Tuesday, March 11, 2014

A response to “Seven theses on the age of the earth”

[Editor's Note: this post was edited for clarity in the paragraph following the quote from Augustine.]

This post was inspired by a blog post published on March 7, 2014, by Douglas Wilson. I would encourage you read it at Blog and Mablog (which, by the way, is the greatest blog name ever) before you continue. My article begins by laying a foundation and then responds to his seven points.

Theses

The created world is as much the word of God as scripture, and they both have the same author. We call the created world “general revelation” and scripture “special revelation” (and usually forget Christ and the Holy Spirit in our simplistic dichotomy of revelation, but that is another story for another day). To dismiss nature as fallen, and therefore unreliable, is to deny its status as general revelation at all. If sin so marred nature as to make its lessons untrustworthy, then any revelation that it does provide cannot be trusted. The psalmist’s assertion that creation declares the glory of God (fallen creation, with its suffering?) or Paul’s belief that those who reject God are without excuse because creation itself declares God, must simply be wrong in a chaos-strewn fallen world. But these declarations are found in special revelation, the source of revelation that is generally considered unfallen and reliable – is there not a tension here?