Re: [asa] Park Street church

I intersperse my comments among Michael's below.

Ted

>>> "Michael Roberts" <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk> 12/17/2007 2:36 AM
>>>
Thanks Randy.

I thought you had given me another Anglican clergy who was YEC in about
1910
to add to my tally of one - Griffith Thomas. I have searched for years for

YEC Anglicans and had only found one from 1855 to 1970.

Hague adopts a very literalistic sounding view of Genesis but implicitly
accepts geology as his last paragraph shows ;

The attempt of modernism to save the supernatural in the second part of the

Bible by mythicalizing the supernatural in the first part, is as unwise as

it is fatal. Instead of lowering the dominant of faith amidst the chorus of

doubt, and admitting that a chapter is doubtful because some doctrinaire
has
questioned it, or a doctrine is less authentic because somebody has floated

an unverifiable hypothesis, it would be better to take our stand with such

men as Romanes, Lord Kelvin, Virchow, and Liebig, in their ideas of a
Creative Power, and to side with Cuvier, the eminent French scientist, who

said that Moses, while brought up in all the science of Egypt, was superior

to his age, and has left us a cosmogony, the exactitude of which verifies
itself every day in a reasonable manner; with Sir William Dawson, the
eminent Canadian scientist, who declared that Scripture in all its details

contradicts no received result of science, but anticipates many of its
discoveries; with Professor Dana, the eminent American scientist, who said,

after examining the first chapters of Genesis as a geologist, "I find it to

be in perfect accord with known science"; or, best of all, with Him who
said, "Had you believed Moses, you would have believed Me, for he wrote of

Me. But if you believe not his writings, how shall you believe My words?"
(John 5:45,46).

TED: I was pretty sure that Dana would be on this list. The more I see OEC
comments (which I think this is, agreeing with Michael) from the early 20th
century, the more I keep hearing the echo of Dana. Sometimes it's explicit,
as here, but not always. Dana's "sound bites" are usually of the type
above: he was fully committed to a concordist reading of the "two books of
God," and that approach continued to make sense to American evangelicals
*and fundamentalists* until it was tossed out by the YECs in the 1960s (an
excellent example would be John C. Whitcomb's booklet, "The Origin of the
Solar System" (1963).

All those mentioned were NOT YEC. Dana actually accepted evolution. Dawson

was a geologist etc.

TED: Dana accepted pretty much all of evolution--Except human evolution,
where even in the last edition of his Manual of Geology (1890s) he affirmed
that humans have a separate origin. He liked to paraphrase Genesis on this,
to leave his readers with a clear implication of special creation without
exactly using that term. And Dawson was also a special creationist,
probably more so than Dana. Neither obviously was a YE creationist.

Was Hague writing to the gallery for the Fundamentals?

TED: No, not in my opinion. Somewhere between 1880 and 1920--the period in
which the movement later called "fundamentalism" emerged--evangelical
scientists and clergy became disillusioned with theistic evolution, I think
(though I am not sure) mostly for theological reasons; and they became more
and more wary of atheistic evolution, which they equated with any version of
evolution in which God did not play an explicit active role, such as
creating humans ex nihilo, or at least by guiding evolution in a
scientifically evident manner, through a created internal principle of order
that would ensure the progressive nature of the unfolding creation. A nice
example of this is George Frederick Wright, a leading advocate of evolution
in the 1870s and 1880s who, in the years before World War One, wrote an
anti-evolutionary essay for The Fundamentals. The problem was, in his
opinion, that evolution had become the basis of a philosophy to exclude
design/purpose from the universe; therefore it needed to be opposed. If all
of this is starting to sound familiar, it's b/c these issues just haven't
gone away. Phil Johnson would be right at home with Dana, and with Wright's
essay in The Fundamentals--but not (I suspect) with Wright's essays from a
few decades earlier.

Ted

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Received on Mon Dec 17 11:01:25 2007