The following is a (lengthy) excerpt from an essay in
The Historicity of Nature in which Pannenberg engages in some fascinating commentary upon Genesis 1-2. I leave it here without comment for your appreciation!
When we turn to the biblical witness on Creation, the first thing must be to remind ourselves of the fact that the biblical texts are historical documents and have to be interpreted accordingly in terms of what they were trying to say at the time of their composition. The principle of the historical interpretation of the bible is the core issue in all discussions with the creationists. Historical interpretation reads the biblical affirmations relative to the context of their writings, to the concerns of their authors at the time of their writing, to the knowledge they had at their disposal. Such historical interpretation does not imply that the biblical affirmations, being limited to their own time, have nothing to tell readers of a much later period. But whatever they have to tell us, they convey it precisely through their historical particularity. Otherwise, it would not be the meaning of the biblical affirmations but a meaning the modern interpreter reads into them. ...
With regard to the biblical report on the Creation of the world in the first chapter of Genesis, this means that we have to read the affirmations as witnessing to the God of Israel who is the creator of the world by using the natural science of the sixth century before Christ, that is, Babylonian wisdom, in order to account for the sequence of creatures coming forth from God's creating activity. The relevance of this report in our present situation, then, is primarily the encouragement to use the science of our era in a similar way for the purpose of today witnessing to the God of the Bible as the creator of the universe as we know it. This is the authority of the biblical report on the Creation of the world. It calls us to try our own theology of nature, but in doing so, to remain true to the peculiar and distinctive nature of the God of the Israel, just as the authors of the Priestly report on the creation of the world did in their own era.
The authority of the biblical report does not require us to consider every detail as the last word on the respective issue. Many statements are inevitably indebted to the limited knowledge of nature in the sixth century BCE. One example is the idea that the experience of rain is evidence of a huge supply of water in heaven above the clouds, comparable to the oceans of the earth. On this assumption, it is astonishing that the water above the clouds normally remain separated from those beneath. This is explained by the idea (Gen.1:6ff) that God created a vault to keep the waters above from pouring down. ... The same applies to the assumption that all the different types of creatures, and especially all the different species of plants and animals were created in the beginning and remain permanently unchanged. ...
But within the Bible as a whole we find other pictures of God's creative activity. In the prophetic writings, for example, we learn that God is continuously active in the course of history and that once in a while he creates something quite new (Is. 48:6ff). That is not to deny the creation of the earth in the beginning. Yet Second Isaiah (the author of Is. 40-55) takes that as an example of God's continuously creative activity. This then, is a model of continuous creation that is coextensive with the course of the world's history. In this model, the creation of heaven and earth is much closer to the modern understanding of nature in terms of a history of the universe ...
In addition, God's creative activity does not exclude the employment of secondary causes in bringing about creatures, In the Priestly document on Creation ... the Creator calls on the earth to bring forth vegetation (Gen. 1:11). And again it is the earth that is called on to produce the animals, especially mammals (Gen. 1:24). If our creationist friends today would adhere in this case to the letter of the Bible, they could have no objection to the emergence of organisms from inorganic matter or to the descent of the higher animals from this initial stages of life. In the biblical view, such a natural mediation does not contradict the affirmation that the creatures are the work of God. For, in the next verse, it is explicitly said that God made the beasts and the cattle and everything that creeps upon the ground (1:25). ... The immediacy of God's creative action with reference to its creatures is not impaired by secondary causes, since their activity is not on the same [ontological] level with that of the Creator. ...
The case of the human is a special one because human persons relate to God in a special way. ... Does that not require that the human being was created by God alone ...? The older report on the creation of the human beings in the second chapter of Genesis ... says that the human body was formed of "dust from the ground" (2:7) That seems to be roughly equivalent to the role of the earth in the first chapter of Genesis, when God addresses the earth to bring forth plants and animals. Therefore, our body is perishable, which is to say, it will return to the earth. Only the human spirit is said to come directly from God, as the second chapter describes it: God breaths his breathe into the figure he formed from the dust ... Correspondingly, with our last breath, we return the gift of the spirit to God, as the psalm says (31:5).
Does that mean that we are allowed to think of the human body as coming from the process of evolution and animal life, but not so the human soul or spirit? ... It was [this conception of God breathing into the nostrils] that the old Christian creationisms of the Patristic period derived its theory about the origin of the human soul ... but this creationisms presupposed the independent status of the soul as compared to the body, an idea that is keeping with certain forms of Platonism but not with the Hebrew Scriptures. In the Old Testament, nephesh hajah, which we translate by the term soul, is not independent from the body but the principle of life, though it is not the origin of life itself. ...The root meaning of the word is "throat." It is in constant need of the spirit of God, the productive breath or wind ...
To be a "living soul" [nephesh hajah] is not a distinctive prerogative of the human being. According to the creation story ... the "breath of life" is in all the animals, the beast on the ground, the birds of the air (Gen. 1:30). This corresponds exactly to the idea in the earlier report on creation of the human race, where God breathes the breath of life into the figure of clay so that it comes alive. If the animals have the breath of life within themselves, although they are products of the earth that was summoned by the Creator to bring them forth, then there is no difference from the creation of the human being with regard to the description "living soul." The difference of the human being from the other animals is not that the human being has [or is] a "living soul" but that it is destined to live in a particular relationship to God, so that it is called to represent the Creator himself with regard to the animal world and even to the earth (Gen. 1:26).
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