Have you ever heard a Christian say something along the lines of, “Scripture destroys that argument!” At the best of times, this appears to be an excited proclamation of the Scripture’s power—indeed, the power of God and his truth over all things. At the worst of times, however, such statements can become more of a prideful declaration of one’s own understanding, namely, that one’s own interpretation of the Bible has destroyed the opposition.
This approach demonstrates aggression rather than the love and gentleness we are called to show towards our fellow saints and those outside the covenant community. Furthermore, when we weaponize Scripture, another problem can be that we conflate our interpretation of Scripture with the actual authority of Scripture alone. Sola Scriptura has never meant the colloquial ideal of “just me and my Bible.”
This lies at the very heart of the problem with biblicism—not only the kind that denies creeds and confessions, but the kind which denies even the possibility of there being another valid interpretation different from one’s own. But God has given his church a better way. The Father has graciously ensured that his children are never alone. He not only comforts them with the gift of his constant presence though his Word and Spirit, but he also provides his grace through his chosen means of Word, sacraments, and prayer amidst his chosen people/place.
One example of these kinds of biblicist statements is found in discussions surrounding creation, including the age of the earth, the length of God’s creative act, and the modern ideas of evolution birthed from the mind Charles Darwin.1 On this issue, we might have heard or said, “Scripture destroys Darwin!” But should this be our aim? Should we set ourselves to destroy Darwin, or should we submit ourselves to Scripture and let God deal with the dead? Some will read this and assure us that we can have it both ways. They will insist that submission to Scripture does destroy Darwinism. While that may very well be, such cannot be our primary aim when we come to the Word of God. The Word of God cannot be the thing we go to in order to prove our case on any given issue. Why not? Because the Word of God is just that—it is God’s very word to us. The results of the Word are for God alone to determine, not for man to demand. It may be that your demands seem to match God’s determinations. Yet, it will not take long before they clash, and you find that your approach to Scripture has been wrong all along.
Darwin is not known as a man who submitted himself to Scripture. In his letter to F. A. McDermott, he says, “I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation and therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”2 To such rebellious men and women, the Word of God says destruction awaits. Yet, let us not rejoice over the death of the wicked. Let us be slow to judgement, that we may understand the deeper issue. The problem lies not so much in the theories Darwin formulated, or the ideas of his followers many years later; the real problem rests in not submitting to Scripture as one’s highest authority in all of life.3 The solution then, for Darwin, his followers, and even his detractors, is to submit to Scripture as the very Word of God.
Just Me and My Bible
Let us return to the well-intentioned but misguided Christian who comes to the Word of God to destroy some person or ideology with Scripture, such as Darwin or Darwinism. The main problem—which can be true of both conservative academic arguments as well as arguments from your everyday conservative Christian—is that they do not submit to Scripture as Scripture interprets itself. Their argument often goes something like this: The Bible says God made everything, so God made everything. The Bible says “day,” so God did it one day at a time. The Bible says “six days,” so it took God six days. And so it goes, point by point. Although each of these statements is true in a sense, to state them and believe them in this way is misguided at best, and actually misleading and even false at worst.4
Rather than speak specifically about the different possible conclusions one can draw and hold to consistently from the Genesis creation account, I would like to first focus on my claim that to state them and believe them in this way is misguided at best, and is actually misleading and even false at worst. The great problem here is that “this way” is a hermeneutic of biblicism, an interpretive method with an overly simplistic and naive view of the words one reads on the pages of Scripture. The naivety of this hermeneutic lies in the assumption that the words must mean exactly what the interpreter thinks they mean, based especially upon how those words are used in their own life. Our feelings, presuppositions, and life experiences are real and are always at play in our understanding and application of God’s Word. But if we believe the Bible is actually God’s Word to us, then we must recognize the danger of relying only upon ourselves as the alone source and standard of its meaning.
Unchecked subjectivism is often coupled with neglecting other vital matters such as the complete phrase(s), the context, and the genres, structures, and frameworks that these words and phrases are presented in, not to mention having little to no grasp of the original languages, or worse, to image you have an understanding that you do not, in fact, have.5 An additional problem is how inconsistently one applies this hermeneutic throughout the rest of their reading of God’s Word, let alone the first two chapters of Genesis.
Day Means Day; Work Means Work; Rest Means Rest?
