7 | The Nature of the World according to Genesis and John

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a Co-Finder of the Table Collective.

In past Episodes I’ve been exploring ways of seeing the mysterious nature of this world through the windows of quantum physics, the Gita, Buddha, and Lao Tzu. Several questions have emerged:

Is the stuff the world is made of eternal? Are there multiple worlds? How does quantum entanglement affect everything, and does that entanglement include something more than our own consciousness?

I cannot help but bring those questions into this Episode as I ask about the nature of the world according to Genesis and John, two more windows into the mystery of the world that is our “where. ” All these texts invite us to open ourselves to more than just theoretical reflection. We are invited to imagine and to feel as we read or hear.

As I did in the last Episode, I will begin this one using music to set a receptive atmosphere. And if the music sounds familiar that is because I use it in the intro and outro music for the podcast! 

I offer it as an invitation to be receptive and attentive as we begin. This is a rough recording of “Four Movements for Piano”. 

(Four Movements on Piano)

Now, to Genesis and John.

But wait, I had said I would be exploring “Judeo-Christian-Islamic” ways of understanding the nature of the universe as we know it. What happened to the Islamic viewpoint?

With every Episode I continue to discover the path as I make it, and as I got into this one I realized, “there’s just too much to do all three together”. To be honest, I felt the same about the Gita, Buddha, and Lao Tzu! But I did not allow myself the freedom to adjust, though I wish I had. At any rate, I decided to follow the path as it emerges this time, and the Qur’an will come in the next Episode. 

Genesis and John will be my windows into the Jewish and Christian ways of seeing the world.

The World According to Genesis 

In Genesis, or Bereshith in Hebrew, there are actually two creation accounts of creation in Genesis. Here are the opening verses of each account.

The first verses of chapter 1:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.”

The second account begins in verse four of chapter 2:

“These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.”

What do these passages reveal about the world, the “where” that we inhabit?

I want to hear from rabbinic voices first. In “the Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer'”, is this:

“The Holy One, blessed be He, alone existed before the heavens and the earth. There were no angels or spirits, and no preexisting material from which the heavens and the earth were fashioned. Since time is measured by the motion of the planets, time did not exist prior to their creation. Before creation, there was only the Holy One, and His name.” 

Another Rabbi, Moses ben Nahman, also known as Ramban, believed that God created the heavens and the earth from nothing, as two different substances, from which everything else was then formed.

Genesis 2 speaks of “the account of the generations of the heavens and the earth.”  “Generations” comes from a word meaning to beget or to give birth. And an “account of generations” is a genealogy.  Thus, Genesis 2 is the genealogy of the ancestral lines we might say of the heavens and the earth.

In part suggested by the word “generations” and in part by mention of plural “heavens” some of the more mystical traditions of interpretation suggest that there have been other worlds, perhaps thousands of them, which may have passed away or might still be in existence.  

As I turn to my own reflections on Genesis, I will keep these prior points in view, as well as the questions from the prior Episode: is the world eternal, or made from something eternal? Is this universe all there is? What about entanglement?

Some key terms from the opening of Genesis:

“In the beginning, God made...” 

This has normally taken to mean that there was nothing prior to “the heavens and the earth,” and that this is the only “heavens and earth” that exists. But, does the text require that interpretation? The Hebrew word rendered “created” suggests forming, carving, shaping, which implies there was something prior to cut from and shape with.

“Heavens and earth.” 

The earth is described by two words. It is formless and void: vast, chaotic, futile, useless, empty, nothingness. More about the heavens comes later. 

There is “darkness on the face of the deeps” (an abyss in the Greek version), and “a wind of God was hovering on the face of the waters.”

This is incredibly mysterious. There is land and water: but so far nothing has been done to separate them from each other, so where are they? How are we to imagine the scene? There are heavens or skies, and there is wind, but the “atmosphere” has not been formed. Later it gets inserted, like a bubble, in between waters above and waters below. 

So, the waters and land and heavens are all amorphous, indistinguishable, and yet there are waters and deeps which already both have a “face,” a surface (implying features).

It is as if the earth and sky exist but are not yet formed,, as if they are still  in embryo.

The idea of an embryo is not far-fetched: when the text says the “wind of God was hovering over the deeps…” the word for hover can refer to a bird sitting on her nest of eggs to hatch them. 

Elsewhere the Jewish scriptures make an even more explicit reference to the divine role in bringing the world to birth. Psalm 90, verse 2, says “Before the mountains were brought forth.” The Hebrew word was often used for women in labor. The Psalm continues, before “the world came into existence.” The word here is “begotten.” Thus the world was begotten, and then brought forth as a woman in labor.

Back to Genesis, what is it that is doing the hatching? “Wind of God” here can mean God’s breath, or a strong wind, but most understand this to refer to the divine spirit hovering, nurturing the distinct elements of the world into existence, recounted a few verses later: water, land, plant life, animals, fish, birds, darkness, and light.

Speaking of light, this is another mysterious element because when first mentioned, “let there be light”, it comes into being before anything visible, anything that can enable visibility (sun, or moon). It just “is.”

Some of the rabbis say that in the beginning, light filled the universe from one end of it to the other, and that when the sun and moon came into being, the primordial light was “sown” into all creation.

The rabbinic understanding that the primordial light in Genesis is sown into all creation comes closest to how, inspired by theories of quantum entanglement, I have described the world. Light also features significantly in John, so I will come back to Genesis after looking at John.

John and Christian Ideas of The World: 

Just as I began with rabbinic ideas before looking at Genesis, I will briefly look at what some early Christian thinkers had to say about the nature of the world before directly exploring the book of John.

