Creation and Reality

Vital and illuminating, Michael Welker's new book awakens the reader from biblical slumbers, disclosing how the biblical text challenges our reigning but sterile notions of nature, transcendence, revelation, and even life itself. Based on his Warfield Lectures at Princeton, the volume probes the classical creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2. Creation, he shows, is not simply "reality." He exhumes a more concrete, dynamic, pluralistic sense of creation, with accents on interdependence, unrest, and the text's "astounding potential for critique of deeply ingrained conceptions and ways of thinking." Welker then sketches surprising and creative interpretations of the text's most perplexing features: the angelic world, the image of God in humans, domination, sin and "the fall." Opening new alternatives in biblical theology, philosophy, and religion and science, Welker's approach allows the novel and discordant strains in the biblical text to sound again.