As summarised here, Genesis 1 describes seven days of creation:

• in the beginning – God started creation
• the first day – light was created
• the second day – the sky was created
• the third day – dry land, seas, plants and trees were created
• the fourth day – the Sun, Moon and stars were created
• the fifth day – creatures that live in the sea and creatures that fly were created
• the sixth day – animals that live on the land and finally humans, made in the image of God were created
• by day seven – God finished his work of creation and rested, making the seventh day a special holy day.

There’s a very real danger, I’m sure, of paying so much attention to theoretical questions about the origin of the cosmos that we neglect the much more practical ones about what it means to live as stewards of creation in the here-and-now.  But the two things are related, and questions of origin do at least bring cosmology and theology into speaking distance with one another.  And, in any case, Scripture itself begins with an account of the origin of the cosmos and so we have good warrant for giving it some air-time.

Christians (and others) continue to be unsure about how to read the accounts of creation in Genesis.  I’d like to set out the main options that are available for those who have a high regard for the inspiration and authority of the Bible.

One thing is clear: whatever sceptics may say about the early chapters of Genesis, they were regarded by Jesus and the early church as just as inspired and authoritative as any other part of the Bible (see Mt 19:4-6; Jn 1:1; 1 Cor 15:45, 47; 2 Cor 4:6; Eph 5:31; Jas 3:9; 2 Pet 3:5-6; Rev 22:2).  Indeed, all Christians would agree that Genesis 1-3 gives us the basis for understanding the universe as created by God.  But beyond that general agreement there is much difference of interpretation.

Here’s an overview:

(Source)

Young earth creationists (YCs) interpret the days as 24-hour, consecutive periods for reasons such as the following:

1. The days in Gn 1 are consecutively numbered and comprised of an “evening and morning.”
2. Exodus 20:8–11 commands a literal week of six days of work and one day of rest based on God’s original creation/rest week. The two weeks would seem, then, to be of equal duration.
3. According to Rom 5:12, “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin,” but old-earth creationism would have animal death entering the world before the sin of Adam and Eve.

Old earth creationists (OCs) argue against 24-hour creation days for reasons such as these:

1. ‘The Hebrew word for “day” (yom) is used in different ways in the creation account. For instance, Gn 1:5 refers yom only to daytime (daylight), not night-time. Also, Gn 2:4, literally translated, speaks of “the yom that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”
2. God’s rest on the seventh “day” has no evening and morning (Gn 2:2–3), and Heb 4:3–11 portrays this same Sabbath as continuing to the present time.
3. Adam could not have named all the birds and animals in 24 hours according to Gn 2.’

(Apologetics Study Bible)

A number of options fall under these main headings:-

1. Seven-Day Creationism

The world was created in series of 24-hour days a few thousand years ago.

This may incorporate a ‘flood geology’ theory, according to which the geological record is the result of the Noahanic flood.  This was popularised by Whitcomb and Morris in their book The Genesis Flood.

This view sees Gen 1-3 as literal history, describing how the Universe was created over a seven-day period just a few thousand years ago.  It is a view promoted by the American Institute for Creation Research and the British Creation Resources Trust.  Its approach to understanding the text of Scripture is straightforward.  However, its understanding of science is not straightforward, since the generally accepted view is that the universe is at least 12 billion years old.  One attempt to reconcile the supposed biblical date with the scientific data is to suppose that God created the universe very recently, but with the appearance of extreme antiquity.  Another approach is to argue that scientists has got their dates completely wrong and that scientific data itself indicates that the earth is young.

James B. Jordan makes a forthright, uncompromising attempt to answer the ahistorical case:

First, it is said that the creation of light on the first day contradicts the creation of the sun on the fourth. This argument is frankly ridiculous, since the Bible everywhere presents the Shekinah light of God as the archetype of which the sun is but a copy. Clearly, the light that was “let be” on the first day was the light of the Spirit. There is absolutely no Biblical ground for asserting a conflict between day 1 and day 4.

Second, it is said that all the plants were made on the third day, while at the time Adam was created there were still plants to be made. Once again, this contradiction is pure illusion. Genesis 1 very carefully states only that grain plants and fruiting trees were made on the third day. Genesis 2:5 states that at the time Adam was created certain other plants had not yet been created, and that the grain plants had not yet sprouted ears of grain. There is no contradiction in the text; only in the imaginations of certain expositors.

