Posted on 02/11/2015 3:05:42 PM PST by Graybeard58
NASHVILLE (BP) -- An article by a popular evangelical blogger arguing that the six "days" of creation in Genesis were not literal 24-hour periods has prompted discussion among Christians about the earth's age and whether orthodoxy necessarily entails believing in a young earth.
Justin Taylor, senior vice president and publisher for books at Crossway, posted a blog article Jan. 28 arguing that there are "biblical reasons to doubt the creation days were 24-hour periods." The article, which was shared on Facebook 15,000 times during its first two weeks online, also noted famous people from church history who did not believe Genesis describes six 24-hour days.
"I want to suggest there are some good, textual reasons -- in the creation account itself -- for questioning the exegesis that insists on the days as strict 24 hour periods," Taylor, a Ph.D. student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote. "Am I as certain of this as I am of the resurrection of Christ? Definitely not. But in some segments of the church, I fear that we've built an exegetical 'fence around the Torah,' fearful that if we question any aspect of young-earth dogmatics we have opened the gate to liberalism."
"Defenders of inerrancy" who did not believe in six 24-hour periods -- like Augustine, J. Gresham Machen and Carl F.H. Henry -- "show that this is not the case," Taylor wrote. "And a passion for sola Scriptura provides us with the humility and willingness to go back to the text again to see if these things are so."
The BF&M & creation
Southern Baptist seminary professors -- though divided on whether Taylor's conclusion is correct -- agreed that old-earth creationism falls within the bounds of the Baptist Faith and Message. However, they distinguished old-earth creationism from theistic evolution.
Old-earth creationism contends that God brought the world into existence from nothing by His direct action and not evolution. Old-earth creationists say the earth is billions rather than thousands of years old and that the "days" of Genesis 1 were not 24-hour periods. Theistic evolutionists claim God used evolution to create, directing the process but not simply speaking things into existence.
Young-earth creationists believe God created the world from nothing between 6,000 and 50,000 years ago in six literal days.
Jason Duesing, provost at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press he disagrees with Taylor's blog post but believes it "is helpful because it reframes a well-worn debate topic back to what the text actually says."
"As the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 does not specifically address the age of the earth, much like the finer points of eschatology, it is a secondary matter to determine what SBC seminary professors believe about the issue. I do not mean to imply it is not important for under the BF&M, SBC faculty must affirm the creation and existence of a literal Adam and Eve and see no room for the affirmation of theistic evolution," Duesing said in written comments.
"Personally, I remain convinced that the young-earth view best accounts for the plain reading of the Bible, and while I have not polled the faculty at Midwestern on this topic, I suspect the majority of the faculty would as well. For those who hold to an old-earth view, I support the legitimacy of their doing so and enjoy the sharpening that comes from healthy dialogue, even as their conclusions and implications do cause me some good natured head-scratching. In the end, I see this as an intramural discussion among creationists and hope that such only serves to bind us closer together in refuting that which is clearly contrary to Scripture, the theory of evolution," Duesing said.
The Baptist Faith and Message refers to God as the "Creator" and explains, "Man is the special creation of God, made in His own image. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation."
An old earth?
Taylor presented five biblical considerations that lead him to believe the "days" of Genesis 1 were longer than 24 hours. Among Taylor's arguments:
-- "The seventh 'day' is not 24 hours long."
God's creation "rest" was not limited to a 24-hour period, Taylor wrote, noting that Hebrews 4 underscores this point.
-- "The 'day' of Genesis 2:4 cannot be 24 hours long."
"After using 'the seventh day' in an analogical way ... we read in the very next verse, Genesis 2:4: 'These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day [yom] that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,'" Taylor wrote. "The precise meaning of this is debated. But what seems clear, if we believe the Bible does not contradict itself, is that this (singular) 'day' -- in which the creation events (plural 'generations') occur -- cannot refer to a single 24-hour period."
-- Genesis 2:5-7 assumes that the "day" described in Genesis 2:4 was longer "than an ordinary calendar day" because it included natural "seasons and rain cycles" that take longer than 24-hours.
Taylor argued that God does not want readers of Scripture to substitute the word "eons" or "ages" when they see the word "day." But neither does He want readers "to think of precise units of time, marked by 24 exact hours."
Ken Keathley, professor of theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and coauthor of "40 Questions About Creation and Evolution" (Kregel), told BP he agrees with Taylor and is "convinced that the 24-hour interpretation does not do justice to all that the text says."
