Jaki on Genesis

I've just re-read Stanley Jaki's article "The Sabbath-Rest of the Maker of All" (Asbury Theological Journal v. 50 n. 1 Spring 1995). In an essay that follows Augustine in seeing the creation account in Genesis 1 as providing the theological setting for the sabbath, Jaki, makes some interesting remarks on a number of matters that I'd like to share.

Firstly Jaki separates Genesis 1 from Enuma elish:

"The usual reason for assigning Genesis 1 to post-Exilic times is its alleged dependence on Enuma elish..." [Jaki goes on to challenge that notion; In distinction to Enuma elish,]

“In Genesis 1 there is no trace of any butchery, any rivalry or any battle. No Leviathan there, no hint of a Chaoskamph—in short, no evidence of any exertion on God’s part. God, in Genesis 1, produces everything with an ease which is not disturbed by any competition or difficulty...Here too the difference between Genesis 1 and Enuma elish is nothing short of monumental. The Babylonian story is neither structured on a seven-day week, nor does it come to an end with a rest...Last but not least, in the Babylonian story humans are produced only for the purpose of providing the gods with slaves...

"After two thousand years of Christian theological reflection, the word creation can emphatically mean only creation out of nothing...This phrase was indeed formulated in early Christian times because it was quickly realized that what Christians meant by creation differed enormously from the “creation” performed by Plato’s demiourgos, let alone from what was on hand in crassly emanationists, pantheistic cosmogonies. In all these the word creare (or its synonyms) could be used, but only insofar as it meant mere growth...

"In Genesis 1 the stating of totality as the object of God’s work hinges above all on the use of that stylistic device. It is free from that conceptual obfuscation which is the hallmark of explaining Genesis 1 in terms of myths and legends, both left studiedly undefined. It was not without good reason that Alfred Loisy, a modernist, who would have gladly found in Genesis 1 a legend, called it the most scholastic treatise in the entire Bible...

"Only by doing grave injustgice to the very realistic diction of Genesis 1 could one assume that the firmament and the upper waters were not real for the author of Genesis 1...

"Gunkel failed to be specific on the crucial question: What is to be meant by legend and how can it be used in coping with the very realist parlance of the author of Genesis 1 about the external universe?...The question about the specific nature of a legend or myth was not, for instance, answered in Danielou’s handwaving that the author of Genesis 1 “used his material freely.” In fact, the systematic approach of that author as outlined above, indicates that he did not feel at all free as to what to say and how to proceed...

"The direction is not that very dubious one which is tied to the alleged similarity of Genesis 1 with Enuma elish...

"Genesis 1 would lose much of the effectiveness of its essentially moral message, given in terms of God as a role model for observing the Sabbath, if one were to take lightly the realism of its worldview...The all, the Universe writ large, remains even in this scientific age the object of an inference, and not a strictly verifiable scientific object...

"More recent theological reflections on the resurrection of Christ contain indeed renewed awareness of its ties to the first creation, brought to a close by God’s resting on the seventh day." "

Jaki sees the concrete and realist language of Genesis 1 separating it from possible categorisation as myth or legend. He sees the text as coming from an author who meant what he said. So how does he appreciate Genesis 1? As I mentioned at the start, he follows Augustine and sees the text as providing the theology of Sabbath. It is, for him, a 'parable'.

But Genesis 1 is in no way parabolic. Parables go from the well known, the prosaic shared experience of us all, to overturn our expectations and make a moral, spiritual or theological point; usually one that sets our preconceptions on their heads. They are rooted in the commonplace and take us elsewhere. But there is no shared experience or commonplace in Genesis 1. For the author it is the only information we have about creation. There is no prior referant that we could agree to make it even faintly a parable using the creation to teach us about something else.

Jaki rules out Genesis 1 as having any cosmogogical or biogogical import; but this, I think is its very purpose. Genesis 1 teaches us a number of things along the way, too. But only because it sets out what really happened. (There is a philosophical matter here that arrests us, standing in a basically Platonic tradition: that is, in 'biblical realism' the details matter. In Plato it is the 'idea' behind the details that matter) Certainly it provides a model of the rhythm of work and rest; it shows us that the creation left God's hand 'very good' and not subject to dissolution. The fall was man's not God's. God is therefore not the author of sin.

Genesis 1 also shows us a realist order in the creation. Creation does not spring magically from words that are disconnected from reality like a fairytale spell. God speaks and his words produce the result congruent with their grammatical meaning, in a sequenece that instructs us as to order and provides, I suspect, clues as to the structuring of the cosmos (not scientifically: those details are left for us; but historically. But the history: the events that occured, do provide, inevitably, information about our physical world). The account also gives us our home as something not alien to us, but provided for us, again, from the hand of the loving God. It profoundly gives us the setting for the drama of salvation. As home, it is not from an intermediary, it is not disconnected from God, as theistic evolution must hold (that is God set it up in deist fashion and walked away: this very serious objection to TE remains to be exposed and criticised, IMO); and contra paganism, it tells us that the material is not 'bad' but part of 'very good'. It overturns the family of gnostic cosmogonies which push us away from God.