Ps. 136, Francis Schaeffer on the Historicity of Gen. 1-11

In my own journey of coming to accept the Biblical account of creation and the early ages of humanity (i.e. Gen. 1-11) as true history, the words of Francis Schaeffer in the introduction to his commentary on Gen. 1-11 were full of insight for me.  The book was Genesis in Space and Time, published by Inter Varsity Press in 1972.  Here are three paragraphs to think about.  One thing I found helpful was his use of Psalm 136.

The battle for a Christian understanding of the world is being waged on several fronts.  Not the least of these is biblical study in general, and especially the question of how the opening chapters of the Bible are to be read.  Modern writers commenting on the book of Genesis tend to treat the first eleven chapters as something other than history.  For some this material is simply a Jewish myth, having no more historical validity for modern man than the Epic of Gilgamesh or the stories of Zeus.  For others it forms a pre-scientific vision that no one who respects the results of scholarship can accept.  Still others find the story symbolic but no more.  Some accept the early chapters of Genesis as revelation in regard to an upper-story, religious truth, but consider any sense of truth in regard to history and the cosmos (science) to be lost.

How should these early chapters of Genesis be read?  Are they historical and if so what value does their historicity have?  In dealing with these questions, I wish to point out the tremendous value Genesis 1-11 has for modern man.  In some ways these chapters are the most important ones in the Bible, for they put man in his cosmic setting and show him his peculiar uniqueness.  They explain man’s wonder and yet his flaw.  Without a proper understanding of these chapters we have no answer to the problems of metaphysics, morals or epistemology, and furthermore, the work of Christ becomes one more upper-story ‘religious’ answer.

So Psalm 136 brings us face to face with the biblical concept of creation as a fact of space-time history, for we find here a complete parallel between creation and other points of history: the space-timeness of history at the time of the Jewish captivity in Egypt, of the particular time in which the psalm itself was written and of our own time as we read the psalm today.  The mentality of the whole Scripture, not just of this one psalm, is that creation is as historically real as the history of the Jews and our own present moment of time.  Both the Old and the New Testaments deliberately root themselves back into the early chapters of Genesis, insisting that they are a record of historical events.  What is the hermeneutical principle involved here?  Surely the Bible itself gives it: The early chapters of Genesis are to be viewed completely as history – just as much so, let us say, as records concerning Abraham, David, Solomon or Jesus Christ.