The Framework Interpretation holds that the six days of creation are not intended to be taken literally as a chronology of how God made the world. That’s what they seem to be on the surface, but there are clues in the text–such as the creation of the sun three days after the day/night cycle has been established–that tell us that this is not meant to be taken literally.
The Framework Interpretation holds that Genesis 1 tells us what God did without attempting to tell us in a literal fashion when God did it. Instead, the facts of creation have been fitted into the framework of a single Hebrew week. (The week being a characteristic measure of time among the Hebrews; prior ancient cultures didn’t have weeks.)
The Fourth Day sun problem that other interpretations have (and have typically solved by introducing things the text does not mention, like atmospheric conditions that clear up, allowing the sun to be seen, or days that overlap each other chronologically) is of itself significant evidence for the Framework Interpretation.
But the interpretation could be strengthened if we could sketch out the specific way in which the events of creation have been fitted into a framework–in other words, if we could point to the framework itself. It’s a fair question, after all: "If this isn’t organized chronologically, how is it organized?"
A careful reading of the text reveals this, and we can see not just that the author has arranged things out of chronological order in a way detectable to the ancients, we can see specifically how he has organized them. We know what his organizational criteria were.
For centuries it has been recognized that the six days of creation are divided into two sets of three. In the first set, God divides one thing from another: He divides the light and the darkness on Day One (giving rise to day and night), he divides the waters above from the waters below on Day Two (giving rise to the sky and the sea), and he divides the waters below from each other (giving rise to the dry land) on Day Three. Classically, this is known as the work of division or distinction.
In the second three days, God goes back over the realms he produced in the first three days by division and then populates or "adorns" them. On Day Four he populates the day and the night with the sun, moon, and stars. On Day Five he populates the sky and sea with the birds and the fish. And on Day Six he populates the land (between the divided waters) with the animals and man. Classically, this is known as the work of adornment.
That this two-fold movement represents the ordering principle of Genesis 1 also is reflected at the beginning and end of the narrative. At the beginning we are told that "the earth was without form and void" (Gen. 1:2). The work of distinction cures the "without form" problem, and the work of adornment cures the "void" (empty) problem. Likewise, at the end of the narrative we are told "the heavens and the earth were finished [i.e., by distinction], and all the host of them [i.e., by adornment]" (2:1).
People have recognized for centuries that these are the ordering principles at work in Genesis 1. This is not something modern Bible scholars came up with (e.g., see Aquinas, ST I:74:1).
I don’t fault anyone who has a different view of the text (particularly the Ordinary Day Interpretation), but this one seems to me to be the most plausible view if you give the text a careful reading.
The dislocation of the creation of the sun thus tells us that the text is using a non-chronological ordering, and the recognition of the two phases of creation (distinction and adornment) proceeding through the same three spheres (day & night > sky & sea > dry land) tells us what ordering system is being used.
And none of this is predicated on modern science. It was all there "in the beginning."
