The Quest for the Historical Adam: Genesis, Hermeneutics, and Human Origins by William VanDoodewaard

Author:William VanDoodewaard [VanDoodewaard, William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781601783776
Publisher: Reformation Heritage Books
Published: 2015-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

Valentine Hepp: “Their Dome of Heaven Crashes Down”

Bavinck’s successor at the Free University of Amsterdam, Valentine Hepp (1879–1950), also held to the special, immediate creation of Adam and Eve on the basis of a literal reading of Genesis 2 and 3. However, in contrast to Bavinck, Hepp explicitly and holistically returned the theological course at the Free University to favor a literal interpretation of Genesis—much as Vos had done in his theological lectures at Princeton. Invited, likely through Vos, to Princeton Theological Seminary to deliver the Stone Lectures in 1930, Hepp boldly criticized ancient earth theory in his lecture “Calvinism and Geology”:

Today we have arrived at the view that Scripture is silent concerning the absolute age of the earth, and even concerning the absolute age of man. The indications of Scripture are so clear, however, that the Christian who reveres it, cannot and may not take part in the paleontological and geological hunt after millions. The Scripture excludes the possibility of the human race being two hundred thousand years old…. It is not true that the data of the natural sciences demand such high numbers; the evolutionistic principle demands this. It is the antithesis against faith in creation that drives to these excesses.203

Hepp asked, “Should not all Christians from all lands unite to oppose this?” He answered, “They should have, certainly!” Giving a fiery assessment of why this “did not happen,” Hepp asserted,

A large body of Christian scholars hoisted the white flag. They were afraid lest they be called unscientific when they did not yield to the demands of geology and paleontology: Give us room for our evolutionistic ideas. And so they began to apply the thumbscrew method to Scripture…. They did not call it a thumbscrew method. No, it was called an attempt at reconciliation…. Those went furthest who construed a separate kind of exegesis for the story of creation in order to please unbelief. This exegesis was not to be allegorical, poetical, or mythological, but what it really was, they did not say. It amounts to this, that the hexaemeron of Genesis 1 does not necessarily have to be taken up literally. Rather, one must see in it the narration of six logically differentiated moments in the creative work of God, six divine ideas becoming real through the formatio. It would not be possible, according to them, to determine anything from Genesis concerning the length of time used in the preparation of the earth…. In appearance the authority of Scripture is saved, in reality it is undermined.204

Hepp noted that the day-age theory was not “exegetically deserving of approbation to change the days of Genesis into millions of years [as] those days only had one evening and one morning” and cited the modernist exegetes of previous decades as concurring that “the writer of Genesis undoubtedly meant an ordinary day when he wrote of creation-days.”205 Hepp’s appreciation of “the modernist exegetes” was limited to this point as he had devoted much of his previous lecture, “Calvinism and the Astronomical Conception

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