I don’t know the situation in the US, but in the Netherlands it’s sure that my grandparents as poor farmers and strict calvinists at around 1900 were yec
I am sure they were, but they were not YEC in sense that modern day YECs are. They were probably like my parents and grandparents who accepted the Bible as literal because they knew no other options, but their faith was based on Christ, not seeing Genesis as foundational but rather just background. Even in my lifetime, I was unaware of Morris and the like with their emphasis on a historical reading of Genesis 1-11 probably until after high school. Before, it was just a position held in ignorance of alternatives.
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It’s hard to say whether the history would have been different than it was, but I tend to doubt that YEC would have made big inroads in the 1980s and beyond had Price died before he wrote most of what he wrote. Certainly his books persuaded both Morris and Whitcomb to convert from the gap view to YEC, and of course they subsequently met as fellow travelers and wrote The Genesis Flood, which effectively launched the movement outside of SDA circles.
I agree that most evangelical and fundamentalist churches weren’t into YEC until maybe the 1970s or 1980s. I myself never heard of those ideas until I was introduced to them around 1975 by a fellow physics student at Drexel, Steven Boyd, who went on to become a leading YEC biblical scholar–he’s featured in the film, “Is Genesis History?” Nearly all of the churches I attended were OEC of some sort, while the others found OEC or TE acceptable options. None pushed YEC, or I would have exited quickly. Once I started reading YEC books, I concluded within 48 hours that the view simply had no scientific merit and very little biblical merit.
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I wholly disagree. When Morris and Whitcomb separately and independently discovered Price’s works, they had epiphanies: without Price, there would have been no “Genesis Flood,” no YEC movement, and probably no Ken Ham either even if he won’t acknowledge the ultimate source as SDA authors.
For sure, YEC ideas were commonplace before the SDA church existed. Ham’s people quite properly point out the existence of the “Scriptural geologists” in the 1820 and 1830s. However, those ideas all but disappeared from evangelical authors for at least a full century, 1860 to 1960, and they survived only on the fringes like SDA and MSL denominations. They didn’t really take hold among evangelicals and fundamentalists until the 1970s, and they came into that world from the SDA world. There can be no reasonable doubt about that, historically.
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While doing some internship type work at a Lutheran church in Indiana I discovered that the junior high and high school Sunday School groups were taught several different views on the Creation accounts from Christians down through the centuries. I wish I could remember one of the sources, one who wrote that the Genesis Creation accounts clearly aren’t history because God isn’t interested in history lessons, only in spiritual ones. It seemed pretty radical to me at the time! Looking back I see how blessed those teens were to have teachers that really educated them.
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“All forms of intelligent design…”
I suppose that may be true by now given how energetically the young-earth crowd hijacked the term, but during my university days studying science there was an informal intelligent design club that consisted primarily of students who’d been atheist or agnostic but who due to studying science had concluded there was a Designer behind it all. To the bafflement of some the “creation science” students, some of those who’d become theists and then Christians were studying evolution, and it was the elegance of the evolutionary process that convinced them there was a Designer/Creator (the same creationists also couldn’t understand why so many science students laughed at them – and why so many students who were Christians when they arrived at the university and began studying were no longer Christians by their junior year.
Under that meaning of intelligent design, well, today’s intelligent design advocates (and a few “creation science” folks back then) would have been run out of the room for a simple reason: they insisted on bringing scripture into the discussions and couldn’t get their heads around the idea that the place of scripture is after reaching the conclusion that there’s a Designer.
Genesis 1 through 11 isn’t “fictional like a parable”; that misunderstands the literature as much as claiming it’s all literal like someone’s great-grandfather’s diary of events he’d lived through. Much of it is heavily mythologized – as opposed to mythological, the difference being that the former takes a known or commonly accepted event and casts it in mythological form while the latter takes common themes and illustrates them in mythological terms.
