The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Creation Museum

Tom,

The Framework Theory basically asserts that Genesis 1 has a deliberately literary framework that looks forward to the rest of the Pentateuch. This literary framework especially consists in parallels between the days of creation. So, taking Meredith Kline's approach, we have God creating light and separating it from darkness on the first day, and then creating the heavenly bodies to govern that realm of creation; God creates the expanse to separate the waters below and the waters above on the second day, and the birds of the sky and fish of the sea on the fifth day. Similarly for the third and sixth days. Finally on the seventh day God crowns Himself King of all creation.

According to proponents of this view, the author has a few objects in mind. One is to write a polemic against the pagan creation myths. In distinct contrast to the pagan myths, the God of Genesis is supremely transcendent, creating the world by fiat, from nothing rather than from His own body or from some preexisting material. Unlike in the pagan myths, this God has no opposition which He must first overcome. These points in themselves should probably be granted: no doubt Moses was concerned to combat the false beliefs of the surrounding pagan nations.

Another object is to foreshadow and legitimize the Exodus story in general, and the Fourth Commandment in particular. Thus one supposedly finds many parallels between the story of creation and the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. The point is NOT that God actually created the world in the way recorded in Genesis, but to provide a literary device that points ahead to God's deliverance of Israel and giving of the Ten Commandments.

The problem with this, of course, is that the Bible does not take this view. According to Scripture, the Sabbath is to be observed because "in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy" (Ex. 20:11). If the Framework Theory has it right, then essentially what God has done is retroactively INVENTED a reason for the Fourth Commandment rather than actually having CREATED the Sabbath. Frankly, that is inconsistent with a high view of Scripture.

The obvious impetus for the promotion of this view is that the ancient understanding of Genesis — that it is primarily a narrative account of creation — is out-of-step with the findings of modern science. That impetus is wrong. But on the other hand, so is much of the impetus behind the work at the Creation Museum, which is to answer pagan science on its own grounds, thus also making science the arbiter of whether or not the Bible is true. We ought to unswervingly uphold the authority and absolute truth of Scripture without making modern scientific presuppositions the ground of truth.