Coming to Grips with Genesis: Biblical Authority and the Age of the Earth

Abstract

As I have written in previous reviews, too many evangelical scientists as well as most theologians and missiologists are so often bound by the epistemology of Modernity.  This syncretism is so blinding because it encapsulates the pre-conscious worldview presuppositions of Western culture.  Yet if we believe that the value and epistemic system of the surrounding idolatrous cultures “lies in the wicked one” and that they are “held captive to him to do his will” (1 Jn 5:19; 2 Tim 2:26; see Eph 2:1; 2 Cor 4:4), why should we accommodate it? I don’t say this flippantly because the god of this age does indeed hold people’s minds in darkness lest they see the glory of the Creator-God in the face of Jesus, the very Word of the Father.The central thesis of this volume of fourteen articles is that modernity’s concept of deep time, and all the surrounding worldview shifts it has brought, has been devastating to theodicy. It is my opinion that any syncretism with deep time also shatters real Gospel outreach to scientists bound by the methodological atheism of modern and post-modern science. I believe all the Ph.D. or Th.D. theologians who author these articles agree.