I’m glad we got the chance to revisit this topic. I had forgotten about this book and King’s juxtaposition of his creation story and the genesis story (or his version of it anyway), but in all honesty I was a little irked when we read originally read this material. I’ll admit to potential bias at the outset, I’m an Orthodox Christian. However, it wasn’t the criticism of the genesis story that irked me. Good criticism is great, it’s often warranted, and it’s not exactly something Christians are unfamiliar with living in the modern world – especially in university. But King was so preposterously off the mark that it almost felt like a joke, or maybe more accurately, it felt at times like a deliberate misrepresentation.
I’ll give an example of what I mean. On page 24 King writes, “In Genesis, all creative power is vested in a single deity who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. The universe begins with his thought, and it is through his actions and only his actions that it comes into being.” (italics mine)
I don’t know what book he read, or what religious tradition he’s working within in his interpretation of the text, but I know of no mainstream Christian sect that would agree with that statement. Many schools of Jewish thought wouldn’t even agree with that statement, and their conception of God is actually unitary in the sense King implies. But I’m assuming he’s approaching the text from a Christian perspective because he alludes to just that at several points in the preceding pages. However, if he were working within a Christian tradition in his analysis of the text, then he would know that Christian’s don’t believe creation to have been, as King puts it on page 24, “[…] a solitary, individual act […]” It was, as any student of the religion could tell you, an act of cooperation and love between the three Persons that makeup the Godhead. The Trinity is one of the most basic and well-known Christian doctrines, so for King to leave that unmentioned seems, to me, an oversight at best, and intentionally malicious at worst.
Of course, he’s trying to set up a clear juxtaposition between his story and the genesis story, and in service of this juxtaposition he sets up three clear and distinct dialectical relationships between the stories: solitary act vs shared activity, harmony to chaos vs chaos to harmony, competition vs cooperation. But the fact is that these two stories aren’t nearly as different as King attempts to paint them, and I’m not quite sure why he’s so intent on doing so. As I just mentioned, mainstream Christian traditions (Catholic, Orthodox, High-Church Protestant) do not and have never viewed creation as a solitary act, and if King had just read a handful of verses further he would have seen God speaking in plural (Us, We, etc.).
There are issues with the other two dichotomies as well, though they’re less frustrating. The second one just sort of puzzled me, and I was left scratching my head wondering what he was talking about. Genesis isn’t harmony to chaos, it’s chaos to harmony in the exact same way as King’s own story. A formless void, a chaotic bundle of potential, given order through the cooperative interaction. When exactly is the slide into chaos King mentions on page 25?
The first dichotomy was frustrating because everyone familiar with Christianity (and some schools of Judaism for that matter) know that that just isn’t true. The second dichotomy was confusing because it doesn’t make any sense within the genesis story itself. The third dichotomy, I think is fair to say, is open to debate. I can see how he would be justified in interpreting the post-Fall world as one marked by competition rather than cooperation. There are mainstream Christian traditions who would agree, at least in part, with King’s interpretation. Without spending another 400 words on a really nit-picky aspect of Kings piece, all I’ll say is that it’s probably an overgeneralization at best.
My point in all this (besides venting a bit) is that the two creation stories aren’t all that different from one another. I was, obviously, unimpressed with King’s personal interpretation of the genesis story, as it doesn’t jive with Christian theology at all. The dialectical relationships he set up feel, to me, forced and invented. All this being said, the point of creation stories isn’t really to explain how the world came to be, is it? Some of the earliest Jewish and Christian traditions argued the genesis story is truth, not fact, and rather than explaining the literal creation of the world it describes our own lives and relationship with God, as each of us eats from the Tree and falls as we reach the age of self-consciousness (between 8 and 14 in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions), and we each are cast out from the paradise of childlike innocence and have to find out way back again.
Works Cited
Breck, John. “On Reading the Story of Adam and Eve.” Orthodox Church in America, www.oca.org/reflections/fr.-john-breck/on-reading-the-story-of-adam-and-eve.
“BibleGateway.” Genesis 1 NKJV – – Bible Gateway, www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1&version=NKJV.
King, Thomas, “The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative.” CBC Massey Lectures. House of Anansi Press, 2003.