Re: Shedd on Creation Days

Many thanks for this Rich, it is the best statement I have come across and sums up 20 years of research on Genesis and geology. (Part in a paper in Evangelical quarterly April 2002 Vol LXXIV) What we have is a two-stage creation as the traditional view from 0 AD to 1850AD or so, whereby God first created matter and then ordered in 6 days - whatever they were. The famous Gap Theory is a degenerate form of that with the Fall of Lucifer thrown in. It took me a long time to realise this as I could not understand how Christians flipped soeasily from a 144hr creation to long ages so rapidly in 1800. It was Haydn's Creation which has a two-stage creation which made me realise and as I looked at writers from 1600-1800 I found most went for a two-stage view with an indefinite time for the first stage.

One thing is absolutely clear Christians in 1800 or so did not succumb to compromisers and atheists as Mortenson argues in his awful little book which AIG is trumpeting.

I could say much more

Michael
  During the recent debate on creation in the PCA, Shedd was used as an example 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).

   
Received on Mon Dec 27 17:52:58 2004