Theology – Joshualetter

THE OLIVET DISCOURSE A Comment

Thomas Alderman, November 29, 2025

All three Synoptic Gospels – Mark, Luke, and Matthew – contain Jesus’ discourse concerning future events, known as “the Olivet Discourse” because He delivered it while gazing from the Mount of Olives at the magnificent Herodian Temple across the Kidron Valley.

The Discourse poses a number of hermeneutical challenges, but one in particular causes some to stumble. Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple. He also predicts His own return “in clouds with great power and glory.” But then He emphasizes that “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” Manifestly, the generation living when Jesus spoke has been gone a long time – yet Christ has not returned. Did Jesus make a mistake? Or did the Gospel authors err in recording what He said? And if He or they erred in this instance, where else might they have erred? Is the New Testament reliable at all?

According to William L. Lane, author of the New International Commentary on the New Testament (NICNT) Book of Mark,¹ “In the Gospel of Mark there is no passage more problematic than the prophetic discourse of Jesus on the destruction of the Temple.”² Other scholars concur: Hans Bayer, Professor Emeritus, Covenant Theological Seminary, declares it to be “one of the more difficult things to understand in the Gospels.” At the same time, since the Olivet prophesy is among the most difficult New Testament texts, its vindication, if that were possible, would be of interest to the honest seeker. Many have therefore attempted to rescue the Discourse with various explanations as to how Jesus’ predictions could all have been true. I set myself to understand those attempts in the hope of reaching an opinion on the question.

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Two: The Scientific Revolution Arose only in the West for a Reason

As we saw in Part One, there are reasons science arose in the West. At the same time there are also reasons why it did NOT arise anywhere else: their theology did not permit it.

Barbour argues that “science in its modern form [arose] in Western civilization alone, among all the cultures of the world,” because only the Christian West had the necessary “intellectual presuppositions underlying the rise of science.”¹ These included, as noted in Part One, the belief in a rational God who created an orderly cosmos and humans in his image as also rational beings precisely because he wished to be known.

Greece.

Ancient Greek philosophy is a case in point. Many Greek philosophers “assumed they could deduce how nature ought to behave . . . based on only superficial observations of natural phenomena or without actually observing nature at all.”². Thus, Aristotle’s conception of the cosmos was based more on his suppositions about the divinity of the celestial objects and his assumptions about what kinds of motions would be suitable to them, given their divine nature. Supposing that a circular motion was most perfect, for example, Aristotle concluded that the orbit of the sun around the Earth must be perfectly circular. (Of course the sun does not orbit the Earth, and the Earth’s orbit of the sun is elliptical, not circular.) He also reasoned that the Earth must be eternal and the center of the universe.

Egypt

Despite Egypt’s technical prowess in building the pyramids, Egyptian mathematics and geometry remained a practical art.

Any possibility for scientific breakthroughs was destroyed by

the polytheistic, animistic precepts central to Egyptian religion. In polytheism, each god governs its domain according to its own rules; uniformity and hence intelligibility are elusive. In animism, likewise, many gods inhabit natural things such as trees and animals.

Eastern pantheistic monism

The Hindu and Buddhist precept that all is One implies that all distinctions are illusory – a real curiosity-killer! The study of nature requires duality: the knower and the thing which is known. They are not the same thing. Just as importantly, classification is an indispensable scientific exercise. E.g., a dolphin is not a porpoise, and a bacterium is not a virus. Study of the Creation entails careful distinctions. But in Eastern thought, to realize one’s oneness with the cosmos is to pass beyond knowledge. This is hardly a view that encourages scientific inquiry.

NEXT WEEK: Part Three: There is Conflict, but it is Between Naturalism and Science

ENDNOTES

¹Barbour, Religion and Science, 27.

²Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper Collins 2021), 32.

Pearl of Great Price

Will Durant said it well: The portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels must be true, because no one could have invented such a character:

That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of Higher Criticism, the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man.

