A piece published many years ago in The Presbyterian Witness
Q & A
with
Dr. Douglas Kelly
Q. The focus of your forthcoming book is Christ and creation. What is the importance of a study on creation in our day?
A. The title of my next book is The Creation: An Exposition Look at Genesis In Light of Changing Paradigms. Let me begin by citing from a great work from Straussburg by one of Calvin’s colleagues written in 1539 called Hexameron (still in Latin) on the six-days of creation. It was authored by Wolfgang Capito. He says that creation is the foundation stone of the whole Christian philosophy. By Christian philosophy he means systematic theology - world and life view and practice. If God did not make this world then religion is really a matter of some less than real world.
James Denny was a Scottish theologian in Glasgow in the 1890's and early 1900's. He wrote in the 1890's that to separate religion (Christianity) from science is to separate religion from the true. Once religion is separated from the true, Denny goes on to say, then religion dies among true men. I would say that if God begins His revelation to us with the doctrine of creation it must be important. It is therefore not only the first doctrine of the Bible (other than God Himself) it is primal. It is the basis of all covenants, of all revelation, of all God’s dealings with the human race, that He made all things out of nothing.
Of course we know from the New Testament, particularly the prologue to John’s Gospel that it was the agent of creation who took on flesh in the incarnation. As St. Anselm said in his famous Cor Deos Hormo? (Why Did God Become Man?) it took somebody as big as the Creator/God to become man to redeem us. If God is not really the Creator. Christ is not as big as the New Testament told us He was. His work does not have the kind of universal and eternal consequences that the New Testament theology teaches. Creation is important both for reality and that the real world is controlled by God. Christ the Agent of Creation is also our Redeemer. If you eviscerate a solid biblical doctrine of creation, the religion becomes unreal and Christ is diminished.
Q. Why is there so little connection between Christ and creation in modern day preaching?
A. I think there are two or three factors involved. I believe that evangelical theologians and commentators since the late 1800's have tended to avoid creation because of its controversial nature. There has been the rather uncritical acceptance of the assumptions of vast ages of the universe and of some form of evolutionary theory by most evangelicals. Dr. Nigel Cameron who is now at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School wrote a book in 1983 Evolution and the Authority of the Bible. He surveys the evangelical commentaries in the late 19th century and finds there is only one - Thomas Scott's - that hadn't caved in to some form of evolution. Therefore most ministers have come out of ministries and institutions that have accepted some form of evolutionary thinking. Obviously that is going to take away one's zeal for the glory of the Creator; if what He did is considerably less than what we are told in Genesis.
A second reason might be that there is a tendency among us ministers to see practical results. There is nothing wrong with that. I do as much as anyone. There can be a hesitancy to preach the whole range of biblical doctrine because you might feel that some doctrines might be too hard for people to understand or the doctrines do not get a good response or are too divisive. An example is the critique of evolutionary thinking. Thus many avoid it.
Q. Regarding creation, some reformed denominations are receiving men who believe that Genesis is poetic. What is some argumentation that elders can use to confront this view?
A. First let me recommend In the Beginning by Edward J. Young, published by Banner of Truth a few years ago. He was an authority of massive erudition in the Semitic languages. He discusses this matter. In the 60's when he wrote this he said that evangelicals were hesitant to enter the lists with people that accepted evolution. Thus they said that Genesis 1-3 was poetic and not meant to be taken as serious chronological history. Therefore they could have peace with the other point of view.
E. J. Young says that there are poetic accounts of creation in Scripture such as Ps. 104 and certain passages in Job. Such characteristics of Hebrew poetry are not found in Genesis 1-3. One of the marks is heavy parallelism as in the Psalms such as synthetic and antithetic parallelism. Such parallelism is not found in Genesis 1-3. These chapters are written as straight chronological history.
My colleague at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Dr. John Currid wrote an excellent article a few years ago in which he shows that the five or six characteristics of Hebrew poetry are not found in Genesis 1-3.
