Since teaching in Joburg I have developed a tremendous interest in what happened to the faith of the world pre-Jesus. As a result today I decided to do a slow meander through the Old Testament, so slow in fact, that I’m only on chapter two of Genesis.
Before I comment on my findings I would like to lay down a few principles of communication and history- making that I learnt about and subsequently lectured at UCT. This may be old hat for some but has given me a completely new perspective on things in relation to the Bible.
Prior to the invention of the alphabet and literacy human beings had no concrete form of storing information and history, everything we knew or remembered was documented through the system of orality. We told stories. There are still many cultures in the world today that practice a form of remembering through storytelling. If lessons were to be learnt we told them through fables with morals. Even Jesus taught important philosophies through parables. They were suited to his audience as they were culturally and socially appropriate to that particular society at that particular time. Today when we learn about Jesus’ teachings we have to translate the social milieu of the time into something that is socially applicable to us. Take ‘The Good Samaritan’ as an example. I suppose in contemporary society we could translate the fable into ‘The Good Tsotsi’. Basically it was about a guy who wouldn’t normally be seen as someone who would go the extra mile for someone but does so despite ones initial judgement of him. We would not know this, however, if the concept of a Samaritan was not translated into the way we perceive things. It’s all about context.
The next important thing about orality is the structure with which stories are learnt. The only reason why I remember ‘The Three Little Pigs’ is because there are hairs on a chinny chin chin and a lot of huffing and puffing. (Sounds like laser hair removal if you ask me). In the same way we remember Little Red Riding Hood and her wolf because there’s a lot of ‘my what big...you have’. (I think a man wrote this story). The stories we remember best are the ones with rhythm and repetition. Reading a bed time story is easy – one gets into the rhythm of it, even if it’s the first time we read it we come to know what’s coming next as a result of the rhythm of the story. So too does repetition spur the story on and it also makes the story that much more difficult to forget.
Traditional Zulu story telling takes rhythm and repetition to the next level. Listening to a Zulu story is like having the 3D version of the storytelling world. The story becomes an auditory treat where the words echo the noises they make and the soundscape for an entire world becomes accessible through the words that describe it.
Obviously this form of historical documentation, as entertaining as it is, has some serious flaws. Much like an elongated form of broken down telephones one cannot fully rely on all the facts being correct. To illustrate my point - I recently read Max Du Preez’s ‘Of Warriors, Lovers and Prophets’. In it is a story about Shaka Zulu. What Du Preez does is he combines the popular hero folklore with historical evidence from Shaka’s time. The emerging figure of Shaka comes to be somewhat more complex than the statue of him that once stood (briefly) at King Shaka Airport. We see an abused child, teased about his small penis who then later would take baths in front of everyone to prove his manhood, a man who did not produce an heir, was obsessed with his mother and who surrounded himself with strong young men. Interesting how these facts are somewhat glossed over by overzealous Zulus. We all choose to do this, in remembering someone we choose not to remember the bad, I think it’s quite an endearing human quality – it doesn’t however, bode well for the history books.
At this point you may be asking what this has to do with my reading of Genesis chapter one. I have for a long time (with many other people) suspected that the creation story doesn’t really match up. I have absolutely no doubt that God could create the entire universe in a week. It’s almost a comforting thought – He took a week to create the universe and He took nine months to make me, flip I’m special. Fossils, however, don’t lie. Human beings lie but the bones of human beings don’t.
I do believe in evolution, its very hard not to and although some Christians think it is blasphemy to not believe every literal inch of the Bible I think we need to start seeing things from a different perspective. Imagine trying to explain how to use a cell phone to your great great grandmother. Impossible. Her concept of technology would be limited to fixing a butter churn. Heck it’s been hard enough to get my Dad to appreciate the use of the computer, and that is limited to internet banking (as long as my Mom logs on and gets it onto the right page). Our brains are constantly evolving; we are becoming increasingly more capable of assimilating and accepting new knowledge. So with this in mind can we try and think of a way to explain evolution to a nomadic tribe in Israel a couple of thousands of years ago? Tricky isn’t it? I think we would lose them at ‘amoeba’. So what does God do, just as His son would do a couple of thousand years later? He turns His tremendous creation story that happened over millennia into a seven day affair because that was all that the people at that time could understand.