The old-earth interpretation of Genesis 1-2 is becoming increasingly popular among Southern Baptists, Keathley said.
"Prior to the 1960s, the majority of evangelical pastors and professors (including those in the SBC) held to old-earth creationism," Keathley said in written comments. "In 1961 John Whitcomb and Henry Morris published 'The Genesis Flood' and the young-earth movement was born. Until recently, young-earth creationism has been the predominant view among evangelicals in general and Southern Baptists in particular.
"A significant change is happening now. The arguments in 'The Genesis Flood' have not stood the test of time, and very few young-earth advocates use them. More and more pastors and leaders are realizing that the Genesis text does not lend itself easily to the young-earth position. Many of the strongest proponents of the old-earth interpretation are Old Testament scholars," Keathley said.
A young earth?
James Hamilton, professor of biblical theology at Southern, disagrees with Taylor. In a Feb. 9 blog article responding to Taylor, Hamilton cited as a key passage in the debate Exodus 20:10-11 -- "But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. You must not do any work -- you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the foreigner who is within your gates. For the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything in them in six says; then He rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and declared it holy."
The "most natural reading of Exodus 20:10-11 seems to be that the six days of creation followed by the Sabbath day of rest was a cycle of the same kind of seven day week that was to become the pattern of Israel's experience," Hamilton wrote. "It's hard for me to imagine someone coming to some other kind of conclusion unless he seeks to accommodate extra-biblical considerations from philosophy (a la Augustine) or science (a la contemporary old earthers)."
Other respondents to Taylor also discussed whether his arguments were driven solely by study of the Bible or by outside influences as well.
Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, wrote in a blog post that Taylor's "real motivation is that outside influences have already led him to postulate whatever reasons he can try to muster not to be adamant about six literal days of creation in Genesis 1."
Ham added, "When Christian leaders today are rejecting a dogmatic stand on six, literal, 24-hour days of creation and a young earth, if you search their writings or question them, you will find that ultimately their thinking is being controlled by the belief in an old earth/universe (billions of years). Even though some try to claim that is not so but that they are just looking at what the Bible says, if you ask the right questions, I assert, you will find this strong influence is there. You simply do not get the idea of millions or billions of years from Scripture -- it comes from outside Scripture."
Evangelical blogger Samuel James responded to Ham at the Patheos website, stating that Ham's blog was "an incredibly irresponsible reply to an article that deserved much better." Hamilton similarly wrote that young-earth creationists should hold their position "with epistemological humility and not, as AiG does, suggest that old-earth creationists ... are opening the door to abortion on demand and gay marriage."
James wrote in his blog, "If Ham believes that adherence to YEC [young-earth creationism] is essential for Gospel faith, he should produce the necessary theological arguments. Until he does, Ham has absolutely no right to slough off well written and fairly argued articles that present inerrancy-friendly challenges to YEC interpretations. Ham's response is the kind of attitude that stifles productive discussion and unnecessarily divides the church. He should, and can, do better."
Ping
What difference does it make?
The whole question of the actual, temporal length of a Biblical day in Genesis seems like a futile pursuit. The early part of Genesis is clearly metaphorical (even poetic). I don’t think the author intended the wording to set a thousand mathematicians in action.
God tells us what a day was in creation
William Jennings Bryan was an old earth creationist. The contrary impression created by the play Inherit the Wind is false - it may have been what Clarence Darrow hoped Bryan would say, but he didn’t.
Einstein provided on solution. time is relative.
“When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems as a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”
Lorentz factor (gamma) = 1 / (1 v^2/c^2)^.5
Which formula says at low speed, gamma equals 1 - no time dilation.
And at high speeds, approaching the speed of light (c), the terms goes to infinity.
FR has creationists as well as evolutionists on the site. I don’t any of them will ever change their mind.
True. If God wanted to mean a 24 hour day, how else would he have said it? He called it a 'day', and then described each day as evening and morning. Amazing how easily intellectuals twist scriptures.
And for those who make each day a 1,000 years, then how did the plants and fish survive? They were created on the third day, but the sun, moon and stars weren't placed in the sky until the fourth day.
Well, leaving aside Darwin (who I think was kind of a jerk) and the science of geology, it strikes me that Genesis uses the word “day” as a unit of time, but that it’s hard to see how it can be a “day” in the strict sense if the sun and the moon were not yet created on the first day, since they supply us with the measures of time.
