Loving the Bible too much?
by Carl Wieland
(First published in CMI’s Update, August 2007.)
There are too many good people in Christian circles who avoid the Creation issue like the plague.
I’m sure that many of you, like me, must have often been frustrated at the
number of good people you know in Christian circles who avoid the creation issue
like the plague. And when you do press the point, you get that uneasy feeling that
if they come out on any side at all on the matter, it’s definitely not going
to be on the side of a ‘real’ Genesis.
I’m not talking here about the out-and-out apostates, those who say, for example,
that the Bible ‘contains’ (rather than ‘is’) the Word of
God. Such theological liberals do not believe in the authority of the Word of God.
So they find it easy to overlook just about anything mandated in Scripture. So,
logically, they see no barrier to ordaining a practising homosexual minister, even.
After all, there is no such thing as any absolute biblical authority if
the Bible is not regarded as true and without error in all that it teaches—every
part of it, in context and ‘rightly divided’ (2 Tim 2:15). If we were to accept that some parts were mistakes,
reflecting human fallibility or ignorance, then who is to say (other than fallible,
mistake-prone humans themselves) which parts are mistaken and which parts
are not? One may as well throw away the whole thing.
But here, I’m focusing on those who, while they reject God’s straightforward
account of what He did in Genesis, are in all other respects evangelical Bible-believers.
Let’s call them ‘evolution-compromising evangelicals’ (ECEs1 ). Many of them publicly stand
on the correct side of issues such as ordaining homosexuals, or abortion, or the
Resurrection—sometimes even bucking other portions of their own denomination.
They are clearly committed to the historical, risen, crucified Christ as Lord and
Saviour.
Those of you familiar with our materials would know how terribly inconsistent such
ECEs are being on Genesis, which was clearly written as history. There
is no hint of the NT writers seeing it as anything else. That’s how the Lord
Jesus also took it—a lot of His words make no sense otherwise. For example,
Mark 10:6 and other places where He makes it plain that
people were there from the beginning, not millions of years after the beginning.
You probably also know how virtually any view other than straight six-day creation
invariably puts the evidence we see in the fossil record for death, disease and
violence/suffering prior to the Fall. (We would argue that the fossils are all post-Fall,
most of them entombed in the Flood.) But if the fossils predate the Fall of man,
what can that ‘Fall’ possibly mean? God’s Curse on the earth would
then seem to have done nothing to the world. How could we then blame sin for ‘bad
things’, such as cancer, since malignant tumours are found in the fossils?
This means we would have the problem of a good God allowing such
things senselessly.
The fatal flaw for all long-age views
In fact, if long ages were true (which means that the fossils existed before people),
God must like such things as death, cancer and suffering—because
He states, after people were created, that this world is all very good.
But if He were looking at an ‘old earth’, He would be describing a graveyard
of eons of cancer, suffering and death as ‘all very good’!
Such ECEs are unwittingly sawing off the branch on which they (and all Christians)
are sitting. One of our ministry speakers a while back was at a university meeting
in Sydney, Australia. While he was talking to one of those ECEs, a student was keenly
taking in the whole conversation, as the ECE ducked and weaved about all the inconsistencies
in his stance. After a while, the student interrupted and said, ‘I have to
leave now, but listening to you two, I want to say something. I’m not a believer
yet, but you [pointing to the CMI speaker]—you make sense. As far as
you’re concerned [pointing to the ECE], you’re full of it!’
With that he spun on his heels and walked out, giving a friendly ‘thumbs up’
to the creationist. I know that in my own experience when I was an atheist at university,
the ‘compromisers’ got very little respect for their position from myself
and my fellow (at that time) humanists. Evolution/long-ages is so obviously not
what the Bible teaches that the various ‘woolly compromise’ positions
on Genesis are seen as an obvious cop-out.
ECE’s are often afraid that intellectuals will be ‘put off’ by
a straightforward Genesis, but time after time we see the very opposite (think only
of the 30 Stellenbosch University students that professed publicly receiving Christ
after the CMI presentation, recorded on our new DVD Creation: The Key to Dynamic
Witnessing.)
Why do they do it?
So why do ECEs take the stance they do? Many people, referring to discussions
with them, describe something I’ve experienced myself. They say, ‘You
have a rational conversation for a while, then when you make your main point, it’s
as if the shutters go down, the eyes glaze over, and that’s it’.
I.e., it’s more an emotional thing than a rational one. I recall once meeting
a minister prominent in ECE circles. A CMI supporter had been dialoguing with him
over months, bringing him to the point where the lights were just beginning to go
on about the matter of death before sin, and the crucial Genesis-gospel links.
