Seeing God’s voice in creation : a visio-spatial interpretation of Genesis 1

Abstract

Contemporary Christians, evangelicals in particular, find it problematic to formulate and understand the relationship between the Christian faith tradition and natural science, with the result that they struggle in their understanding of the creation story in Genesis 1. The purpose of this study was to bring Christian theology and the science of linguistics into dialogue with each other in an attempt to understand the biblical creation story in modern-day terms. The motivation for the study is based on the belief and understanding that within the paradigm of the dialogue model disciplines other than theology, like linguistics, can bring insights to the world of the Bible and vice versa. The hypothesis for this thesis is based on the presupposition that God’s voice, believed to be inaudible sacred sound as Pretorius (2011:1-7) envisions it, can indeed be seen by humans as it becomes visible in creation, and interpreted in a way similar to the way deaf people communicate. This interpretation finds support from insights gained from the world of the Deaf and the basic principles of ‘Sign’, the language used to communicate within the deaf community. Two significant characteristics of Sign that strongly resonate with the picture of the natural world emerging from Genesis 1, are its unique and complex use of threedimensional space, and its rich modulation in time. This is explained in eloquent terms by renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks who says that, “…what occurs linearly, sequentially, temporally in speech, becomes simultaneous, concurrent, multileveled in Sign… and what looks so simple is extraordinarily complex and consists of innumerable spatial patterns nested, three-dimensionally, in each other” (Sacks 1991:88). These insights were fundamental in the development of the Divine Sign Language Model (DSL), which has proven to be a fruitful model to use in an effort to understand what it could possibly mean when the Bible talks of ‘God speaking’ or of ‘God’s voice’. Through the application of the DSL Model, ten basic image-concepts have been identified in Genesis 1, which form the foundation to a relational theology of Genesis 1.