The Dutton C.R. Church asks Classis Thornapple Valley to request a revision of the decisions of the 1988 Synod which ignored and the reply, in effect, approved the continuing questioning and denial of our Biblical and confessed doctrine of Creation at Calvin College.

The Synod of 1972 (Acts, p. 69) addressing this issue, warned “against the use of any method of biblical interpretation which excludes or calls into question either the event–character or the revelational meaning of biblical history thus compromising the full authority of Scripture as the Word of God.”

The Synod of 1982 (Acts p. 107) reiterated this warning, declaring that “adherence to the confessions, as required by the Form of Subscription, includes those utterances of the confession that affirm the historical factuality of the events recorded in Genesis 1–3, and that departures from these doctrines must be dealt with in terms of the requirements of that form.”

The published book of Dr. Howard Van Till, The Fourth Day, explicitly and repeatedly does the very thing that these synod warnings say must not be done. Its questioning or denials of events in the Bible’s account of creation are unmistakable in many places in the book. We are early informed, for example, regarding “information about events, or information about the material world expressed in the pre-scientific language of the day,” that, “taking the Bible seriously does not require us to treat such matters as the product of divine revelation” (p. 13). The book informs us that these Bible stories “are much more like parables than like journalistic reports of events.” As such “illustrative stories,” “They were never intended to answer questions about precisely what happened,” (p. 83). “The seven-day chronology that we find in Genesis 1 has no connection with the actual chronology of the Creator’s continuous dynamic action in the cosmos.” It is “a literary device, a framework . . . the packaging in which the message is wrapped . . . not the events of creative action reported with photographic realism but rather imaginative illustrations of the way in which God and the Creation are related” (pp. 84, 85). Page 91 alludes to “the unwarranted assumption that Genesis 1 is meant to be a journalistic recounting of God’s original creative activity, a log of God’s specific acts in constructing the cosmos and the creatures that inhabit it.” (Notice that this is not a “questioning,” but a flat denial of the “event-character” of the Bible’s account.)

After a quotation from John Calvin’s Institutes, not regarding creation, but affirming God’s continuing providence for His creation, Calvin’s statement is misrepresented to support the claim that “according to biblical theism, the word creation stands not for merely an instantaneous act or event but for an eternal, covenantal relationship. Even an event as important as an initial act of exnihilation—if that is a valid concept-stands as but one grain of sand on the endless seashore of the Creator‘s eternal relationship with his Creation” (p. 226). Calvin’s Commentary on Genesis 1:1 far from endorsing such an interpretation of “creation” as an eternal relationship, states that God “teaches by the word ‘created,’ that what before did not exist was now made . . . . Therefore his meaning is, that the world was made out of nothing. Hence the folly of those is refuted who imagine that unformed matter existed from eternity . . . . This indeed was formerly a common fable among heathens . . . but for Christian men to labour . . . in maintaining this gross error is absurd and intolerable. Let this, then, be maintained in the first place, that the world is not eternal, but was created by God.” Thus this book questions not merely details of the creation account, but questions whether the notion of “exnihilation” (“creation out of nothing”) is “a valid concept” at all, suggesting instead what Calvin called the “absurd and intolerable” pagan notion that the universe may be eternal.

Furthermore; the book states that the author has been teaching these views to more than 2000 students during the last ten years (p. 75).

After the Board’s year-long investigation and approval of the teaching of such views the 1988 Synod (according to the June 27 Banner) was confronted “with 40 overtures and communications asking it to review the board’s decision.” That synod “turned down a proposal that Calvin physics professor Howard Van Till and geology professors Clarence Menninga and Davis Young be prohibited from teaching in a way that might lead to questions about the event character of the history in the early chapters of Genesis.” Instead, the synod appointed a 3-year study committee, not in any way to curtail the continued teaching of the views that called forth objections, but merely to study “the relationship between special and general revelation.”

What this means is that the synod, the largest governing body of the churches, in the face of over 40 objections, has officially condoned within our institutions, what previous synods in 1972 and 1982 had forbidden, the questioning and denials of our Biblical, confessed teaching of God’s Creation. Thus the denomination has, in a concrete case, officially approved the ongoing denial of the first revealed doctrine of the Bible and our Christian creeds, “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth,” and “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”

In the face of this actual discard of a first essential of the Gospel of Christ, the confession of God the Creator, we propose that the classis appeal to the synod of1989 to revise the decisions in order to officially recommit our churches to the confession which has been compromised, and to take whatever steps are needed to ensure that the teaching of our churches’ school Will stop denying what our churches must confess.

Grounds:

1. The 1988 decisions by refusing to restrain the questioning and denials of the event character of the Genesis account have in fact approved the continuation of such teaching. 2. The synod’s affirmation that the “Church confesses its complete subjection to the Word of God and to the Reformed creeds” and that the Calvin faculty has expressed its loyalty to these and “the event character of Genesis 1–11” are effectively cancelled by the synod’s own refusal to maintain these positions in the case which was before it. 3. The appropriate way to seek correction of faulty decisions appears to be that which is stipulated in Article 31 of the Church Order. Done in Consistory Aug. 7, 1988.

NOTES:

Article 31 reads, “A request for revision for a decision shall be submitted to the assembly which made the decision. Such a request shall be honored only if sufficient and new grounds for reconsideration are presented.” The September 20 Classis, sustained by a 13 to 11 vote, quickly dismissed the matter; ruling that “no new ground” was advanced to reconsider the issue. How could there be “no new ground” when the main grounds advanced were the self-contradictory decisions of the 1988 synod? Is there “nothing new” when one of our church assemblies c0ntradicts itself in dealing with the same matter? This classis action opens the way to submit the matter to the coming synod. (Editor).