Similarly, the Bible says that the sun rises and sets and goes around the earth, but that is a way of speaking that we still use today, even though most of us believe that the earth goes around the sun. But to all appearances, the sun rises, travels across the sky, and sets, and there’s no reason not to speak of it that way.
Or, as Terry Pratchett might say, “It’s turtles all the way down.”
“whether orthodoxy necessarily entails believing in a young earth”
This isn’t the sort of question we should waste our time on in that it is clearly no, orthodoxy does not entail necessity to believe in “young Earth”.
I see this insistence on young Earth a form of idolatry.
I don’t think anyone will argue the following:
God is eternal, having no beginning and no end.
(Well, the Mormons will argue with that one, but anyway....)
The arguments in the article and the thread boil down to this, as far as I can tell:
1. God was alone for all of eternity, doing nothing, until a weeklong burst of activity brought everything into existence, somewhere between 6,000 and 50,000 years ago (that’s what the article said, I only repeat it), and that’s what Genesis 1 says, and anyone who disagrees dares damnation.
2. God created everything, in such a way that certain derived knowledge and/or conjecture can be deemed correct, and the text of Genesis 1 has been mistranslated, or misinterpreted, or just plain misunderstood.
3. There is no God and you’re all a load of useless dolts whose arguments are a nuisance to the rest of us (this doesn’t include me!).
Then there is my theory, which I do not urge on anyone, but will suggest if people are curious; it gets me in trouble with my YECist friends, and I don’t really like to talk about it. Since I regard it as of minimal doctrinal importance, I am content to wait until my entry into eternity, when I am certain all will be made clear.
You might not be an intellectual but you ought to at least find out the accurate facts about OEC explanations. It is quite easy to explain such things.
Try http://www.reasons.org for one major proponent of that explanation.
As for the “24 hour day” — evening and morning are a far cry from making any claim about rate or time. A frame of reference is needed. You did know that it is always day at some spot on this earth didn’t you? It would never naturally be evening for the entire earth. And that days and nights on this earth are figured with respect to a small locale? Yet we are not told that creation was limited to a small spot on the globe.
The Beginning Genesis 1
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Time.(the beginning)..The Universe.(the heavens)...Matter.(Earth)..All in one sentence long before the scientists and agnostics ever got their warped little minds wrapped around it.
From a unbiased and straight reading of the Genesis account of creation - without carrying forth any of today’s bias ... that straight reading indicate ordinary days, with an evening and morning.
If one was to dig down into the original language of the Old Testament, the analysis FORCES one to conclude it’s an ordinary 24-hour day.
There is one reason and ONLY ONE REASON why ANYONE would look for another explanation outside of an ordinary 24-hour day ... and that is, this person has been INDOCTRINATED (and INTENSELY SO) into “having to believe” that there could not be 24-hour days to creation because the earth has been around a WHOLE LOT LONGER than that. Before that indoctrination came into being, no one had a single problem with it.
BASICALLY those people who have a problem with it do not want to accept God’s Word or the Authority of Scripture in that section.
The idea of prolonged creation days is actually, quite old. Your accusations say more about you than they do about this idea.
Except God hadn’t created the sky until the second day, the earth on the third day, and the sun and moon until the fourth day. So the light wasn’t from the Sun, and could not mean a full rotation of the earth as neither had been created yet.
I have read where the term “day” might be better translated as “period of time” or “era”.
These primitive people that had not witnessed Creation, but it had been revealed to them, on their own terms, described it in their own terms the best they could.
As with so many things in the Bible that can be considered a mystery (the Resurrection is perhaps the most important mystery to me), I take them on faith, even if I don’t completely understand them.
On the first day, I have wondered if the “let there be light” was more like “let there be energy” (what we now theorize is something like the “Big Bang”). And that energy is distinct from the empty dark expanse of nothingness previously.
I have seen electrical engineering T-shirts that were printed with
And God said
[put the 4 Maxwell’s equations here, which refer to all electromagnetic phenomena, not just visible light]
And there was light.
And don’t forget spiritual light, a very frequent topic in scripture. Was it the physical alone that came into being at the creation event? Very doubtful, given the sheer importance of spiritual light.
If something is “in Scripture” ... this applies ...
2 Timothy 3:16-17
16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,
17 that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Which means it must be used correctly. You can’t throw the bible into a blender and apply the result for any such thing.
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