The central question on Adam: who is the authority?
As in the Reformation, so now in the theistic evolution challenge, behind the questions of interpretation of Biblical and creation givens, is the question of final authority. The Catholics put tradition above the Bible, even while quoting the Bible; Luther and Calvin put the Bible above tradition, even while diligently studying the Church Fathers such as Chrysostom and Augustine. Theistic evolutionists put “the sure results of science” above the Bible, even while saying they honor the Bible; the creationists put the Bible above “the sure results of science,” while at the same time diligently searching creation and seeing that everywhere it confirms the Bible.
Daniel Harlow is re-interpreting Genesis because of “the sure results of science”. In his Perspectives article, he says “the hominid fossil record unmistakably shows….”, and “ molecular biology indicates.. the present human population cannot possibly be traced back to a single couple”. In other words molecular biology has more certainty than the very words of Jesus who as Creator of Adam and Eve speaks of their historical existence “in the beginning of creation”. Matt. 19, Mark 10. Dr. Harlow in essence thinks that man’s origin science is infallible, but the Bible is not infallible. He made this claim that the Bible is not infallible in an article that is found on this page. It is no longer to be found on the Calvin Chimes site starting a year ago. It was a letter written to the Calvin Chimes. He even is so bold as to claim that the CRC agrees that the Bible is not infallible.
As to what the CRC believes about infallibility, I offer first my own experience about this and then an examination of what CRC people have actually written on it.
When I was at Calvin College in my senior year (58-59), Marv Hoogland, a first year Calvin Sem student wrote an article for Stromata, the Calvin Sem student publication, denying the infallibility of the Bible. See under “infallibility question” in this history of the CRC lecture by Swierenga, given in South Africa: http://www.swierenga.com/Africa_pap.html). Hoogland’s article was a bombshell at the time, and caused a huge uproar in the Banner, in faculty, among students, because the CRC did indeed teach that the Bible was infallible not only in matters of doctrine and morals, but in history and science. So important was the teaching of infallibility that the infallibility was very first thing that Dr. Anthony Hoekema, our theology professor at Calvin Seminary opened his theology course with on September 1 of 1959 in my freshman year at Calvin Seminary. (Swierenga is wrong on Hoekema’s view). Hoekema gave us a month of Biblical proofs of infallibility and of refutations of what Marv Hoogland wrote. He required each of us to read Benjamin Warfield’s 400 page book, the Inspiration and Authority of Scripture. Dr. Hoekema gave multitudes of examples from church history where sceptics had thought the Bible was in error, only to be shown by further study that it was not.
For example sceptics had asked: Was the blind man healed as Jesus entered Jericho or as he left Jericho? On the surface it seems that two Gospel authors contradict. But no, there were two cities next to each other called Jericho, and one author was thinking of the old Jericho and the other of the new Jericho.
Sceptics had asked: Was the author who describes the circumference and the diameter of the laver which Solomon built for the temple not wrong about “pi”, because it doesn’t come out to 3.1416. On the first reading, it may seem so. But no, the walls of the laver were thick, and the diameter given measured the distance between the inside to inside walls; whereas the circumference given measured around the outside wall, not the inside wall.
Yes, there are still some things we haven’t fully understood, but shall we judge God and say he allowed his Holy Spirit to guide error, when the problem could well be our own lack of knowledge of history, geography, or the Spirit’s intent?
If Dr. Harlow is correct that the CRC no longer teaches the Bible’s infallibility, then I would like to know what Synod decided that. He appeals to report 44 of the synod of 1972 which can be read at the following :
http://www.crcna.org/site_uploads/uploads/resources/synodical/Acts1972_nature.pdf
which dealt with this question at great length. When this report discusses the history of Genesis 3, it totally rejected the view of Daniel Harlow. (see page 531 and 532 of that report)
Some CRC leaders believe in the infallibility of the Bible as indicated by the signers of the Chicago Statement on Infallibility, which states the case exactly as I was taught at Calvin Seminary in the late 50’s.
Daniel Harlow states that the great church leaders never taught infallibility. That is patently false as Benjamin Warfield shows in quoting Luther, Calvin, and others, going back to early church history. In 2013 Dick Gaffin put together a book of 1400 pages quoting Reformers and creeds from the 1500’s to the present, proving that they did indeed believe and teach infallibility. So Daniel Harlow is wrong.
