A Critique of The Lost World of Genesis One by John Walton

As much as his book makes valuable observations about how Genesis 1 sees the world as a temple in which God seeks to dwell and make his home, there were two underlying assumptions that guided his reading of Genesis that seem to be deeply problematic and, ultimately, just wrong.

I was recently engaging in a conversation with a teacher and some students at Trinity Classical School about a book they had been discussing called The Lost World of Genesis One by John Walton. Walton is a professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College. As much as his book makes valuable observations about how Genesis 1 sees the world as a temple in which God seeks to dwell and make his home, there were two underlying assumptions that guided his reading of Genesis that seem to be deeply problematic and, ultimately, just wrong. Even if you haven’t read or engaged with this book, thinking through the subtleties of his argument is actually helpful for us, even in our modern context.

Introduction

Part of the reason this critique is important to me is that even though Walton does not directly attack the historic understanding that God created the universe ex nihilo (“out of nothing”), his argument is the first step in undermining it.

This is important to notice because theological errors—or even worse, theological deception—generally come in a two-step attack. This has been true since the deception of our first parents. Notice that when the Serpent asks Eve, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?’” he invites a “yes” or “no” answer. Which is the right answer? If you say, “No, God did not say that,” the Serpent can respond, “Well then you may eat of all the trees in the garden—let me show you one in particular.” But if you say, “Yes, God did say that,” that is a lie, and deception has been introduced.

The problem is a false choice. The Evil One always deceives in this two-step process. Step one opens the door a crack; step two is the outright defiance of God: “You will not surely die” (Gen. 3:4). The only answer to the first question is, “I reject the question altogether.” If we don’t reject the premise, we have taken a step down the path of deception.

The essence of the gospel is about the joining of the spiritual and the physical.

Walton’s book is (very possibly unwittingly) asking a question like in step one. You can notice that Walton explicitly says he is not attacking the traditional doctrine that God created the universe ex nihilo:

An important caveat must be noted at this point. If we conclude that Genesis 1 is not an account of material origins, we are not thereby suggesting that God is not responsible for material origins. I firmly believe that God is fully responsible for material origins, and that, in fact, material origins do involve at some point creation out of nothing. But that theological question is not the one we are asking. (p. 42–43)

He may affirm creation ex nihilo, but what he is doing is undermining the very foundation of this doctrine. And it turns out that the way he does it is through a false choice and a false premise—both of which lead to a distorted view of the world that Christians have been fighting for millennia.

The False Choice: Material or Functional

The main premise of Walton’s book involves a distinction between material ontology and functional ontology, or different understandings of what it means for something to be “created.” Usually, we think of “creating” meaning that something material did not exist, and then—poof!—it is there. But he says we use the word “create” in other ways, like creating a business or a curriculum. He says these are examples of new functions (functional ontology) instead of new material (material ontology).

Now the question Walton poses is, “Does Genesis 1 describe material creation or functional creation?” Walton insists that all people in the ancient world only thought and cared about functional creation, so we should read Genesis 1 solely that way:

Consequently, to create something (cause it to exist) in the ancient world means to give it a function, not material properties. (p. 35, emphasis added)

If existence is defined in functional terms, creating is a function-giving activity. (p. 39)

Now, I don’t disagree in the least that Genesis 1 is about the functions of God’s creatures—absolutely. The problem is the false choice. If he had just said, “Let’s focus on the functional aspect of Genesis,” great. But he wants to go further and insist that Genesis 1 is not about the creation of matter but only about function.

Now you might be wondering, “Who cares? Is this that big of a deal?” It is because he is introducing dualism into the biblical worldview. God’s people have always had to battle dualisms, such as maybe the earliest Christian heresy, Gnosticism.

Dualism is always trying to divorce the physical from the spiritual. So, for example, Walton uses the example of creating a curriculum as being functional and not material. He says, eventually, a curriculum will have to become something concrete, but ultimately, curriculums are about goals and ideas, both of which are non-physical (i.e., spiritual). Notice his divorcing of the physical and the spiritual. 

