Taking Every Thought Captive

I am pleased to offer this article by Dr. Donald Crowe on why he wrote his recent book, Creation Without Compromise. I have recently finished reading this book and highly recommend it.  My review of the book is available here.

Why I Wrote Creation Without Compromise

By Donald D. Crowe, Ph.D.

Used with permission.  This article first appeared in the Counsel of Chalcedon magazine.

The book is available for purchase here.

One 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 find church history text for the early period. The focus is on the champions of the faith: martyrs, pastors, theologians, and apologist. Polycarp, Athanasius, Augustine and a host of others are sure to be included. The heretics always lose.

Good histories of the Reformation are also available. Again the focus will likely be on reformers like Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. We are pointed to the best of the theologians.

But a typical church history or history of doctrine text covering the 19^th and 20^th centuries passes over the faithful defender of biblical Christianity. The persons most praised are those religious 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 compromise with Darwinism and the evolutionary worldview.

Two big failures for the 19^th American church were compromising biblical creation, and failing to deal biblically with the issue of racial slavery. I chose to write about biblical creation since the evolutionary worldview also contributed heavily to the problem of racism and race-based slavery.

One thing that became clear is that evolution is not just a theory about the ages of rocks, but a comprehensive worldview to which all thought must conform. Even the Bible was re-interpreted to fit the evolutionary worldview. But the anti-Christian evolutionary worldview is not new! It has been in existence long before “modern science.” (In fact modern science was made possible on the basis of the Christian biblical worldview.)

1. There is Nothing New About Evolution.  Some kind of evolutionary worldview has always been the refuge of rebels against God. For example, Epicurus (341-270 BC) asserted that tranquility of soul was the highest virtue. To achieve such tranquility we must rid our minds of troubling thoughts. Nothing was more troubling to Epicurus than the thought of having to give an account to “God” in an afterlife. Therefore, 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 “scientific” investigation. Some kind of evolutionary story has always been the preferred presupposition of those who will not have God in their thinking.

2. The Epicurean-Evolutionary worldview could not prevail where the confidence in the Word of God was strong. The apostle Paul stood strong against the Epicureans at Athens. The anti-Christian strategy then was to undermine the Christian confidence in Scripture. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Baur were just three of those who rejected the biblical doctrines by their distorted pretense of “reinterpreting” the Bible.

3. The first and fatal compromise on the part of the church was on the issue of Chronology. Would Christians accept biblical Chronology as recorded plainly in Genesis 5 & 11 and other historical books of the Bible? Or would they feel it necessary to “reitnerpret” the Bible so it would fit the new “science”? In the 19^th century we would expect the find our champions at Princeton Seminary. Charles Hodge wrote What is Darwinism? He correctly concluded that it is atheism. Hodge was hindered by his evidentialism (we must “prove” the Bible by appeal to more certain “evidence”) and their confusion of pagan philosophy of origins with operational 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 Bible’s authority. At Princeton is was only downhill after that.

4. A closer exegetical look at the text of Genesis is required. W.H. Green’s incredible twisting of the Genesis genealogies was repeated without question by the rest of the Princeton giants. Even Robert Reymond claims in his mostly excellent systematic theology that Genesis 5 & 11 “ should be understood as: X lived a number of years and begat [the ancestral father that begot] Y. And X lived after he begot [the ancestral father that begot] Y a number of years, and begot [other] sons and daughters.” Such preposterous treatment of the God-breathed chronology of Scripture illustrates our need of a total commitment to Scripture as the ultimate authority that judges all ideas of men and is judged by none. Incidentally, 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. This is unbelievably absurd as a desperate measure to accommodate the Bible to evolutionary speculation. The 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? This 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 infallible word of the living God.

5. There are three powerful explosive Biblical truths that bring down the condemned house of evolution:

• Creation ex nihilo in six calendar days
• The world-wide Flood in the time of Noah
• Biblical chronology, the structure of real history.

Incredibly these are the very things evangelicals so easy dismissed just so they could have the smile of the pseudo-scientific academics. If naturalistic philosopher came in the guise of ‘science’ they compromised at once.

We must hold to every word of the God-breathed Scripture. The consequences of compromise have been quite severe. The application of the evolutionary worldview to life issues like abortion, euthanasia, forced sterilizations, and eugenics show that evolution is a worldview, not merely a limited science theory. Social Darwinists sought to ‘speed up’ evolutionary progress through government intervention. History reveals the theological decline and the societal decline that follows the abandonment of the Biblical worldview. Soon after Darwin’s Origin of Species, German intellectuals were applying ‘survival of the fittest’ 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.

The Biblical worldview must not be traded away for the mess of pottage that is the evolutionary anti-Christian worldview.