Will Durant, Historian¹

But Simon Greenleaf said it even better:

Lastly, the great character they have portrayed is perfect. It is the character of a sinless Being; of one supremely wise and supremely good. It exhibits no error, no sinister intention, no imprudence, no ignorance, no evil passion, no impatience; in a word, no fault; but all is perfect uprightness, innocence, wisdom, goodness and truth. The mind of man has never conceived the idea of such a character, even for his gods; nor has history or poetry shadowed it forth. The doctrines and precepts of Jesus are in strict accordance with the attributes of God, agreeably to the most exalted idea which we can form of them, either from reason or from revelation. They are strikingly adapted to the capacity of mankind, and yet are delivered with a simplicity and majesty wholly divine. He spake as never man spake. He spake with authority; yet addressed himself to the reason and the understanding of men; and he spake with wisdom, which men could neither gainsay nor resist. In his private life, he exhibits a character not merely of strict justice, but of flowing benignity. He is temperate, without austerity; his meekness and humility are signal; his patience is invincible; truth and sincerity illustrate his whole conduct; every one of his virtues is regulated by consummate prudence; and he both wins the love of his friends, and extorts the wonder and admiration of his enemies. He is represented in every variety of situation in life, from the height of worldly grandeur, amid the acclamations of an admiring multitude, to the deepest abyss of human degradation and woe, apparently deserted of God and man. Yet everywhere he is the same; displaying a character of unearthly perfection, symmetrical in all its proportions, and encircled with splendor more than human. Either the men of Galilee were men of superlative wisdom, and extensive knowledge and experience, and of deeper skill in the arts of deception, than any and all others, before or after them, or they have truly stated the astonishing things which they saw and heard.²

¹From The Story of Civilization, Vol. III: Caesar and Christ, by Will Durant, p. 557.

²Simon Greenleaf (1783-1853), The Testimony of the Evangelists: The Gospels Examined by the Rules of Evidence (Full text: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34989/34989-pdf.pdf (last visited 4.5.24).) (Greenleaf, of course, one of the founders of Harvard Law and the Nineteenth Century’s foremost authority on the law of evidence, set out to refute Christianity and became a follower of Christ instead.)

He is Risen!

On this Easter weekend it pleases me to share with you something of what I’ve learned from Gary Habermas’ On the Resurrection: Evidences (B&H Academic, 2024).

There is virtual unanimity among scholars, both liberal and conservative, that the details of the events which gave rise to the Gospel story probably happened – with the sole exception of the empty tomb, which is accepted by “only” a clear majority of scholars. That is to say, more particularly, that the scholarly community agrees that the disciples believed they had seen the risen Christ, it transformed them from cowering fugitives into on-fire evangelists, and many of them were martyred for it. None recanted.

As to the Resurrection itself, a strong minority of scholars believe Jesus arose. For those who do not, there are no plausible naturalistic explanations for the events described above. Their only theory is a hidebound naturalistic prejudice that there is no God and hence no miracles. But if God exists then naturalism is false and miracles can and will happen whenever God wants them to.

Applying well-accepted historiographical criteria for historicity, it would be almost impossible for the evidence for the Resurrection to be any stronger than it is. Indeed, considering that we are at a distance of 2,000 years, it is astonishing how extensively documented are the events of the New Testament, such that one can only ascribe it to a meticulous providence. What are those criteria? (Time permits only a cursory recounting; I hope to flesh out the following in future posts.)

Early attestation. (Check.)
Eyewitness testimony. (Check.)
Multiple attestation. (Check.)
Dissimilarity. (“[A] particular saying may be attributed to someone . . . if it cannot plausibly be [attributed to] . . . the words or teachings of other roughly contemporary sources.” Habermas, 47.) The very idea of imagining the sayings of Jesus as coming from anyone else is ludicrous.
Palestinian origin. (Sayings in the Aramaic language, for example.) The raising of Jairus’ daughter and the cry of dereliction come to mind.
Embarrassment. (Frankly acknowledging words or events which place the author or others in a negative light may reflect a commitment to truth-telling.) Mark and Peter, for example, are unflinching in describing Peter’s repeated failures.
Enemy attestation. The Jews to this day claim that the body was stolen, which means the tomb must have been empty.

He is risen!