Early Christian writers were greatly shaped by Plato and Aristotle, and as such generally rejected the idea of multiple universes, based on the idea that a single universe was more "perfect."

As to whether the world came from nothing, or was formed from pre-existing, eternal, “stuff”, things are less clear. Two of the earliest Christian thinkers, after the period of those who had known Jesus in person, seemed to suggest matter pre-existed creation:

Justin Martyr (CE 100-165): “God, having altered matter which was shapeless, made the world”  out of a “substance” Justin says had been referred to by Moses.

And, Clement of Alexandria (CE 150-215): God made the world “from the shapeless mass of matter.”

However, the idea that the world came from nothing, “ex nihilo,” became dominant by the end of the 3rd century of the Common Era.

What Would John Say?

Before I dig into John, I want to address two questions. First, “why use John?”

There are other New Testament texts I could use, but it is clear that at the beginning of his book, John is writing with Genesis in mind, and his views differ from those of Genesis. Thus, it seems natural to use John after the Genesis material. 

A  second question, “Is John “Christian”?

John’s religious heritage was the Jewish religion, but by the time he writes, a separation was taking place between followers of the Jewish rabbi, Jesus, and a majority of the Jewish leaders. It was not yet a division between Judaism and Christianity, for Christianity as a religion had not yet come into existence. That happened over time and sadly was accompanied by tremendous antisemitism.  

John’s writings however, were part of the soil from which the “Christian” view of the nature of the world would be formed. 

Keeping all of that in mind, it is time to let John speak, and I will do so using my own translation:

“In the beginning the Word was.”

What does he mean by “the Word?” There are many proposed sources for John’s idea of the Word here. Stoicsm, Philo, and the ideas about wisdom in the Jewish scriptures. I am not convinced that John drew any single source. He was intentionally and also subconsciously navigating within the larger “cognitive environment” of his place and time. I will try to let the text bring out the way that John understands “the word.” 

The passage continues:

“In the beginning the Word was, and the Word was toward God, and God was the Word, which was toward God.”

The phrase in Greek forms something like a loop that circles back on itself to repeat: the Word was toward God, and God was the Word, which was toward God, and God was the Word, which was towards God, and God was…” And so on. So the Word and the Divine are profoundly connected, entwined, entangled. But this is merging into the lane I have called consciousness, the nature of the divine Self, and I will return to it later. 

Beginning and Word and Was

Some key terms: With the words, “In the beginning,” John opens the same as the Greek version of Genesis.

Word: 

As I mentioned, it is common for Christians to link “Word” here with the personification of wisdom spoken of in the 8th chapter of the book of Proverbs. But that figure was clearly a created entity. Wisdom was created when God made the world. 

Some Christians have suggested this is the word by which God creates when saying, “let there be..” However, John is saying that the “word” never had a beginning, it always simply “was”. That is different from what I would call “an act of speech” such as in “let there be…” 

Next, that word, “was”:

The Word did not become. There is a word for that, and John uses it later for other concepts and “things” but not here. The Word simply was, it did not become, and was not made.

The next sentence in John is:

All things came to be through the word and apart from the word not one single thing came to be.”

Everything ‘became’ through the Word (which is the Word that is towards God who is the Word that is towards God…so, everything came to be through God).

And then…

In the word was life.

Life did not come to be. Life, like the Word, simply “was.” It existed in the Word.

The word “life” is not in Genesis, but “light” is, and John includes that term as well, and connects it with life: 

This life was the light of humanity, and the light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness has not extinguished or overwhelmed the light.

A few verses later, John will add that the true light, the real light, the essential light, which continually shines and illumines all human beings, was coming into the world…that light was always in it, but could also come to it. This is close to the rabbinic idea of light being sown into all creation, but in John that light is in the life which is in the Word which is God, and through which all things came to be. Life, and light and the divine are entangled with all creation.

Back to the Questions

How might Genesis and John address the questions which surfaced from the Gita, Buddha, and Lao Tzu:

Was the world created from nothing? There is no explicit answer to that question in the texts. 

Is there just one world? Not a question these texts were asking, and so they don’t answer it.

What about the entanglement I have been exploring? In Genesis, the created world is in some way “other than” the creator, though there are streams in the Jewish scriptures which speak of creation being begotten, and of God wearing the created world like clothing, similar to what we saw in the Gita. In John, the life which came to be as a result of the creative activity of the divine is “in” the divine being. These could be seen as ways of describing what quantum physics terms entanglement..

“Light” deserves special mention. In Genesis there is a primordial light which as we saw some rabbis say refers to the light infused into all creation. In John the light illumines the everyone in the world, though for John the light comes from life, whereas in the Jewish scriptures, normally it is light that leads to life.

Wrapping Up

Before comparing the Gita and Buddha and Lao Tzu with Genesis and John, I still want to bring the Qur’an into the conversation in the next Episode, and after that I will present a  comparative conversation among all these heritages. 

Then I plan to develop an Episode with more about quantum physics, and conclude that with my own attempt at a synthesis of all of this, using an approach I have called mutualism: seeking to let each voice speak, seeking to learn from each about this world that is our “where.” 

For me this entire process, religious heritages and quantum physics, continues to add layers upon layers of mystery, and for me, wonder.

So it seems fitting to return to how I began the Episode, with a reminder to us to be receptive, and welcoming; a reminder to pay attention to, to see this world that is our “where”, in which it seems we are so mysteriously entangled. So I close with the musical piece we began with: Four Movements for Piano

(Four Movements for Piano)

Thank you for listening, and see you next time!