Third, it is said that the sixth day involves too much activity for one mere day. This is preposterous and hardly worthy of attention. All the events could easily have been finished by noon.

Fourth, it is said that the sabbath day is unending. Well, clearly it both ended in one sense and did not end in another. In any event, this has nothing to do with the lengths and character of the other days, which are specified as having mornings and evenings.

Finally, it is asserted that the firmament of the second day must be a hard shell over the earth, which we now know does not exist, and thus must be symbolic. This assertion ignores the facts (a) that a firmament in Hebrew is not always a hard shell, and (b) that the Bible often speaks of the firmament as a chamber as well as a layer, which comports perfectly with the statement that on day 4 God placed the sun, moon, planets, and stars within the firmament chamber. While some ancient people believed that the stars were fixed on a hard shell, they knew full well that the sun, moon, and planets were not, because of their independent movement. They knew, in other words, that the firmament had depth.

This understanding of Genesis 1-3 is open to a number of objections:

(a) there are indications within the text itself that it should be read figuratively rather than literalistically;

(b) this position assumes that creation must have been instantaneous, rather than occuring over an extended period; but the biblical text does not require this;

(c) the notion that God created the universe with an apparent age seems to involve a huge deception; and those biblical passages that speak of nature’s witness to God (e.g. Psa 19:1; Acts 17:22-31) are called into question;

(d) the argument that modern science has made such a series of blunders about the nature and origin of the universe denies the work of so many scientists – both Christian and non-Christian – whose results have been tried and tested by the scientific community.  It is easy to raise doubts about this or that piece of scientific evidence, but it is quite another matter to question the whole edifice.

2. The ‘ideal time’ view

The world was created quite recently, but features such as tree-rings, navels, and rock strata would already be present at the moment of creation, suggesting an extreme apparent age.

3. The ‘local creation’ view

Gen 1 refers to a remodelling of a small part of the earth. Geology accounts for the history of the world, while Gen 1 is the record of the re-creation of a certain territory.

4. The ‘Gap’ Theory

There is a long gap between Gen 1:1 (the original creation) and Gen 1:2 (a refashioning of the earth in six literal days).

According to Ramm (The Christian View of Science and Scripture), this theory developed as an attempt to reconcile the geological record (which suggests that the world is millions of years old) with the biblical data (which seems to point to a young earth).

This theory was championed by Thomas Chalmers, G.H. Pember, C.I. Scofield and Harry Rimmer.

Verse 1, it is suggested, refers to the original creation, which could have taken place billions of years ago.  But the earth ‘became’ formless and void due to the ruin and destruction brought about by the fall of Satan and God’s subsequent judgment of him and his associates.  Over a period of many millions of years geological changes took place which resulted in the record we have today.  The rest of Gen 1 is an account, not of creation, but of re-creation. or re-fashioning.  This took place over six literal 24-hour days, around 4000 BC.

According to this theory:

(a) The words underlying ‘without form and void’ refer to something that had been a a good state of repair (cf. Isa 45:18) but is now ruined.  This ruin was due to divine judgment.

(b) The word underlying ‘and’ in v2 should be translated ‘but’; ‘was’ should be translated ‘became’.

(c) The ‘gap’ between v1 and v2 allows plenty of time for the development of the geological record.  The fossil record shows evidence of disease, violence and death – indications of sin.  Jer 4:23-26 suggest the existence of pre-Adamite human beings in the original creation; the lack of human fossil remains may be due (according to Pember) to the earth swallowing them up (as with the sons of Korah in Num 16).

The main objections to this view are,

(a) most scholars do not think that ‘but’ and ‘became’ are allowable translations in verse 2.  They are, at best, secondary meanings and it is perilous to base an entire interpretative scheme on such secondary meanings.

 

(b) there is little support in the rest of Scripture for the account of the fall of Satan required by this view.

5. The ‘Age-Day’ View

The word ‘day’ (yom) is used figuratively to mean an indefinite period of time, as in Gen 2:4.  Each epoch is characterised by a distinctive creative act, the order of which corresponds quite closely to the scientific record.

According to this view, the ‘days’ of Genesis 1 are not 24-hours days at all, but much more extended periods of time.  It is then argued that Genesis 1 and the fossil record give a concordant view of the order of the creation events.

But,

(a) there is little evidence in the text itself that the writer was using the word ‘day’ in this way.  After all, he refers to ‘evening and morning’, and places the whole sequence in the context of a week; and

(b) there are disagreements between the text and the fossil record as to the order of creative acts – for example, in Genesis the tress appear before marine creatures, and evening and morning before the Sun and the Moon.

