Civil War

I later graduated to a more sobering treatise examining the utter brutality of the First and Second World Wars in the local school libraries I haunted, but it was still rather clinical, in a way, with lots of maps, graphs, statistics, and data points, but I’d never interacted with someone that had participated in those conflicts.

When It Gets Personal

It wasn’t until my early 40s when I just happened to meet an older man who’d been a soldier serving in Libya and Egypt during WWII that I got to feel the very real visceral and emotional reaction from someone who’d gone through the trauma and terror of those times.

Upon learning about his service in the desert campaign that had put British, Canadian, and US troops up against one of Germany’s most cunning commanders—Erwin Rommel, known as “the Desert Fox”—I asked him a few preliminary questions and then rather naively but eagerly asked, “So you went up against Rommel’s 88s?”

If you aren’t familiar, Rommel had cleverly taken his 88 mm flak guns, meant to fire explosive rounds extremely high in the air as antiaircraft weapons, and dropped them down more parallel to the ground, unleashing them on the Allied armor in devastating fashion.

“I don’t even want to talk about those 88s!” he said, turning away rather resentfully.

Of course, I was speaking about these events as a curious WW2 buff, but the look of instant bitterness that flashed across this gentleman’s face made me realize my uncaring blunder as soon as I’d spoken.

We didn’t talk much after that as the situation became rather awkward and I excused myself and clumsily shuffled off, and I’ve regretted my rather insensitive comment ever since.

I, of course, had been thinking about how effective Rommel’s tactics had been and was wondering how the Allies had attempted to overcome them intellectually. Whereas, he’d seen their direct effects firsthand and had been dealing with them ever since—psychologically.

Civil Wars

Now, of course, no kind of war has ever been good, but as bad as all wars are, likely the most cruel and bitter of all are civil wars. These are conflicts in which neighbors, fathers, friends, and brothers end up killing one another and devastating their own nations.

Unfortunately, throughout church history, there have sometimes been severe divisions in Christian homes, churches, and denominational groups over differing interpretations of specific texts relating to various theological issues that have torn huge rifts between believers. And these often caused a massive amount of resentment when it often simply needn’t have done so.

Now, most mature believers today have relegated such disputes categorically to be seen more as in-house discussions and as secondary issues rather than as reasons to divide because they all pertain to differences in interpretation of specific Scriptures rather than the core, fundamental beliefs and doctrines that define the Christian faith.

However, there is an ongoing, metaphorical “civil war” in the Christian church that has been engaged now for over 200 years that simply won’t go away, and that battle is over the understanding of the Genesis account of creation (particularly Genesis 1–11).

Curiously, this battle never existed in Christendom prior to the growing popularization of the idea of long ages at the end of the 1700s and into the early 1800s, as it was (and still is) very easy to see what the Genesis account of creation plainly said. God had created the world, the universe, and everything in it approximately 6,000 years ago in six 24-hour days and rested from his work on the seventh day.

And not only stated in Genesis, but this was reiterated and corroborated in Exodus 20:11 where God wrote with his own hands these words:

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

So, in the majority of Christian’s minds over the centuries, what was there to argue about?

Old Earth Interpretations

Today, because we’ve had close to 200 years of deep-time interpretations of the universe and the earth being promoted in academia virtually unchallenged, so much of the church has adopted these old-earth interpretations and attempted a wide variety of ways of inserting them into the Genesis account—all without any intellectual or theological success whatsoever. This has caused the numerous and increasingly fanciful iterations of them to appear over the last several decades.

I’m a gap theorist! I believe in the day age theory! I’m a progressive creationist! I believe in the framework hypothesis! I believe in theistic evolution! And, of course, there are still a great number of Christians that are commonly referred to as young earth creationists, or simply “biblical creationists.”

However, biblical creation was once the norm in Western culture, but today it is often seen as the outlier, a primitive and rather simplistic view adopted by the average Christian bumpkin with no real scientific understanding.

In fact, belief in biblical creation is often mocked outright in Christian academia to the same degree that the secular world at large mocks, relegating YECs to the level of unintellectual science deniers.