The meeting had clandestine overtones—he was fearful his colleagues would
find out that he had been listening to the ‘dreaded creationists’. A
personable fellow, he said smilingly, ‘You know, my tribe will not be happy
that I’m even listening to you guys.’ He also said, ‘What
you say makes so much sense biblically, but in a way, I don’t
want it to. I don’t want to be forced to believe it.’
What emotions are driving it?
Perhaps I’m being too charitable, but I suspect that for many, their tragic
‘blind spot’ may actually be a misplaced demonstration of love for
the Bible’s message. I think they are afraid that by exposing
Genesis to the ‘real world’ of science, evidence and reality, it will
fail the test. And with it will go everything they have stood for. Much
easier to waffle on about things like, ‘O, you have to understand why Genesis
was really written, it’s a theological discourse, not to tell you what really
happened.’ (Funny, that—so why does Paul write about Adam’s
fall into sin as if it really happened? And if it didn’t, what are we being
saved from?) Then there’s the old standby, ‘You have to understand the
literary genre’. (Actually, it’s historical narrative).
Unlike liberals, who have no problem with mistakes in the Bible, ECEs are under
huge tension in the matter. Their whole position on the gospel is based on the authority
of the Bible. So, to hold onto that authority, they are forced to become evasive
and fuzzy when asked why the plain Genesis history, repeated and alluded to over
and over in gospel-crucial parts of the New Testament, does not mean what it seems
to be saying.
It’s easier to use misleading slurs like ‘blind fundamentalism’
or ‘wooden literalism’ than to face the fact that the creationist position
is garden-variety Christendom, based on time-honoured historical/grammatical principles.
For them, it seems easier to try to write creationism off as a ‘fringe’
movement, even though it is the historical position of the church through the centuries.
It’s easier to use misleading slurs like ‘blind fundamentalism’
or ‘wooden literalism’ than to face the fact that the creationist position
is garden-variety Christendom, based on time-honoured historical/grammatical principles.
In a sense, at the emotional level, they are loving the Bible ‘too much’,
albeit in a very inconsistent way. They fear that if the history in Genesis is not
protected from being exposed to falsification, it will fail. Imagine, though,
if Paul were challenged with evidence against the Resurrection. We know from his
own writings that he would not have become ‘fuzzy’ and ‘vague’,
fearful that ‘they might be right’. No, he would have put it all on
the line—if it’s not true, it’s all in vain, all for nothing (1 Cor. 15:17)!
And it is true—all of it. ECEs need to be reassured that a) honest
exegesis shows that Genesis is to be taken just as Jesus and Paul took
it, and b) that standing up for real Genesis history does not mean ‘flying
in the face of facts’. In any case, as an Australian educator, an evolutionist,
said: ‘The Genesis account of Creation may even be the correct one, but
there is no way science can prove or disprove that, and
the creationists know it.’2
Our ECE friends need to be lovingly shown that science, though a wonderful methodology,
does not even have what it takes, philosophically, to disprove anything
about origins.
Imagine how ECEs’ passion for Christ, unshackled from such unhealthy fears
and freed from the pressure to massage and evade the force of the Bible’s
teaching, could help impact the world!
The classic book for such folk, overwhelmingly powerful, is Dr Jonathan Sarfati’s
Refuting Compromise. Then there’s the ‘cut-down’ version
(we call it ‘RC lite’, deliberately small enough to be read at one sitting)
by Drs Batten and Sarfati, 15 Reasons to Take Genesis as History.
ECE changed
Chris L wrote: ‘[I always thought] that Young Earth Creationists were people
who were denying the obvious truth of an old universe. …
‘Just a week ago I found creation.com and was astonished at how wrong
I had been. … [I have] found your arguments sound and biblical … [and]
have become a believer in the literal reading of Genesis. Your desire to share the
truth of how creation really occurred is appreciated by this changed mind. …
‘God bless all those at CMI who expose the bankruptcy of evolution, and an
old earth interpretation of the Scriptures which clearly contradicts the intended
meaning. May you continue to do as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10:5 ‘We demolish arguments and every
pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and we take captive
every thought to make it obedient to Christ.’
You may know someone from that ‘tribe’—an evangelical who loves
the Lord but resists the message of a real Genesis history of the creation. For
the sake of the gospel’s penetration into our culture, getting that person
‘on-side’ is obviously vital.
God bless you for standing with us in this battle.
Further reading
Recommended Resources
References
- I include in this arbitrary term the ‘progressive creationists’
because, though they are not Darwinists and reject biological transformism, in all
other respects they accept the total evolutionary framework: cosmic and
geological, and this dominates their understanding of the biblical text.
Return to Text.
- MacInnis, P. (a prominent Australian science educator who
has taught evolution at the Australian Museum), ‘The seven types of science’,
http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/macinnis/story.htm, 22 August
2002. Emphasis added. Return to Text.
Published: 23 November 2007(GMT+10)
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