Lutheran Church Tackles Creation Days

Christian Post has an article on the recent Lutheran Synod resolution involving the “creation days.” Michael Gryboski writes:

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod passed a resolution at their convention affirming the belief that God created the Earth “in six natural days.”

At the 67th Regular Convention of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod on Tuesday, the theologically conservative denomination adopted Resolution 5-09A, titled “To Confess the Biblical Six-Day Creation.”

“We confess that the duration of those natural days is proclaimed in God’s Word: ‘there was evening and there was morning, the first day,’” resolved the resolution.

The resolution also declared that the creation of Adam as the first human being was a “historical event” and rejected the claims of the theory of evolution.

As noted in the article, there is some debate about what the word “natural” means in this context.

Another delegate expressed concern over the alleged “lack of clarity” on the definition of the word “natural” as used in the resolution.

Supporters responded that the term “natural” was defined by the Bible’s own words, describing the days as having an evening and a morning.

This has always struck me as a peculiar defense given how the scriptures actually reads:

14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day. (Genesis 1:14-19, NIV)

Every translation reads pretty much the same way.  That happens on the fourth day. Without the sun and moon, you cannot have “evening and morning.”  There is no reasonable context for it.  To argue this implies that the entire universe revolves around a 24-hour earth day.  We know this is not so.

It is notable that the vote was 662 in favor and 309 against, so there is quite a bit of dissent about the resolution.  The rider involving evolution, while not taking center stage, is a slap in the face to those congregants who accept it.  The rising science of coalescence theory is hard to square with the idea of Adam and Eve being the first humans.   As Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight put it in their book Adam and the Genome,

As our methodology becomes more sophisticated and more data are examined, we will likely further refine our estimates in the future. That said, we can be confident that finding evidence that we were created independently of other animals or that we descend from only two people just isn’t going to happen. Some ideas in science are so well supported that it is highly unlikely new evidence will substantially modify them, and these are among them: The sun is at the center of our solar system, humans evolved, and we evolved as a population.

I always find it somewhat interesting that these large denominations fight tooth-and-nail over social issues that are somewhat fluid in society, such as homosexuality and female ordination, and yet, for issues in which there is actually hard, scientific evidence, retreat to a very flat, conservative interpretation of scripture.

Interestingly, the new T-shirt being issued by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America celebrates both science and LGBT rights.  That is not true for the science part.

Geocentrism Goes Catholic!

The Chicago Tribune is reporting on a small but growing group within Catholicism that has embraced “original church doctrine” that the earth is in the center of the universe. Manya A. Brachear writes:

“I have no idea who these people are. Are they sincere, or is this a clever bit of theater?” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, the curator of meteorites and spokesman for the Vatican Observatory.

Indeed, those promoting geocentrism argue that heliocentrism, or the centuries-old consensus among scientists that the Earth revolves around the sun, is nothing more than a conspiracy theory to squelch the church's influence.

“Heliocentrism becomes 'dangerous' if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system,” said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. “False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today. … Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world; and governments and academia were subservient to her.”

Sungenis attended a conference last year called “Galileo was Wrong, the Church was Right” in which like-minded catholics congregated to discuss the future of geocentrism. The conference, itself, touched on different topics, all of which fall within the young earth creationism rubric.

But here's the corker:

But Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., said the Bible is silent on geocentrism.

"There's a big difference between looking at the origin of the planets, the solar system and the universe and looking at presently how they move and how they are interrelated," Ham said. "The Bible is neither geocentric or heliocentric. It does not give any specific information about the structure of the solar system."

At last count, there are over eighty scripture references that mention a static, non-moving or flat earth. Some notable ones:

Then spoke Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the men of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel, "Sun, stand thou still at Gibeon, and thou Moon in the valley of Aijalon." And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stayed in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. (Joshua 10:12-13)

As the argument goes, if the earth is not in the center of the universe, then what difference would it have made if the sun stood still? The earth, itself, would still be moving and Joshua would have lost the battle.

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. (Matthew 4:8)

One again, if earth is not flat and unmoving, what difference would it have made where they were when the devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth? If the writer really is talking about ALL the kingdoms of the earth, as a literal interpretation would argue, then a round earth would have made this impossible.

Interestingly, as Karen Wynn Fonstad points out in her Atlas of Middle Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien's Endor is constructed on an ancient understanding of the earth and its foundations. Although he never mentioned it, he evidently struggled with this as the story evolved, eventually ending up with a history in which the first two ages of Middle Earth take place on a flat earth with an “encircling sea” (a la Job 26:10) while the third age involves a round earth with “new lands” to the west.

Is the earth flat? Of course not. Is it in the center of the universe? No, it isn't. The vast majority of Christians would agree with these conclusions, based on modern science. My point is not that the earth is round or in the center of the universe or that the Bible is in error. My point is that a strict literal reading of these passages that are either implicit or explicit about the earth being in the center of the universe and flat is absolutely unwarranted and that for Ken Ham to assert that the Bible is silent on geocentrism but speaks volumes on the age of the earth is absurd.

Common-sense Christianity hits another roadblock.