Jordan Peterson’s podcast recently included a lecture Jonathan Pageau gave to some group of Jungian psychologists. It’s pretty interesting stuff. <\/p>\n
After presenting his general thoughts, he goes through Genesis 1 and explains how a symbolic view of the text makes sense of the structure. It’s a matter of God progressively separating actuality from potentiality, or … something like that. I get confused when people use words like that, but the basic idea is you have the intellectual side of things being separated from the physical side of things. <\/p>\n
I’m sure he’d say I got that wrong, but that’s how I took it. It’s almost like a Russian doll — progressive layers of the same sort of separation, nested inside one another. <\/p>\n
The separation goes like this. <\/p>\n
Etc. etc. You know the general story, but he casts it as the separation of meaning \/ logos from chaotic stuff, creating a progressively more ordered world. <\/p>\n
I’ve heard other people explain Genesis like this. The world was “without form and void,” or literally (they say) “without form and without filling,” so the basic structure was to create the forms in the first 3 days and to fill them in the next 3 days. E.g., form = light and dark (Day 1), filling = sun, moon and stars (Day 4). form = upper and lower expanses (Day 2), filling = birds and fish (Day 5). <\/p>\n
Both structures seem to have some merit, and if you have a long drive ahead of you, it’s worth a listen to Pageau’s explanation. <\/p>\n
But all these explanations don’t answer an important question. Did people in the past interpret the text as an explanation of how things happened? <\/p>\n
Sometimes people seem to think that as long as you can show that the text is organized according to a pattern which has a greater (more symbolic, more archetypal, …) meaning, that means you’re not supposed to see the text as explaining what actually happened. <\/p>\n
I don’t think that follows, because the two thoughts are not incompatible. A person can believe God actually created things that way, and yes, they also show this cool order \/ structure \/ symbolism. He is God after all, so you don’t expect Him to create willy nilly. <\/p>\n
IOW, coming up with a really cool symbolic way to understand Genesis 1 is really valuable, but it doesn’t seem to address the modern person’s concern that the Bible portrays the creation of the world in a way that a modern person isn’t going to accept. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jordan Peterson’s podcast recently included a lecture Jonathan Pageau gave to some group of Jungian psychologists. It’s pretty interesting stuff. After presenting his general thoughts, he goes through Genesis 1 and explains how a symbolic view of the text makes sense of the structure. It’s a matter of God progressively separating actuality from potentiality, or … Continue reading “A symbolic interpretation of Genesis by Jonathan Pageau”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1958"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1963,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1958\/revisions\/1963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}