The Recovery of the New Testament

Was the New Testament corrupted? Or has it been restored?

Thomas Alderman 2024

The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, by Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford University Press, 3d ed. 1992; 4th ed. with Bart D. Ehrman 2005)¹.

I. Introduction.

The Apostle Peter exhorts believers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man who asks of you a reason for the hope that is in you.” 1 Peter 3:15. We certainly ought, therefore, to be prepared in advance to answer those who insist that the text of the New Testament has been so corrupted that we cannot know what its authors were trying to tell us.

It’s a claim that cannot be lightly dismissed.

Toward an Epistemology of Love

N. T. Wright, Loving to Know: The 2019 Erasmus Lecture (First Things Magazine, February 2020, pp. 25-34.)

To transcend the divided field of knowledge – the antitheses between fact and value, objective and subjective, reason and faith, science and religion – requires an epistemology of love – a love, that is, which recognizes the material universe for what it is, “the loving gift of a wise creator.”

N. T. wright places the origin of these antitheses in ancient Epicurean philosophy, which held that “The gods may exist, but they are in an entirely different sphere to ourselves, taking no notice of us and certainly not intervening in our world.” He traces this view of the cosmos through the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution to the present. To this day, he says, “most Westerners – including, alas, many Christians! – don’t realize that they are looking at the world through Epicurean spectacles.”

The intellectuals of the Enlightenment were receptive to Epicurean philosophy because it justified their “antipathy to [hierarchical] top-down social, political, cultural, and religious systems . . . which were perceived as denying a proper aspiration for freedom.” What they failed to realize, and what many today also do not realize, is that Epicurean cosmology is just as “top-down” as divine creation. It says, essentially, that since the gods are not involved in mundane things, the universe must therefore create itself – “so that the evolution of species was approached not simply as a newly discovered bit of inductive knowledge from below but as the necessary postulate from . . . the Epicurean assumption that if the gods do not act within the world then the world must make itself.”

Wright’s observations help explain how it is that modern science acquired its naturalistic bias. It is indeed a thing requiring some kind of explanation. It is completely evident, after all, that naturalism – the prejudice that the material world of space, time, matter and energy is all that exists – is not something that science has discovered. It was not found in a test tube, or on a distant planet. Where did it come from?

Epicurean philosophy pre-dates modern science by more than 1800 years, so it was ready and waiting when the Enlightenment philosophers needed it. Wright says that this helps to show that “modern Western culture is not a new thing based on modern science as is so often assumed, but an ancient worldview with some modern twists and footnotes.”

Wright’s antidote is to view the cosmos as a gift from a loving Father, and he has an answer for those who charge that theism’s openness to divine activity in the universe discourages scientific inquiry:

An epistemology of love, seeing the creation as the outflowing of divine creative love, must pay attention to that creation. It isn’t enough to know that it is God’s creation, and so to infer that we already know all that’s important to know about it. Love demands patient curiosity. Love transcends the objective/subjective divide, because as the image-bearing stewards of creation, as liturgists of creation’s praise, as prophets called to speak creation’s reality, we humans are called not to a cool, detached appraisal of the world, nor to a self-indulgent grasping of it, but to a delighted exploration and exposition, in which respect and enjoyment go together.

. . . .

. . . Our delighted, sensitive, respectful, and curious exploration of creation is the response of love to the love we have received.

Genesis as Allegory

This is the fourth in a series on the old earth/young earth controversy.

Paul in Galatians 4:21-31 refers to the birth of Isaac to Sarah and of Ishmael to Hagar (Genesis 16), as an allegory. Some have appealed to this text as warrant for treating Genesis 1 also as allegory.

Here is the Galatians text in the King James:

21 Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?

22 For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman.

23 But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise.

24 Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.

25 For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.

26 But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. [My emphasis.]

The critical word in the Greek is ἀλληγορούμενα·

I do not have any Greek, and I appeal to the Greek scholars among us to correct my mistakes.

The English Standard Version (https://www.esv.org/Galatians+4/) also:

Now this may be interpreted allegorically.

The New International Version takes a slightly different approach:

These things are being taken figuratively.