However, due to the incredible amount of theological damage old earth and theistic evolutionary views do to the authority of Scripture, the character of God, and the gospel itself, I suppose a less charitable biblical creationist could accuse our opponents of being unspiritual theology deniers. But, of course, fanning the flames with such discourse is what keeps civil wars alive.

The Enemy Revealed

But who or what is the real enemy here? Remember, YECs haven’t changed their course: we were willing to simply keep the status quo. We were just carrying on believing what the vast majority of the church had believed based on what the Bible plainly said when all of a sudden a growing number of believers within the church said we needed to change our views.

However, unlike the typical disagreement over doctrinal issues based on differing interpretations of the biblical text, we were being told we needed to change our views based on an authority completely outside Scripture.

It obviously wasn’t based on an argument coming from the Word of God because Christianity qua Christianity had been around for quite a while, and it really hadn’t been an issue before. For example, 100% of the church fathers were YECs.

No, it was coming from a new interpretation of the supposed age of the earth which was now informing Christians how they (supposedly) should reinterpret the Word of God in contradiction to its plain reading because of so-called science.

Theologians Admit What Genesis Says

And this was admitted by several of the theologians of the day who were arguing this way—for example, Charles Hodge. Hodge was the principal of Princeton Theological Seminary between 1851 and 1878. As one biography describes him,

Hodge’s primary responsibility was instruction in biblical languages, hermeneutics, biblical criticism, and study of Old Testament texts. During 1826–28, he travelled to Europe to study with the leading European biblical and theological scholars. Hodge focused his studies on theology and biblical interpretation, with additional concentration in Semitic and cognate languages. His studies in Europe made him one of the leading Hebraists teaching in an American theological institution in the early nineteenth century.1

Hodge was an expert regarding the biblical languages and the meaning of the words of Scripture contextually. He knew, for example, that the Hebrew word yom (day) meant a literal day in the context of Genesis 1.

However, under the influence of what he felt (whether unknowingly or not) was a higher authority (i.e., science), he was willing to bend the rules to make the language comport with that authority in contradiction to the rules of grammar.

It is of course admitted that, taking this account [Genesis] by itself, it would be most natural to understand the word [day] in its ordinary sense; but if that sense brings the Mosaic account into conflict with facts, [millions of years] and another sense avoids such conflict, then it is obligatory on us to adopt that other.2

Many modern old-earth proponents, such as the day-age adherent Dr. Pattle Pun, have also admitted what the driving force of their interpretive method is as well, and it’s (not surprisingly) not the Word of God. Just look at what Pun admits in this quote.

It is apparent that the most straightforward understanding of the Genesis record, without regard to all of the hermeneutical considerations suggested by science, is that God created heaven and earth in six solar days, that man was created in the sixth day, that death and chaos entered the world after the Fall of Adam and Eve, that all of the fossils were the result of the catastrophic universal deluge which spared only Noah’s family and the animals therewith.3

A Different Kind of Science

Of course, this “science” that theologians were conceding to was not science in the truest sense of the sort people typically think of. You see the concept of “millions of years” wasn’t something someone could run a repeatable, observable test on to directly corroborate it as scientifically proven. It was originally, primarily based on interpretations of rock layers as having been deposited layer by layer each year.

Of course, this “science” that theologians were conceding to was not science in the truest sense of the sort people typically think of.

The argument was that if you added each layer up and assumed the rate of deposition was constant the results would support a deep-time conclusion; however, it wasn’t based on direct observation. It was also based on the presupposition that the Noahic flood (which provided mechanisms that could account for rapid deposition of sediments) had never occurred.

However, the discovery of polystrate fossils—like 30-foot-tall trees that extend through meters of sedimentary rock—completely blows away the uniformitarian explanation for fossils and deep time that Christians like Hodge were intimidated into compromising the Word of God over!

And yet somehow, many modern Christians still bow the knee to old earth beliefs despite being aware that YECs have the best understanding of the Genesis text and also have robust scientific explanations for their beliefs.

