Recently an “Answers in Genesis” person came to our church. I have some well-developed views about the interpretation of Genesis 1, which are not consistent with AIG’s. What bothers even more than what I perceive as glaring flaws in the facts and logic of the “young Earth” view, however, is the dishonest way AIG portrays the discussion of different views on this divisive topic. AIG’s “ministry theme” for the year sums up their attitude: “Operation Refuting Compromise.”
One fundamental flaw in AIG’s approach is a failure to distinguish a hermenuetical dispute from a dispute about scriptural authority. The introduction to AIG’s “Refuting Compromise” book specifically claims that the dispute is one over the “authority” of scripture. (You can review this yourself in the pages reproduced from the book on Amazon.com; I don’t want to link to it because I don’t want to drive up its Google rating — that’s how strongly I feel about it). If you hold a view different than AIG, you are compromising the authority of scripture. This position is either spectacularly uninformed or just plain disingenuous.
The truth is that many Christians who accept the “authority” of all of scripture, including Genesis 1, hold divergent views about how it should be interpreted. AIG’s real dispute seems to be with the use of general revelation — God’s truth revealed in His creation — to illuminate the meaning of special revelation (the written scriptures).
The concept that God reveals Himself in “nature, history and the constitution of the human being” is well established within the theology of revelation in just about every Christian tradition. (These categories are from Millard Erickson’s excellent Christian Theology.) Nor is the idea that special revelation and general revelation should be interpreted in a consistent way anything revolutionary. (See this article I found recently for a good discussion of this principle from a Reformed perspective).
AIG couches the dispute in terms of “authority” rather than “hermenuetics” because bumping up against the “authority” of scripture scares people. It’s a way of making people think they are being disobedient to God’s word if they question AIG’s interpretation of Genesis 1. Indeed, it’s a way of making a young earth position a principal hallmark of orthodoxy. This is manipulative and wrong.
The real issue is whether the facts we know from general revelation are sufficient to justify a reexamination of some common ways of intepreting Genesis 1 (specifically, the view that the Earth was created in 6 “calendar” days about 7,000 – 13,000 years ago). In my view, there’s no question but that this is so; indeed, the evidence from numerous lines of data in cosmology, astronomy, geology and biology overwhelming establishes the antiquity of the universe and the Earth. The subsidiary question is how to interpret Genesis 1 in light of such evidence. Here, I’m not as certain, although I think a careful gramatical and literary analysis of the relevant scriptures shows that the text can accomodate either a “day-age,” “framework,” or combination “day-age / framework” position. But this is an issue of hermenuetics; if you interpret the passage differently as part of a good faith effort to determine what it truly means, I don’t question your commitment to the authority of scripture.
What AIG is doing truly breaks my heart. I believe it confuses immature Christians who are searching out these issues, dupes uninformed people into believing falsehoods, divides the body of Christ, and drives away many who equate the credibility of Christianity with the credibility of a young Earth that happens to look very, very old. My hope and prayer is that we can someday differ on such hermeneutical issues without resorting to accusations and suggestions of heresy.