Both the the Noah story and that of the Tower of Babel are mythologized, built around real events but cast in terms that derive new meaning from those events. The Noah story’s kernel of truth is straightforward: there was a monstrous flood, a small family survived it on a boat, and they saved animals that were important to them (arguably the sending out of birds to check on the land is part of that kernel); the story is cast with poetic balance and divine meaning. The Babel story isn’t quite as simple: there really was a tower, it really was for “reaching heaven”, it really did get left unfinished, and the workers really did have a problem with communication due to multiple languages. Archaeologists found the beginning of a ziggurat that would have been the largest ever (and possibly the largest building to date), but that wasn’t completed, and evidence indicating a large workforce where a number of different languages were spoken and that this was a problem. They also understand what “reaching heaven” means: back then gods were associated with “high places”, so to speak to the gods it was generally necessary to “go up” to where the gods would “come down” to talk to heroes or kings or priests. But the cities of Mesopotamia were essentially on flat ground, leaving them without “high places” where they could meet with the gods – so the solution was obvious, namely to build their own high places and hope that the gods would honor these artificial high places and “come down” [trivia: there are records indicating that in a few places it was made explicit that nothing could be taller than the city’s ziggurat because that would interfere with the priests’ task of communicating with the gods, perhaps causing the gods to reject the city]. So height per se wasn’t the point, the object was to build something high enough and impressively constructed enough for the gods to deem it worthy of their attention. Going for the largest ziggurat ever certainly fit that bill, but Eridu the city had a labor shortage which they decided to fix by bringing in workers from lands they controlled, only to find that wasn’t a lot of help because workers who can’t talk to each other get less done than a small workforce that can. Then things went south politically and the project was abandoned, whereupon all the workers scattered back to their homes.
It’s a fascinating bit of history because it has all the elements of the Genesis version, just not in the same order and with differing reasons for some things. And the Genesis version is itself fascinating since the discoveries of the religious meanings of terms such as “come down”.
So one way of addressing these stories is to point out that there are real events, and that lots of people told these stories, but the Bible tells them in a way that helps us get to know God.
This prompted a thought: in some seminaries you can find in the course catalogue courses with the title “Polemics”. But polemics seem to come natural to most people; what’s needed are courses in “Irenics”, how to communicate peacefully! I could have benefited from a course like that early on in college; as a member of the varsity debate team in high school I’d developed the habit of being critical and antagonistic in any disagreement.
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I’d say that they’re not lying, they’re just wrong, and then explain that they’re wrong because they make two mistakes: forgetting that the Bible is ancient literature, and setting science up as the ultimate measure of truth.
The second one will sound funny, but it’s nevertheless correct: the source of the idea that every statement in the Bible has to be scientifically correct doesn’t come from the Bible at all, it comes from scientific materialism – so why is anyone applying that idea to the Bible?
As ancient literature we can’t expect scripture to fit the ways we think, so when we read a story from the Old Testament especially we have to remember that the story almost certainly doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means, and also that God wasn’t interested in teaching “how the heavens go”, He was interested in teaching “how to go to heaven”. And those mean that the writers He inspired wrote from their perspective in their understanding of the world, and if something sounds strange to us the problem is usually in us!
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I recall having two sets of Lincoln Logs and my brother borrowing a couple of more so we could build out own Noah’s Ark. It carried every toy animal we had, including a triceratops and a unicorn.
Noah and family were plastic Army men.
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There’s a bit of complexity involved in that the mythology and mythologized history in Genesis are written so that if read literally they lead to valid conclusions about God, so it’s easy to just assume that if they can be treated literally for doing theology then they must be literal. The easy way out is to just treat them like “Just So” stories, which actually is closer to the truth than reading them totally literally, but that doesn’t do them justice, either.
This problem is linked to something about the modern church that has contributed to dumbing-down theology: if you read ancient sermons, it becomes evident that they didn’t try to fit a message into fifteen or twenty minutes, they preferred to take the time to make the lesson clear, and they didn’t pull punches on difficult issues. Far, far too many modern “sermons” are little more than shallow theological pep talks, so people have lost the capacity to really listen and remember. I recall reading some of Martin Luther’s sermons on Galatians and thinking he’d never make it as a pastor today because he really went into depth and took his time with sermons that could easily have gone forty-five minutes!
