If you have ever wondered why Adventist thinkers insist on reading the early chapters of Genesis as history, I recommend that you read He Spoke and It Was. In this well-researched book, editor Gerald Klingbeil engages in conversation with select Adventist thinkers—scientists, theologians, and biblical scholars—to investigate how the biblical account of creation influenced the composition of virtually all genres in the Old Testament (OT). This is not a small accomplishment, since the Genesis account of creation plays a foundational role in Christian theology in general and in Adventist theology in particular.
In relation to Adventism, I observed that the reason Adventist thinkers have insisted on approaching Genesis as history is often misunderstood. Mark Noll, for example, claims that the reason Adventist thinkers have taken this approach is that they “wanted to show that the sacred writings of Adventistfounder Ellen G. White . . . could provide a framework for studying the history of the earth.”1 Ronald Numbers suggests that Adventist thinkers have taken this approach because they want to strengthen biblical support for “their distinctive Sabbath doctrine.”2 While it is difficult to deny that there is some truth to these claims, I find it odd that neither Noll nor Numbers took time to mention the primary reason Adventists insist on interpreting early Genesis as history. The primary reason is the undeniable theological dependence of the wisdom literature, the prophetic books, the gospel, and biblical eschatology on the biblical account of creation.
This is not a topic that can be easily dismissed. In fact, the recognition of this influence is theologically essential to Christianity, because virtually all genres in the OT contain information used to identify Jesus as the promised Messiah. Consequently, if the OT is built upon the premise that early Genesis contains the record of a historical event, but this premise is denied to favor an evolutionary approach to origins, then the theological foundation of the OT books used to validate the claim that Christ is the Messiah is wobbly and its claims untenable.
To address challenges such as this, the authors of He Spoke and It Was offer the reader a variety of biblical and theological arguments that support the historicity of the creation account in Genesis and show how biblical authors have built upon this premise. For example, they argue that biblical eschatology is undeniably contingent on biblical protology. In other words, “Scripture is able to speak about the end of the world and humanity only because God is the Creator of that world and humanity” (13). This approach to protology and eschatology alone should raise concerns about Christian scholars who deny the historicity of the Genesis account of creation or who categorize the Genesis account as issuing from ancient Near East (ANE) mythology. In fact, He Spoke and It Was disputes the idea that Hebrew cosmology is fundamentally based on the ANE cosmology. In the book the authors show that this notion appeared in the late nineteenth century but that it “has been virtually abandoned by subsequent scholarship” (25). One of the reasons for this abandonment is that scholars are coming to the realization that the Genesis account of creation does not mirror ANE mythology. The Genesis account is “deconstructing the alternative theories and speculation of origins available in the ancient Near East” (170) instead.
He Spoke and It Was is a wellcrafted piece of scholarly literature that strengthens the argument in favor of the biblical approach to origins. The book shows that the biblical account of creation is an inseparable theological component of virtually all genres in the OT. All in all, this book is a must read for laypersons, pastors, and scholars who want to be in sync with those currently dialoguing about origins.
1 Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 189.
2 Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists, 1st ed. (New York, NY: A. A. Knopf, 1992), 74.
