It Started with the Resurrection, Not Genesis

I live near a church – I’ll keep it nameless to protect the innocent, but yeah, it’s one of those churches – that recently put up a banner that reads, “Genesis: The Gospel from the Beginning.”

Oh boy, where do I start?

Let’s get the usual snark out of my system first. What do I mean by “one of those churches?” I’ll let them answer that themselves since they have these ideas listed in their statement of faith online.

• Biblical inerrancy – win one for the flat-earther geocentric crowd.
• The Bible – not Jesus or the Holy Spirit – is the final authority in faith and life.
• Substitutionary atonement that only goes to those who accept Jesus Christ – sorry if you were born in Japan in the 11^th century.
• Christ’s second coming is imminent – I mean we’ve been saying it’s just around the corner for 2,000 years so someone must be right about this eventually.
• Without faith it is impossible to please God – Ouch! Someone has unresolved daddy issues.
• Baptism should only be by immersion for believers.
• You want to guess what their stance is on LGBTQ rights?
• Sin includes spiritual death which is separation from God (in the interest of fairness I had to include the one I agree with and to see if you’re paying attention).

Suffice to say I disagree with their theology. In fact, there’s probably enough in that list to pique my readers’ curiosity for the rest of the year’s blog posts. But that would imply that my interest is to go toe-to-toe and blow-by-blow with any concept such a church might have. That’s not my concern. In other words, I’m not as concerned with the many areas of disagreement we might have as I am with the reason we disagree.

It comes down to hermeneutics. Your hermeneutic is your method of textual interpretation. Dropping the phrase, “Let me expound upon my personal hermeneutic,” will make you sound fancy and perhaps a bit fussy in your next Bible study group. Of course, I have another definition for hermeneutic as well: making the Bible say whatever you want it to say regardless of what it might be screaming at you. That’s the truth. You, me and anyone attending that church cannot avoid our own private, personal and experience-shaped hermeneutic. That’s why I’m less interested in debating the points above. I think a lot of us decide what we want to agree or disagree with first and then seek to justify those positions. That is just being human. Preaching those ideas or even listing them on a website doesn’t make them remotely correct. That is true of their ideas, it is also true of my ideas.

I frequently drive by that church as it is in my neighborhood and on the way to two highways, and I might get angry at their LGBTQ bigotry but generally I say live and let live. I don’t engage deeply with them and I don’t have evidence they are fighting against our rights so my sisters and brothers in Christ, let’s just leave each other alone.

But then that church put that banner up. “Genesis: The Gospel from the Beginning.” And it put our hermeneutical differences in focus.

I don’t believe that the Gospel started with Genesis. I don’t even believe Genesis contains much actual history anyway, so to say the Gospel started in Genesis is making a pretty bold mythological claim that I don’t that that church intends.

I cannot speak for that church on any level of fairness. But to say it all starts in Genesis would make sense of a wide array of gate-keeping that I don’t think they could’ve even imagined 3,500 years ago. If you think Genesis is some kind of literal history, the literal start of Christianity, then it’s no wonder you might also believe:

• The world started with the creation of two people less than 10,000 years ago despite what all of science and the geological record are telling us. That might explain their stances on LGBTQ marriage and substitutionary atonement. I just don’t think that’s a real story even though I love it as a myth.
• Their idea that without faith you can do nothing to please God makes more sense if you think the Bible’s flood story actually happened. I’m here to tell you that if God literally got so mad that God killed almost everyone off in a flood, then I’ll probably just become a Gnostic anyway. It better not have actually happened that way or the God of the physical world is just a cruel demiurge.
• All those genealogies were intended for historical purposes, not mythmaking and theology. I don’t have time here but it’s a fun rabbit hole to explore if you want to research what some of those names mean or why the geneologies seem to be illogical or conflicted yet the names themselves help tell the stories.

The biggest issue is that if you are married to inerrancy and believe everything in the Bible is historical fact, then you are married to univocality. That means that you believe the Bible speaks through one voice – the voice of God. If that is the case, then it must be inerrant. It must line up. If all of creation started with Genesis then the Gospel had to start in Genesis, too. It seems nakedly apparent that the Bible is quite eclectic and so frequently unclear that mystery and philosophical negotiation must be the point. In other words, the Bible is obviously multivocal and not speaking with one permanent interpretation in mind. How could it when it contradicts itself and even Jesus interprets scripture in different ways?

