My wife and I recently took a trip out west. We wanted to see, once again, some of those majestic national parks and awesome mountains that we have come to love. We did Yellowstone National Park, and, naturally, went to see Old Faithful. The crowds were horrendous, with parking spaces hard to find. We did find a brochure, though, with the stupendous reminder that “Yellowstone National Park sits on top of an enormous super volcano which powers all the geysers and Old Faithful. Don’t worry—the volcano’s last major eruption was 640,000 years ago.” Really? Must I accept that as truth?
Our next stop was in Teton National Park, where we were informed that “the 2.7 billion-year-old rocks are some of the oldest in North America. Beginning 100 million years ago . . . the collision of tectonic plates bowed up a vast block of sedimentary rock deposited by ancient seas. Beginning 10 million years ago, movement on the Teton fault generated massive earthquakes causing the current Teton range.” Really? How did they arrive at those calculations? What happened during those missing 90 million years? What happened during the 2.6 billion years since those rocks were formed?
Our third park was Arches National Park in Utah. A fascinating place, but covered with more evolutionary gobble-speak. We were told that this park “lies atop an underground salt bed that was deposited across the Colorado Plateau 300 million years ago when a sea flowed into the region and eventually evaporated.” What were we to do with all these conflicting bits of information? Are we to believe them as the government bureaucrats present them? Surely not, for all of that is fabricated falsehood. This is fiction presented as reliable science. At best, this is pseudoscience, heavy on the pseudo. This is anti-Scripture in its most blatant form. Should we ignore it, pretend as though it were all some cruel joke? If we care at all about truth and falsehood, we can’t turn a blind eye to it. If we care at all about our fellow humans, believers by nature, should we not demand that they be told the truth? Should we not expose falsehood for what it is? Do we have an obligation before God, to proclaim the truth, even when the odds are stacked against us? Does it make much sense to swim upstream when floodwaters tend to drown us?
Within our Presbyterian and Reformed communities, there are relatively few issues that divide us. We don’t quarrel about women’s ordination. We don’t fight about infant baptism. We don’t argue about covenant theology, even if we are sometimes unclear what that means. We should debate, though, about creation specifics. The Westminster Confession of Faith declares: “It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for the manifestation of glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning, to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein, whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days, and all very good” (WCF. Chapter IV.I). There are those, especially persons who may have been influenced by Meredith Kline, who want to give a more flexible twist to that phrase “in the space of six days.” Looking at some of the phraseology in Genesis 2, they are apt to question the literal language of our Westminster Confession. There are also some who like to argue for a “gap theory,” claiming that there are longer periods of time between those six days, thus allowing for plants to mature and animals to produce their young. With minimal creativity, people can raise questions that seemingly beg for answers.
My purpose is not to delve more deeply into such speculation or into Kline’s conclusions but to raise another, broader issue. When did God create the universe and the world in which we reside? In many Christian communities and in a number of academic institutions, there are some disturbing conclusions. It is not un-common for some Christian schools and colleges and some seminaries to conclude that we are residents of an “old earth.” This universe, of which we are an extremely tiny part, they claim, is millions of years old. Some would escalate that number to read “billions” of years. Calvin College and many others adopted Howard Van Til’s conclusion that our earth was at least 14.5 billion years old. Almost any trip to our state or national parks would confront one with the blatant evolutionary assumptions about the formation of our earth and universe. Both state and federal governments seem committed to the old earth idea. They fabricate chronologies to support their theories.
I grew up in the Dutch, Reformed tradition and knew little about the Westminster Confession of Faith. We had our own confession, nicknamed the Belgic Confession, because that was where it was first drafted. The Belgic Confession avoided the controversy over “six literal days.” It simply said, “We believe that the Father by the Word, that is, by His Son, has created of nothing the heavens, the earth, and all creatures, when it seemed good to Him” (Confession of Faith, Article XII).
When one is involved heavily in the Christian school movement, as I was for decades, it is almost impossible to escape the creation-evolution arguments swirling all around you. You can try to ignore them, putting one’s head in the sand, like the proverbial ostrich, or one can try to resolve them by appeal to either science or Scripture. Knowing that “science” is best defined as “knowledge,” and knowing that all knowledge originates with God, the choice was simple: look to Scripture for the answers.
Depending on the person(s) who most influenced your thinking, or the subject matter you are assigned to teach, you might find it quite convenient to adopt a position called “theistic evolution.” That is the basic position adopted by both the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church of America. That philosophical position emphasizes that God is the Creator, but he did his work by natural processes over long periods of time. Those natural processes, they claim, are evolutionary in nature. By calculating the measure-ments within the universe, it becomes necessary, in their estimation, to advocate the age of the earth in terms of billions of years. Of course, we want to acknowledge God as the Creator. Of course we want to be scientific. The alternative is to be blind to all the discoveries of science. Nobody wants to be characterized as being unscientific. At the same time we delight in making public profession of the Apostles’ Creed, which begins with that beautiful phrase, “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”
But the question continues to provoke us: If God created the universe in six twenty-four-hour days, as the Westminster Confession so boldly states, why would it take him millions or billions of years to form this universe? Does not the argument for six twenty-four-hour days push us into the “young earth” camp? If the language of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 is considered to be literal and truthful, would not that same argument hold true for Genesis 5 and Genesis 11, where the genealogies are listed? When we are told that Adam lived to be 930 years old, and that the earth was 930 years old when he died, would that not prove a young earth? If the creation account from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 is truthful, since it is authored by God himself, would it not hold true for the genealogies in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11, since they are also authored by God himself?