But there doesn’t seem to be a significant difference between “allegorically” and “figuratively.” According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “the word [allegory] traces back to the Greek word allēgorein meaning “to speak figuratively,” and means “a work of written, oral, or visual expression that uses symbolic figures, objects, and actions to convey truths or generalizations about human conduct or experience.”

It may be noted, of course, that the dictionary definition is neutral as to whether the events which carry the allegorical meaning are themselves true, or whether the allegorical meaning is true. And in the case of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, clearly Paul has no intention of questioning the historicity of the births of Isaac and Ishmael. Genesis could, likewise, be both history and allegory, no? What if it is? Would its allegorical quality have any bearing on the meaning of the Six Days of Genesis 1:3-31?

Paul’s comment on Genesis 16 is very helpful, in that it shows that in regard to any given biblical text, a figurative interpretation cannot be ruled out a priori. Essentially, Paul gives us permission to ask the question.

Genesis 1 doesn’t sound much like an allegory. An allegory uses actors and actions to represent other, deeper things. What deeper things do the waters and the mountains and the fish and the birds represent? They represent themselves, do they not? The uncertainty as to the duration of the Six Days isn’t resolved by any attempt to interpret them as allegory: how is a 24-hour day an allegory for some longer period of time? How is a longer period of time deeper than a 24-hour period?

This is to be contrasted with Genesis 2 and 3, however. A Tree of Life, a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and a talking snake look everything like symbols of greater things. But if Genesis 2-3 are an allegory, would that make a figurative understanding of Genesis 1 any more plausible?

It might, particularly in light of the apparent need to read Genesis 1 together with Genesis 2 and 3; for they both contain accounts of the creation of man, and the latter account does sound figurative. The man is formed out of the dust of the ground, God breathes life into him. There also seems to be a connection between the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and Genesis 1, in that Eve was created on day 6, and 1:27 and 2:8 together show that the Garden and the Trees came before Eve (perhaps even as early as day 3). 2:16-17 shows that some time on day 6 but before creating Eve, God commanded Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree. (There is no positive indication that God made that command to Eve directly, since she didn’t yet exist – Adam may have informed her about it later.) All of this shows that even if the Fall did not occur until day 7, the command concerning the Tree must have come on day 6. To me, the Tree looks everything like an allegory.

I would like to mention here the possibility that we are Adam (and Eve) – and I mean literally! Modern genetics shows that every human being has a genetic endowment inherited from our first parents. Isn’t it Adam who now walks the fields and the streets of the world? Weren’t we literally in Adam at the Fall? In some mysterious yet literal way, didn’t we also repudiate God on that primordial day? Taste the fruit? Isn’t this both an allegory and literally true at both levels of meaning?

Galatians 4 shows that the at least some of the people and events of the Old Testament – people who actually existed and events which actually occurred – were providentially ordered so as to teach deeper things about God and his plan for redeeming the cosmos. It does not enable us to rule out the possibility that Genesis is history or that it is allegory or that it is both.

Genesis seems to describe universal human experience in a way which is unfathomable, at least until now. Genesis is somehow my biography, and yours. Genesis tells me that being human may be a greater mystery than any of us realizes.

But at present, I remain unconvinced that it is necessary to take one view or the other or, if one takes one view or the other, to convince anyone else that one is correct. Why? Because what we do know, through other lines of reasoning, is that whether it took him 6 days or 13 billion years, God created everything that exists. Together, nature and the Bible assure us that there is a God who wants us to know him, and that our happiness is in knowing him. If we know this, then we are free, and how is it then necessary to pledge loyalty to one interpretation of Genesis or another, and why should we feel compelled to try to convince anyone else that our view is the correct one? Better minds have wrestled with this, to no clear conclusion.

I do not intend (obviously) to suggest that it is not worth the attempt; and again, we have not yet looked at the scientific arguments and counter-arguments.

Genesis: Four Views

I recently read Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Kindle edition; J. B. Stump, ed.; Zondervan 2017, contributions by Ken Ham, Hugh Ross, Deborah Haarsma, and Stephen C. Meyer). I will be posting my ruminations about it from time to time.