Daniel Harlow in his Chimes article mentions 2 “factual errors in the Bible”, 1) Daniel 5 wrong about Belshazzar, and 2) Luke 2 wrong about Quirinius’ census.
Concerning Belshazzar being Nebuchadnezzar’s grandson, not his son as Daniel 5:2, 11, and 18 calls him, the answer is: the courtezans call Nebuchadnezzar “your father” meaning “your ancestor” or “your grandfather”, in order to give great honer to Belshazzar. There are times when the Bible uses son to mean grandson, and father to mean grandfather. (See Matt 1) Since the courtezans and Daniel actually addressed Belshazzar, by calling Nebuchadnezzar “your father”, then the Holy Spirit is not in error here. These people knew all three kings and all agreed in saying father. Moreover although Prof Harlow claims that Belshazzar was not king of Babylon there is a tablet giving the annals of Belshazzar’s father Nabonidos which says that Belshazzar was left as king in Babylon while Nabonidos went out to meet Cyrus. See the Jewish historian Alfred Edersheim, Bible History, The Babylonian Empire, page 201.
Concerning the claim that Quirinius was only involved in an AD census, not a BC census because Josephus speaks only of the AD census, all the study Bible notes (NIV, ESV, Reformation Study Bibles) give a good answer, and the commentator Lenski, shows that Quirinius was governing in the BC time as well. Lenski observes that Luke was born around the time of Quirinius whereas Josephus was born in 37 or 38 AD, so maybe Josephus had inaccurate information because he was 40 years later. To assume that Josephus or some other Roman author has more infallibility than Luke who was guided by the Holy Spirit is to assume that an America living 2000 years later knows more than an eyewitness yea more than the Holy Spirit. I just don’t want to go there. Shall we call such an attack intellectual pride or what?
I have here investigated Harlow’s two examples just to illustrate what Prof. Hoekema of Calvin Seminary taught us in 1959: those things that the sceptics call errors are errors in our understanding, and in extremely very rare occasions errors of textual transmission or translation, but not errors of the Holy Spirit. Moreover if we don’t have a clear answer now to some Bible difficulty, let’s be humble enough to admit our own ignorance rather than accuse God of lying.
In the ASA Perspectives article Dr. Harlow treats Genesis 1-11 as though it is somehow related to or even partly dependent on Babylonian creation and flood myths. Genesis is one of my two favorite books in the Old Testament and I taught 100’s of hours from it in my courses in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Dr. Harlow’s perspective is so contrary to the text of Genesis.
Why? The very structure of Genesis as a collection of 11 little books militates against any influence of Babylon or Egypt in the writing of those first 11 chapters. Genesis 5:1 uses the word “book” thus indicating that Genesis is a collection of genealogy books, not genealogy legends passed by mouth to mouth with loss of truth in the transmission. The first three genealogy books were written far before the very existence of either Babylon or Egypt. (the first three books were about flood and pre-flood times, Babylon and Egypt are nations arising from Noah’s sons AFTER the flood). Genesis 5:1 says “this is the BOOK of the generations of Adam.” The Hebrew word for book here is “sepher”, a word used around 150 times in the Hebrew Bible and every time meaning something written such as letter of instruction, written order, written decree, legal document, certificate of divorce, deed of purchase, scroll, book of prophecies, genealogical record, register, law-book, book of kings, record-book, etc.
Gen 5:1 is therefore contrary to what my Denver Christian school teacher taught us back in the 40’s, when she said that writing was not invented till around the time of Moses. Now we know from archaeology that writing goes back to early Egypt, to before the time of Abraham. And Genesis 5:1 tells us that writing goes even back to the time of Adam. It is only our Western pride beginning especially with the Enlightenment (oops, the Endarkenment) that we think writing had to take so many 10’s of thousands of years to develop. The Endarkenment convinced even some Christians that man has slowly progressed from those mythological slow monkey-like idiot ancestors, who took so many thousands of years to invent writing.
