डॉ। फोर्ड काल्स फॉर अद्वेंटिस्ट दोक्ट्रिनल reforms

Listen to his call for Adventist Reform:

"God raised up the advent movement to proclaim the three angels' messages to the world, a proclamation which would have the everlasting gospel at its center with warnings against its counterfeits and perversions. "

"The Sabbath would be presented as the outward sign of the spiritual rest which comes to all who by faith accept the gospel. But we have failed. At this point of time, more than a century and a half since our beginnings we represent but one in every 450 people on the globe. "

"This failure is because the gospel has not been clearly presented even among ourselves and therefore the average church member does not give even one Bible study a year to nonbelievers, and our apostasies are gargantuan. Surely it is time for reformation. "

Desmond Ford, July 2004





DESMOND FORD

Most educated people in Western countries regard Adventism as a 19th century cult. Why? Because of the promoting of Usher's six-thousand-year-old earth for most of our existence, and because we ignore the evidence furnished by the geological column, astronomy, continental drift and plate tectonics, radiometric, radiocarbon, and amino acid dating, etc. Among Bible scholars who do accept the Scriptures as God's supernaturally inspired Word, we are also considered as an anachronism because of the way we interpret the early chapters of Genesis. Please note well that the issue here at stake is not the inspiration of Genesis, but its interpretation.

FOUR CATEGORIES OF INTERPRETATION

Evangelicals fall into four chief categories as regards their understanding of the first chapter of the Bible. There are those who hold "the gap theory," believing that long ages intervene between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. Few scholars now teach this, as the exegetical and linguistic case is clearly against it.

A second group is concordist and regards the days as symbolic of long ages. This too has fallen into disfavor in recent decades among exegetes. It cannot reckon adequately with the successive evenings and mornings and the clear statement that the heavenly bodies were made on the fourth day.

The third view is chiefly that of fundamentalists, who hold that the literal meaning of the words is to be cherished and taught. There are practically no theologians of worldwide repute in this category.

Last, a fourth group looks at Genesis 1 as literature, semi-poetic in style, using the language of appearance so as to cater for all peoples, of all ages, in all places-despite illiteracy. The vast majority of scholarly commentaries in the last century take this position. Le
t us briefly consider some of the reasons why this is so.

THE MEANING OF GENESIS

The clear meaning of Genesis 1:1-2:3 is to tell of the formation of the entire universe, not just this planet. Verse 1 by its reference to "the heavens and the earth" is a merism (a presentation of two opposites making up a whole). This points to everything in existence, and, for this reason, some translators and commentators rightly render it: "In the beginning God created the universe." At the close of the creation account again we read of "the heavens and the earth." But this time we read also about "all the host of them." Genesis 1:1 and 2:1 point to each other and constitute a class for the entire narrative, and by "the host of them" is meant first of all the starry heavens. See Deuteronomy 4:19; 17:3; Nehemiah 9:6, etc.

So here is literature suggesting that the whole universe was made in less than one week! We doubt that even the fundamentalists among SDAs believe that. Confirmation of this intended meaning is found in verses 14-19 of the chapter where, not only the sun and the moon, but the stars also are set "in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth."

The accepted age among scientists for the universe is between 15 and 20 billion years, and for our solar system between 4 and 5 billion years. These figures are not guesses, but they are based on the same science that is able to place men on the moon and can bring events from the other side of the world into our lounge rooms at the very moment of occurrence. Christians who fly through the heavens in planes and speed along the earth in cars, who watch television and use electric razors, cannot fairly repudiate the conclusions of science about such matters as the age of the universe and our earth. It is true that science makes mistakes; 500 PhD dissertations were written on the Piltdown man, which turned out to be a hoax‹but science is also self-corrective. The real problem in religious circles is that an ounce of bias too often outweighs a ton of evidence.

THE YOUNG EARTH THEORY

For decades Adventism has been defending a young earth. Yet more than half of the scientists in our ranks repudiate that position. In the recent volume Creation Reconsidered, some well-known Adventist scientists and theologians speak their minds regarding the impossibility of holding the young earth doctrine. I know many of the writers personally, and I could add to the list others who stand in the foremost ranks of Adventist scientists. These would agree with the writers of this book, though originally all of them believed in a young earth and once explained the geological column by resorting to a worldwide flood in Noah's day. All of these men of science I greatly admire. Certain of them lost their jobs rather then surrender their integrity and allegiance to scientific truth, believing that God was as surely the author of that as he is of the truth found in Scripture. (Dr. Peter Hare is one example.)

