Genesis, Theology of

The theology of Genesis can be studied on three levels. The first level of study focuses on its message in and of itself. This is the attempt to determine what the meaning of the book is apart from its place in the larger canon of Scripture, and particularly relates to the question of what it might have meant to its original readers. The second level of study concerns the theology of Genesis within the Old Testament canon. This relates to how the rest of the Old Testament looks back to Genesis and draws upon its theology. The third level of study looks at the theology of Genesis from the New Testament perspective. This relates to how Genesis feeds into the Christian faith.

The first level involves one's critical outlook more than the other two. Scholars who in some fashion accept the documentary hypothesis of Julius Wellhausen are less concerned with the theology of Genesis as a whole than the respective theologies of J, E, D, and P. Other scholars, such as those who follow the tradition criticism of Martin Noth, believe that Genesis is the result of legends and traditions that grew and underwent transformation throughout the centuries of Israel's history. These scholars, too, tend to find diverse messages in the various streams of tradition they claim to uncover and rarely concern themselves with the book as a whole. Some critics have attempted to bridge the gap between critical theory and biblical theology with "canon criticism" (following especially Brevard Childs) and thus have a theology of the whole book of Genesis without abandoning the reigning critical theories. Even so, it is fair to say that those who hold to the view that Genesis is a late work (ca. 450 b.c.) and is the result of competing traditions or schools either have great difficulty describing a theology of Genesis or simply do not consider the concept meaningful.

Scholars who essentially hold to Mosaic authorship contend for a unified message for the book since they believe that it has a unified background and purpose. It is not enough, however, simply to say that Moses wrote Genesis to be in a position to grasp its message. Since the stories in Genesis presumably circulated among the Israelites in Egypt log before Moses, one must ask what significance the stories would have had to them. Another question is how these stories were put together into a coherent package as the Book of Genesis. Assuming that Moses did receive these stories and gave them coherent form, much as Luke did with the stories of Jesus ( Luke 1:1-4 ), one can work through the structure of Genesis to its message for the earliest Israelite community.

The structure of Genesis parallels an ancient Near Eastern model in which there is a prologue, three threats to an ancestor or community of ancestors, and a concluding resolution. A story in this pattern describes how the community has come through a series of dangers in the persons of the ancestors. On the one hand, it is a story of triumph but, on the other hand, it can be rather bleak since the "concluding resolution" tends to be semitragic in this pattern. The main purpose of this kind of story is to tell the community of descendants how they came to be in the situation in which they now find themselves. Genesis has the following structure:

The "Primeval History" ( Gen 1:1-11:26 ) sets the stage for the whole of the book. It tells how humanity began in paradise and yet lost its hold on the tree of life through disobedience. It explains how the world we live in came to be. This concerns not only the creation of the physical universe and living things, but also the origin of both human evil and of the diverse, competing nations of the present world order. This sets the stage for the emergence of Israel among the nations.