Quotes from John H. Walton

Mesopotamian literature is concerned about the jurisdiction of the various gods in the cosmos with humankind at the bottom of the heap, the Genesis account is interested in the jurisdiction of humankind over the rest of creation as a result of the image of God in which people were created.

Instead of offering a statement of causes, Genesis 1 is offering a statement of how everything will work according to God's purposes. In that sense the text looks to the future (how this cosmos will function for human beings with God at its center) rather than to the past (how God brought material into being).[9] Purpose entails some level of causation (though it does not specify the level) and affirms sovereign control of the causation process.

Whatever humanity does, it should be directed toward bringing order out of non-order. Our use of the environment should not impose disorder. This is not just a house that we inhabit; it is our divinely gifted home, and we are accountable for our use of it and work in it.

The Bible considers it much more important to say that God has made everything work rather than being content to say that God made the physical stuff.

We must be cautious that as we accept by faith that nothing is too hard for God, we do not begin to dictate to him which hard thing he must do. He tends to have things in mind that go far beyond what we are able to ask or even think.

It is difficult to think of the "natural world" as sacred (because we just designated it "natural").

The friends believe that Job is on trial—the defendant in a criminal case—and that he has been found guilty. But this is a backward trial. In their assessment, the judge has passed down the verdict, and now they, as the jury, need to try the case and find the evidence to uphold the verdict. To this end, Job is intensely cross-examined.

We cannot have all the answers, Job; we don't even know all the questions.

In the ancient Near East people were created as slaves to the gods. The world was created by the gods for the gods, and people met the needs of the gods.

But our God is a God of grace. If we desire to be like him, we need to go beyond being people who are saved by grace to be people who are characterized by grace.

God's process of revelation required that he condescend to us, that he accommodate our humanity, that he express himself in familiar language and metaphors. It should be no surprise then that many of the common elements of the culture of the day were adopted, at times adapted, at times totally converted or transformed, but nevertheless used to accomplish God's purposes.

Metaphysical naturalism is not metaphysically neutral regarding teleology. Not content with an empirically based methodology, it mandates the restriction of reality to that which is material. By definition, empirical science is characterized by methodological naturalism, but once it begins propounding metaphysical naturalism, it has overstepped its disciplinary boundaries.

These points of continuity and discontinuity should have an important role in our interpretation of the Bible, and knowledge of them should guard against a facile or uninformed imposition of our own cognitive environment on the texts of ancient Israel, which is all too typical in confessional circles. This recognition should also create a more level playing ground as critical scholarship continues to evaluate the literature of the ancient world.