The problem facing the church is a very urgent one. Because we have dealt with science as an enemy, and because we have not been prepared to listen to the scientists amongst us, we have ill prepared the many thousands of our young people who go to universities and learn the sciences. Far more than half of them then lose their way, assuming that the church is not to be trusted in any of its teachings seeing it is demonstrably wrong regarding its teachings on the very opening page of the Bible. Our second major problem is in evangelism. Because of our stand regarding the beginning of Genesis, we mainly reach people of the third world, or those of poor education in the Western World. We have cut off the ears, so to speak, of many intellectuals and lost those who should have become the bellwethers of the flock. We have augmented the unnecessary divide between science and revelation.

Many theologians in our ranks do not consider this a difficult problem to solve. And some of them have given their solution in the book Creation Reconsidered. Their explanation is the same as that of well-educated Christians for more than a century, including such figures as Henry Drummond (author of The Greatest Thing in the World), Charles Kingsley (author of Westward Ho), James Orr (editor of The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia), Benjamin Warfield, and a host of contemporary evangelicals such as John Stott. While not agreed on details, all of these have believed in an old universe and an old earth, and that Genesis 1 is literature, not science.

Such a conclusion should not be strange for anyone who considers the matter. Christ, the living Word, Lord of all truth, refused to disclose anything men could find out by the use of their own faculties, and so it is with the written Word. Consider how the living Word took the signs of the Aramaic language to communicate the truths of heaven and the idioms of the smallest nation on earth to express eternal verities. So it is with Genesis 1. The record--while theocentric in another sense-- is anthropocentric (man-centered), for it uses the language of appearance. But it is also anthropomorphic, and pictures God as seeing and speaking, and in the later chapters acting as a surgeon, a farmer, a potter, and a tailor making garments. Yet, Jesus said God is a spirit. See John chapter 4:24. God knew that for millenniums 99 percent of the inhabitants of earth would be illiterate. Even today the percentage is approximately 33
percent. As we communicate the truths of sex to children in terms less than scientifically precise, so did God with the story of creation. He was like a tall man bending low to whisper to a child.

Had Genesis 1 been written in scientific terms, which science would have been employed? Would it be that of Moses' day, Christ's day, the Middle Ages, the 19th Century, the 21st, or tomorrow's science? Had the chapter consisted only of the ultimate in scientific statement, probably all we would have would be an equation. However, Genesis is so written that "the wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein." It is concerned with the questions of Who and Why, not How and When. "By faith we understand that the Universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible" Hebrews 11:3, NIV.

HOW OLD IS THE EARTH?

But is it quite certain that the earth is old as geologists declare? Yes, it is quite sure. Even the Geoscience Research Institute of SDAs now admits this (after denials of decades). The proofs run into scores, of which perhaps five percent are questionable. For example, under the South Downs of England lie about 800 feet of chalk. These deposits are composed of tiny organisms, which sank to the ocean floor after death, taking about 1,000 years to form one inch of chalk. Think of the White Cliffs of Dover. Every microscopic fragment of it was once living. The present color testifies that these cliffs were not the product of a catastrophic flood. Think of coral reefs, sometimes forty miles long and of great height and thickness.

Think of the varves that run sometimes into millions in some geographic locations, such as the Green River district in USA. Each varve (a varve is a pair of distant layer of sediment) represents the climatic changes of a single year, and a multitude of other features of earth give the same testimony as radiometric dating. "God spoke, and it was. He commanded, and it stood fast," refers to the certainty of his creative work, not its duration. Other evidences of the earth's great age, which are almost universally accepted by specialists in the earth sciences include the following:

The multitude of oil drills in the U.S. alone testifies to the reliability of accepted geological data. A fortune is regularly spent based on this research. There are literally hundreds of places around the world where the same sequence of strata appear.

The oilfields of the Great Lakes area, Texas, and Alberta were originally beneath the sea and the
thousands of feet of sedimentary rock that piled up contain multitudes of marine fossils. On top of these sedimentary deposits coral reefs grew which ultimately because fossilized into limestone. Some of these are many miles long and about a thousand feet thick and required many thousands of years to develop. On top of these reefs are more layers of sediment upon beds of mud‹only after the sediments became rocks did coral edifices begin.