This is the third in a series on the old earth/young earth controversy and the first on Four Views.

Chapter 1: Young Earth Creationism by Ken Ham.

Ham writes:

. . . [C]reation is cursed, whereas Scripture (the written Word) is not. Without the biblical revelation about the cosmos-impacting fall of man, the creation gives a confusing message about the Creator.5 Therefore, we start our thinking about origins (as in all other areas) with Scripture, God’s inerrant, holy Word. [Kindle Location 292.]

From the fact that the creation is cursed it does not follow as a matter of logical necessity that God’s revelation in nature is confusing. It certainly can be, of course, and there is no question that the scriptures teach much about God and a great many other things which cannot be discerned in nature. But Paul writes to the Romans that God’s power and deity are readily apparent from nature. Paul’s view is vindicated by Big Bang cosmology and the Fine-Tuning of the laws of physics, which prove God’s existence[1]; and that is no small thing.

Moreover, Ham here claims merely that nature is confusing without the revelation of the Fall; but none of the other contributors deny the Fall. So is Ham conceding that nature is not confusing, as long as the Fall is in view? Then he is not making much of a claim. It might be more pertinent to observe that in light of the Fall, we should adopt a healthy skepticism with regard to all our judgments, and be cautious about human interpretation of both Genesis and the book of nature.

To me it is not the meaning of the word “day” which is most interesting about the Genesis account, but the phrase, “and there was evening and there was morning.” It’s pretty hard to interpret that as having anything in mind other than one period of darkness followed by one period of light. This may be YEC’s best argument. There are other compelling arguments, based on Exodus 20:8-11 (“in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them”), the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, and the question why it would have been necessary to save the animals in an ark if the flood was not global in extent.

Yet the findings of science appear to be at great tension with these texts. The question is whether there is a way to resolve that tension without stretching either the biblical text or the science to the breaking point.

My present bias is that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and the universe much older. If, at the end of this project, I remain of that opinion, then I may be forced to say that I do not understand the biblical text. I do not think I will be forced to say that I do not believe the biblical text. Instead, I might say that it belongs in the catalogue of the many unanswered questions that I have about the universe, God, and his plan of redemption, right up there with the Trinity, the Incarnation, and atonement for sin. I do not understand those things either, yet I believe them because the Bible clearly teaches them, they make very good sense insofar as I do understand them, and I have very good, independent reasons to believe that the Bible is the Word of God.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Ham does not go into YEC’s responses to mainstream geology and astronomy, and I intend to reserve judgment until I can review all of that.

I do very much doubt I’ll change my opinion. It’s like my views on same-sex attraction (SSA). I read widely and have been doing so for many years. I noticed pretty much everything that was said about gay rights from the time I was in law school starting in 1971; but I did not take notes, and would not have been able to marshall the evidence against the notion that SSA is inborn and immutable. Yet I was sure that that evidence was out there. When, ultimately, the task of marshalling the evidence became unavoidable, I researched the matter thoroughly.[2] I was not certain, when I began that project, that my opinions would be confirmed, but they were confirmed.

It is like that here. I have been paying attention for a long time to the debate over the age of the earth, and have not been convinced by YEC arguments about the unreliability of radiometric dating, geological strata, ice corp samples, or astronomical measurements. But until now I was not taking notes, and I confess I have not heretofore had the motivation to entertain young earth theories seriously and carefully as I now, God willing, hope to do.

[1] See joshualetter.com/blog, June 28, 2018 post, “The Existence of God: Four Philosophical Arguments.”

[2] See joshualetter.com/blog, July 4, 2015 post, “What is Homosexuality? A Survey of the Scholarly Literature.”

“And There was Evening and There was Morning”

(Third in a series on the old-earth/young earth controversy.)

I am reading Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (2017), a sort of symposium presenting an interchange among Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis for young-earth creationism (YEC), Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe for old-earth creationism (OEC), Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute for intelligent design (ID), and Deborah Haarsma of BioLogos for evolutionary creationism (EC).

