As someone who has seen and felt the damage from the battle over Earth’s age, I welcome Ted Cabal and Peter Rasor’s appeal in Controversy of the Ages. This book calls believers to tone down the inflammatory rhetoric over what most would consider a nonessential doctrinal issue for the sake of our effectiveness as “salt” and…

Different views on creation in the church today are often summarized in terms of whether one takes the biblical creation story “literally.” Similarly, Augustine’s crowning achievement on the doctrine of creation was, as we have noted, the production of a “literal” commentary on Genesis 1-3. Yet what Augustine means by “literal” is quite different from…

From conversion to death, Augustine was captivated by Genesis 1–3. He kept writing and re-writing commentaries on these chapters, and they pop up his other works as well (many have noticed, often with puzzlement, that even the Confessions climax into an exegesis of Genesis 1). Then, for 15 years, he labored on a kind of…

Martin Luther, so the conventional wisdom says, was a “Pauline” theologian, the doctor of justification by grace through faith alone. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that his work as professor of Bible was not centered in Paul, nor even in the New Testament. Instead, he lectured mostly on the Old…

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…

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…

Learning from missteps is often just as important as having exemplars to emulate. The Venerable Bede offers contemporary readers some of both when it comes to interpreting Genesis 1. Relatively little is known about Bede’s life in Northrumbia at the Wearmouth-Jarrow monastery; we don’t even have a monastic rule from Bede’s time. While some have…

Basil is finding a new level of popularity in young-earth creationist (YEC) writings, and no wonder. He explicitly turns away from the allegorical approach that led Origen and later Augustine to embrace instantaneous creation, and professes a literalism in his Homilies on the Hexaemeron that seems to spare Genesis 1 from the sorts of interpretive…

Modern readers typically view the Genesis creation narratives through the lens of science. Does the text confirm or contradict contemporary scientific accounts of the origin of life? If the former, the reader attempts to demonstrate their congruence; if the latter, the reader either rejects the prevailing scientific consensus or rejects the veracity of scripture, at…

As a member of my church’s education committee, I share the duty of planning and organizing the topics and teachers for the various adult Bible classes. All adult classes work through the same biblical books, and we are used to kicking around names of potential teachers within the congregation and then assigning them to a…

John Webster’s Holy Scripture is arguably the most academically significant book in English to deal with the Bible from a theological point of view since the publication four decades ago of David Kelsey’s Proving Doctrine: The Uses of Scripture in Modern Theology. Webster’s little book is widely cited and has been assessed by a variety…

In my previous post I discussed the value of using ancient Near Eastern (ANE) texts to sharpen and enhance our understanding of the world of the Old Testament. In terms of the Creation Project, I want to explore ANE texts that address cosmology in order to understand better how the ancient Israelites might have interpreted Genesis 1. In this post…