In response to much evolutionary debate during the 1980s and 1990s, I argued that “my own conclusion, after repeated and careful study of the Genesis account, is that the precise chronology of God’s creative acts and/or processes ought not to be our central concern.”1 Instead of taking a firm stand for a six-day creation and a young earth, I fudged. I concluded that God had not given us such precise chronological data and had withheld it from us. The great Synod of Dordt, in 1619, had embraced that creedal statement. I felt comfortable taking such a stand because one of our most influential creeds had not taken such a stand. Guido de Bres, the author of the Belgic Confession, had concluded that God had created the world “when it seemed good to Him.”2 If that was to be the position of the church, should I not embrace it and proclaim it? Should I not become comfortable in telling my students that God has seen fit not to address the question of the age of the earth? Such a stance would leave the scientific community with the exclusive rights to tell us about the age of the earth. We would then have to accept every pronouncement, no matter how preposterous it might be. In the process, of course, we would have to discount the Noahic flood as a fabrication of ill-informed traditionalists. We would also have to conclude that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are pre-historic!
But that conclusion did not sit right with me. I could not ignore all the historical data about those first families and their unusual life spans. If the Noahic flood occurred 1,656 years after the creation of Adam and Eve, should I not embrace the notion that we live in a young earth? In search of additional facts, I discovered that John Calvin had concluded that the earth was created only 3,943 years before the birth of Christ.3 That conclusion was in contrast to Martin Luther, who had stated some years prior that the earth was only 3,960 years old by the time of Christ. When we look at other major players in the Protestant Reformation, we note that Henry Bullinger, the noted Swiss theologian, calculated the earth was 2,488 years at the time of Moses’ death. If we estimate the time of Moses’ death to be 1,500 years before Christ, we would have the age of the earth to be 3,988 years at the time of Christ’s birth. Zacharias Ursinus, the primary author of the Heidelberg Catechism, concluded that the earth had aged 1,616 years since the birth of Christ and that the earth was 5,534 years old since Adam. Ursinus then tells us that Melancthon had calculated the earth to be 3,963 years old at the time of Christ.4 These scholars obviously accepted the genealogies of Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 to be accurate, reliable accounts. When we attempt a summary of the views held by some of the major Reformers, we conclude:
Martin Luther 3,960 years old
John Calvin 3,943 years old
Phillip Melancthon 3,963 years old
Henry Bullinger 3,988 years old
Zacharias Ursinus 3,988 years old
Bishop Ussher 4,004 years old
It would take no little effort to analyze critically the data that went into each one of these calculations. These prominent Reformers obviously had access to slightly different sources and had arrived at their conclusion with slightly different results. Given that, it would have been foolish for the Synod of Dordt or Guido de Bres to select one of these dates as the final one. Much better to conclude, as did de Bres, that God had the final, definitive answer. The conclusion then had to be that God had ”created it when it seemed good to Him.” The conclusion reached in the Belgic Confession was that this universe in which we live is a relatively young earth. For all practical purposes, we can conclude that this world is approximately 6,000 years old! I have come to that conclusion a long time ago, based on my own computations of these genealogies. But I have been mocked and ridiculed whenever I made that conclusion public.
I happily conclude, along with the confession, that there is little or no point in trying to determine whether Calvin or Luther or Bullinger or Uscher or any other medieval scholar had the precisely correct date. Somewhere in that relatively small span of years, God spoke the world into existence. We don’t need to know the precise year or month or date, but we need to accept the fact that the Almighty Creator spoke it all into existence, out of nothing, ex nihilo!
If that cardinal truth does not strike you dumb, then what kind of proclamation would? When you begin to reflect on the magnitude of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the splendor of our earth, you begin to realize the awesome power of our God. He is Almighty, worthy of our highest praise. He simply spoke it into existence, out of nothing! The alternative is to reduce him to a slow-moving, dumb, uncreative Being who took millions and even billions of years to form a human life or a bird or an animal. To reduce God to an evolutionary force is to make him less than we ourselves. To allow our state and national governments free rein on such agendas is a travesty. That we cannot allow!
1. Norman De Jong, God’s Wedding Band: Reflections on the Creation-Evolution Controversy (Winimac, IN, 1990), 44.
2. Confession of Faith, Article XII.
3. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of Moses Called Genesis (Grand Rapids: Baker), 67–100, 224–37.
4. For parallel calculations, see Joel Beeke, “What Did the Reformers Believe about the Age of the Earth?” Answers in Genesis, October 2, 2017, https://answersingenesis. org/age-of-the-earth/what-did-reformersbelieve-about-age-earth/.
Dr. Norman De Jong is a semi-retired pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.