There’s something I really liked about a Lutheran priest/pastor I was privilege to learn from; there was a morning adult class before the early service, and another after, and the two classes and the sermon were all part of a single lesson. You could get the core of it from just the sermon, but if you stuck it out through all three there was so much more!
As for defending YEC, he would have had a simple answer to that question: how God created is trivia; theology rests on Jesus, and if you’re not talking about Jesus you aren’t doing theology anyway! I used that once in response to a guy who just wouldn’t shut up about the earth being young; when he paused for breath at one point I just asked, “What does this tell me about Jesus?” He started in on a spiel about how if Genesis isn’t historical then the Bible can’t be trusted, blah-blah-blah, and at the next chance I jumped in and this time asked, Didn’t Jesus rise from the dead? That caught him off guard, but he said “Of course”, but I cut him off before he could add anything and just said, “If Jesus rose from the dead then nothing else matters – we don’t trust Jesus because the Bible is truth, we trust the Bible because Jesus is truth, and that means it doesn’t matter if the Creation stories are literal or not; it doesn’t change who Jesus is!”
In similar vein I once changed the words to a simple song for a vacation Bible school, replacing just one word:
“Jesus loves me, this I know for the Gospel tells me so”. After all, the Bible tells me all sorts of things; it’s the Gospel that tells me that Jesus loves me, and since He loves me my focus should be on Him – and every moment spent trying to prop up the notion that the Bible is scientifically accurate is a moment not spent getting to know the One who loves me so!
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I don’t think that Martin Luther is on your side. It is true that the basis of his theology is Jesus but he also adhered strongly to litterally reading the scriptures. You can’t use one aspect to knock out the other.
But actually, that is not the only written evidence we have.
and carbon dating confirms this as well.
Good thought. And the irony is that it primarily comes from young earthists, and is rejected by those in the EC world, and probably by most other old earth adherents, though some have a variety of it in concordist readings.
I would answer this with a yes… but. Yes, both Calvin and Luther held to a literal 6-day creation. But this is more in response to the prevailing Catholic teaching of instantaneous creation of their time(s). They were hardly YECs in the modern sense of the term.
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Luther and Calvin would likely (if they haven’t explicitly) agree with Augustine in this matter:
“Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.”
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Contemporary YEC would likely agree with Augustine, Luther and Calvin, I assume?
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I can see how that can swing the other way without a fixed reference point.
The YEC claim depends on some kind of flat earth phenomenon, which I have very little interest in debating, because the Earth is not flat and it is quite old.
It might be nice to explicitice the difference between our YEC forfathers and YEC nowadays. What is the key difference between them?
I’m going to let @LM77 respond to this as it was initially his topic
There was no “ruleset” to cast Lucifer out of Heaven, there was a Name.
What was the essence of Lucifer’s rebellion? He said, “I will be like God”.
Who stood in opposition to Lucifer? Mi-cah-El, a name that is a question and thus a battle cry: “Who is like God?” It was the answer to that question that drove Lucifer out of heaven: Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Man, Savior, Redeemer – HE is like God! Not some created being, but the only-begotten unique Son who is Himself God.
Before that question Lucifer could not stand, because it pointed to the fact that humans differ from angels in one critical respect: human nature was taken into the Godhead, and that made every effort of Lucifer and all his minions worthless. He was defeated at the moment of the Incarnation, when Gabriel made the Announcement to Mary, it just hadn’t sunk in yet. The Crucifixion was the moment his delusion that he hadn’t yet lose was thrown up against the declaration by Jesus, “τετέλεσται” (teh-TELL-ess-tie), “It is [now and forever, thoroughly and without anything missing] finished!” – and if he didn’t get the point then, on the third day it certainly did.
Michael didn’t need any rules to boot Lucifer from Heaven; his name and the Name that answered it were more than enough.
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