Take Dr. James Montgomery Boice, for example, when he says,

We have to admit here that the exegetical basis of the creationists is strong. . . . In spite of the careful biblical and scientific research that has accumulated in support of the creationists’ view, there are problems that make the theory wrong to most (including many evangelical) scientists. . . . Data from various disciplines point to a very old earth and an even older universe.4

Notice once again, it is not an appeal to the text of Scripture that drives Boice’s conclusion. It is his self-confessed appeal to the “data from various disciplines” that drives his conclusion. But the raw data from these disciplines don’t prove anything.

It is the interpretation of specific data according to old earth thinking that contradicts the plain reading of Scripture—not the facts themselves. And yet (just like the example of the 30-foot tree having been buried rapidly rather than layer by layer over thousands of years), that same data can be interpreted according to Scripture far better than the evolutionary story ever can.

And this inconsistency regarding belief in historical events as plainly recorded in Scripture is glaringly obvious when one makes a comparison to what old earth and theistic evolutionists profess about specific historical accounts in the Bible compared to others because of what secular science would accept.

Inconsistencies in Application

For example, modern materialistic science teaches that (outside of using some kind of modern medical process) virgin human females don’t have babies. However, Christian OE creationists and TE proponents would insist that even if science teaches something in contradiction to what the Word of God conveys, we simply have to trust what the Bible says even if we don’t have a scientific explanation for it.

And the same could be said for the idea of all the New Testament miracles like people walking on water that isn’t frozen, miraculous healings of lepers/physically-disabled/blind folks, water into wine, and resurrections of dead people, etc. Modern scientists wouldn’t accept any of those being supported by science, and yet OE- and TE-believing Christians believe in them anyway.

And of course, YECs would agree: if the Word of God says it, it is true!

However, when it comes to the age of the earth issue, we see OE and TE proponents act very inconsistently. They would say that because modern materialistic science teaches old earth/evolution respectively, we should accept their interpretations of the data and reinterpret the Bible accordingly to fit this idea.

And in my experience, when pressed as to their obvious inconsistency, they typically say something like, “Well, yes, but no one can perform an experiment to verify a virgin birth or a resurrection or whether someone walked on water—whereas—we can examine the rock layers and perform tests on them, so we need to modify our interpretation of Genesis accordingly!”

But wait, that’s in complete opposition to how human beings typically gain trust regarding any information source we access! For example, if a parent were to ask their son where he had been after school each day for the past two weeks and was able to verify several of his answers through multiple sources that all corroborated his story, the parent is much more likely to believe the accounts given in situations where there was no way to verify them.

But if in each case where it was possible to verify the son’s story, it turned out to be incorrect, the parent is rightly going to suspect that the accounts that aren’t verifiable are also suspect!

And the same would be true for any type of literature or news source. If in each case when I can verify something myself it turns out to be false, why would I trust the accounts I can’t verify? This is why I’ve always asked my OE and TE brethren why they would expect someone to trust the Bible in one area as plainly written but not in another.

Especially Genesis 1–11. These accounts fully recount 50% of the time recorded in Scripture and are the seedbed of all Christian doctrines.

Back to the Authority of God’s Word

You see, YECs are consistent. We would argue that in just the same way that we believed that if the words written in the Bible recorded any other specific event, when the Word of God says it, it is true! We would say that even though the Bible teaches something different than what the world is teaching we will continue to trust what God’s Word clearly says. Scripture is our authority.

And we’re not talking about denying observational science here. No one has observed evolution. No one has experienced deep time. You can’t set up a repeatable experiment demonstrating dinosaurs evolving into birds over supposed millions of years!

If you believe that happened in the unseen past, you do so by faith with the information you were willing to accept regarding it, not direct observation.

Genesis can be trusted as plainly written and is supported by observational science.

Genesis can be trusted as plainly written and is supported by observational science. We would entreat our old-earth- and theistic-evolution-believing brethren to lay down their arms and understand that the authority of God’s Word has been greatly harmed by the acceptance of these old-earth ideas.

Trusting in the literal creation account is a unifying message, not a divisive position. Remember, we never left! Any division that has been caused in Christ’s church regarding the book of Genesis and its understanding certainly wasn’t caused by those that take it at face value.

Rather, it has been those who have listened to the world’s explanation regarding our origins and have attempted to synthesize that understanding back into Scripture who have deviated away from the harmonious interpretation that you can simply trust the Word of God from the very first verse.