The Bahamas Banks are underwater mountains of sedimentary rock enormous in size and containing what has been described as "one tremendous stack of fossil material". These banks have steeply sloping sides, evidence that the fossils grew in place and were not deposited from elsewhere. Millions of years were required for these massive banks to grow.

Sedimentary rocks become metamorphic rock only under the combination of tremendous heat and pressure‹temperatures of about 600 degrees centigrade and pressures of 30 tons per square inch, for long ages of time.

Using the parallax method, astronomers have concluded that light from the most distant objects in the universe took about ten billion years to reach earth.

Stars are usually in groups and not scattered at random. The bigger a star is, the hotter and the faster it uses up its energy resources. The hottest blue stars have enough energy to enable them to survive for a few million years but the cool red stars have a life span several times as long. On no occasion do we find a cluster entirely lacking in the long-lived stars, which means that in those clusters the stars of shorter life spans have already burned themselves out. Millions or even billions of years are thus comprehended in each star cluster.

There are seventeen radioactive nuclides with half lives more than 80 millions years and this coincides perfectly with an estimate for the solar system of between four and five billion years of age. If the earth were only about 10,000 years old we would find radioactive nuclides with half-lives between 1,000 and 50 million years only. The Christian physicist, Alan Hayward, comments: "There are forty such nuclides that can only be made in star-interior conditions, and EVERY ONE of them is absent from the earth's crust." Then he adds: "the odds against this distribution [of the 17 nuclides with half-lives above 80 million years] just happening" to occur, by pure chance: are worse than a million billion to one. This means that the distribution of the radioactive nuclides provides a positively overwhelming argument for an ancient


earth." Creation and Evolution p. 106.

Regarding recent creationist attacks on radiometric dating, Dr. Davis Young (both a respected professor of geology and a creationist) says: "No geochronologists will ever take seriously such arguments. It is hoped that Christian lay-people will not take them seriously either, for they are poor arguments." Ibid. p.112

Rocks of earth and rocks from meteorites and the moon agree on an age for our solar system of between four and five billion years. Such great ages as we have recognized for the universe are necessary because some of the elements necessary for life on earth had their origin in star nuclear furnaces burning through long ages until the supernova climax expelled these elements to become part of our earth and of living things.

The Bible says nothing precisely about the age of the earth. Chronologies indicate descent not a chronological line. Terms such as, "begat", and "son", do not in Scripture always have the meaning we now give them. "Begat" can mean "the ancestor of," and "son," can mean a distant descendant. Scripture begins its story of the human race at the time when both writing and civilization began (and when earth's population was much less than one percent of what it is now), and never attempts to convey supernaturally any information man himself can find out by using the gifts God has richly bestowed upon him. We see this truth best illustrated in the teachings of Christ himself, and it was his Spirit that inspired the Old Testament writings.

Continental drift with its inconceivably slow movement also demonstrates the earth's great age. Denied by scientists till after World War II, continental drift is now widely accepted.

It is estimated that ninety-nine percent of coal seams are readily explained by the burial of vegetation in tropical swamps to be ultimately metamorphosed into coal. Coal reserves equal approximately 65 pounds of coal for every square yard of the planet, and yet a whole forest of full-grown beeches can only yield a seam of about 2 centimeters. No universal flood could ever have produced the gigantic coal contents of our globe. Most coal seams are devoid of flowering plants, trees, or the pollen found in recent sediments. Most of earth's strata, including the coal layers are finely arranged and not at all what the destructive work of a great flood would have yielded.

The Yellowstone Fossil Forests have in one place 44 successive forest layers that are encased in rock that was formed by volcanic ash. Beneath the forests are thousands of feet of fossiliferous rock. SDA paleontologist, Dr Richard Ritland, after considerable field work at the site, wrote, "The transport theory for the origin of the fossil forests of the region as suggested by Whitcomb and Morris is not in harmony with the facts." Creation and Evolution, p. 130

But what about the universality of the Deluge? Because there is no geological evidence of a worldwide deluge, most evangelical scholars believe that the Genesis Flood covered the existing civilization, not the entire globe. Others believe that the inspired writers took a well-known historical event of limited proportions and used it to teach theological truth, transcending mere history, which is never an end in itself in the Bible. When John Morris of the Creation Research Institute was asked if he had ever convinced a secular geologist regarding flood geology, he answered, "No." Furthermore, flood geology is no necessary accompaniment of belief in a universal flood.

