When Myth Thinks: V. The God Who Speaks

In Genesis, God does not first appear as an object within the world.

God appears as the one who speaks.

The distinction matters.

The opening of Genesis repeatedly presents creation through a simple pattern: God says, and something comes to be. “Let there be light”: and there is light. The world is progressively differentiated through what is said. Before humanity appears, there is already a Sayer whose speech organises the world that humanity will eventually inhabit.

Read as theology, this is a claim about God.

Read as mythology, however, it can also be a symbolic construal of something else: the position from which a world becomes available as meaning.

God is the Sayer.

And the Sayer is not simply another thing in the world.

This makes the position of God in Genesis rather unusual. God speaks the world into being, but is not himself introduced as one of the things created. The distinction can therefore be read symbolically as a distinction between the source of linguistic construal and the world that is construed through it.

This does not mean that God simply “stands for humanity.” That would be too crude. The human being has not yet appeared. What is represented here is something more fundamental: the capacity through which experience can be organised as meaning.

Language does not merely give us names for a world that is already fully constituted for us. It provides the resources through which differences, relations, processes, identities, values and possibilities can become articulable. The language-user occupies the position from which such a world can be construed.

Genesis gives that position a name.

God.

There is also something strikingly recursive about what follows. The God who speaks eventually creates human beings, and those human beings are themselves capable of speaking. Humanity therefore appears within a world already constituted through the activity that humanity will itself participate in.

The creature who can construe the world is itself construed within that world.

This gives the creation of humanity a significance beyond the question of where humans came from. Humanity is not merely added to an already completed inventory of things. The human is introduced as part of the semantic order that the preceding creation narrative has established.

The distinction between God and human can therefore be read, cautiously, as a distinction of perspective rather than substance.

God occupies the position of the source of the collective construal.

The human occupies the position of an individual participant within that construal.

The distinction is not absolute. The human will itself speak, name, distinguish, evaluate and construe. What appears at first as a distinction between creator and creature can thus become a relation between the collective meaning-making capacity of a language community and the individual participant who inherits and extends it.

The mythology has produced a remarkable image.

The source of the world is a speaker.

And the human being, when finally created, is a being created within the world that speaking has made available.

Perhaps the deepest irony is that the speaker does not disappear when the human appears.

The speaker becomes us.

Not God as a theological doctrine.

Not humanity as a biological species.

But the position from which a world can become meaningful.

Genesis may therefore be doing something more subtle than telling us that God created the world.

It may be symbolising the discovery that a world becomes a world for a language-using species because it can be said.