But dualism is simply not true. Even in this example, as a person who has written many curriculums, I can tell you that creating a curriculum is emphatically physical. The whole act is about taking the spiritual things (ideas and goals) and making them concrete with words written on a piece of paper. If you have not made the ideas and goals concrete, you have not created a curriculum.

But maybe a better way to communicate the problem with divorcing matter and function is in how this is playing out in the current transgender movement. Many people are saying that being a woman is something you do or feel, not what your physical body is. A boy can wear a girl’s clothes, talk in a high voice, and change his name (all functions) and think that he is now a girl. Our culture says his material biology doesn’t matter. This is the effect of dualism.

Now again, as Christians, we don’t think being a woman is just about your body; it does include your function. But we don’t want to divorce these two realities. They must be held together. In fact, the essence of the gospel is about the joining of the spiritual and the physical. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Over and over again, the New Testament says that our spiritual life is to be manifested in our physical bodies: “For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor. 4:11, emphasis added).

We receive Christ spiritually by eating physical bread and wine. Jesus tells us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The whole of the Christian worldview is a resistance to this dualism and a celebration of the deep union of physical and spiritual.

Early in the book, some of this dualistic thinking comes out in a confusing statement by Walton, where he says:

As a result, we should not expect anything in the Bible or in the rest of the ancient Near East to engage in the discussion of how God’s level of creative activity relates to the ‘natural’ world (i.e. what we call naturalistic process or the laws of nature). The categories of ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ have no meaning to them, let alone any interest (despite the fact that in our modern world such questions take center stage in the discussion). The ancients would never dream of addressing how things might have come into being without God or what ‘natural’ processes he might have used. (p. 20)

Walton is noting that modern scientific dualism divorces the natural and supernatural. (It is not at all clear whether he thinks this modern worldview is wrong.) We moderns tend to think that there is a domain that God controls (the supernatural or spiritual) and one that runs on its own (nature). But the Bible is clearly trying to destroy this view of the world, both for ancient people and modern people. In a biblical worldview, there is no molecule in the universe or moment in history that is not held together, ordered, and ordained by the sovereign God—“in [Christ] all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).

So how did such a subtle but unbiblical premise find its way into Walton’s reading of Genesis 1?

The False Premise: Ancient Literature Interprets the Bible 

The reason this dualism finds its way into Walton’s reading of Genesis 1 is because he adopts an interpretive principle that lets it in: “The key [to understanding Genesis 1] then is to be found in the literature from the rest of the ancient world” (p. 12).

Walton says that, as modern people, we can’t understand how ancient Israelites would have processed what they were reading in the Genesis narrative. In order to get inside them, we need to read other ancient literature (Babylonian, Egyptian, etc.) to come to understand their worldview.

The first thing to say about this is that it is contrary to our church’s Reformed tradition. The Westminster Confession of Faith, in its first chapter on the Word of God, tells us how to interpret difficult passages of Scripture:

The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly. (WCF 1.9)

Westminster agrees that we need other literature to help us understand passages like Genesis 1, but that other literature is not from the Babylonians or Egyptians but from the Bible itself, which is a library of sixty-six ancient texts. Can you imagine if Moses thought people were looking to the Egyptians to help them understand the meaning of the Bible’s creation story? Other literature can be helpful and at times illuminating (e.g., the discovery of Hittite treaties we see in the structure of covenant documents)—but it must not take on such a dominant interpretative role. Often, the differences between Israel and the surrounding cultures are greater than the similarities (cf. Deut. 4:7-8).

The whole purpose of the Bible was to be a counter-culture. The whole point of the creation story is to show how YHWH, the God of Israel, is not like the other gods. There are countless ways the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, called the books of Moses) are radically different from the neighboring peoples. All the other cultures worshiped their gods through images. The Bible condemns this. The law of Moses cares for the poor and the sojourner, unlike neighboring peoples. Other cultures only thought kings were made in the image of the gods. Genesis sees all people as made after God’s image. On and on the differences go. 