Allow me to illustrate the problem by continuing to use this Genesis example. If one believes the Almighty God worked upon his creation for any amount of time, and if one actually believes the Almighty God rested for any amount of time, then they might be unorthodox in their belief about God who is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. You might be shocked when you read that, but I am not trying to be shocking. I italicized the words worked and rested for a reason. What one means by the words worked and rested is essential to whether or not one has an orthodox (true) or unorthodox (false) view of the Creator. “The Bible says” is simply not an interpretive method that one can utilize consistently or stand upon for very long. The problem is not in the Word of God, for it is God breathed and therefore infallible, inerrant, and absolutely authoritative (2 Tim 3:16). Rather, the problem is in our being wise in our own eyes, assuming our interpretation to be infallible and inerrant simply because we think “the Bible says” something (Prov 26:12).6
If by worked, one means God had great energy at the beginning of the morning, along with intentions that may or may not have gone according to plan, that he began to sweat and grow weary by about the middle of the day, needing to take breaks here and there to replenish himself with resources, and that by the end of the day, he was spent and unable to put forth anymore worthwhile effort, and so went to rest for the evening until he was refreshed once again the next morning, and that he did this until the seventh day when he rested in a full and complete way, having finished the job as it were, then one would be unorthodox. To be fair, those I have met who hold to a biblicist interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 do not believe this about God. And yet, to be clear, some of the most consistent biblicists are open theists, who do, in fact, affirm that God changes and does not have any eternally fixed decree. They might very consistently say, “The Bible says he worked and he rested. The only meaningful way I can understand those words is that he did those very things—he took time and effort to make things by his work, and he took time to rest and be replenished so that he might continue to work another day. I am just taking the Bible at face-value. Day means day, work means work, and rest means rest.” Using a biblicist hermeneutic, it is hard to explain to the open theist that he is wrong if we are simply going by what “the Bible says.”
Notes
- By Darwinism, I am thinking especially of the belief that man as we know him today came to exist over vast amounts of time which have allowed for the appropriate adaptations to occur, replicate, and develop, especially through natural selection. What began as stardust developed and branched into simple organic matter, which then became both more complex and more simplified, branching off further unto numerous other organisms, to then produce various pre-human species. Ultimately, this led to a particular group of branches giving us Homo sapiens, or what we call humans. All of this contrasts with the idea that Adam was specially created by God as recorded in Genesis 1 and 2.
- Charles Darwin, “Letter to F.A. McDermott, 24 November 1880,” in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 28. ed. Frederick Burkhardt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
- This is not to say that Scripture speaks authoritatively to every single matter under the sun, because it does not. Yet, where it does speak, explicitly, and by way of good and necessary consequence, it has absolute and supreme authority—it has the final say (Westminster Confession of Faith 1).
- To read about the senses in which statements such as these are not true, see Meredith G. Kline, “Space and Time in the Genesis Cosmogony,” Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith 48, no. 1 (1996): 2–15; “Because It Had Not Rained” Westminster Theological Journal 20 (1957/58): 146–57.
- To begin addressing these matters, see Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003); Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1997); Michael Brown and Zach Keele, Sacred Bond (Dorr, MI: Reformed Fellowship Inc., 2017).
- NB. Matt 16:21–23 and the rebuke of Christ to Peter, declaring, “Get behind me, Satan!” in spite of Peter’s assurance of what “shall never happen” to his Lord.
©Bryce Souve. All Rights Reserved.
RESOURCES
- Hermeneutics And The Creation Wars
- Subscribe To The Heidelblog!
- Download the HeidelApp on Apple App Store or Google Play
- The Heidelblog Resource Page
- Heidelmedia Resources
- The Ecumenical Creeds
- The Reformed Confessions
- The Heidelberg Catechism
- The Heidelberg Catechism: A Historical, Theological, & Pastoral Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2025)
- Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008)
- Why I Am A Christian
- What Must A Christian Believe?
- Heidelblog Contributors
- Support Heidelmedia: use the donate button or send a check to
Heidelberg Reformation Association
1637 E. Valley Parkway #391
Escondido CA 92027
USA
The HRA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization
Bryce Souve
Rev. Bryce Souve was born and raised in Southern California. He married his high school sweetheart and they have five children. He received his Master of Divinity from Westminster Seminary California and has served as pastor to Bethel Reformed OPC in Fredericksburg, VA since 2024.
More by Bryce Souve ›
Exodus 20:11, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”
The problem with the militant Klinean is that they haven’t been able to rest yet, according to their troublesome hermeneutic! That’s why they’re so cranky and self-satisfied!
Chris,
I’m having trouble following you or how this comment is relevant to the post. Can you explain a bit so I can make sense of it?
