Imagine a young man in his late teen years. He has recently moved to the city to go to school. In the course of his study, he becomes convinced that Genesis 1 is no longer consistent with the most sophisticated intellectual trends of the day. He rejects the Christian faith in which he was raised,…

I am grateful to Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight for their work in Adam and the Genome, and I am also thankful for the engagement provided by the scholars who have contributed to this symposium. This conversation is exactly the sort of forthright, well-informed, and charitable discussion that the church needs, and it is just…

In a well-known passage from his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas makes a distinction between two different kinds of doctrine, each of which “pertain to the faith” in different ways. First, there are doctrines that constitute “the substance of the faith in itself” (per se substantia fidei); second, there are doctrines…

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that evangelicals are embroiled in a lively debate about Adam and Eve. On one side are those who insist that Adam and Eve were the first and sole progenitors of the entire human race. The other side cautions against reading too much dogma into Genesis 2-3;…

“If we fail to hold together the mediation of salvation and that of creation,” wrote Colin Gunton some years ago, “we risk a reversion to [Gnosticism].” One could say the entirety of the Henry Center’s Creation Project strives to maintain that very balance. Nathan Chambers, who joins the Creation Project in its second year as…

St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (c. 1217–1274) placed a high value on the doctrine of creation, as is manifest in his several discussions of the doctrine throughout his career. Getting clear on creation, Bonaventure believed, entailed not only knowing the creature better, but also knowing the creature in terms of the Creator. Higher still is the…

Among the more interesting and less appreciated developments of modern scientific society is the emergence of a new genre of literature: science fiction. While the works may be fictive, they should not be understood as mere entertainment. Indeed, they represent a kind of eschatological—and often apocalyptic—imagination, one inseparably tied to an important element of our…

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga argued in his book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, religion, and naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2011), the central thesis: “There is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.” Now, Plantinga wrote about “theistic religion,” but his main…

Genesis 2:7 states, “Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” But what does “the breath of life” refer to? Is it the Holy Spirit? Is it a life force? Is it a human soul?…

Gavin Ortlund joins the Creation Project after recently earning a PhD in historical theology from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. His dissertation, which will soon be published by Brill, is titled “Ascending Toward the Beatific Vision: Heaven as the Climax of Anselm’s Proslogion” and focuses on St. Anselm’s doctrine of heaven in the Proslogion. As one might guess from…

Augustine (A.D. 354-430), the “Doctor of Grace” from north Africa, is arguably the most significant theologian in the Western tradition. He had once been a Manichee, during which time he would have affirmed a kind of good vs. evil dualism, as well as seeing matter as evil, and seeing creation as an act of necessity….

Deerfield, IL—The Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding has awarded five recipients for our second annual Henry Resident Fellowship program. The recipients for the 2017–2018 academic year are Stephen Williams, Marc Cortez, Gavin Ortlund, Daniel Houck, and Nathan Chambers. Despite the importance of the doctrine of creation within the Christian tradition, relatively little…