Do Christians have to believe in a literal 6-day creation?

I've heard some Christians say that you can't pick and choose which parts of the Bible are literal. You either believe it all to be literally true or you believe none of it is literally true.

I recently read a paper (PDF) by Tim Keller called "Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople." Keller, a New York pastor for 35 years, put on paper what I've thought for years but didn't know how to say.

I'm not going to address whether Christians should or shouldn't believe in a literal 6-day creation, only whether or not they must.

In Keller's paper he poses and answers 3 questions:

Question #1: If God used evolution to create, then we can’t take Genesis 1 literally, and if we can’t do that, why take any other part of the Bible literally?

Answer: The way to respect the authority of the Biblical writers is to take them as they want to be taken. Sometimes they want to be taken literally, sometimes they don’t. We must listen to them, not impose our thinking and agenda on them.

Question#2: If biological evolution is true—does that mean that we are just animals driven by our genes, and everything about us can be explained by natural selection?

Answer: No. Belief in evolution as a biological process is not the same as belief in evolution as a world-view.

Question #3: If biological evolution is true and there was no historical Adam and Eve how can we know where sin and suffering came from?

Answer: Belief in evolution can be compatible with a belief in an historical fall and a literal Adam and Eve. There are many unanswered questions around this issue and so Christians who believe God used evolution must be open to one another’s views.

Each question contains pages of more detailed responses that I won't rehash here.

Here are 2 of Keller's key arguments along with quotes from his paper supporting those arguments.

1. Genesis 1 was written in prose with repeated statements similar to a hymn or song.

Genesis 1’s prose is extremely unusual. It has refrains, repeated statements that continually return as they do in a hymn or song. There are many examples, including the seven-time refrain, “and God saw that it was good” as well as ten repetitions of “God said”, ten of “let there be”, seven repetitions of “and it was so,” as well as others. Obviously, this is not the way someone writes in response to a simple request to tell what happened. In addition, the terms for the sun (“greater light”) and moon (“lesser light”) are highly unusual and poetic, never being used anywhere else in the Bible, and “beast of the field” is a term for animal that is ordinarily confined to poetic discourse.

2. The order of creation in Genesis 1 does not follow a "natural order."

For example, there is light (Day 1) before there are any sources of light--the sun, moon, and stars (Day 4). There is vegetation (Day 3) before there was any atmosphere (Day 4 when the sun was made) and therefore there was vegetation before rain was possible. Of course, this is not a problem per se for an omnipotent God. But Genesis 2:5 says: “When the Lord God made the earth and heavens--and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, because the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth, and there was no man to work the ground." Although God did not have to follow what we would call a ‘natural order’ in creation, Genesis 2:5 teaches that he did. It is stated categorically: God did not put vegetation on the earth before there was an atmosphere and rain. But in Genesis 1 we do have vegetation before there is any rain possible or any man to till the earth. In Genesis 1 natural order means nothing--there are three 'evenings and mornings' before there is a sun to set! But in Genesis 2 natural order is the norm.
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So what does this mean? It means Genesis 1 does not teach that God made the world in six twenty-four hour days. Of course, it doesn’t teach evolution either, because it doesn’t address the actual processes by which God created human life. However, it does not preclude the possibility of the earth being extremely old. We arrive at this conclusion not because we want to make room for any particular scientific view of things, but because we are trying to be true to the text, listening as carefully as we can to the meaning of the inspired author.

I won't expand on anything here or on anything else in Keller's paper. He's done a fine job without me adding anything more.

Keller isn't trying to change others' views on a literal 6-day creation so much as he's trying to contend that there's a legitimate reason to believe the 6-day creation account wasn't literal. He's appealing to Christians that the 6-day creation story is not a key tenet of our faith.

In short, I don't think a Christian must believe in a literal 6-day creation. And while a Christian denouncing evolution may be standing up for their beliefs, I don't see how they're standing up for their faith. Faith in God simply does not require belief in a literal 6-day creation.

But that's my view. What's yours?