With this in mind, Walton’s advice is precisely what we should not do:

In conclusion, analysts of the ancient Near Eastern creation literature often observe that nothing material is actually made in these accounts. This is an intriguing observation. Scholars who have assumed that true acts of creation must by definition involve production of material objects are apparently baffled that all of these so-called creation texts have nothing of what these scholars would consider to be creation activities. I propose that the solution is to modify what we consider creation activities based on what we find in the literature. If we follow the sense of the literature and its ideas of creation, we find that people in the ancient Near East did not think of creation in terms of making material things—instead, everything is function oriented. (p. 35, emphasis added)

When it turns out that none of the other gods in the other creation myths of the ancient world created ex nihilo, it should lead us to see how different the God of the Bible is. He is not like them!

God has made all things well, he rules over every atom, and his kingdom is coming—not just in the spiritual world but to the physical world of the earth.

I imagine if some archeologist 3000 years in the future read my sermons and thought, “Oh, I want to find out what this pastor meant when he talked about ‘love.’ Let’s read some of the books by the professors from the university up the street from where he pastored, who talk about ‘Love is love.’” If they interpreted my sermons in light of what my contemporaries thought, they would completely miss my meaning. In fact, they would miss that I was arguing exactly against what my contemporaries thought.

This false premise is what lets dualism creep into his reading of the creation story.

But another problem with this false premise is that it assumes that ancient people did not care about material existence. This is simply not true. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo was made famous by Augustine in the 5th century but was first coined by Theophilus of Antioch in the 2nd, who was explicitly arguing against ancient pagan worldviews. These are both ancient writers. If ancient peoples largely didn’t care about material creation, and therefore matter itself, why were these ancient authors different? The answer leads to a remarkable insight.

The Bible Led Us to Science

At one point, Walton asks a question that it would have been good if he had answered: “ . . . we might begin to wonder why material origins have taken on such central significance to us” (p. 36).

Why does the modern world care about matter? The answer is that Christians were unique in the ancient and medieval world to believe that matter itself should be studied because it would reveal to us truths about God. Both the Greeks and the Chinese had developed all kinds of technology and engineering that would have made you think they were on the cusp of discovering science, but they never did. Why?

Well, most of their discoveries came through trial and error. But their religious beliefs blinded them from contemplating matter itself. They believed matter could be used (it is “functional”—used by the gods to get power), but they never thought that matter had been made by God himself. The Greeks believed matter was eternal, chaotic, and unpredictable. Hence, they never thought to study it deeply. This material/functional dualism—which is woven into all other ancient literature—kept them from discovering the wonders of God’s created world. 

It was Christians who believed that God had created matter out of nothing and so assumed that the material world must be imprinted with the rational and beautiful mind of the Creator. They were right. Rodney Stark was a historian at the University of Washington for forty years, and he has written about this in The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success:

This is precisely the conclusion reached by the very distinguished Joseph Needham, the Oxford historian of science who devoted most of his career and many volumes to the history of Chinese technology. Having spent several decades attempting to discover a materialist explanation, Needham concluded that the failure of the Chinese to develop science was due to their religion, to the inability of Chinese intellectuals to believe in the existence of laws of nature because the “conception of a divine celestial lawgiver imposing ordinances on non-human Nature never developed.” (p. 17)

Greek learning was a barrier to the rise of science! It did not lead to science among the Greeks or the Romans, and it stifled intellectual progress in Islam, where it was carefully preserved and studied. (p. 20)

The rise of science was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it is necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles. (p. 22-23)

Our conclusion, then, is that the God of the Bible created all things out of nothing, and Christians for millennia have seen this truth to be the plain reading of Genesis 1. We don’t need the dualistic and pagan accounts of other peoples from the ancient Near East to understand what is plain in God’s Word. He not only gave his creatures function (as Walton says), but Genesis also teaches that he made and sustains our very material being. As Christians, we must be on guard against dualism in its many forms. It plagued the ancient world and it is plaguing our modern one as well. God has made all things well, he rules over every atom, and his kingdom is coming—not just in the spiritual world but to the physical world of the earth.