I was already aware of the omission of the phrase, “And there were evening and morning, the [nth] day” from the discussion of the 7^th day (Genesis 2:1-3), but had not fully appreciated the implications until now.

In context, the omission is very conspicuous and requires explanation. Perhaps the most popular explanation is that the 7^th day did not end, that it indeed continues to the present. God rested from his creation activity and continues to rest from it. “God rested” would be taken to imply “God rested permanently,” or at least until further notice. I suppose that would become the eighth day. (Wow, we could form some sort of eschatological movement and call it “The Eighth Day”!)

It would certainly be difficult to show that explanation to be implausible. But if the 7^th day did not end, then it was longer than 24 hours; and if the 7^th day was more than 24 hours, then on what basis can we confidently say that the first six days were themselves 24 hours long? Isn’t it young earthers’ argument that we are addressing an ordinary 7-day week? But if the 7^th day was more than 24 hours, that alone would mean that it was not an ordinary 7-day week.

And if we cannot confidently say that the first six days were 24 hours each, then we also cannot confidently say that the Genesis account is incompatible with standard interpretations of modern scientific observations.

There is no need to show this explanation to be true: if it is even possible, OEC’s fidelity to scripture is established.

And yet . . .

Yet the text nevertheless recites, after each of the first six days, “and there was evening and there was morning, the [n]th day,” which unavoidably seems to imply the phenomenological effects of the rotation of the earth, once around. How else can one make sense of it? How far do we stretch the ordinary meaning of the text in order to reconcile it with what modern geology and astrophysics seem to be telling us? I think this remains a challenge for OEC.

Presently I don’t have an answer. My solution is simply to leave the question open in the hope that someday I will understand. Emphatically, I do not throw Genesis out the window; but then, neither do I throw modern astrophysics out the window.

God is the author of both the scriptures and nature. What he has revealed about himself in each must be compatible with the other. If it appears otherwise, the defect is not in the revelation but in our understanding, and requires further inquiry.

In the meantime, I prefer to emphasize what we do know. Science has vindicated the biblical world view in very impressive ways, both generally and specifically. We know there is a God, and everything science tells us about his attributes (personal, intelligent, powerful) is true to the biblical revelation. Knowing all of that, it becomes possible (and permissible, I think) to tolerate the uncertainty we have about the proper interpretation of Genesis.

And we have barely begun our investigation.

John C. Lennox on the Age of the Earth

(Second in a series on the old-earth/young earth controversy.)

John Carson Lennox is a British mathematician, a philosopher of science and a Christian apologist. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, Oxford University. (Wikipedia.)

In Seven Days that Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis and Science (Zondervan 2011), John C. Lennox examines the Genesis text and provides many enlightening observations.

I don’t recall how I heard about this book, but when I did hear about it I bought it immediately because Lennox is one of my favorite Christian thinkers.

I was hoping that Lennox would discuss the scientific theories of young-earth creationists. His focus, however, is on the scriptural text, the title of the book notwithstanding. At the outset of my investigation of this topic, it does seem to me that the science is crucial, since each side seems to criticize the other for both their interpretations of scripture and for their science. Young earth advocates accuse their opponents of subordinating the authority of scripture to modern science, while old earth advocates maintain that young-earthers adopt far-fetched scientific theories to accommodate their woodenly literal interpretation of the biblical text. It’s my intention to start boning up on the science right away.

Nevertheless, Lennox’s observations about the biblical text are illuminating.

The “Pillars” of the Earth

Lennox observes that the Copernican controversy arose partly out of a very natural, but ultimately discredited reading of 1 Samuel 2:8:

For the pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and on them he has set the world.

It wasn’t easy for the church to accept the idea that the Earth orbits the sun, but ultimately she did so under the pressure of irrefutable scientific observations. Lennox asks,

But now we need to face an important question: why do Christians accept this “new” interpretation, and not still insist on a “literal” understanding of the “pillars of the earth”? Why are we not still split up into fixed-earthers and moving-earthers? Is it really because we have all compromised, and made Scripture subservient to science? (Page 19.)

