Genesis creation account

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

— Genesis 1:1

The Genesis creation account is the narrative of Genesis 1:1-2:3 (or 2:4a), describing God’s making of the heavens, the earth, and all their contents across six days, followed by his rest on the seventh. Interpreters have long debated whether the six “days” of Genesis 1 name six ordinary days or something else.

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith states, in wording it shares with the Westminster Confession of Faith:

In the beginning it pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, to create or make the world, and all things therein, whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days, and all very good.¹²

Both confessions locate creation “in the space of six days” without further specifying the days’ length, but their framers wrote within a tradition that read those days as ordinary ones. John Gill, the Particular Baptist theologian whose Body of Doctrinal Divinity stands in the same confessional line, held that each day’s creative acts were themselves instantaneous (“every creature started into being in a moment”) but that God spread them across six days “to make his works the more observable, and that they might be distinctly considered, and gradually become the object of contemplation and wonder.”³ On the first day, Gill wrote, “by the word of the Lord the heavens and the earth were at once made, and light was called into being”; each subsequent day brought its own instantaneous acts: the firmament on the second, the seas, dry land, and vegetation on the third, the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth, sea and air creatures on the fifth, and land animals followed by man and woman on the sixth.³ John Calvin drew a similar distinction a century and a half earlier: the work “was accomplished not in one moment, but in six days,” not from any necessity in God, but “that we may have no reluctance to devote our whole lives to the contemplation of it.”⁴

Biblical Basis

The account itself structures the six days as a sequence marked by the recurring formula “and there was evening and there was morning” (Genesis 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31), culminating in God’s rest on the seventh day, which he blessed and made holy (Genesis 2:2-3). The Decalogue grounds Israel’s own six-day/seventh-day work-rest pattern directly in this narrative: “in six days the LORD made heaven and 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” (Exodus 20:11). Hebrews 4 treats God’s seventh-day rest as an ongoing reality that God’s people are exhorted to enter (Hebrews 4:3-10), a text some interpreters have taken as evidence that “day” in the creation narrative is not uniformly bound to a twenty-four-hour sense.⁵

Historical Development

Patristic and Medieval Interpretation

Herman Bavinck identifies two schools of interpretation that emerged in the patristic and medieval church regarding the six days: one “rejects the temporal character of the six days,” treating them as a vision rather than a sequence and often reading them allegorically; the other “adheres to the literal sense of the creation narrative, including that of the six days.” Roman Catholic scholasticism and Protestant theology followed the literal approach, though Augustine’s alternative reading (which held that God created all things simultaneously and instantaneously) “was consistently discussed with respect and never branded heretical.”⁶ A. H. Strong likewise cites Augustine’s own statements that “the length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our” ordinary days.⁷

The Reformation and Reformed Orthodoxy

Calvin’s Institutes treats the six days as Moses’ own historical report, read in their plain sequence, while locating their purpose in God’s pedagogy toward mankind rather than in any constraint on God’s own power.⁴ Gill’s Body of Doctrinal Divinity, writing within the Particular Baptist tradition that produced the 1689 confession, holds the same ordinary-day reading combined with the view that each day’s acts of creation were individually instantaneous.³

The Nineteenth Century and Geology

The rise of geological science in the nineteenth century pressed the question of the days’ length with new force. A. H. Strong catalogued four interpretive options current in his day. He rejected (a) the allegorical or mythical interpretation, which treats the narrative as poetic speculation on the model of pagan cosmogonies, on the ground that the creation narrative is inseparably bound to the historical narrative that follows it. He also rejected (b) the hyperliteral interpretation, which combined a strict six ordinary days with a vast geological age inserted between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, finding no textual warrant for such a gap and noting that Scripture elsewhere uses “day” for “a period of indefinite duration” (citing Genesis 1:5, 8; 2:2, 4; Isaiah 2:12; Zechariah 14:7; 2 Peter 3:8).⁵ He rejected as well (c) the hyperscientific interpretation, which demands a precise correspondence between Genesis and the geological record, since “it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science.”⁸ Strong instead held (d) the pictorial-summary interpretation: the narrative is “a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind,” compatible with successive ages of geological history rather than six ordinary days.⁹

Twentieth-Century Reformed Restatement

Louis Berkhof’s catechetical Summary of Christian Doctrine restated the case for the ordinary-day reading against the geological and evolutionary arguments of his own day, offering five considerations: the Hebrew word yom “primarily denotes an ordinary day, and should be so understood unless the context demands another interpretation”; the recurring “morning and evening” formula; the seventh day, which Jehovah “set aside and hallowed” as a day of rest, “was evidently an ordinary day”; Exodus 20:9-11 grounds Israel’s own six-day labor and seventh-day rest in God’s six days of making heaven and earth; and the fourth through sixth days were fixed by the sun’s now-created relation to the earth, “and if they were ordinary days, why not the others?”¹⁰ Bavinck, for his part, cautioned that the church is not confessionally bound to any particular cosmology: Scripture’s language about the heavens is the same everyday phenomenological language still used today, and “presumed cosmologies are not normative” for the text’s own teaching.⁶

Opposing Views

Strong’s own pictorial-summary interpretation treats the six days as a literary framework for successive ages of geological history rather than as six literal twenty-four-hour periods, while still affirming that God created the world’s contents in the order Genesis narrates.⁹

A more recent departure reads Genesis 1 as describing the cosmos’s functional rather than material origins. John Walton has argued, “Genesis 1 has been presented as an account of functional origins (specifically functioning for people) rather than an account of material origins (as we have been generally inclined to read it). As an account of functional origins, it offers no clear information about material origins.”¹¹ On this reading, the six days describe God assigning functions and roles to an already-existing material cosmos rather than describing that cosmos’s material creation moment by moment.

Objections and Responses

The fourth through sixth days are fixed to the sun’s created relation with the earth, so if those days are ordinary, so are the rest. Berkhof pressed this as one ground for the ordinary-day reading: the last three days were “evidently ordinary days, for they were determined by the earth’s relation to the sun. And if they were ordinary days, why not the others?”¹⁰ Proponents of the day-age and functional-origins readings respond that Scripture itself uses “day” for periods other than a strict twenty-four hours, as in 2 Peter 3:8’s “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years,” and that Hebrews 4 speaks of God’s seventh-day rest as a reality still ongoing, which they take as evidence against binding every occurrence of “day” in the account to ordinary duration.⁵

Treating the narrative as poetic myth severs it from the history that follows it. Even Strong, who rejected the ordinary-day reading himself, raised this objection against the allegorical interpretation: the creation narrative is “inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical.”⁹

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 1. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 1. ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 3, chap. 1, “Of Creation in General.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 1, chap. 14, sec. 2. ↩ ↩²
Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 394-395. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩ ↩²
Strong, Systematic Theology, 2:395, citing Augustine, Confessions 12:8, and De Genesi ad Litteram 4:27. ↩
Strong, Systematic Theology, 2:395. ↩
Strong, Systematic Theology, 2:393-394. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Louis Berkhof, Summary of Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1938), 34-35. ↩ ↩²
John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 163, quoted in Carol Man Fen Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 230n57. ↩