Yes brother, Kline was brought into the mix in the article. He’s just a disaster on creation and Exodus 20:11 ties God’s creation in six days to the pattern of the week. If we use Kline’s hermeneutical approach here, we haven’t even gotten through the first day, let alone to the Sabbath, or Lord’s Day. If the pattern of the week is 6 regular days with one day of rest, and it’s based on God’s creative work in Genesis 1, that’s tough to overcome. It makes a disaster as well of doctrines like the Resurrection(if Theistic Evolution is involved), and God’s character since “death is the last enemy” and in a Klinean world, death predated sin. How can we trust the new creation to be any better than the old? It brings the trilema of God’s character to the forefront.
Thank you for the explanation.
Can you tell me which of Dr Kline’s works you’ve read and exactly how he is wrong?
I would also be interested in your opinion of J. Gresham Machen’s (Day-Age) view of the creation days. While we’re at it, what do you make of E. J. Young’s view c. 1949 or even 1964, when he said,
Yes, Ex 20 does tie the Sabbath to the creation days but it isn’t necessary for those days to be 24 hours for the analogy to hold. E.g., God is said at different times in Scripture to have eyes, ears, a nose, feet, legs, arms, hands, and even a finger. We know that all those are figures of speech. To say that he literally has those things is heresy against the ecumenical faith. The analogy holds, however, despite the fact that those are figures of speech and we have literal body parts.
As Young noted in 1949, there is a framework pattern to the creation days. In 1964 he revised his position a bit but even then, as quoted, rejected 6/24 creation since there’s no sun until day 4.
The “morning” and “evening” of days 1-3 is distinctly different from our days but it’s not necessary for the analogy to hold for them to be solar days.
Clearly Yom in days 1-3 is not quite like our days. It certainly doesn’t denominate a “regular” day since a sunless day is hardly regular nor is it a “normal” day. God speaking into nothing is quite abnormal, which is part of the point of the narrative.
Further, the Yom of Gen 2:4 is clearly figurative since it encompasses all of them. So then, we are left arbitrarily to call some “literal” and the other “figurative” or we can opt out of the whole problem by recognizing the nature of the narrative.
The point of Gen 1-2 is not to answer questions raised by 19th century paleontology and geology. The point is to say to the Israelites, whom he had just saved out of Egypt, “The God who saved you is the God who created and sustains the world.”
As to death before the fall, it’s a theory and not a dogma. We don’t confess it. I don’t hold it. Some Klineans hold to it, others do not. It’s not inherent to the Framework reading of Gen 1-2.
Dr Kline pointedly rejected theistic evolution. It’s not material to the discussion.
The issue isn’t who holds to what as authoritative. To mess with the clear, narrative structure of Genesis 1, “exalted narrative” and Exodus 20 makes a mess of the declaration that we must know which literary approach we’re dealing with.
Concerning the idea that God’s not capable of growing plants without the sun, well, the sun won’t be here for long, it’s not in His eternal plans for the new heavens and new earth. God doesn’t need the sun.
I’m grateful to hear that you don’t hold to sin before the Fall. How does that jive with an earth billions of years old?
Chris,
It would help the discussion for me to know which of Dr Kline’s books and/or articles you’ve read since you make some fairly strong criticisms and it’s always useful to discuss specifics. I understand that you disagree with what you perceive Dr Kline to have said but I don’t know how you have come to your conclusions.
E.g., When you say, “Concerning the idea that God’s not capable of growing plants without the sun” I don’t know any orthodox Christian who believes or teaches this. Certainly Dr Kline did not teach any such thing. This is why I wonder if there isn’t some misunderstanding or confusion.
I am also interested in a more substantive response to my questions about E J Young and Machen.
As to the question of the age of the earth, I’ve never understood, even when I held the 6/24 view how that mattered. Are you able to determine the age of the earth from Scripture because I am not. I doubt that God’s Word has any interest in the age of the earth.
Chris,
Are you still with us?
Thanks for this insightful post. Indeed, most biblicists dare not say that God literally rested. Taking “rest” so literally can also deprive one of a fuller understanding of scripture. For example, here St. Augustine says that God rested, “meaning thereby that those rest who are in Him, and whom He makes to rest.”