One young-earth advocate commented:

Only when such a position became mathematically and observationally “hopeless,” should the church have abandoned it. This is in fact what the church did. Young earth creationism, therefore, need not embrace a dogmatic or static biblical hermeneutic. It must be willing to change and admit error. Presently, we can admit that as recent creationists we are defending a very natural biblical account, at the cost of abandoning a very plausible scientific picture of an “old” cosmos. But over the long term this is not a tenable position. In our opinion, old earth creationism combines a less natural textual reading with a much more plausible scientific vision. . . . At the moment this would seem the more rational position to adopt. [Moreland and Reynolds, eds., Three Views of Creation and Evolution (Grand Rapids: Zondervan 1999, p. 73.] (Page 62.)

Neither old earth theory nor young earth theory is a recent invention

The Jewish calendar, for instance, has for centuries taken as its starting point the “Era of Creation,” which it dates to 3761 BC. (Page 40.)

Lennox:

Some of the early church fathers, such as Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho, and Irenaeus, in Against Heresies, suggested that the days might have been long epochs, on the basis of Psalm 90:4 (“For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night”) and 2 Peter 3:8 (“With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). (Page 41.)

Augustine (354-430):

As for these days, it is difficult, perhaps impossible to think, let alone explain in words, what they mean.”

In his famous commentary On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, he added:

But at least we know that it [the Genesis day] is different from the ordinary day with which we are familiar.

Lennox:

In fact Augustine . . . held that God had created everything in a moment, and that the days represented a logical sequence to explain it to us. (Page 42.)

Four Distinct Usages of the Word, “Day”

The author of Genesis uses the Hebrew word yom in four different ways.

God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. Genesis 1:5.

Lennox:

What is the natural reading of this statement? Here day is contrasted with night; so a twenty-four-hour day is not in view, but rather “day” in the sense of “daytime.” (Page 49.)

The second time the word for “day” occurs, again in Genesis 1:5, it is in the context of saying that day one involves “evening and morning,” and “day” would naturally then be understood to refer to a twenty-four-hour day.

The third usage of the word “day” is in reference to the seventh day – a day of indefinite duration. (Page 50.)

Finally, in Genesis 2:4, the author refers to the entire period of creation as “the day” of creation. (Some translations render it “When God created . . .” but it should be rendered “In the day God created . . .” according to Lennox.)

Turning to the Six Days of creation, Lennox says,

[T]here is a clear pattern to the days: they each begin with the phrase “And God said” and end with the statement “and there was evening and there was morning, the nth day.” This means that, according to the text, day 1 begins in verse 3 and not in verse 1. . . . [T]he text of Genesis 1:1, in separating the beginning from day 1, leaves the age of the universe indeterminate. It would therefore be logically possible to believe that the days of Genesis are twenty-four-hour days (of one earth week) and . . . that the universe is very ancient. (Pages 52-53.)

Lennox suggests another possibility:

[T]he individual days might well have been separated from one another by unspecified periods of time. . . . One consequence of this is that we would expect to find what geologists tell us we do find — fossil evidence revealing the sudden appearance of new levels of complexity, followed by periods during which there was no more creation. (Pages 54-55.)

The Science

Again, Lennox does not provide a detailed description of YEC scientific theories, nor does he critique them. He does mention, however, “The honest and admirable admission of prominent young-earth creationists that ‘recent creationists should humbly agree that their view is, at the moment, implausible on purely scientific grounds. They can make common cause with those who reject naturalism, like old earth creationists, to establish their most basic beliefs.’” (Paul Nelson and John Mark Reynolds, “Young Earth Creationism,” in Moreland, et al., eds., ibid.) (Page 86.)

The source just cited may be the next place I’ll look, despite its having been published 20 years ago. I have studied under both Moreland and Nelson and I found them both to be brilliant in their fields and of high integrity. However, another basis for critique of Lennox is his “cherry-picking” of unusually non-doctrinaire young earth advocates. He does not mention Ken Ham or Ham’s organization, Answers in Genesis (AIG), which is one of the leading young earth advocacies in the world, and certainly a more contentious one than Moreland and Reynolds. I am sure we will hear more about AIG in these pages in the near future.