My favourite film in my teens, and still the film I’ve seen more than any other, is The Three Amigos, a very silly slapstick western in which three movie stars are mistakenly hired to defend a Mexican village against the local thug. Much hilarity ensues, as you’d imagine given the talent involved. The theme is repeated in Galaxy Quest, a Star Trek spoof in which, once again, actors are mistaken for heroes.

Both films are based on the victim’s mistake of the genre they were seeing on screen, believing the drama to be real and acting on that basis. We pick up clues in what we see, and attempt to discern the genre (is a TV show a comedy? a drama? a documentary?) Some shows are indeed designed to blur the distinction, so the viewer is left guessing what is really going on.

I think that, in some cases, what seemed to me to be cracks in the authority of a biblical passage may have been indications that I was misreading the genre of the text. Perhaps the most well-known example is the opening chapters of Genesis. Since I had always assumed that the genre was historical narrative (and I attributed to that the same characteristics one would expect of modern history; that events were portrayed factually and accurately), the only leeway in concession to evolutionists was to allow that the ‘six days’ may have been extended periods of time.

But what if the choice is not necessarily between biblical fidelity and the evidence of cosmology and Darwinian biology? What if we have simply misread the genre of Genesis; that not only is it ‘not a science textbook’ but that it may be altogether different from a straight historical narrative? The more I read those chapters, the more likely it seemed to me (as an untrained reader of an English translation rather than a Hebrew scholar, I concede) that they were an attempt to set the scene for God’s story with Israel, that the text is a profoundly theological/mythological rather than modern-historical genre.

This may mean that there was never a specific garden located in Iraq; that there was never a ‘literal’ talking snake or two fruit trees side by side; that there was no single couple in this garden (their names are ‘Earthy’ and ‘From Man’, for goodness sake!) I could never have countenanced the idea before, since without an individual ‘Adam’ or ‘Eve’, how does one read passages such as Romans 5 or 1 Corinthians 13 which refer to these individuals? But I am more prepared now to embrace the notion that Adam and Eve maybe represent a crucial theological idea, rather than necessary individuals. Paul can talk in Romans 5 about sin entering the world ‘through Adam’ and we still get the message; that humans are blessed with a gift of self-awareness that has become our curse; that we turn from God to self-centredness and this spirals into envy, murder and much worse, and that Jesus has come to undo this. I no longer believe the strict correspondence (one man, Adam versus one man, Jesus) needs to mean two human males.

This is liberating for me on many levels. Last week I visited the World Primate Centre at Twycross in Leicestershire. The sensation of gazing into the eyes of a bonobo ape, an orang-utan or gorilla and perceiving a deep personal intelligence will be familiar to millions of us. Yet I steadfastly maintained that humans were a different order of creation, a creature apart from all others not by degree but by essence. Genesis tells me so. Now I am not so sure. I suspect that Genesis is telling us our story; that we came to dominate the world around us; that this blessing turned into a curse, that we are now the planet’s deadliest and most destructive predator, and that we have a calling to return to a humble stewardship that reverses this curse through Jesus. Maybe the rest of creation has its own story. But the Bible is not a rigid factual account of everything.

One last thought before I go to bed. The world should have ended two days ago, according to the notorious predictions of Harold Camping and his followers. These predictions were based on an approach to Scripture that denies genre, that assumes inerrant, technical precision and that raids the text for proofs and arguments instead of letting its wonder instil a lighter humility. Can I recommend a dose of The Three Amigos?