Jamin Bradley

The creation mythology in Genesis is less about how God literally made the world and more about how God literarily made the world. Every ancient culture has stories about how their gods created the world, and each is meant to communicate something about the character of their divine being, what was important to them, the order of the cosmos, and humanity’s place within it. These are the kinds of themes mythological literature aims to address, just as Genesis does. Whether or not God created the world in seven days isn’t the literary point. (And if it is to be taken literally, then we have to choose which of the Bible’s creation myths is correct since it has a few of them.)

J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation myth in The Silmarillion is a great example of this predicament. No one reads his story thinking that it literally happened. Rather, they read it trying to understand something about God’s creation of Middle Earth and its purpose. (And in Tolkien’s case, the God of Middle Earth is the same God of the Bible, since Middle Earth is supposed to be a part of the history of our own planet.)

Tolkien’s creation story is a beautiful mythology reflecting on a good and beautiful God who faces off against angelic evil that begins to contort his good creation. I’ve read it many times and always find myself in awe of God through Tolkien’s story, even though his creation myth didn’t literally happen. And yet, simultaneously, because he captures the biblical story so well in his myth—it kind of did happen.

The genre of biblical mythology has much to teach us if we’re willing to listen. Let’s not strip it down into something more simplistic than it desires to be.