Chris,

I sympathize with your frustration at how inerrantists and creationists have taken Genesis 1 hostage in ideological warfare. I also resonate with your idea of looking to the Biblical creation story as creative inspiration. A good beginning corrupted by evil, a protagonist setting out on the long road to redemption – many a story owes a debt to Genesis. These narratives so deeply shape our outlook on life that it’s often hard to imagine stories not following the Scriptural trajectories. The influence extends beyond our literature to our entire culture, as the narrator in Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being observes:

Behind all European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.

Like you, I’ve found myself drawn to Genesis 1 for its connections with contemporary life – what you’ve called “eighth day” considerations. During the active phase of the “True Myth” thread I put forward an alternative exegesis of the text. Implicit in that exegesis is an emphasis on the “creatorly praxis” that God exercised while creating the universe. Made in the image and likeness of the Genesis 1 Creator, we who share the Judeo-Christian heritage and the Western tradition of innovation owe a large debt to the Biblical Creator’s “artistic technique”:

The creative interval. A work of creation doesn’t take shape instantaneously (as the Greeks would have it), nor is it a continuous unfolding without beginning or end (as in Eastern traditions). In Genesis 1 the work begins on day one and ends on day six – a delimited duration in time set aside specifically for creating.The formless void. It’s not a chaos to be avoided (as in Greek and pagan traditions), but rather an opening, a place of pure potential. The creator immerses himself in the void and shapes a creation from inside it. Postmodernists like Derrida and Badiou and Zizek have been rehabilitating the void as a creative space.In the midst. The Genesis 1 Creator doesn’t stand apart from the creation like some perfect Deist. Neither does he give birth to a creation that is essentially an emanation of himself, like a pagan sky father or earth mother. Instead he jumps into the void, rolls his sleeves up, and sets to work.

Separate and name. Repeatedly the Creator speaks the name of something (light, seas, heavens, etc.) and separates it from that which it is not (light from darkness, waters above from waters below, etc.). This systematic conceptual-linguistic method has always guided Western thought, even if it is presently derided as the result of the modern mind’s overdeveloped left hemisphere.

Goodness. Repeatedly the Creator looks at what he’s just made and sees that it’s good. He isn’t satisfied merely to adapt, or to express his inner passion, or to satisfy the customer. The emphasis on excellence as its own reward – not just morally but also aesthetically – is another hallmark of Biblical creative praxis.

Creating wholes. The Creator doesn’t just crank out a string of artifacts; he creates a whole universe. Every work of art and literature, every theological system and scientific theory, every farm and village – the universe is riddled with man-made mini-universes that make sense of and impose order on a whole array of things.

Creation as a real possibility. The idea of consciously shaping something that wouldn’t have come into being without intelligence and imagination and will, something that wouldn’t have evolved on its own: this is a distinctly Biblical idea. It’s been with us from the beginning, and it’s served us well over the millennia.

Image and likeness. It’s certainly consistent with the flow of Genesis 1 to assert that man too is a creator, that the “image and likeness” manifests itself in our ability (both genetic and learned) to emulate God’s creative ethos as demonstrated in Genesis 1.

In extracting elements of creative process from Genesis 1 is it necessary to invoke a mythical hermeneutic? I don’t believe so, at least not in the usual sense of the term; in fact, identifying the praxis depends on preserving a literal reading of the particulars. Still, insights into creativity are the sort of “eighth day” truths that mythic readers seek to uncover. Elements of the creatorly praxis emerge not by pulling allegorically on the main narrative thread but by unraveling a cross-weave in the fabric of the story. I’d warrant that even your nemesis Dr. Dawkins follows the creatorly praxis of Genesis 1 in his own work, fallen and depraved though it may or may not be.

Though this reading of Genesis 1 doesn’t directly address cosmogony or theology, it does refocus the Creation narrative away from the results and toward the process – from creation as a noun to create as a verb. Perhaps also the eschatological thrust is redirected, from restoring the Creation as a physical place to restoring the creatorly ethos, which is God’s image and likeness, in man.

I’ve taken to calling it a “ktismatic” reading – ktismatics, from the Greek ktisma meaning “creation.” Ktismatics: the theory and practice of creation. It’s an awkward word, unlikely to pass into popular usage. Still, its very obscurity means that anyone who “googles” it will, for better or worse, find a link to my blog.In reading your posts I see a strong commitment to creativity, to aesthetics, and to Scriptural narrative as a source of inspiration. At the same time you seem to share with many postmoderns a Romantic resistance the Enlightenment’s influence on modernity: science and technology, rational analysis, grammatical-historical exegesis, propositional truth. Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, Huyghens: many of the seminal figures of the Enlightement were accomplished musicians, just as many of the Renaissance artists were also engineers and mathematicians. Science and art, technology and craftsmanship: the work of creating takes many forms. Every creator’s work can be diverted by greed and the desire to please. Perhaps a renewed commitment to “good” creation is part of what redemption is intended to accomplish.