I have just one more thing to say relating to Janet Kellogg Ray’s book, “Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark.” (Part 1 of my review is here, Part 2 is here). Ray makes no attempt to harmonize mainstream origins science (Darwinism) with the Bible. Her position is that Christians are free to believe anything that does not contradict Darwinian origins science, but she leaves to others, including John Walton, to say exactly what that will be:
“What does a science-accepting person do with Genesis? Ignore it? Not at all. Honoring Genesis means recognizing its genre. Honoring Genesis means listening to its ancient voice. It’s a fascinating study; some of the best scholarship is being done by John Walton, Scot McKnight, and Pete Enns.” (pp. 167-168)
I’ve mentioned John Walton and his book, The Lost World of Genesis One, a couple of times in connection with La Sierra (here and here), because it was being promoted by John Webster, one of the Darwinist professors there.
Back at the height of the La Sierra controversy, some liberal Adventist at AToday (when I was still commenting there), challenged me to read Walton’s book, urging that it was the resolution of the creation/evolution controversy. I accepted the challenge and read the book, and as I did so it became glaringly obvious that no believing Seventh-day Adventist could ever endorse John Walton’s theology. That this book was being touted by the religion teachers at La Sierra was appalling.
Below is my 2010 review of John Walton’s “The Lost World of Genesis One”:
John Walton is a professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College, a Christian college situated in suburban Chicago, Illinois. In this short volume, Walton lays out his theory that Genesis chapter One does not describe a material creation, but rather the assigning of functions to pre-existing things.
The book is organized around 18 propositions, the first of which is that "Genesis One is ancient cosmology." Walton argues that Genesis is not written to or for moderns but to the ancient Hebrews; thus, studying the literature of contemporary ancient societies “is the key to a proper interpretation of the text.” He acknowledges that if God inspired the writer of Genesis (presumably Moses), Genesis need not reflect the cosmology of surrounding nations, but Walton’s analysis assumes it does.
Next, Walton argues that ancient cosmology is primarily concerned with function, not with material existence. He briefly surveys some of the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian creation accounts, and notes that in many cases nothing material is made. Rather, things are given a function in an ordered system.
Walton argues that the Hebrew word bara, which is translated as "create," concerns function, not material creation. Walton notes that bara occurs about 50 times in the Old Testament, and God is always the subject or implied subject of the verb; in other words, it is always God who does the bara-ing or creating. That fact, along with the additional fact that no pre-existing materials are ever mentioned in conjunction with bara, has caused scholars to conclude that bara implies creation ex nihilo, that is, creation from nothing. Humans can give things a function within an ordered system, but only God can speak matter into existence. Psalm 33:6; 148:5; Rom. 4:17. Nevertheless, Walton insists that bara means the assignment of function, not creation ex nihilo.
Genesis 1:2 states that the earth was "formless and void"--tohu and bohu, in Hebrew. If the earth was really "empty" or "void," as the Hebrew term bohu is translated, then all the plants and animals must have been physically created during the creation week. Walton engages in a lengthy analysis of the word tohu, which means "formless" or "chaotic", but not of the word bohu, which is translated as "void." He argues that because bohu is used only 3 times, and always in conjunction with tohu, then bohu must mean the same thing as tohu. But that doesn't really make sense, and one begins to grow suspicious of the conceit that everyone BW (Before Walton) mistranslated the relevant Hebrew terms.
As we go through the days of the creation week, God seems to be creating things out of nothing:
“‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.' So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind."
Walton admits that animals don't have a function; God tells them to “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas,” but, if Walton's thesis is correct, God is telling them to do something they had been doing for millions of years.
The human function is to subdue and rule. (Gen. 1:26) Walton notes that Genesis Two seems to describe a material creation of man: “The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being" (Gen. 2:7), but argues that the "Adam" discussed in this passage is an archetype, not the prototype, and that the story is meant to caution man about his mortal nature ("Dust you are and unto dust you shall return" Gen. 3:19), not to describe the physical creation of man.
Walton believes that on day six, God gave humans the image of God, by which he means a moral nature, “though it remains difficult to articulate how God accomplished this.” He believes that, prior to the creation week, humans were simply animals with no moral accountability. “The anthropological specimens would not be viewed as humans in the image of God. They would not be assessed morally (any more than an animal would), and they were subject to death as any animal was.” This as an anthropology that separates body and soul, and hence Adventists could never assent to it.
Seventh-day Adventists will be disappointed in Walton's rationale for the Sabbath. "In the traditional view that Genesis 1 is an account of material origins," he writes, "day seven is mystifying. It appears to be nothing more than an afterthought with theological concerns about Israelites observing the Sabbath--an appendix, a postscript, a tack on." Walton argues that God did not rest on the Sabbath, in the sense of cessation of labor, but rather transitioned from the extraordinary activity of assigning function to the more normal, day-to-day business of being God in His cosmic temple. Toward the end of the book, Walton argues that Christians should keep the Sabbath not in imitation of God's rest--because He did not--but to celebrate that God, rather than man, is at the controls. In effect, Walton substitutes his own rationale for Sabbath-keeping for the Bible's (Ex. 20:11).
Just as jarring to the Adventist reader will be Walton's argument that the Hebrew tabernacle is a map of the cosmos. He believes the objects in the courtyard represent the disordered cosmos, the objects in the holy place represent the ordered cosmos, the curtain between holy place and most holy place represents the raqia or “firmament” (which Walton conceives of as a solid structure), and the most holy place represents heaven. Walton makes no mention of the function of the tabernacle in the Jewish economy, nor that it is patterned after a temple in heaven (Ex. 25:40; Heb. 8:5; Rev. 11:19; 15:5), nor of its Christ-centered symbolism, so well-studied by Adventists. For him, it is merely a biblical analog of other ancient temples, which, he notes, were often meant to be models of the cosmos.
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I note from perusing Amazon that Walton has produced two more “lost worlds,” “The Lost World of Adam and Eve,” with N.T. Wright, about Genesis two and three, and “The Lost World of the Flood,” with Tremper Longman III. I probably will not be bothering to review these, seeing how fast and loose Walton played with the biblical text in the first book.