The great Jewish scholar, now deceased, Issac Cassuto did, I think, the finest single commentary I have ever seen on Genesis. It was translated into English in l961. He says the creation account is the way the Hebrew mind wrote history. The writer gives the broad picture in Genesis 1 and then isolates a portion and expands upon it in Genesis 2. This approach is not the method found in the Hellenistic and western intellectual tradition of writing history.
Q. Another critique laymen may hear is that past reformed scholars such as B. B. Warfield did not hold to a six-day (24 hours) creation view.
A. That is a true statement. Reformed scholars beginning in the mid 19th century felt the pressure in the shift in the intellectual world to the belief that geology had proven a massive age of physical structures in the physical world and in the solar system. The reformed scholars perhaps did not have the same alternative explanation to help them critique as some of us do today. They tried to preserve the truth claims of Scripture but make some kind of allowance for vast ages as did Thomas Chalmers of the Free Church of Scotland. That began to influence Charles Hodge somewhat. However Hodge very clearly came out strongly against Darwinism in 1874. He wrote What Is Darwinism? Therein he said that Darwinism is basically Satanism. Hodge was not an evolutionist. In his later years however he felt it necessary to make an allowance for an ancient earth because he thought the information that was coming in at that time was fairly conclusive.
Green, one of his successors at Princeton, was for an old earth. He felt that evolution was receiving so strong a testimony in science as for instance McKosh's support. McKosh was the head of Princeton and an evolutionist from Scotland. So Green wrote on the genealogies of Genesis, trying to lengthen them out and allow for an ancient earth. Warfield, a student of Green's, did the same. He would, I think, have allowed for some form of theistic evolution although Warfield was very conservative, one of our greatest scholars.
In his lifetime he did not have any serious challenges to this scientific paradigm. Therefore he felt he had to accommodate it. This has been the story with many of our best reformed scholars. Without wishing to disparage their great work in other areas, I think we have to say that we regret that they did not raise enough questions about those people who question the veracity of the word of God at these points. We do have considerable information available to us that they did not have to help us answer these questions.
Q. It is also a reminder that men are prone to error. We have to ultimately return to Scripture for our answers not just rely on the work of godly scholars.
A. Yes. That is perhaps what Christ meant when he said, "Call no man ‘Father’."
Q. Looking at Scripture there seems to be much internal evidence for a 24 hour day. If ‘day’ is not literal then the passage may not be literal itself.
A. Right.
Q. What is the meaning of the word ‘day’ in Gen. 2:4?
A. It is referring to the first day of creation on which God created all things out of nothing- all things visible and invisible as the Nicene Creed states. The remaining days are, as the German theologian Von Rad states, the turning of a chaos into a cosmos. [Alternatively it is merely an idiomatic way of saying ‘when’.]
Q. In Gen 5:5 we read "So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died." In Gen. 5:8 we read, "So all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years; and he died." Thus the time comparison between the two life spans was based on the same increments of time. [note that the ‘days’ these men lived were ordinary days: a whole lot of them, formed into definite other periods called years. The days remain normal days.]
A. I think that is clearly true. It is definite in Hebrew that when you have an ordinal accompanying the word "day" it always means a normal solar day. If in the Bible anywhere "day" means something else the immediate context makes that perfectly clear. For example, in 2 Peter 3:8 we read that "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." The context clearly shows that "day" is a long period of time. [On the contrary, the normal day is used as a comparison; it tells us that God is not constrained as we are by time. If the day here was a long period it would make the comparison nonsensical.] It would be the worst form of isogesis to read that meaning back into Genesis 1 where "day" has ordinals in a specific series. The creation account sets the order for our lives. Are we to work 6000 years and rest 1000 years?
The Fourth commandment also points this out in Ex.20:8ff. The Sabbath is very clearly a normal solar day. Six days of work and one day of rest is the normal pattern.
