If you take the stories in Genesis about Creation and the Great Flood literally, keep on doing so. If you take them figuratively, keep on doing so. Either way, read them and ponder what they say.
I join many others in feeling much gratitude to Brian Bull and Fritz Guy for the three books about Genesis they authored and to Brian for discussing them the last two Sabbaths and this coming one at the Roy Branson Legacy Sabbath School (September 25, 2021).
One of their recurring themes is that the stories in Genesis about Creation and the Great Flood are not science but theology. We can go further and say that they are expressions of narrative theology as distinguished from, say, historical, philosophical and systematic theology.
As its name suggests, narrative theology makes its points by telling stories. It does not matter whether people take these stories to be literal or figurative because their messages are the same either way. The stories Jesus told are expressions of narrative theology and their messages are the same no matter how we read them. The important thing is to read and think about them.
The point of the stories in narrative theology is not to explain the past but to excite the present. Good stories help us to flourish here and now and bad stories cause us to languish.
Think of the much more recent story of inevitable human progress. Both totalitarian communists and laissez- faire capitalists told this story in their own ways. They sacrificed millions of human and nonhuman lives in its name without reaching either a “Classless Society” or a “World Safe for Democracy.” It turned out to be bad story.
Consider the talking snake in Genesis’ second Creation Story. We could long debate whether we should take it literally or figuratively and miss why it is in the narrative. When we do focus on this question, we notice several things that its presence signals. One of them is that evil intrudes. Another is that evil entices. A third is that evil insinuates. A fourth is that evil interrogates. A fifth is that evil intimidates. Why argue about whether the talking snake is literal or figurative when we could discuss these things about evil all of which are very real in our own circumstances?
Reflect, also, of how the second Creation Story pictures God chiseling Eve out of Adam’s rib. We could long discuss whether this is literal or figurative and again miss the point. It is that Eve is comprised of the same stuff as Adam and therefore she is equal in being and value. After all, Adam himself exclaims “This is at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”
How different this is from the stories, which existed even in Christianity for hundreds of years, that communicate that women are humans but of a lower order. The message of this part of the story is the same whether we take it literally or figuratively.
I suggest that we do our very best not to get sucked into debates about whether these stories are literal or figurative and focus on what they say either way.