#343 Concordism

Dr. craig’s response

I don’t normally take questions like this, CL, but your letter is so full of misconceptions that, having recently spent several months lecturing on creation and evolution in our Defenders class, I find your question irresistible. I hope that by addressing it, some positive good may come by directing readers to my lectures, where I articulate my thinking clearly.

First of all, the definition of concordism that you give is not the customary one. I don’t know who Wimmer is, but he is using the word in an idiosyncratic way that departs from normal usage. Concordism is not the attempt to correlate the Bible and modern science through a Day-Age theory. The Day-Age theory is one particular interpretation of Gen. 1. Concordism rather is a hermeneutical approach to scripture. It is a hermeneutic which advocates interpreting scripture in light of modern science. One attempts to read modern science into the text. Concordism is a hermeneutic which may be adopted by Young Earthers or Old Earthers. For example, the Old Earther might take the biblical expression that the Lord “stretched out the heavens” to be a description of the expansion of space postulated by modern cosmology. The Young Earther might take the biblical expression that things reproduce “after their kinds” to be referring to modern biological species.

Now I reject the hermeneutic of concordism. Instead we should adopt the hermeneutical approach of trying to determine how the original author and audience would have understood the text. Rather than trying to impose modern science onto the Genesis account of creation or to read it in light of modern science, we want to read the account as it would have been understood by the original people who read it. That requires us to bracket our knowledge of modern science and put ourselves in the shoes of these ancient Hebrews.

(By the way, concordism is not a heresy. It’s just bad hermeneutics which will obscure rather than illuminate the text.)

I trust this answers your question “How are you not a concordist?” (Ironically, I’m not a concordist in Wimmer’s idiosyncratic sense either, since I reject the Day-Age interpretation. I’ve been perfectly straightforward about this in my Defenders lectures.) So I’ve got nothing to “distance” myself from.

Your point about William Dembski’s theodicy is puzzling. As I understand him, his proposal aims precisely at explaining how there can be a world of death and suffering ages before man’s fall. His solution is that the wider world outside the Garden of Eden is proleptically fallen, that is to say, God, foreknowing that man would fall into sin, created him in a fallen world that would be most appropriate to his fallen condition. His view is not the absurd view that “the past was created after the ‘Fall’,” as if by backward causation! Dembski’s provocative view is an Old Earth theodicy.

I find it odd that you advocate Francis Schaeffer’s approach of “humble openness,” since that is precisely what I advocate in my Defenders lectures on the interpretation of Gen. 1. I outline around eight different interpretations of Genesis 1 advocated by evangelical exegetes, from the literal interpretation to the mythological interpretation. In the end I leave the question open as to which is the correct understanding, though some of these views (like John Walton’s) strike me as much more implausible than others. How about you? Are you open to Henri Blocher’s literary framework interpretation? Or Walton’s functional interpretation? Or are you open only to Young Earth views?

Beyond the question of how one should best interpret Gen. 1 is the logically subsequent question of how that interpretation is to be integrated with the findings of modern science in order to achieve a synoptic worldview (which should be the aim of every systematic theologian). Notice that these are two distinct questions, handled separately in my lectures. As one who for over thirty years has been plumping for Big Bang cosmology, I have been perfectly clear that I believe that the universe is some 13.8 billion years old. No informed reader could be confused about that. But unlike a concordist like Hugh Ross, I don’t think that the Bible teaches the Big Bang. To repeat: there are two distinct questions here: (i) how Gen. 1 is to be properly interpreted (which requires shunning concordism) and (ii) how that interpretation is to integrated with the findings of modern science (which requires taking account of the data of both modern science and scripture, properly interpreted).

As for the origin of life and the development of biological complexity, I again have no strong views on the subject. I maintain a humble openness and am ready to follow the evidence where it leads. Perhaps some of the lack of clarity about my views that you mention is due to the fact that I am undecided about these questions and so genuinely open to alternatives. But as explained in my lectures, it seems to me that some sort of progressive creationism is perhaps the view that best integrates the biblical and scientific data.