Is the geological column an established fact? It is, and has been so since 1849, by which time correlations had been made between strata in England and European countries.

Is not the idea of long ages of creature strife before the advent of man an intolerable one for the Christian? We should remember Deuteronomy 29:29 about the secret things belonging to the Lord, and that only those things are revealed which are to help us to obedience. Romans 8:10-23 is probably the key to this problem. All of nature testifies that intelligent beings have rebelled against their Maker. We must keep in mind that this rebellion began before our solar system was formed. Spurgeon believed that the shadow of the Fall extended backwards just as does the shadow of the cross. In the beginning, God's work was declared "good," not "perfect." It is good, despite storms, earthquakes, tigers, malarial mosquitoes, etc.; good for its probationary purpose. This world was intended to be "a vale of gospel-making."

Do not evolutionary scientists reason in a circle when they date strata by the fossils and vice versa? George McCready Price, that good and learned man, taught so. But he was wrong, as almost all SDA scientists now admit. Radiometric dating and comparison of the sequence of strata in all continents have made Price's views untenable.

The geological column points to death long before the arrival of man. Did not death begin at the Fall? Scripture teaches that all human death began with the Fall. In a creation such as we live in, existence is protoplasmic--that is, acting upon existing life. Otherwise, the sea would soon be solid fish, and the atmosphere a mass of insects. When Adam ate his first piece of fruit, obviously he took its life. It may help to remember, as we look at difficult questions, that God's work in creation is as mysterious as his own nature. Indeed, mystery is a key word used by many recent scientists as they discuss both the beginning of life and of humanity.

WE MAY NEVER FULLY KNOW

We may never know the full truth of our origins. No less an authority on evolution than Ernst Mayr, professor emeritus of zoology at Harvard University, former curator at the American Museum of Natural History, and avowed lifelong advocate of Darwinian evolution, has finally come to admit that the origin of our species is a "puzzle" (to use his word) that may never be solved. The link that leads directly to Homo sapiens is missing. That should not be a surprise. Such direct "links" are not abundant in the fossil record. Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God, p. 127.

When G. G. Simpson wrote in Science magazine about the book The Origin of Vertebrates, by N. J. Berrill, he said: Berrill's last sentence is, "Proof may be forever unattainable, and it may not matter, for here is such stuff as dreams are made of." Then Simpson himself states: "Perhaps this is the last word on the chordate ancestry of the vertebrates. As for the ancestry of the chordates, all is left in darkness without even the dream of 60 years ago." Science, Dec. 9, 1955, p. 1144.

Even known organisms, despite all we have learned of their physiology, biochemistry, embryology and ecology are still very much black boxes, and only a fraction of their total adaptive complexity is understood. We still do not have anything approaching a complete description of even the simplest bacterial cell. See Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 201.

The truth is that despite the prestige of evolutionary theory and the tremendous intellectual effort directed towards reducing living systems to the confines of Darwinian thought, nature refuses to be imprisoned. In the final analysis we still know very little about how new forms of life arise. The "mystery of mysteries"-the origin of new beings on earth; is still largely as enigmatic as when Darwin set sail on the Beagle. Ibid. pp. 358-359.

Despite all we have said above, it must be confessed that Genesis 1 is about Science; the science of salvation. Spurgeon delighted to speak on that truth, and we offer one example.

"Furthermore, we must note that if any man be in Christ he is a new creature, and the creation of him bears some resemblance to the creation of the world. I have at other times gone through that wonderful first chapter of the Book of Genesis, which is a Bible in miniature, and I have tried to show how it sets forth the spiritual creation."

"Behold, by nature we lie like chaos: a mass of disorder, confusion, and darkness. As in the old creation, so in the new, the Spirit of God broodeth over us and moveth on the face of all things. Then the word of the Lord comes and says within us, as aforetime in chaos and old night, 'Let there be light,'and there is light. After light there comes a division of the light from the darkness, and we learn to call them by their names. The light is 'day' and the darkness is 'night.'"

