I had a rather amazing conversation with a friend a few days ago. She claims Christianity, and in the course of our conversation it came out that she doesn't believe the Creation account at all (and thinks this makes her more spiritually aware than me, go figure). But because she doesn't believe that, she also doesn't believe in the story of the Fall (because Adam and Eve couldn't have been the only humans around) and so not in human sinfulness, and that leads to her pluralism....
And she'd probably call herself an evangelical and thinks she's a conservative Christian. I just don't know... what are these churches teaching? Anyway, in my view it's another reason to homeschool. Obviously you can't count on churches to educate your kids in Bible stories.
So the rational approach to Genesis would be to ask how Jesus approached it, how He saw it. Do that, and you'll never find anything but a straightforward reading of the text as God-breathed this-world history. But that isn't the fashionable view. It isn't the popular view. And that's where our real loyalties revela themselves.
Viewed one way, you could truthfully say that everything in the Bible after Genesis chapter twelve is a development of themes, seeds, found within the first twelve chapters. So naturally, if we botch our handling of those chapters, we're going to go wrong somewhere in our handling of the rest.
I wish I could remember verbatim the way I heard this, but I loved something a fellow said once. He was responding to the notion that the story of the Fall is figurative. He said something like, "Figurative of what?" If it's a figurative story of the entry of sin and death, then why tell a figrative story? Why not tell the actual story? Doesn't the actual story tell, well, the actual story? How would a figurative telling improve upon it?
WHen men try to twit God, they only succeed in twitting themselves.