Do You Accept 'Old Earth' and Evolution?
The following is an edited transcript of the audio.
Do you accept "old earth" and evolution?
If by "accept" you mean, "Are there people on our counsel of elders who hold to the old earth theory?" then, Yes.
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If by "accept" you mean, "Is that my view?" here is what I said the other day when the church staff was talking about this. We spent about an hour, talking about how we as a church should orient ourselves in the conversation about old earth and young earth, and I said that there seem to be two viable, biblical views for me. (This is going to offend a lot of people.)
One is young earth, because it seems to me that the natural reading of Genesis 1 is 24-hour days, not Day-Age.
And two, the view that John Sailhamer wrote in Genesis Unbound or in his other books, which says that all of creation happened in verses 1 and 2. It may be as old as 4 trillion years, as far as he is concerned, and what was happening in Genesis 1 each day was not the bringing into being of the earth and its various forms, but rather the ordering, managing and structuring of things. This allows for 24 hour days but also allows for an old earth.
I lean that way. I don't believe in evolution as the way that Adam came to be a human. I think God created Adam from the dust of the ground. I think he was unique and that he is the father of all humanity-Adam and Eve-and that he is not the product of a long evolutionary process. I can't make that jive with the way the text reads.
And I think that it's very important that Adam be a historical figure, because that's the way he is treated by the other biblical writers. The heart passage in Romans 5 collapses, and the whole nature of God's making with Adam a covenant and then him failing and then Christ being a second Adam comes to naught, if he's not a historical person.
