The Gospel of Genesis: Learning alongside the Ancient Israelites
4 WK COURSE
The good news? We have very successfully turned early Genesis (chapter 1–11) into a series of picture books, Sunday School lessons, videos, and flannelgraphs. As a result, most children growing up in the church are quite familiar with those Bible stories. The bad news? There can be trouble when we never move beyond that child-sized understanding. Ironically, early Genesis can be a challenge precisely because of our strong start in childhood. We are very familiar with these passages, but we are also significantly uninformed about their ancient setting.
A good, healthy way to ‘grow up’ in our understanding is to hear these passages in their original ancient Near Eastern context, to listen alongside the ancient Israelites. What would they have heard? What kind of literature would they have known this to be? What would have been the obvious main points? What are we modern folks missing? These questions will be the focus of this course.
When we approach early Genesis this way, we find that it is not about the various culture-war issues we often bring to the text, but rather about things far deeper. Early Genesis proclaims Good News about God, about the world, and about what it means to be human.
Dr. Paul Teel
Paul has been a teacher at Pacific Christian Secondary for over 30 years, specializing in Calculus, Philosophy, and Biblical Studies. Somewhere in there he also enrolled at UVic and earned an MA and a PhD in philosophy, concentrating on the relationship between Christian theology and modern science. As a result, he was a guest lecturer at Regent College (a graduate school of theology in Vancouver) for nearly 20 years, including a stint on faculty for a program helping church leaders think about science in a more theologically robust and positive way.
Also during that time, Paul was the interim teaching pastor for one year at Saanich Community Church before joining the preaching roster at St. Barnabas Anglican Church. For the last two years, Paul has been one of the co-pastors at The Place Community Church. He and Heidi have been married for 34 years and have three adult daughters (and two sons-in-law!).