Re: Terry's TE

Mike Farley (mifarley@i1.net)
Mon, 2 Dec 1996 21:19:55 -0600

There is a tremendous variety of perspectives among the Reformed community.
On the one hand, as David Tyler has noted, many strongly Reformed people
hold quite strongly to YEC views. At the same time, the Reformed tradition
has also been quite accepting of other views. Warfield, after all, thought
that a version of TE like Terry's view was perfectly orthodox, and other
Princeton professors agree with him (William Henry Green, for instance).
(Although Warfield's defense of inerrancy was adopted by the fundamentalist
movement, it is incorrect to view Warfield's theology as the foundation of
the fundamentalist movement. If only that were so! Warfield and the
Princeton school were confessionally Reformed and strong adherents to the
theology expressed in the Westminster standards. Princeton had a very high
view of scholarship, a tradition that continues at its daughter seminary,
Westminster. This wasn't even remotely true of the fundamentalist movement.
In fact, Warfield's most famous student, J. Gresham Machen, while opposing
liberalism also strongly opposed the anti-intellectualism of
fundamentalists. He, too, was a careful scholar and Westminster Seminary
under Machen's leadership almost singlehandedly preserved qualified
evangelical biblical scholarship during the 20's and 30's.)

I attend a Reformed seminary where most of the faculty hold OEC views
similar to Hugh Ross and Bob Newman. Westminster professor Meredith Kline
has long defended a framework hypothesis that views the days of Genesis as
a literary device, and many at this flagship Reformed school agree with
him.

So, on the face of it, there doesn't seem to be much correlation between
Reformed theology and one's view of origins and Genesis. However, I think
that the Reformed community possesses the necessary theological resources
and a legacy of a strong emphasis on careful scholarship that are conducive
to an increased openess and a more nuanced evaluation of the relevant
hermeneutical issues.

By His sovereign grace,

Mike Farley
Covenant Theological Seminary