Here is a longer excerpt:
“When it is said that God rested on the seventh day from all His works, and hallowed it, we are not to conceive of this in a childish fashion, as if work were a toil to God, who “spake and it was done,”—spake by the spiritual and eternal, not audible and transitory word. But God’s rest signifies the rest of those who rest in God, as the joy of a house means the joy of those in the house who rejoice, though not the house, but something else, causes the joy. How much more intelligible is such phraseology, then, if the house itself, by its own beauty, makes the inhabitants joyful! . . . Most appropriately, therefore, the sacred narrative states that God rested, meaning thereby that those rest who are in Him, and whom He makes to rest. And this the prophetic narrative promises also to the men to whom it speaks, and for whom it was written, that they themselves, after those good works which God does in and by them, if they have managed by faith to get near to God in this life, shall enjoy in Him eternal rest.”
-City of God, St. Augustine, Book XI, Chapter 8 (Dods translation)
https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf102/npnf102.iv.XI.8.html
Amen!
Well said. To this parade of biblicist horribles we could add the oft-heard “Israel means Israel.” Looking forward to subsequent posts.
Thank you.
Very true.
As a fairly new member of an NARPC congregation, I was surprised when I encountered just how divisive Creational views can be, when this one issue stood in the way of approving a potential candidate. A sister congregation nearby even has the literalist interpretation listed in their Statement of Faith on their website. I’m sure the popularity of the Creation/Ark Museum with its militant leanings certainly hasn’t helped either.
Hi Diane,
In some places, yes, it’s a real issue. I have tried to address this over the years. There’s a discussion of this very issue in Recovering the Reformed Confession and in some HB articles. I address the psychological aspect by describing two quests, 1) QIRC – the quest for illegitimate religious certainty (pron. quirk) and the 2) QIRE – the quest for illegitimate religious experience (pron. choir). The Qircer must be right and he’s chosen to be “right” on creation by making 6/24 creation a boundary marker for orthodoxy.
The history (briefly) is that few of our men were doing that until the early 1960s. No one doubted the orthodoxy of J. Gresham Machen and he held the “day-age” view, which correlates the geological ages with the days of creation. I don’t know a single advocate of the day-age view today. I suspect that any candidate who held such views would be subject to a brutal interrogation by some presbyteries today in the denomination that Machen founded. 25+ years ago an OPC ruling elder told me that he would not vote to sustain Machen’s ordination. The irony of that statement did not seem to impress him. Warfield might be in even greater trouble.
Fundamentalism, in the pejorative sense (not in the original sense of the Fundamentals of the Faith (c. 1912, which did not include 6/24 creation) is born of fear and ignorance. Few advocates of 6/24 are aware, e.g., that the Framework reading of Gen 1 is at least as old as Aquinas, who was no liberal and was held in the 1940s by the undoubtedly orthodox Old Testament scholar E. J. Young. He later criticized it but he never adopted the 6/24 view. See also E. J. Young On Creation Days And Solar Days.
It wasn’t until fundamentalists adopted the 7th Day Adventist approach to Genesis 1 that the trend toward using the 6/24 view as a benchmark for orthodoxy really got a foothold. In 1968 one OPC presbytery published a statement allowing for a relative latitude on creation but by the 1980s, that had been overturned by the influence books like The Genesis Flood.
I hope that the tide is turning. I see some evidence that it might be but it will continue to be a struggle for the foreseeable future.
Amen!
Dr. Clark, I get your point when you say this: “25+ years ago an OPC ruling elder told me that he would not vote to sustain Machen’s ordination. The irony of that statement did not seem to impress him. Warfield might be in even greater trouble.”
However, churches sometimes figure out that their founders were wrong.
I hope most presbyteries in the PCA would be unhappy with a candidate who advocated the racial views of Dabney or even of Morton Smith.
Dr. Smith and some of the other founders of the PCA had to figure out a way to be polite to me and my wife. I “held my tongue” when I listened to serious comments by men who were at the First General Assembly of the PCA explaining to me that while my marriage was not something they would encourage, it was tolerable because my wife is Asian and not subject to a generational curse. (That wasn’t Smith, BTW, and I’m not going to give names — what I will do is to point to Smith’s published articles and his role, near the end of his life, in being on the wrong side of a presbytery fight with Joel Belz over racial issues in a small PCA church.)
And it’s not just a PCA issue. There are ordained men still living who made comments to me, when it became known that I was about to be engaged to my wife, that “Yes, an interracial marriage will probably be okay for you, Darrell, because we all know you can’t marry one of our girls.” In other words, I’m not Dutch.
Saying that Machen and Warfield would have problems in today’s OPC might mean the OPC has improved. Or it might mean the OPC has become narrower than it was in the 1930s because the issues of the fundamentalist-modernist conflict were so serious that secondary issues had to be made less of a priority than the most important issues of the gospel.
