In 2013 and 2014 I did some work for the Keswick Convention, turning some of its Bible talks into articles.

One of my favourites were the talks from John Lennox, which became a series of blogs for Christianity magazine. Here’s an excerpt from the first one:

What we are going to discuss is absolutely fundamental. The first page of Genesis is the charter of all human dignity and value. In the next 5 days, we will challenge, in the name of God and the Bible, the prevailing naturalism, that is regarded as the default in our culture.

Genesis is a thorny subject for Christians, who tend either towards accepting evolution and seeing Genesis 1-2 as some kind of allegory, or they are six day creationists. The subject causes a lot of arguments.

It all obscures the real beauty of Genesis 1-2 – the calling of creation ‘good’, the importance of living things and particularly humans to God, our vital responsibility in looking after the Earth and everything in it: there are so many crucial insights into our world in this short bit of text.

I think I am unusual in being happy with the scientific evidence for evolution (though I often think bigger claims are made for it than can be currently justified) – but I don’t think Genesis 1-2 is only an allegory either. I think there’s no need for the polarisation that currently exists, and we end up missing the point.

I think Lennox is near this position too – his talks are well worth listening to. You can get them free on http://www.keswickministries.org, or read a summary in these blogs. I’ll pull out some more stuff from them in the coming weeks, hopefully.