Genesis for Everyone, Part 1 Quotes

“Genesis supplements “created in God’s image” with the affirmation that God thus made humanity “male and female.” Women and men together comprise this image. The statement is an extraordinary one in this opening chapter of Genesis, written in a patriarchal culture. One might wonder whether the author of Genesis saw the implications of this declaration. Certainly generation after generation of Christians have not seen it. We have often talked and behaved as if the male was the normal and full form of a human being, with the female a deviant and slightly inferior form. But both male and female belong to the image. You have the image of God represented in humanity only when you have both men and women there. When women are not present and involved in God’s work in the world (and in the church), the image of God is not present.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“It is said that the difference between God and us is that God never thinks he is us. Genesis suggests some nuancing of that insight. God doesn’t mind sharing with us the divine life and the divine image and thus the divine responsibility for the world, and eventually God will become one of us.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“I am told there are readers of Genesis who argue the following: If evolution is true, there was no Adam and Eve. If there was no Adam and Eve, there was no fall. If there was no fall, we didn’t need Jesus to save us. But this argument has reversed things. In reality, we know we needed Jesus to save us, and we recognize the way Genesis describes our predicament as human beings. We know we have not realized our vocation to take the world to its destiny and serve the earth; we know there is something wrong with the world in its violence; we know there is something wrong with our relationships with one another, especially relationships between men and women and between parents and children; and we know there is something wrong with our relationship with God. We also know we die, so we know we need Jesus to save us. The question Genesis handles is, Was all that a series of problems built into humanity when it came intoexistence? The answer is no. God did not create us that way. There was a point when humanity had to choose whether it wanted to go God’s way, and it chose not to. The Adam-and-Eve story gives us a parabolic account of that. They ignored the red light and crashed the train. God brought the first human beings into existence with their vocation, and they turned away from it. That is true whether or not you believe that the theory of evolution helps us understand how God brought them into existence.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“One question such events provoke is “What kind of God allows this to happen?” Another question we might ask is, “What kind of creatures are human beings that we should cause and allow this to happen?”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“the order in which Genesis reports on God and Noah is significant. First it tells us Noah found grace with God. Then it tells us Noah was a person of faithfulness and integrity, and someone who walked about with God like Enoch. Then it tells us how God gave Noah instructions for surviving the coming destruction. Messing with any aspect of the order in this story messes up the theology. Noah is indeed a person of faithfulness and unique integrity, but that somehow follows from God’s grace rather than being its cause. There is a link between grace and faithfulness or integrity, but the link is that grace generates faithfulness and integrity, not the other way around. And if faithfulness and integrity had not followed from finding grace, then the story would have miscarried; God would have had to think again. God exempts Noah from the destruction and makes him the head of a new humanity because Noah turns out to be an unexpected exception to that general rule that “all the inclinations of the plans of people’s heart’s was only wrong, all the time”; but that happens only because Noah found grace or grace found Noah.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“We have noted thatthe two creation stories contained no pointers toward male “headship” in the sense that men or husbands are supposed to exercise authority or leadership over women or wives. But the audience of Genesis knew that patriarchy was a reality of life. Genesis here tells them how this came to be. Male authority or domination was not God’s design but a consequence of a breakdown in relationship between humanity and God, between humanity and the animal world, and between human beings and one another. From now on, the Bible will assume the reality of patriarchy and of male headship, but it begins by noting that this came about only as a result of those various breakdowns of relationship.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“It is as creatures made jointly in God’s image that women and men together have the task of mastering the earth. In Genesis 1 there is a structure of authority. God is the ultimate authority. God then delegates authority over creation to humanity, and women and men together are the means of exercising it. There is no suggestion in the creation stories that God designed the world to be a place where any human beings exercised authority over any others. There was no authority to be exercised by men over women, or husbands over wives;”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“God is a different league of person from us, but God is a person like us, not an abstract force or a principle. So despite the huge difference, Genesis says we are made in God’s image. Human beings are the kind of entity God would be if God were earthly. God could hardly have become a horse; horses were not made in God’s image. Human beings were made God-like, so it was not so unnatural for God to become a human being. It is this fact that makes it possible for God sometimes to appear in human form in the Old Testament, and it eventually makes possible, even makes natural, God’s incarnation in Christ. In this sense it was not logically difficult for God to become a human being although it involved some sacrifice.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“For Abraham, therefore, some poignancy attaches to his tour of the land. He will look around but will do so as someone who will always be an alien. Possession lies in the future. He thereby illustrates a consistent feature of the life of the people of God. We live in the present and in the future. (We live in the past, too, recalling what God did in redeeming us; but that is another story.) It is possible to live wholly in the present, without having expectations for the future. In one sense, Abraham had to do that; he was never more than an alien in the country. But God invites him not to consider himself in isolation from what is going to happen. He is part of a big project God is undertaking. It will not come to fruition in his day, but he is part of it.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“maybe an implication of Noah’s offering was, “Now that it’s all over, give us your blessing; please don’t do it again.” God’s undertaking is then an answer to that prayer. If this is so, it reminds us of another facet of the importance of our worship and prayer. Sometimes God’s acts of grace and mercy are a response to prayer. If we don’t pray, the world may miss some acts of grace and mercy. As James 4 frighteningly puts it, “You don’t have because you don’t ask.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“So that is why grace found Noah. Not surprisingly the way this worked was evidently the same as the way God’s grace works elsewhere in Scripture. There is never any basis we can find in ourselves for God’s showing grace to us. It would not then be grace. If that seems unfair, then yes, it is unfair, but it fits with the rest of the way life works. God does not give everyone equal gifts, capacities, and lengths of life. God did not decide to make humanity equal. Life is not fair. The priority in God’s mind is not fairness but how we serve God and serve other people with the gifts, capacities, and lengths of life that God gives us.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“God can of course look in someone’s mind to discover what he is thinking, or look into the future to discover what she will do, but here and elsewhere the Old Testament implies that God does not always do that. God waits to see what will happen. Perhaps it implies a kind of respect for human beings, a desire to let them make their decisions and not mess with their minds, and a desire for a realtime relationship. If God always worked out ahead of time whatwe would do, and knew it before we did, it would introduce an element of phoniness into the relationship. But that’s just my guess; the Bible makes clear only the fact of God’s not knowing things ahead of time, not the rationale.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16