Genesis – maybe more than any other book of the Bible – proves that the Bible’s stories were compiled through the work of many writers, editors and the legacies of other culture’s mythologies. The editors who compiled Genesis were not shy about putting together different stories next to each other. Genesis seems to disprove univocality.

Note: If you have a little less than an hour and would like an introduction to the Documentary Hypothesis that seems to explain how the Old Testament was compiled from many varying sources, Yale has this course online: RLST 145: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible)

The problem with saying the gospel starts in Genesis is that it just isn’t true. I believe that the Gospel starts with Jesus’ resurrection and everything changes looking backward and forward ever since. Imagine if someone you loved and followed closely as a mentor was brutally killed and then you saw them a few days later. That would change your worldview dramatically and it has absolutely nothing to do with Genesis. We’re so often told that the resurrection is the climax of the story of Israel, and it is, but only because the resurrection is the foundation of our faith that made us reinterpret Israel’s story. Without the resurrection, the story follows a very different path.

The resurrection is the beginning for Christians, not Genesis. It is the validation of Jesus’ life and teaching. It demonstrated God’s power over death and it underlined Jesus’ key ideas: love God and neighbor, live by the Beatitudes, provide food, drink, clothing, extravagant welcome and comfort the imprisoned. These are the seeds of the Gospel. This is my hermeneutic. This is the lens through which I think about all the rest of scripture and all that came before and will come.

The radical fact of the resurrection forced the disciples to reexamine their scriptures. By the way, the Jewish people in that period had wide disagreements on what writings even qualified as scripture and how they should be interpreted. Sound familiar? The disciples weren’t starting from a single place of interpretation, but the resurrection gave them a lens for focusing their scriptures. They saw writings about suffering, service, death, love and victory and started to read Jesus into those words. It helped explain how the resurrection demonstrated God’s ultimate rule over all of creation. Rome wasn’t in charge, death wasn’t final, God holds us all in all.

I cannot and will not try to explain why a local church would say Genesis is the beginning of the Gospel. It was the resurrection that inspired the early Christians to adopt an entirely new way of life. They suddenly decided they weren’t bound by the things they read in Genesis or other parts of the Torah. It didn’t matter what day you worshipped on. It didn’t matter if you ate pork. It didn’t even matter if you washed your hands. It was amazingly shocking to abandon cherished traditions, some which were rooted in Genesis. The reason is that they started living in light of the resurrection, motivated by love of God and neighbor and willing to set aside tradition. Yes, they looked backward to the old texts to find ideas that helped explain and communicate the miracle of the resurrection. But they looked forward even more than they looked backward.

What is our response? We are called to look forward just as the disciples did. We should respect our tradition, but we can only respect that tradition through reinterpretation through the lens of loving God and neighbor. We can reinterpret our tradition considering new discoveries in philosophy, science, anthropology, human psychology and more. Just as our understanding of our place in the universe had to evolve with the invention of the telescope, our support of gay marriage has to evolve with our understanding of human sexuality. Our lives should be committed to taking the resurrection faith forward through love, not blind commitment to the exact words that were written down 3,500 years ago in a language and culture we’ll never fully appreciate. Our life and culture continue to evolve, and Jesus’ model of love keeps us eternally grounded.

Wait, Matt, you believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus Christ? It is at this moment that my progressive friends start to feel uncomfortable. But yes, I believe it actually happened. I’ve experienced the living Jesus in my life, I’ve been blessed and formed by trying to cling to the Christ that lives inside me, I’ve been transformed by love just like Jesus said I would be transformed. And from there, I trust the rest. I think the weird central story of our early faith makes the most sense if it’s actually true. Try taking the living Christ seriously for a month or so and just see if your life changes. But even if you can’t join me there yet, the resurrection is more than just an historical event. It’s the entire shape of our faith. Living “as if,” can form you, inspire you, give you courage and challenge you to move forward in new ways of life. Even if you don’t believe it happened, if it were to happen, wouldn’t it look exactly like this?