"So to us there is a knowing and a naming of things, and a discerning of differences in matters which before we confounded when we put light for darkness. After a while there cometh forth in us the lower forms of spiritual life. As in the earth there came grasses and herb, so in us there come desire, hope, and sorrow for sin. By-and-by there appeared on the globe fowl and fish, and beasts, and living things, and life beyond all count."

"So also in the new creation, from having life we go on to have it more abundantly. God by degrees created all His works, till at last He had finished all the hosts of them, and even so He works on till He completes in us the new creation and looks upon us with rejoicing. Then He bringeth to us a day of rest, blessing us and causing us to enter into His rest because of His finished work. We could draw a very beautiful parallel if we had time, but you can think it out for yourselves. Christ's Glorious Achievements." (pp. 72-73.)

GENESIS AND THE BIBLE

When the New Testament draws from the first chapter of the Old Testament, it customarily links it to the new creation made possible by Calvary. See John 1:1; Mark 1:1; Luke 1:1; Matthew 4:17; 2 Corinthians 4:6; 5:17; 1 Peter 2:9. We should do the same. This cannot be overemphasized.

But can we really be certain that the Genesis narrative is inspired? Certainly, there exists in Scripture, particularly in its introductory passages, what has been called "the seal of seven." The first sentence of the Bible has 7 Hebrew words and 4 x 7 Hebrew letters. The three nouns: God, heaven, and earth a have number value of 777. (Each Hebrew letter stands for a number‹see any Hebrew Grammar). There is one Hebrew verb, "created," and its numeric value is 203 = 7 x 29. According to some researches there are at least 30 different numeric features in this verse. Statistically, the chance of this is 1 in 30 trillion. I have checked out at least one dozen of these from my Hebrew Bible, but I do not endorse the extremes of Ivan Panin.

The second verse of Genesis 1 has 7 x 2 words and the last paragraph of the creation story (Genesis 2:1-3) is constructed similarly, including 3 statements of 7 Hebrew words each, with the word for seventh in the center. The first genealogy of the Bible is the genealogy of the heavens and the earth, and it is divided into 7 divisions. The next genealogy is found at the end of Genesis 4 and has 7 names. The seventh man in this genealogy, Lamech, utters an oath embracing the number 7 three times. The years of the later Lamech (Genesis 5) are 777.

The next genealogy is Genesis 5, and here the seventh man is so close to God he does not die but is taken to heaven for eternal rapturous rest. The numbers in this chapter are based on the Babylonian sexagesimal system (60s); each given age is a multiple of five years = 60 months. Wherever there is an exception to this, it is because a seven has been added. The total ages of the antediluvians comes to 8,575, which is 7 x 1,225. The ages from the Flood to Abraham come to 2,996, which is also a multiple of seven. A similar listing of kings was well-known long before the days of Abraham, but the ages transcend those of Genesis 5 by far.

In Genesis 46:8, the sons of Jacob are listed. The seventh son is Gad (whose numerical number from the Hebrew letters of his name is 7), and he has 7 sons. Genesis 46:70 says, 70 people went into Egypt. All this reminds us of the first NT genealogies. Matthew has 3 lots of 14 in chapter 1, i.e. three lots of 7 x 2. Luke has 77 generations. His whole book revolves around 7 pericopes, beginning each time with reference to the seventh-day, the Sabbath. (Most of this can be found in such learned tomes as Umberto Cassuto's Commentary on the Pentateuch, part one, and L. R. Bailey's Genesis, Creation, and Creationism).

We have only touched the fringes of the topic, but what uninspired human being could ever duplicate those fringes, indeed, even that wonderful first verse of the Bible? Consider how many heresies are challenged by the first 7 Hebrew words of Scripture. Polytheism, animism, pantheism, deism, atheism, agnosticism, secularism, materialism, etc. This approach is but one of many to show the supernatural nature of Genesis. The Jews who learned its lessons gave civilization its most beneficent features: monotheism, science, education, freedom, democracy, worship, and morality. See the book The Gifts of the Jews, by Thomas Cahill.

In pagan religions, time was cyclical, leading to the philosophy of eternal recurrence and inevitable resulting gloom, depression, and enervation. The pagans never successfully linked ethics with religion but the readers of Genesis did, to the benefit of us all.

