The Meaning of Genesis 1
Advocates of special creation have long disagreed about the
meaning of the creation story found in Genesis 1. By the middle
of the nineteenth century an estimated fifty percent of Christian
Americans, including many evangelicals, had stretched the Mosaic
account to accommodate geological discoveries indicating the antiquity
of life on earth. In 1814 the Scottish divine Thomas Chalmers
attempted to harmonize the evidence of vast geological ages with
the Genesis story by inserting an indefinite period of time between
the initial creation "in the beginning" and the much
later creation in the Garden of Eden. This so-call gap theory
enjoyed great popularity among Christians eager to harmonize science
and religion. The American geologist and minister Edward Hitchcock,
for example, endorsed this scheme in his influential textbook
Elementary Geology. As he explained it, the gap theory
"supposed that Moses merely states that God created the world
in the beginning, without fixing the date of that beginning; and
that passing in silence an unknown period of its history, during
which the extinct animals and plants found in the rocks might
have lived and died, he describes only the present creation, which
took place in six literal days, less than 6000 years ago."
In 1910 the Scofield Reference Bible, an immensely influential
annotated edition of the King James Version, presented the gap
theory as Christian orthodoxy, influencing millions of Fundamentalists
and Pentecostals until late in the century. Harry Rimmer, perhaps
the best known American antievolutionist during the second quarter
of the century, and Jimmy Lee Swaggart, one of the most successful
televangelists during the last quarter of the century, both endorsed
the gap theory.
Numerous other Christians chose to harmonize Genesis and geology
by interpreting the "days" of Genesis 1 as vast geological
ages rather than twenty-four-hour periods. According to the nineteenth-century
American naturalist Benjamin Silliman, a man widely known for
his Christian piety, God in the beginning had instantaneously
"created the heavens and the earth, and established the physical
laws, the ordinances of heaven, by which the material world was
to be governed." Subsequent to this act, our planet "was
subjected to a long course of formation and arrangement, the object
of which evidently was, to fit it for the reception, first of
plants and animals, and finally of the human race."
In the
early twentieth century this interpretation of the Genesis "days"
enjoyed great popularity among conservative Christians, receiving
the enthusiastic endorsement of such high-profile Fundamentalists
as George Frederick Wright, author of the essay on evolution in
The Fundamentals; William Bell Riley, founder of the World’s
Christian Fundamentals Association; and William Jennings Bryan,
who led the crusade against evolution in the early 1920s.
Email
link | Printer-friendly | Feedback
| Contributed by: Dr. Ron Numbers
|