No, Adam and his descendants could write, and the book of the generations of Adam (Genesis 5:1-6:8) the book of the generations of Noah (Gen 6:9- 9:28), the generations book of Gen. 2:4- 4: 26, and all the other books of generations of Terah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob all were collected by Joseph perhaps, later edited by Moses, but all written by the guidance of the Holy Spirit by people who lived through the events, and are not corrupted by the silly myths of the Babylonians. Whatever slim similarities there are to Babylonian god and goddess fights, Dr. Harlow is forcing these similarities in his charts in the Perspectives article.
These so-called similarities have been criticized by many authors, such as John Collins, in his book Did Adam and Eve Really Exist, and it would take too long to point these out here. If there are superficial similarities, they are because the Babylonians, (living from 400 to 2000 years after the first 9 chapters of Genesis were written) are taking God’s Holy Spirit truths found in Genesis available to them in some form no doubt, and distorting them into myths that fit their silly human like gods. It is false to claim that God’s people like Moses, or Ezra, listened to their silly stories and turned them into the book of Genesis. You only have to read the Gilgamesh epic for yourself to see how ridiculous is the claim of Dr. Harlow. We had to read the Gilgamesh epics ourselves for courses at Westminster on Genesis and groaned upon learning that liberal Christian theologians were saying such unintelligent stuff. C S. Lewis dismissed this stuff back in the 1940’s
As for so much weight lately given to the latest “infallible science of the genome” there are two excellent books that came out in the past three years that show the scientific problems with such trust. One of them is Science and Human Origins (2012) by three experts in fossils and genes; the other is Should Christians Embrace Evolution (2009) by 14 British theologians and scientists. Both show a lot of problems with claiming that chimpanzee and human genomes are so much alike. The first shows how there are no missing links between monkey and man.
When Francis Crick first worked on gene analysis some 30 years ago he claimed that a huge number of genes were junk, were remnants of evolutionary past that no longer function in producing a person. Now in the past 5 years, 80 per cent of what was called junk is now seen to have an important function.
For years the evolutionist claimed that we have some 70 or 80 vestigial organs, from tonsils to appendix, and that these were leftovers from evolution. Now all of these have been shown to have an important function, and doctors don’t remove the tonsils nearly as quickly as when I was a boy and had mine removed at age 6.
At the Scopes trial, in 1925, Clarence Darrow, the evolutionist claimed that science had clearly proven that man comes from a monkey because of two clear proofs of a missing link: Piltdown man and Nebraska Man.
But in 1953, Piltdown man was shown to be a deliberate fraud, in which Dawson who lived close to Piltdown, England secretly took the skull of a human, and the jaw of an ape, filed down the teeth of the ape, used acid to make the bones look old, buried them, and then guided some unsuspecting anthropologists into the gravel near Piltdown to discover this great finding in 1912.
Nebraska Man which consisted only of one tooth at the time of the Scopes trial was shown to be the tooth of an extinct pig when they found a complete skeleton in another place in Nebraska, and a few years ago it was discovered that this pig exists today in the jungles of So America and was never extinct. So much for the “sure findings of science.” The DVD “the origins of man” which exposes how many of the hominid ancestors are merely apes shows how silly it is to say that “the hominid fossil record unmistakably shows…” There are even dozens of atheist evolutionists who would not say this fossil record is so unmistakable. You can find this in the Origins book which is mainly quotes from evolutionists who in many cases destroy their own case by the evidence they admit.
Another weakness in his trust in science is a serious failure to distinguish between operation science and historical or origin science. Operation science looks at things that can be repeated in experiments, can be observed over and over in all parts of the world, such as testing gravity, studying disease, or how electrons work. This has given rise to computers, space shuttles and cures for disease. Historical or origin science attempts to discover truth about the past by examining reliable eyewitness testimony if available, or circumstantial evidence such as pottery, fossils, and canyons. Because the past cannot be observed directly, assumptions greatly affect how these scientists interpret what they see. The debate between creationists and theistic evolutionists is not about operation science, which is based on the present. The debate is about origin science and conflicting assumptions or beliefs about the past.
In one sense the origin of the earth science is not really science, because creation cannot be repeated, we cannot make an experiment over and over and watch how it happened. We really need an eyewitness who saw it happen and only God is that eyewitness, and he has graciously told us in the Bible’s most fundamental book, Genesis, not only that he did it, but when he did it and how he did it. That’s the historical science (science is simply the Latin word for knowledge) that I trust: God’s testimony of the true history, and God never lies.
The musings of Gary from the heart.