I think the evidence is preponderant that "day" means a twenty-four hour day. The famous Hebrew Old Testament linguistic professor of Oxford University, Dr. James Barr was no conservative. He wrote the book Fundamentalism attacking conservative Christianity although he came out of that sort of background himself. He wrote a letter to David C. C. Watson in 1984. I have a copy of that letter. In it he says that no world class scholar in any major university that he is aware of thinks that the writer of Genesis intended the word "day" to mean anything other than a 24 hour day. Now he doesn't agree with the truth claims of Scripture. He is saying that we must be honest when we interpret Scripture and say that the writer meant 24 hour days.
Q. If we follow the reformed hermeneutic of Scripture interpreting Scripture then we can come to no other interpretation than that of a six day (24 hours each) creation. To deny six day creation is also to deny this interpretive principle.
A. I fear that if we loosen our moorings to the clear teaching of Scripture in these early chapters of Genesis we have brought in a principle that when the basic teachings of Scripture go against the culture then you go with the culture.
Q.Your forthcoming book is on changing paradigms. Could you elaborate on that theme?
A. I take the subtitle from the famous work of Thomas S. Kuhn (University of Chicago) who in 1970 published his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Therein he speaks about a paradigm shift. Science proceeds not on an even uphill line but in terms of revolutions in which one paradigm (which is a world view, model or explanation of reality) is in a sort of revolutionary way replaced by another. This new paradigm is contradictory to many aspects of the former but contains all the same facets though from a different point of view.
The reason the old paradigm eventually goes defunct is because anomalies or questions are raised with it that cannot be answered in light of the basic paradigm. Kuhn gives illustrations in the history of science such as the old phlogistic theory of fire which finally just could not accommodate all the evidence. Another very different theory arose. This has happened many times in science.
Only time will tell if I am right. I am proposing that since so many problems are now being raised against the scientific empirical possibilities of the evolutionary mechanism even from non-Christian scholars, it is becoming increasingly difficult for evolutionary science to maintain intellectual standing because it cannot answer these questions.
I am thinking that we are in a transition time. If believing scientists of which there are many will continue to do their homework well and if people will learn what they can, the pressure may come that in another 40-50 years from now there may be an intellectual revolution that causes the old evolutionary paradigm to be replaced by the creationist paradigm or perhaps some other paradigm.
Fred Hoyle of Oxford and Wickransinghe wrote a book entitled Evolution from Outer Space in which they say evolution is preposterous. Professor Wickransinghe has flown over here from the British Isles to be a witness on the creationist side in some cases, such as a recent one in Louisiana. Even as a Buddhist he is willing to stand on the side of creation because evolution is such bad science. Now their paradigm would not be one of Biblical creation. Thus I do not know which paradigm will replace it. I do believe the evolutionary paradigm has got to go.
Professor Phillip E. Johnson of the University of California is showing in his books that evolution is intellectually bankrupt. He is not a young earth man but he does believe in creation. He shows that evolution is dogma, not science.
Q. Could you list two or three books that you think are important- books that parents could use with their children- teaching them how to counter evolutionary teaching?
A. A very helpful book by Phillip E. Johnson, Evolution As Dogma is approximately 40 pages and very helpful. Another book Pandas and People by Davis and Kenyon examines empiric evidence against any possibility of evolution. It is intended for use as a supplement to high school biology textbooks. The authors asked evolutionists to critique the book. They interact with them. They try to be fair. There is no mudslinging. That book is being used in many public schools as a supplementary text. It has been translated into Russian and is in wide use there.
A somewhat older work, but still a valid one, is Henry M. Morris' Evolution and the Modern Christian- particularly in regards to the two laws of thermodynamics. It is written at a popular and accurate level.
Paul Ackerman's It's A Young World After All is popularly written Some of its chapters are uneven but it is thought provoking and of use to parents regarding the age of the earth.
Q. Your book should be available by the end of 1997?
A. That is right. The book will have questions at the end of each chapter. I hope to have a study guide for use with it for Christian school and home school youth.
Q. It should also be of use in Sunday Schools and Bible study groups.
A. That is right. It will also be useful for pastors and seminary students.
Q. We will look forward to the book's publication. Thank you very much for this interview.
A. God bless you.
