The PuritanBoard - View Single Post - Six-Day Creation: Is it worth the battle?

Daniel Ritchie · #**325** (**permalink**) 06-06-2008, 06:56 PM

From the above article please note the following extract:

Quote:

2. Reformation Understanding of Creation "Days"

The sixteenth-century Reformers agreed that the fourfold sense of Scripture compromised the literal sense of the Bible, making its authority for faith and life null and void. They insisted that the single, true sense of Scripture is the literal sense, the plain meaning of the text.

One of the major achievements of the Protestant Reformation is the return to Scripture. This meant that Scripture is in no need of an external key for interpretation — whether that key be the Pope, the church councils, philosophy, or any other human authority. Scripture's clarity and perspicuity became the norm of the day; its reading from within its own context was paramount. External meaning must not be superimposed on it, as had been the practice under medieval Catholicism. The Bible was to be read in its literal and grammatical sense.

Martin Luther, accordingly, argued for the literal interpretation of the creation account: "We assert that Moses spoke in the literal sense, not allegorically or figuratively, i.e., that the world, with all its creatures, was created within six days, as the words read." The other Reformers understood the creation "days" in the same way.

This literal and grammatical interpretation, known in the history of hermeneutics as the historical-grammatical method, was the norm for biblical interpretation more or less into the nineteenth century.

3. Changes Under the Influence of Modernism

As the concept of long time periods made its way into the understanding of Earth';s origins in the wake of the publications of James Hutton (1726-1797) and Charles Lyell (1797-1875), some Christian concordist interpreters started to reinterpret the Genesis "days" of creation in a non-literal manner. The impetus for this was not found in the Bible itself but in the new world view which was being developed on the basis of uniformitarianism and its concomitant understanding of origins which demanded long periods of time.

The understanding of the creation "days" as "days of restoration," "days of revelation," aside from taking a "day" for an "age" ("day-age" theory) or an epoch/era goes back to this time and the changes in time frames required by the new geology. The approach of a non-literal reinterpretation of "days" was typical of concordists who had accepted long ages for the origin of Earth. In view of these developments, it is unavoidable to conclude that external influences exerted by a new understanding of geological ages became the catalyst for the reinterpretation of the "days" of creation.