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Reviewed by:
  • Reading Genesis Well: Navigating History, Poetry, Science, and Truth in Genesis 1–11 by C. John Collins
  • Michael S. Moore
c. john collins, Reading Genesis Well: Navigating History, Poetry, Science, and Truth in Genesis 1–11 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018). Pp. 211. $36.99.

This volume attempts to fashion a “critically intuitive” approach to reading Genesis 1–11 by thoroughly immersing the reader in C. S. Lewis’s pragmatic understanding of the reading process. The author, a professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary (PCA), gravitates to Lewis out of frustration with fundamentalist extremists on the one hand (e.g., “young-earth creationists”) and critical extremists on the other (esp. Charles W. Goodwin [d. 1878], Benjamin Jowett [d. 1893], and James Barr [d. 2006]). Contra Noam Chomsky and other theorists, Collins discovers in Lewis a practitioner of “linguistic pragmatics” (language as a means of “social interaction”); that is, an intelligent reader of texts whose ideas “in many ways reflect the raw observations that lie at the base of several linguistic disciplines, such as lexical semantics, speech-act theory, and sociolinguistics. These disciplines can be abstruse and sometimes counterintuitive . . . but Lewis offers a model of someone who intuitively (albeit informally) steers a wise path through the difficulties” (p. 25).

In chap. 2, Collins surveys some of the lesser-known contributions to the Lewis corpus in order to (a) establish him as a “linguistic pragmatist,” and (b) bring his ideas into fruitful engagement with the disciplines of literary and rhetorical criticism. Chapter 3 then moves to speech-act theory, a discipline C. classifies as a “subfield of linguistic pragmatics” (p. 51), focusing on three aspects: locution (actual form of words spoken), illocution (intended effect of those words on actions and beliefs), and perlocution (actual effect of the words). Lewis, C. argues, similarly speaks of ordinary language (phenomenological), scientific language (analytical), and poetic language (imagistic). Seasoned readers understand how important it is to distinguish these three basic types, recognizing (a) that the Bible rarely uses the middle category (though when it does it is very clear; e.g., Col 1:18–31); and (b) that “the goal of biblical interpretation is to learn how to cooperate with the authors’ intent” with respect to all three types (p. 84). In chap. 4, C. then reviews what it takes to create a meaningful act of communication, particularly the obligatory requirement that both author and audience live in a shared world.

The next two chapters ask questions about what type of language populates Genesis 1–11 in terms of context (chap. 5) and function (chap. 6). Context subdivides into two categories: internal (cohesion) and external (other ancient Near Eastern literature). Addressing the cohesion present in Genesis 1–11 without denying the possibility of separate sources underneath, C. argues that (a) “undoubtedly, for whoever wrote the story sources existed, but just as probably, those sources are completely irrecoverable,” even though (b) “the whole in which the ‘source’ is incorporated can be shown to have a remarkably unified and cohesive structure” (p. 110, citing Robert E. Longacre, “Interpreting Biblical Stories,” in Discourse and Literature [ed. Teun A. van Dijk; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1985] 170). With regard to external context, C. notes that Lewis accepts the possibility of the Hebrew creation narrative “deriving from earlier creation stories that are pagan and mythical,” but that it is “a gross error to suppose that the ritual or myth from which some ingredient in a romance or poem originates necessarily throws any light on its meaning and function” (pp. 120–21, citing Lewis, “De audiendis poetis,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature [ed. W. Hooper; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966] 9). [End Page 114]

In chap. 6, C. responds to Gerhard von Rad’s comment that in the call of Abram “Israel saw herself being led on a special road” (p. 132, citing Genesis [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956] 154), insisting that “nothing could be further from the truth than attributing the Pentateuch to the community’s effort to understand themselves—at least, if the prophets are to be believed. Rather, the Pentateuch presents itself as providing the authoritative story that specifies how Israel ought to see herself and which...

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