We are in a conversation and discussion about John Walton’s (professor at Wheaton) new book, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate.

Proposition 6: Days 4 to 6 install functionaries.

“… in most cases the functionaries simply carry out their own functions in the spheres delineated in the first three days (time, cosmic space, terrestrial space)” (63).

How has this functional understanding of creation helped you understand Genesis 1? How has science taught us to go back to the Bible, in its context, and learn to re-read the creation account?

Day 4 — lights in the sky to govern day and night — corresponds to Day 1 in that Day 4 specifies perhaps the “how” of Day 1.

Day 5 — fish for the sea, birds for the sky — corresponds to Day 2. Their function is to occupy those spaces, be fruitful, and to multiply.

Day 6 — dry land animals and humans as Eikons — to reproduce and fill the earth. But with humans as Eikons, there is something profoundly new: Eikons are to govern the earth, they are to image God, and they have a function with one another — male and female in mutuality [my term].

Eikons have a godlike function in the world. Humans present God to the world. Walton discusses Genesis 2 and the dust — and he enters into the discussion of Adam and Eve as archetypes.