Preparing to know God |
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| December 23, 2007 | 0 Comments |
In our last lesson we looked at the strategies for interpreting Genesis. We dealt with the fact that evolution is not new! Rather, it’s an ancient belief of the Continuity of Being, that has come down through time and is now packaged in what we call Cosmic Evolution, the evolution of all things in the universe. It’s really nothing more than an outgrowth of that old HVP idea. It can be expressed mathematically, with slick equations, but after all is said and done it’s the same old belief in a Continuity of Being.
Even secular scholars admit that there’s a linkage going on between ancient paganism and modern paganism. Science really isn’t involved in this debate, its philosophy that’s involved, the philosophy of naturalism.
We also compared a brief list of characteristics in regards to Genesis and Evolution and saw that there were not only differences in the characteristics, but major differences in the sequence of things. One example we saw was in the Bible God created everything very good and death was introduced later so death becomes abnormal. Death is something that came in after creation because of man’s sin. Evolution uses death to bring about life. In the Bible we have life and then it descends into death.
Our worldview really determines how we interpret the book of Genesis. Even small influences from HVP can really cause us to get off track with the Scripture. We looked at three historical strategies that have been used to interpret the origins of the Bible:
- The Capitulation Strategy - using higher criticism, interpreters have influenced the church to completely surrender to cosmic evolution leaving Genesis behind as nothing more than a myth with individual spiritual meaning. We would call this the complete surrender strategy.
- The Accommodation Strategy - also called theistic evolution (God used evolution to create), this approach tries to get Genesis and evolution together and usually attempts this with one of three basic theories:
- Gap Theory - interpreters place an indefinite period of time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 followed by divine creation in six 24 hour days
- Day-Age-Day theory - interpreters places indefinite periods of time between the six 24 hour days
- Day-Age theory - interpreters read each of the six days is an indefinite period of time.