My Mom told me when I was little that babies were made when two people hold each other very closely and a seed of love is planted. Years later when I discovered the nasty truth I was so grateful to my Mom, to this day my vision of sex is not skewed by some weird biological happening, I understand why sex was created and this is because I learnt about it at the appropriate time and in the appropriate frame of mind.. God, like my Mom, is a parent, The Ultimate Parent. He will not burden us with things that we are incapable of understanding or dealing with.
I think Jesus is an excellent example of this. His teachings were revolutionary in his time – he said we should love everybody. A fairly simple philosophy for us now but in the days when Jews, gentiles and various sundry groupings were fixated on a tribal philosophy that extended religion only to those with a genetic birthright to that religion one can see how radical Jesus’ teachings were. God used the example of Jesus to evolve our thinking about Him, perhaps some of us weren’t ready for this, we felt safer in the archaic traditions and practices of our past, but for those who saw the gift of Jesus’ life for what it was it meant we were finally free from the burden of having to conduct a relationship with God that had long lost its potency. Jesus revealed our God who is alive and hip, who is found in the beating heart and not in some old ancient law written by people thousands of years ago.
So what, you may ask, does this have to do with rhythm and repetition? Have a look at Genesis chapter one, you will notice an interesting pattern – after each day of creation something to this effect will be said – ‘And there was evening, and there was morning – the first day...And there was evening, and there was morning – the second day.’ And so on. There is also a lot of ‘And God said’. Seven times to be exact. Quite a lot of rhythm and repetition here, smells dangerously like a story from the oral tradition. When one asks a child to recount their day to you one gets a lot of ‘and then....and then...and then.’ It helps us to remember things, it establishes a rhythm for us to follow. Why can’t this be the same for the creation story? Could it not be that the story was condensed into a bite size page of the Bible in order for a particular society, at a particular time in history to be able, with the limited scientific capacities they had, to understand our God, a God whose works are to this day beyond human comprehension.
Then of course we have the whole apple debate. Do human beings really think that the ultimate downward spiral of the human race was caused by a fruit, and that it was the woman’s fault? Yes, one may argue that the serpent tempted Adam away from the path of God by way of Eve but I’m not sure I’m entirely confident about this one. Ultimately human kind needed a simple story to explain why we have allowed ourselves to be tempted into committing acts of evil which have resulted in the creation of the world that we currently live in and what better way for man to control women than to blame everything on her? God created a heavenly world for us, a world where humans respected nature, where man and woman had a relationship of mutual dependence and respect and where sin did not exist. (Here in your mind I would like you to have a flash back to the bushman family pre-coke bottle arrival in the delightful flick, ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’). We can still live as God intended us to live, our bad choices as a species, however, have made it increasingly difficult for us to do this. Lets be honest, almost every thing man has ever invented has come to be used as a weapon of man’s destruction. God gave us the choice – we could choose to eat the fruit, to evolve, to gain knowledge but He knew that it would ultimately lead to our own destruction. The more we evolve the further away from God we drift.
So there it is – my own theory of evolution and creation with a bit of storytelling thrown in. If you have managed to get this far in my long diatribe I thank you, its been one of those stewing for a while and today I feel I got affirmation that my hypothesis is correct – sometimes God uses stories to explain things that are greater than our minds have capacity to understand and sometimes human beings create stories to try and understand the greatness of God. As human beings become increasingly more scientific, rational and inventive it is a pity that we do not allow our imagination, wonder and awe of God’s greatness to develop too. If we could learn to celebrate God’s creation and the many human beings who form a part of it surely we would be able to then find our way back to the garden?
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