Interview with Charles Halton, General Editor of Genesis: History, Fiction, or Neither?

Today's the big day, when Charles Halton's book becomes available to the hoi polloi. If you've been tracking here, you know that I've been posting a play-by-play of each chapter. If you're wondering about the review of Halton's last chapter, "We Disagree, What Now?", I guess you'll just have to buy the book.

As promised, Charles agreed to engage in a little interview about the book. We sat down together over a meal in San Diego, but that's not where this interview took place. We just emailed each other.

Hi, Charles. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me about the upcoming release of Genesis: History, Fiction or Neither? Tell us a little about the book itself. What are its goals? Who is it geared for?

Hi, Kyle, thanks for hosting this interview.

The book discusses whether or not the events described in Genesis 1-11 happened--whether this section of Scripture is historical or fictional--or whether that binary association is even a helpful way of thinking. Three senior Old Testament scholars present their views on this and then critique the positions of the other two contributors. This format is designed to help anyone think through the strengths and weaknesses of various viewpoints regarding the historicity of Genesis.

To be honest, everyone should be interested in this. Since there are around a billion people who can read English I’m hoping we sell around eight hundred million copies (accounting for the mooches who will read the book at a library).

80% of the English speaking world is a good start. Speaking of "start," you begin the book with a chapter about genre. Why do you think genre is so important to a faithful reading of Scripture? As Wenham states in his chapter, "recovering the message of Gen 1-11 is more important than defining its genre" (p. 95). A lot of people will resonate with that, so why make a big fuss about it?

I agree with Wenham’s statement that the message of Genesis is more important than understanding its formal genre. The labels that modern scholars assign to Genesis are a bit contrived. That is, ancient writers generally did not assign genre classifications to their prose writing (they sometimes did to poems, prayers, and songs though). However, meaning and genre are tied together and one cannot arrive a proper sense of a text’s meaning unless one understands the kind of text one is interpreting.

Normally, genre is not a big deal. We intuitively understand the type of writing that we encounter--say, an advertisement or a traffic ticket--and interpret its meaning accordingly. But genre is a big deal when we are not able to intuitively understand the way an author structures his or her work. This is the situation that we face when we encounter the Bible. It is a collection of documents that were composed within extremely different cultural contexts, customs, languages, literary expectations, and time periods than our own. In order to more fully understand the meanings of Scripture we must make explicit what we normally intuit. We must self-consciously determine the genre of the section of Scripture we are reading in order to understand how we should interpret its meaning.

As I say in the introduction, no one encounters Jesus’s statement, “I am the vine,” and believes that Jesus was literally saying that he is a plant. This is because we understand this statement as a metaphor and not a horticultural description. That interpretive conclusion hinges upon a decision that we have made regarding the purpose and structure of this sentence. Similar dynamics are in play when we consider groups of sentences and textual units. Get the genre wrong and you could completely and utterly bungle the meanings of a text.

The market has been flooded in recent years with books on origins-related topics. Why do you think there has been such a surge in interest? Are evangelicals becoming more open to alternative interpretations of Gen 1-11, are scholars finally taking a more focused interest in communicating to a lay audience, or is it something else?

I think there are probably many reasons for the interest in origins-related topics. Many people are coming to realize that the evidence for human evolution is so overwhelming that it is a virtual fact and it is silly to continue to argue against it. This means that we must rethink some of our traditional readings of Scripture. On the other hand, many people feel threatened by this and want to find a way to retain the interpretations of the Bible that they grew up with or find comforting. People from these two groups often worship together in the same church or if not that then within the same denomination. Sometimes the people in one group are silent about their beliefs but they are there nonetheless. This brings tension to religious communities. There are also generational concerns. Younger people are finding the faith they have been taught unattractive and they are no longer practicing or they are changing their religious affiliation. One reason for this is that young people tend to embrace scientific consensus more readily than the leaders of some evangelical communities. These leaders then make life within the faith community intolerable for those with differing opinions. This brings even more tension.

As to whether evangelicals are becoming more open to alternative interpretations of Genesis 1-11 I think that, unfortunately, the evangelical world is fracturing along this and a handful of other lines. Some evangelicals are more open to alternative interpretations and others are not. For the most part, the leaders of these two groups do not mix. But as I said above, if we look to our churches, both of these dispositions are there. Openness to alternative interpretations is especially common in youth and college groups and some churches and denominations should stop pretending otherwise. And when they do realize that the existence of this openness is within their midst, I have seen religious leaders respond in a most unhelpful way by shutting down those that they disagree with--saying that their questions or perspectives are dangerous and they merely need to tow the line and embrace traditional beliefs which conveniently coincide with the beliefs of the leadership.

