Shedd on Creation Days

During the recent debate on creation in the PCA, Shedd was used as an example <http://www.ccpca.net/csc/2001-0808_csc_final_appendix_c.htm> of an orthodox theologian who believed in an old earth. What wasn’t mentioned was that Shedd argued that a young earth was an innovation and the more forced exegesis of Genesis 1. Shedd was a great proponent of the Westminster Confession and actively fought against latitudinarian revisions of it. (cf. Calvinism: Pure and Mixed and Proposed Revision of the Westminster Standards) What follows is from Shedd’s Dogmatic Theology. Note particularly the passages I emboldened.

Between the single comprehensive act of the creation of the angels and of chaotic matter mentioned in Gen. 1:1 and the series of divine acts in the six days described in Gen. 1:3–31, an interval of time elapsed. This is the old patristic interpretation. The very common assertion that the church has altered its exegesis, under the compulsion of modern geology, is one of the errors of ignorance. The doctrine of an immense time prior to the six creative days was a common view among the fathers and Schoolmen. So also was the doctrine of the rarefied and chaotic nature of matter in its first form a patristic tenet. Kant’s gaseous chaos filling the universe, adopted by La Place and Herschel, was taught, for substance, by Augustine, in the following positions taken in Confessions 12.8.1. God created a chaotic matter that was “next to nothing,” that is, the most tenuous and imponderable form of matter. This chaotic matter was made from nothing “before all days,” that is, in that prior period marked by the words in the beginning. This chaotic unformed matter was subsequently formed and arranged in the six days that are spoken of after Gen. 1:1.

Augustine’s exegesis of Gen. 1 is substantially this: In the beginning, that is, in a time prior to the six days, God created ex nihilo the angelic world or “the heaven” and chaotic inorganic matter or “the earth.” Then in the six days he formed (not created) chaotic inorganic matter into a cosmic system, solar, stellar, and planetary, and upon the planet earth created (not formed) the organic vegetable, animal, and human species. This was the interpretation generally accepted in the patristic and Middle Ages. Lombard (Sentences 2.12) adopts Augustine’s views. David Kimchi, a learned rabbi of the twelfth century, respecting whom the Jews said, “No Kimchi, no understanding of the Scriptures,” explained Gen. 1 in the following manner: “First of all, God created the ‘heaven,’ that is the highest heaven with the angels; then the ‘earth,’ the first appearance and condition of which are described in the second verse and out of which the other creatures are subsequently formed. And it is called without ‘form and void,’ in opposition to heaven; which was immediately carried to its full perfection and replenished with inhabitants” (Witsius, Apostles’ Creed, diss. 8).

Respecting the length of the six creative days, speaking generally, for there was some difference of views, the patristic and medieval exegesis makes them to be long periods, not days of twenty-four hours. The latter interpretation has prevailed only in the modern church. Augustine teaches (On the Literal Meaning of Genesis 4.27) that the length of the six days is not to be determined by the length of our days. Our seven days, he says, resemble the seven days of the account in Genesis in being a series and in having the vicissitudes of morning and evening, but they are “quite unequal.”22 In 4.1 he says that it is difficult to say what “day” means. In 5.1 he calls attention to the fact that the “six or seven days may be and are called one day” (Gen. 2:4). In 2.14 he calls the six days “God-divided days,” in distinction from “sun-divided days” (see Lewis, “Genesis” in Lange’s Commentary, 131). Gangauf (Augustine, 111n) cites numerous passages to the same effect. Anselm (Cur deus 1.18) remarks that there was a difference of opinion in his time as to whether the six days of Moses “are to be understood like days of ours” as a successive creation or whether “the whole creation took place at once.” He says it is “the opinion of the majority” that man and angels were created at the same time, because we read: “He who lives forever created all things at once.”

There is nothing in the use of the word day by Moses that requires it to be explained as invariably denoting a period of twenty-four hours; but much to forbid it. The following facts prove this: (1) day means daylight in distinction from darkness (Gen. 1:5, 16, 18); (2)day means daylight and darkness together (1:5); and (3) day means the six days together (2:4). The first day (1:5) could not have been measured by the revolution of the sun around the earth because this was not yet visible. The same variety in signification is seen in the Mosaic use of the word earth: (1) the entire material universe (Gen. 1:1); (2) the solar, stellar, and planetary system (1:2); (3) the dry land of the planet earth (1:10); or (4) the whole of the planet earth (1:15, 17). The Ten Commandments were called by the Jews the “ten words.”The term word here denotes a truth or proposition, not a single word. Similarly, a period of time having its beginning and ending, its evening and morning, may naturally be called a “day.” (See supplement 3.7.4.)

The seven days of the human week are copies of the seven days of the divine week. The “sun-divided days” are images of the “God-divided days.” This agrees with the biblical representation generally. The human is the copy of the divine, not the divine of the human. Human fatherhood and sonship are finite copies of the trinitarian fatherhood and sonship. Human justice, benevolence, holiness, mercy, etc., are imitations of corresponding divine qualities. The reason given for man’s rest upon the seventh solar day is that God rested upon the seventh creative day (Exod. 20:11). But this does not prove that the divine rest was only twenty-four hours in duration any more than the fact that human sonship is a copy of the divine proves that the latter is sexual.

3.7.4 (see p. 374). Grabe, in his Spicilegium patrum56 (2.195), gives a fragment from the commentary of Anastasius upon the six days’ work, in which the latter remarks that “Justin Martyr says that all things which were made by God are sextuply divided: Into immortal and intelligent things such as angels; into mortal things endowed with reason such as men; into sentient things destitute of reason such as cattle, birds, and fishes; into insentient things that move such as winds, clouds, waters, and stars; into things that grow but do not move such as trees; and into insentient things that do not move such as mountains, land, and the like. All the creatures of God fall into one of these divisions and are circumscribed by them.” This shows that the classification of the works of creation was a familiar conception at a very early date. This would harmonize with the theory of long periods and creative days and would naturally suggest it.

  _____

22. multum impares (i.e., to our days)

56 Gleaning of the fathers
Received on Mon Dec 27 15:03:57 2004