why i wrote

Donald D. Crowe, Ph.D.

Creation Without
Compromise
O
ne way I look at church history is
to see the Word of God and the
Church of the Lord Jesus Christ being
challenged by the intellectual elite or
politically powerful God-haters. It
is not hard to nd church history text
for the early period. Te focus is on the
champions of the faith: martyrs, pas-
tors, theologians, and apologist. Poly-
carp, Athanasius, Augustine and a host
of others are sure to be included. Te
heretics always lose.
Good histories of the Reforma-
tion are also available. Again the focus
will likely be on reformers like Luther,
Zwingl, and Calvin. We are pointed to
the best of the theologians.
But a typical church history or his-
tory of doctrine text covering the 19
th

and 20
th
centuries passes over the faith-
ful defender of biblical Christianity.
Te persons most praised are those re-
ligious anthropologists (wrongly called
theologians) who could accommodate
the Christian faith to be more in step
with the cultural norms. In particular,
I wondered why even the Reformed and
evangelical churches seemed to com-
promise with Darwinism and the evo-
lutionary worldview.
Two big failures for the 19
th
Ameri-
can church were compromising biblical
creation, and failing to deal biblically
with the issue of racial slavery. I chose
to write about biblical creation since
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37 Counsel of Chalcedon Issue 5 2009
Unclassied Laws of Etiquette
the evolutionary worldview also con-
tributed heavily to the problem of rac-
ism and race-based slavery.
One thing that became clear is
that evolution is not just a theory
about the ages of rocks, but a com-
prehensive worldview to which all
thought must conform. Even the Bible
was re-interpreted to t the evolution-
ary worldview. But the anti-Christian
evolutionary worldview is not new!
It has been in existence long before
modern science. (In fact modern sci-
ence was made possible on the basis of
the Christian biblical worldview.)
(1.) Tere is Nothing New About
Evolution. Some kind of evoluitonary
worldview has always been the refuge
of rebels against God. For example, Epi-
curus (341-270 BC) asserted that tran-
quility of soul was the highest virtue.
To achieve such tranquility we must
rid our minds of troubling thoughts.
Nothing was more troubling to Epicu-
rus than the thought of having to give
an account to God in an afterlife.
Terefore, excluding such possibilities
from his mind, he went on to postulate
a very evolutionary story of the origins
of life over long ages of time. As with
evolutionism today, his worldview was
in no way the result of scientic in-
vestigation. Some kind of evolutionary
story has always been the preferred pre-
supposition of those who will not have
God in their thinking.
(2.) Te Epicurean-Evolutinary world-
view could not prevail where the
condence in the Word of God was
strong. Te apostle Paul stood strong
against the Epicureans at Athens. Te
anti-Christian strategy then was to
undermine the christian condence in
scripture. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Baur
were just three of those who rejected the
biblical doctrines by their distorted pre-
tense of reinterpreting the Bible.
(3.) Te rst and fatal compromise on
the part of the church was on the is-
sue of Chronology. Would Christians
accept biblical Chronology as recorded
plainly in Genesis 5 & 11 and other his-
torical books of the Bible? Or would
they feel it necessary to reitnerpret
the Bible so it would t the new sci-
ence? In the 19th century we would
expect the nd our champions at Princ-
eton Seminary. Charles Hodge wrote
What is Darwinism? He correctly con-
cluded that it is atheism. Hodge was
hindered by his evidentialism (we must
prove the Bible by appeal to more cer-
tain evidence) and their confusion of
pagan philosophy of origins with opera-
tion observational science. As a result
Hodge made the rather absurd claim
the Bible may be reinterpreted several
times to bring it into agreement with
science without any damage to the
Bibles authority. At Princeton is was
only downhill after that.
(4.) A closer exegetical look at the text
of Genesis is required. W.H. Greens
incredible twisting of the Genesis ge-
nealogies was repeated without ques-
tion by the rest of the Princeton giants.
Even Robert Reymond claims in his
mostly excellent systematic theology
that Genesis 5 & 11 should be under-
stood as: X lived a number of years and
begat [the ancestral father that begot]
Y. And X lived after he begot [the an-
cestral father that begot] Y a number
of years, and begot [other] sons and
daughters. Such preposterous treat-
ment of the God-breathed chronology
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Counsel of Chalcedon Issue 5 2009
38
Unclassied Laws of Etiquette
of Scriputre illustrates our need of a
total commitment to Scripture as the
ultimate authority that judges all ideas
of men and is judged by none. Inciden-
tally, in every case where we know more
about the persons mentioned in the
genealogies they are direct sons. We
know of none who were merely remote
descendants totally unknown to the
one who begat them. Tis is unbeliev-
ably absurd as a desperate measure to
accommodate the Bible to evolutionary
speculation. Te biblical genealogy has
20 names covering the period of 2,000
years from Adam to Abraham. Of what
possible value could it be if the time
is stretched to 2 billion years to meet
the demands of evolutionary thought?
Tis would mean that only 20 names
are given where there should have been
20,000,000 names if the evolutionary
chronology is correct. We are overdue
to stop letting atheists do our thinking,
then trying to salvage what is left of
the Bible. Instead let us govern every
thought and every subject by the infal-
lible word of the living God.
Tere are three powerful explosive
Biblical truths that bring down the con-
demned house of evolution:
Creation ex nihilo in six cal-
endar days
Te world-wide Flood in the
time of Noah
Biblical chronology, the struc-
ture of real history.
Incredibly these are the very things
evangelicals so easy dismissed just so
they could have the smile of the pseu-
do-scientic academics. If naturalistic
philosopher came in the guise of sci-
ence they compromised at once.
We must hold to every word of the
God-breathed Scripture. Te conse-
quences of compromise have been quite
severe. Te application of the evolution-
ary worldview to life issues like abortion,
euthanasia, forced sterilizations, and eu-
gencs show that evolution is a worldview,
not merely a limited science theory. So-
cial Darwinists sought to speed up evo-
lutionary progress through government
intervention. History reveals the theo-
logical decline and the societal decline
that follows the abandonment of the
bilbical worldview. Soon after Darwins
Origin of Species, German intellectu-
als were applying survival of the ttest
principles to their society. I describe
some of the horrendous results of such
thinking when Hitler attained the power
to carry out Darwinist-inspired policy.
Or own United States was not without
its scholars advocating the same kinds
of things.
Te Biblical worldview must not
be traded away for the mess of pottage
that is the evolutionary anti-Christian
worldview.
Donald D. Crowe Ph.D.
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