15 Reasons to Take Genesis as History by Don Batten & Jonathan Sarfati

Author:Don Batten & Jonathan Sarfati [Batten, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Creation Book Publishers
Published: 2014-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

12. The Reformers understood Genesis as history

Calvin said: “The day-night cycle was instituted from Day 1, before the sun was created [commenting on ‘let there be light’]” and “Here the error of those is manifestly refuted, who maintain that the world was made in a moment [almost certainly referring to Augustine and Origen]. For it is too violent a cavil to contend that Moses distributes the work which God perfected at once into six days, for the mere purpose of conveying instruction. Let us rather conclude that God himself took the space of six days, for the purpose of accommodating his works to the capacity of men” and “They will not refrain from guffaws when they are informed that but little more than five thousand years have passed since the creation of the universe” and “And the flood was forty days, etc. Moses copiously insists on this fact, in order to show that the whole world was immersed in the waters.”43

Luther wrote even more explicitly of these issues, clearly stating his acceptance of the historicity of Genesis. He also dealt with skeptics’ claims of supposed contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2.44

The opponents of the historicity of Genesis love to refer to historian Ronald Numbers’ book, The Creationists. Numbers is cited as supposedly showing that young-earth creationism was invented by a Seventh-Day Adventist, George McCready Price, in the 1920s. This has to be one of the most incredible examples of historical revisionism in existence; on par with the myth (demolished by historian Jeffrey Burton Russell45) that the ancients in general, and the church in particular, held to a flat earth. It is as if Numbers, a lapsed SDA, knows nothing of history before Price or Ellen White. The above material on the church fathers and reformers is sufficient to show the error of Numbers’ work. But there is much more that refutes it. See the research of the earth science historian Dr Terry Mortenson on the geologists of the early 1800s who defended the biblical age of the earth and the global Flood of Genesis.46

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