6. Days of Revelation, not Creation

This view, popularised by P.J. Wiseman, maintains that Genesis presents, not an account of creation itself, but of how God revealed creation to Adam.  But Genesis 1:1 does not say that ‘God made known the heavens and the earth’, but that he ‘made the heavens and the earth’.

7. Literary Approaches

Those adopting a literary interpretation note that the cosmos has the appearance of great antiquity, that the phrase ‘morning and evening’ seems inconsistent with the ‘day-age’ theory, and that the gap, postulated by some, between the verse two verses of the chapter is not apparent from the text itself.  The ‘days’ of creation , then, constitute a literary framework, which is:

‘designed to teach that God alone is the creator of an orderly universe, and to call upon human beings made in the image of the creator God to reflect God’s creative activity in their own pattern of labor. (Gen 2:2; Ex 31:17).’

(New Geneva Study Bible)

This approach begins by asking what kind of literature Gen 1 actually is.  There are indications that the text is theological and polemic in nature, rather than scientific and descriptive.  For example, on the seventh day book of Revelation picks up the imagery of Genesis (e.g. ‘serpent’, ‘tree of life’) in a way that suggests that it is being understood figuratively.  Then again, the structure of Gen 1 makes good logical sense but less good chronological sense.  Once more, there are indications that Gen 1 reflects a liturgical form and hat it was intended for use in worship; it is, in fact, more like poetry or hymn than like scientific history.  ‘It is a meditation on the work of creation so that we can understand that the creation is related to God.’

statement of theology, it is a hymn of praise to the Creator through whom and for whom all things exist.’ (NBC)

As evidence of the strongly literal nature of this chapter, Carol Hill notes the careful and repeated (and obviously intentional) use of the numbers 7 and 3:

‘The first stanza of Genesis has seven (7 × 1) Hebrew words in it, and the second stanza has fourteen (7 × 2) words.  After the introductory stanza, the section is divided into seven paragraphs, each of which pertains to one of the seven days. Each of the three nouns that occur in the first stanza (“God,” “heavens,” and “earth”) is repeated throughout the chapter a multiple of seven times: “God” occurs thirty-five (7 × 5) times, “earth” is found twenty-one (7 × 3) times, and “heavens” appears twenty-one (7 × 3) times. Each stanza after the first contains three pronouncements that emphasize God’s concern for man’s welfare (three being the number of emphasis), namely the phrases “Let us make man,” “Be fruitful and multiply,” and “Behold I have given you every plant yielding seed.” Thus, there is a series of seven corresponding dicta of triads (threes). The terms “light” and “day” are found seven times in the first stanza, and there are seven references to “light” in the fourth (parallel) stanza. “Water” is mentioned seven times in stanzas two and three; “beasts” seven times in parallel stanzas five and six; and the expression “it was good” appears six times—the seventh time “very good” for emphasis.’

(A Worldview Approach to Creation and Science)

Recognising Genesis 1 as primarily poetic does not turn it into a fable with no truth content or revelatory purpose.  Real events can be presented an a symbolic way, just as in Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants, Mt 21:33-41.  Gen 1 is true, but its true is theological rather than scientific.  Galileo famously said, “The Bible does not tell us how the heavens go but how to go to heaven.”

If Genesis 1 had been written as a scientific text then, of course, few people would be able to understand it.  Moreover, the scientific picture is constantly being modified, and if scientific language were used in Genesis then it would quickly have gone out of date.  In Genesis, God communicates truth to all peoples in all ages.

With a robust understanding of Scripture and of science we can with confidence bring God’s two books together – the book of his Word and the book of his works.  Since God is the author of both, we need not fear the truth in either, nor suspect that any contradiction will be found between then.  On the contrary, they complement one another, so that our understanding of one sheds light on our understanding of the other.

For Grudem (Systematic Theology, 2nd ed.), the strongest argument against a literary framework view is that:

‘the whole of Genesis 1 strongly suggests not just a literary framework but a chronological sequence of events.’

Bibliography

In addition to the works cited above, I have consulted:

Henri Blocher, In the Beginning.

David Wilkinson, The Message of Creation (IVP).  Wilkinson is both a scientist and a theologian.  He is a Methodist minister and is currently Principal of St John’s College, Durham.