One other approach that recommends itself to most thoughtful people is the fact that the book which gives but one chapter to creation and five to millenniums of human history, yet dedicates 13 chapters to the life of one man. This man, one of the very few against whom no sin is recorded, becomes the Savior of the world with the bread of life, after having been falsely accused, betrayed and sold for pieces of silver to a foreign nation. And all this was done by his own Jewish brethren. In those thirteen chapters are approximately four score parallels with the life of Christ, as recorded in the four Gospels. Sometimes the very words of the evangelist are set forth. Such phenomena are beyond mere human ability.

Genesis can be viewed as infallible in all it intends to teach; the good news about God and his gracious offer of redemption through Christ. Read and believe John 20:31: "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." Consider also John 5:46: "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say."

IS GENESIS INSPIRED?

There is clear evidence of the supernatural inspiration of Genesis. Not only the miraculous interweaving of the number seven from the first verse onwards, but also the prophetic statements of the book. We will mention just one of these, which should be convincing to any open
mind. Genesis 12:1-3 predicts that an obscure Bedouin sheik would become the most respected man in the world. This sevenfold prophecy is clearly supernatural.

Who among us before the days of media could ever have pointed to an unknown figure among the millions of earth and say that one day his name and memory would tower above all others? For over 14 centuries, the millions of Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians, have claimed Abraham as their spiritual father. And from Abraham came the chosen race who guarded the oracles of God, brought forth the Messiah, and the Book which has blessed civilization above all others combined. Nevertheless, unbelief can reason away the most positive evidence because it prefers evil. Skepticism is not the result of lack of evidence but springs from the choice of evil (John 19:21).

Genesis is a marvelous document inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is unlike all merely human documents. Observe, for example, that the theme of Genesis 1 is God himself. He appears in this opening narrative 50 times. He is the subject of every paragraph. Gordon J. Wenham in his Commentary on Genesis quotes Procksch who declared: "The first subject of Genesis and the Bible is God." Indeed, his name is the chief noun of significance in the entire Old Testament. Wenham concludes his introduction to Genesis with these words:

"Though historical and scientific questions may be uppermost in our minds as we approach the text, it is doubtful whether they were in the writer_s mind, and we should therefore be cautious about looking for answers to questions he was not concerned with. Genesis is primarily about God's character and his purposes for sinful mankind. Let us beware of allowing our interests to divert us from the central thrust of the book, so that we miss what the Lord, our creator and redeemer, is saying to us." Word Biblical Commentary; Genesis 1-15, p. liii.

WHAT ABOUT THE FLOOD?

Most scholarly commentaries point out that Genesis 1-11 refutes the idolatries of Israel's neighbors by drawing upon well-known legends, transforming them into inspired theological truth. The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, has the famous narrative about the time when the gods determined to destroy the world by a great flood. One man found grace in their eyes and, because of him, others were saved to begin a new civilization. His ark contained the seeds of the new world by taking aboard animals as well as human. After the flood, this hero offered sacrifice following his sending out of successive birds (including a dove and a raven) to see if it was safe to leave his haven. And the gods were appreciative of the sacrificial offering of the head of the new race and gave him immortality. The biblical narrative compares with this ancient epic as the Chrysler building does to a chicken coop, but there can be no denying the similarities to be found. Dr Frederick J. Harder has a warning for us:

"It is a fallacy to elevate the Deluge narrative to the level of a Bible doctrine, or to suggest that any doctrine is dependent upon it. When we use the Noachian flood to explain stratification or the presence of fossils, we are theorising, not interpreting, Scripture. The significance of the flood chronicle is its assurance that the wages of sin is death and that only by finding 'grace in the eyes of the Lord' as did Noah can mankind, or any part of creation, be spared destruction. (Genesis 6:8) Creation Reconsidered, p. 286.

As regards Noah's flood, we can choose between two options: it is a history of a local flood long before the early kingdoms of Egypt, or it is an inspired parable drawing upon some ancient memories of a diluvial catastrophe.

It might help us in making our choice to recognize that the Old Testament draws upon ancient myths and symbols. See Isaiah 27:1; 51:9, 10; Psalms 74:13, 14. None of us today believe in any monster with several heads, but it was a widely-known symbol in the days of Israel. Another well-known symbol mentioned in Scripture is the center of the world and the navel stone, thought of as the umbilicus (belly button) of the universe. The idea of a navel stone in association with a temple is found in many locations and cultures in the world and is echoed by Daniel 2:44, 45 and other Scriptures.

