the fall? And what of “sheepshead fish” (one of the species within the sparidae family)? All of them begin life as females; some of them develop into males. Is this a result of the human fall into sin, as the HSR would lead us to conclude? Or do sparidae, and sheepshead fish among them, manifest the sexual spectrum ordained in God’s creative act for them? True, that is not specifically mentioned in the creation story in Genesis 1, but why would it need to be? Similarly, if God created sparidae as fish on a sexual spectrum, how can the HSR assert so baldly that God could not have done so with humanity?

HSR flatly denies that such a “between-ness” could or should be recognized in regard to created human sexuality: “Nowhere does Scripture suggest that there is a spectrum of normative biological manifestations of humanity beyond male and female” (p. 76).

How can HSR claim to know that? Because it’s not explicitly mentioned? Why would it need to be mentioned? HSR appeals to the divine directive to “be fruitful and multiply” (1:28) as “quite clear,” a forthright indication that “binary, procreative sexuality” (p. 17) is what God intended.

But is that all that God intended?

It is striking, as we consider closely what is explicitly stated in the creation story, that God identified something as “not good”: God said, “It is not good that the human being [adamah in Hebrew] should be alone” (Gen 2:18 [emphasis added]). While procreation—to be “fruitful and multiply”—was in view in Genesis 1:28, what was emphasized in Genesis 2:18 was being alone. And when the delightful story of how that gets recognized and remedied is completed, the “man” [ish in Hebrew] calls that partner “woman” [ishshah in Hebrew] (Gen 2:23).

What if the point of the creation story regarding humanity is not only the productive binary of “man” (ish) and “woman” (ishah) but also the “not good-ness” of a human (adamah) being alone? What if the good news in this divine revelation is not just the affirmation of procreactive potential, but divine concern for humans—all of them, created in the divine image—not to be alone? What if, as with other creatures God himself made (like the sparidae fish), human sexuality is a spectrum?

Maybe what makes the creation “very good” when all is done is not “order!” but God’s provision of loving companionship for those God made in the divine image. That would be “good news,” indeed—not only for women in the ancient world, but for humans of all times, wherever they are on the human sexuality spectrum.

Note: This essay is a white paper challenging and responding to the presentation in the CRC’s Human Sexuality Report on the creation story in Genesis 1 & 2. Anyone is free to use its ideas in ecclesiastical communications (overtures to classis, letters to council), but please reference this white paper as the source when doing so.