It was C. S. Lewis’s “true fictions” that first broke me out of the modernist expectation of “hard” history in Scripture, so I understand where you’re coming from.

It also serves as a helpful check on way we chop up the grand narrative of the Bible into little pieces to proof-text our theology.

Well said. “The big picture” was much more important in ANE literature like the OT than the dissected point-by-point analysis so popular among today’s exegetes (which might be somewhat more legitimately applied to the Gospels and Acts — but not much).

But it’s always been hard for me to explain just what sort of approach this plain-but-existential reading of Genesis was. Your “Batman vs. Indiana Jones” origin comparison does that brilliantly!

It also serves as a helpful check on way we chop up the grand narrative of the Bible into little pieces to proof-text our theology. To be true to a Christian witness of the human experience of God, it’s no good taking only part of the picture. We weren’t first one thing, then another (like Batman) — we are what what the whole story always says (like Indiana Jones). And if the whole story speaks to how we are as human beings, then the account of creation includes the fall — and looks forward to it’s redemption as well>
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