Also of help in our endeavors to rightly interpret Scripture is Bible astronomy. In the constellations, which were first named more than 4,000 years ago, we find echoes of the dragon myth found in the Bible, and indelible memories of God's first promise of redemption (Gen 3:15); and the latter covenant promise following the Flood (Gen 9:8-17). See the article on "Astronomy" in The International Bible Encyclopedia (ed. James Orr, Eerdmans, reprinted 1984, vol. 1, 309).

Henri Blocher, on p. 37 of his In the Beginning, says:

"Scripture, as has been pointed out by the evangelical scholar J. A. Thompson and by Father A. M. Dubarle, abounds in examples of mixed genre. It frequently recounts the passage of history in the categories of parable or allegory, and expresses the facts it recalls in images and symbols."

Some of the best examples include Matthew 21:33-41 (where Jesus puts over a millennium of history into a short story), 2 Samuel chapters 11 and 12, where we have in one case transcription, but in the other translation into parable. Compare also Ezekiel 16 with chapter 22, and chapters 23 and 20. Jesus himself could even use an erroneous tradition about death and hell to convey theological truth. See Luke 16.

Are we then to ignore Genesis 1:26, 27 about the creation of our first parents and adopt the theory of natural selection? Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist of Harvard, recently deceased, said that Darwinism was dead. Many other scientists have agreed. But Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium, his substitute for natural selection, has also been punctured. It has not worn well. Ellen White wrote long ago that "God's created works are just as mysterious as God himself." That wise and good woman also told us that the Bible was given for practical purposes and that, like Jesus, it is a combination of the human and the divine. If we take her seriously we will also recognize that her writings are not meant to set forth science, though they may help us to cease unnecessary warring against genuine truth discovered by scientific research.

TIME TO FACE THE FACTS
When Adventist scientists were polled in 1994, more than half rejected the literal reading of Genesis 1. One third denied that the geological strata and its fossils can be explained by Noah's Flood; and almost one in five assented to theistic evolution. See Darwinism comes to America, Ronald Numbers, Harvard University Press, p. 109.

Probably most Adventist scientists versed in geology, can be classified as progressive creationists, believing in God's creative interventions over long eras of time. But it is certain that most well-read Adventists have moved well beyond George McCready Price. When William Jennings Bryant cited Price as a respected scientist at the famous Tenessee Scopes trial, Darrow responded: "You mention Price because he is the only human being in the world so far as you know who signs his name as a geologist who believes like you do. Every scientist in this country knows that he is a mountebank, a pretender, and not a geologist at all."

There are two main barriers, which have led to the church's unpaid debt to science and its own scientists. On the part of leadership, it is the fear of confessing that we have been wrong. The smaller the group, the greater the felt necessity of infallibility. Second, like all other people we are shackled by cognitive dissonance. That is to say, we all carry a sieve to separate from our minds all that we hear or read that doesn't fit with our preconceptions. The human mind typically functions in terms of comfortable grooves of thought. But real truth shocks this tendency. It is a realistic immoveable rock upon which our comfortable theories are often shattered. Much of reality to all of us is a vast unknown.

Consider just one or two items. There is a subatomic particle, the neutrino, which can pass through a lead block many light years thick. Second by second, six hundred billion of these pass through every centimeter of every human body, and we remain completely unaware. Consider also that were all the spaces taken out of us, the solid matter remaining for every human being would be the size of a pin head. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in our philosophy, and, thus, true humility becomes us rather than the arrogance characteristic of fundamentalism.

Remember the words of Oliver Cromwell. "I beseech you, by the heart of Christ, consider that you may be mistaken." Should anyone stand on their head for long enough, they will surely conclude that everybody else in the world is upside down. It is important that we see that the human mind is like a parachute, it only functions properly if it is open. Though a bright light be shone in a blind man_s eye he will see nothing. Wise men change their minds sometimes, but fools never. To say that one has changed one's mind is to say that one is wiser today than yesterday.

The Bible gives certain conditions for the ascertainment of truth. Pontius Pilate once asked: "What is truth?" and Truth was standing before him quite unnoticed. Similarly, it is possible to read the Bible over and over, and yet not find its truth. Jesus said: "He who is willing to do his will, he shall know." (John 7:17). He also told us: "The pure in heart shall see." Those who are in love with Christ may see through a glass darkly, but they do see.

Dr. Desmond Ford