Instead of using power to enforce a coerced compliance, religious leaders need to engage the thoughtful and questioning people in our pews with respectful conversation that takes their concerns--and the data that aroused them--seriously. We also should turn these questions onto ourselves and try to assess whether our views are in need of change. This should not be threatening, particularly to Protestants who in theory embrace a central ethos of the Reformation that the church is always to be reformed. I hope that this book is a help to that end.

We also should remember that readers of Scripture ask questions of the Bible in response to their own contextual situations. In other words, if we look back in history we find that the most common topics people look to the Bible to answer are some of the most common topics that society at large is asking. A person in the eighth century AD is not going to have as many questions about the precise scientific origin of the universe as someone living in the age of the Hubble telescope. The culture we live in gives us the vocabulary which we use to think about the Bible. The vocabulary of our age is hyper-scientific.

So, why are certain segments of (predominantly American) evangelicalism opposed to reading Gen 1-11 as anything but an eye-witness account of actual past events? Where does that viewpoint come from and what is at stake for them theologically and intellectually?

I am venturing into armchair psychoanalysis here but I think that some American evangelicals are fearful that if they begin to question Genesis 1-11 the entirety of their faith will come apart. This view is explicitly propagated by a few religious entrepreneurs and it is self-serving to their fundraising efforts but unhelpful for the rest of the Christian community. This fear mongering short circuits clear thinking and genuine conversation. Fear is understandable--change is often scary because it is unknown--but in this case it is unfounded.

Christianity does not live or die on whether Genesis 1-11 is history or not. Christianity is the good news that Jesus is risen and death is defeated. Genesis 1-11 is related to this because we learn of Jesus primarily through the Christian Bible but the story of Jesus is not dependent upon the precise genre of Genesis 1-11. The Apostle John creatively reinterprets Genesis 1 and in Acts 7 Stephen skips over Genesis 1-11 and begins the story that leads up to Jesus with Abraham. This is not to say that neither John nor Stephen believed that Genesis 1-11 was historical--whatever we mean by that--but it does show, at least to me, that a literal reading of Genesis 1-11 is not essential to understand Jesus and the Christian faith.

Tell us a little about the project. Who came up with the idea for the topic? What was it like to work with such prominent scholars as Hoffmeier, Wenham, and Sparks?

I have this problem. I generate more ideas than I have time to complete. They all begin with a question which I then try to answer. I was interested in the genre of Genesis and I knew that it was a hot topic that others were interested in too. I was familiar with Zondervan’s Counterpoints series which I thought would be a good format for trying to address the questions I had about Genesis. I already knew an editor at Zondervan, Katya Covrett, through another project and I pitched the idea to her and she asked me to draw up a preliminary list of contributors and a structure for the book. After I did this she presented it to the publication committee at Zondervan which approved the proposal. I solidified the contributors--a couple dropped out of the project--and tried as best I could with middling success to keep the project on deadline.

Working with Hoffmeier, Wenham, and Sparks was a little like herding well-behaved cats. They are independent people who have clearly marked out ideas that they are not afraid of expressing. They are also scholars and scholars do not take well to editing. We prefer the way that we have written a sentence and bristle when someone else tells us to rewrite it. But for the most part they accepted my suggestions. If I were in their shoes I’m not sure I would have been as gracious with a youngster giving me notes on a subject that I was an expert in so I’m thankful for their patience with me and for their work on this book. It was a real joy to produce this with them.

If you’re going to sell 800 million copies, they should listen to you. Let me finish by asking about what’s next for Charles Halton. You have a couple other writing projects in the hopper right now. When can we expect to see your anthology of women authors in Mesopotamia or your other books? 

I am co-writing the anthology of women authors in Mesopotamia with Saana Svärd, a brilliant assyriologist at the University of Helsinki, and we are just now completing the manuscript. Hopefully it should be out in the beginning of 2016. I’m working on a biography of one of the women included in this anthology--the very first author in human history that we know of by name, Enheduana--which I think should be published at the end of 2016 or early 2017. About this time another book I’m working will hopefully be published, The God of the Old Testament. In this book I try to answer the question: What if we took the passages of Scripture that we normally term “anthropomorphic” and base our theology of God on them instead of throwing them out in favor of what we think are the Bible’s propositional statements about the nature of God? Lastly, I know, this is getting a bit out of hand, I’m co-writing with Joseph Kelly A Moral Vision for the Old Testament which presents our attempt at understanding Old Testament ethics.

Thanks for taking the time to talk about your book. Best wishes on its success.*

I couldn’t have done this without your inspiration, Kyle. You’re the best.

*The interview officially ended here. Although Charles didn’t actually say those last comments, he surely felt them in his heart.