I do think it’s obvious that the BPC-OPC split substantially changed the OPC from a trajectory that would have made it more like a Northern version of what the PCA became four decades later the South, i.e., a denomination that places its priority on being evangelical, less priority on being confessional, and doesn’t like the attitudes of those believed, rightly or wrongly, to be “TRs.”
Darrell,
Machen’s views on creation and the racism of the founders of the PCA are not comparable. The putative exclusion of Machen was due to ignorance and fundamentalism. The way you and your wife were treated is due was just sinful and informed by a sinful attitude born of an ignorant and sinful theory.
Fair point, Dr. Clark.
I do agree that racism and non-six-day views of creation are, at least on their surface, significantly different problems.
There are parallels, however. Girardeau — the Southern Presbyterian who pastored a huge church prior to the Civil War composed of Black Presbyterians — had to contend with people who taught that non-white races are not sons of Adam and therefore not capable of salvation. Only slightly less problematic, there really WERE people who argued that interracial marriage is subject to the Old Testament curses upon intermarriage with the Canaanites.
Today, such views are so obviously evil that virtually nobody defends them.
Likewise, there are views being advocated about Genesis that deny the historicity of Adam. I am absolutely NOT accusing you or men in the OPC, even in the early days of the denomination, of holding such views.
My stance on creation is well-known and it’s a topic on which I reported back in the 1990s during the Howard Van Till controversy in the Christian Reformed Church. What’s less well known is that I recognize that St. Augustine’s views on creation were not what most conservative Reformed people believe today and I’m very hesitant to “unchurch” a theological position which has existed for at least sixteen centuries among people who we would today identify as Reformed or proto-Reformed.
I do think people who advocate views that look problematic, and can lead to positions that today are advocated by people who reject biblical authority or at least biblical inerrancy, better be prepared to answer hard questions.
I apply that to myself, too. When I defend women deaconesses, I expect hard questions about my exegesis and whether I’m using that as a wedge to get women elders. I’m not, and I have a track record of three and a half decades to prove that. However, given current cultural controversies, I fully understand why introducing deaconesses in churches that don’t already have them opens doors to things that need to be kept out, and therefore it may be best not to open the doors at all.
Bottom line: I don’t think we can categorically rule out every view of Genesis that is not six-day 24-hour creation. But people need to expect questions and be able to defend their answers from God’s Word no matter what their view is on Genesis, given how controversial the subject is in today’s church.
Asking hard questions and answering them are not bad things.
I’m sorry to hear that.
Thank you Dr. Clark for the historical background, it is interesting. I find it ironic that 6/24 Creationists choose this as their hill to die on but seem to have no problem with other significant theological diversity within the church (Baptist & Dispensationalism, for example).
But we do take issue with them!
A very timely posting of this article, by the providence of God, to cool my jets in writing a stinging sermon/paper on predestination. Now what am I to do with all this self confidence in my knowledge of the word of God? 😂
Prayer, patience, and a godly editor are great!
God took time and effort— the meaning of God having worked in creation.
OK. But is not God somehow beyond time? Could this work if Gid, then, be an example of what Calvin called God’s “lisping” to us?
As the eternal Creator, God is beyond time.
Foundational to the debates in biblical interpretation is whether God speaks equivocally (nothing in common; no real understanding), univocally (identical; exact correspondence in understanding), or analogically (similar; able to provide real sufficient understanding).
“This doctrine of analogy is the hinge on which a Christian affirmation of God’s transcendence and immanence turns. A univocal view threatens God’s transcendence, while an equivocal view threatens God’s immanence.”—Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims Along the Way (Zondervan Academic. Kindle Edition), 54-57.
Peter,
I wouldn’t attribute “effort,” at least not literally, to God. Indeed, we should think that the work of creation was, in that sense, effortless. He spoke and it was. That’s not to say it was careless—far from it!
Yes, the creation narrative is certainly accommodated to our weakness, as is all of Scripture.
For my part I think of the creation narrative, as Professor Kline used to say, as a series of snapshots, which are intended to create impressions but not intended to convey a detailed timeline. It’s historical but it’s not an engineering scheme or a blueprint. The trouble occurs when people try to read the narrative as something other than that. Moses was not concerned that there’s no sun until day 4. He’s not trying to explain geology or paleontology. He’s illustrating for the Israelites who’ve just been rescued by Yahweh that the same sovereign power they had just seen was also exercised in creation (nature and grace!). That’s why we can’t peg exactly what Yom means in chapter one because we’re not supposed to be able to define it exactly. A Yom can have a sun or not. Indeed, according to 2:4 it can describe the whole process of creation at once.
Amen!