Beginnings
- Theology
- Biblical Studies & Commentaries
- Publisher: Baker Academic (Baker Publishing Group)
- Published: 2008
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Publisher's Description
What are we missing when we look at the creation narratives of Genesis only or primarily through the lens of modern discourse about science and religion? Theologian Peter Bouteneff explores how first-millennium Christian understandings of creation can inform current thought in the church and in the public square. He reaches back into the earliest centuries of our era to recover the meanings that early Jewish and Christian writers found in the stories of the six days of creation and of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Readers will find that their forbears in the faith saw in the Genesis narrative not simply an account of origins but also a rich teaching about the righteousness of God, the saving mission of Christ, and the destiny of the human creature.
Endorsements (2)
“Beginnings meets a precise need in patristic studies and in the history of early Christian biblical interpretation: the need for a historically astute, theologically sympathetic, and hermeneutically sophisticated analysis of the fathers’ reading of Genesis 1–3. Here at last is a work that truly sets in relief the many layers of meaning that patristic commentators saw in these rich and evocative opening chapters of the Bible. Rather than dismissing their work as premodern, prescientific groping for a valid explanation of the stories of creation and fall, Bouteneff definitively demonstrates the profound theological contextualiza-tion at work in early Christian exegesis of the Genesis cosmogony. This is a superb monograph.”
“I hope this remarkable study will be widely read and appreciated. From the start, the reader is obliged to grapple with questions about how a text is to be read when it can be demonstrated that layers of subsequent interpretation have had as much, if not more, influence than the text itself. And what more crucial text is there than Genesis 1–3, which has shaped Christian understanding of both creation and fall in ways that are now controversial, both within the churches and in the public domain? Though not always agreeing with the analyses presented here, I can guarantee that hardly anyone, whatever their starting point, will come away from this book without having found some new insight.”
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