Engaging Tim Keller on Theistic Evolution: Part I

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. To finish, hopefully this week, our study that we begin in 2022, Engaging with Keller. It's a book that was published in 2013 by a number of Presbyterian theologians and pastors.

The subtitle is Thinking Through the Theology of an Influential Evangelical. And for those who have been with me on this journey, this side project, if you will, I think it's been very enlightening. It's been very educational.

It's been very helpful for those of you who are going to churches where Keller's very appreciated and perhaps his material is used and you haven't known what to say. You know, there's something wrong.

There's something that doesn't sit well with you, but now you have some words to put with that and some citations. And for those who are patrons, of course, you have access to the PowerPoint. And at this point, I think we're up to what?

Almost 70 slides.

Let's see.

Yeah, 72 slides and more coming because we still have one more chapter, but we've already gone through last year, Keller's doctrine of sin, his understanding of hell and the Trinity and the church's mission, his hermeneutic.

Keller's Strategy for Making Christianity Compelling in a Secular City

And now we're gonna talk about theistic evolution. And of course, this is adding to material I've already put out there on Tim Keller. I did a very extensive deep dive into Keller's political beliefs and his social justice ideas.

And I think you could make the argument that's one of the big keys to understanding him. But I think you could even take a step back and say, you know, there's something maybe more basic. And that's what I've been realizing as I've been going over this book, engaging with Keller, that it's not just that Keller is a social justice warrior or that he's a new left guy from the 60s who never really changed his political beliefs and is jamming Christianity into that.

It's not that as much as perhaps it is this. Tim Keller is very shrewd. And he looks at the world that he inhabits. He lives in New York City. And he sees opposition to Christianity. He sees a lot of opposition to Christianity.

He sees atheism. He sees all kinds of Eastern religions and maybe even Islam. I mean, New York City has not just a rabid secularism, but it has objections coming at you from just about every angle. And Tim Keller sees this.

Most probably, especially he sees the secularism, but he's, in some ways, some people would consider him an apologist. He's looking at this situation he finds himself in and he thinks, you know, things are becoming more and more secularized, more and more anti-Christian.

Doesn't seem to be changing. I think the best thing to do for Christians right now who are thought leaders, pastors, leaders, intellectuals is to try to forge a path forward that will be compelling. I think that's his big, the word that he uses probably more than winsome.

The Gospel Coalition used winsome for years. I'm wondering if they're gonna do that anymore now that it's been so made fun of. But I think the word that Tim Keller uses more often is compelling. He wants to try to make Christianity compelling to people who are on the political left, generally, and anti-Christian.

Whether that's a secularism with a new age veneer or it's Islam with some kind of, I don't know, anti-Christian Judaism with some kind of anti-Christian bent. And Keller's in an environment where Christianity is very stereotyped.

It's a cartoon to a lot of the people that live in the world that he lives in. They don't think past what the New York Times, perhaps, says about Christianity, and Keller's very aware of this. And so I think that colors a lot of the views that he has.

He wants to take attributes of God that aren't palatable, that aren't compelling in his mind, and he wants to downplay those. He wants to take attributes of God that are compelling, and he wants to try to emphasize those.

We saw that with his doctrine of sin and hell and the Trinity and how he changes these doctrines for an audience that would be very turned off by the traditional and standard ways of explaining these doctrines and really just the basic biblical teaching on them.

And Keller wants to show that not just Christianity, but the church itself has a significant social net positive factor or use, that it's not some archaic institution that has no bearing on today's society, but actually it's very relevant for the lives that people in New York City, in particular, are living.

And so the church becomes an engine, not just for evangelism, for making disciples, it becomes a social justice instrument. And by doing that, by framing it that way, the church gains credibility in the eyes of people who already think that social justice is one of the most important things.

We've talked about all this, I'm just reviewing. Of course, in order to do all this, you have to have a hermeneutic that's not the grammatical historical hermeneutic. You need to have something that will allow you to approach scripture in such a way that you can, I'm just gonna say manipulate, because I don't know what other word to use here, but change some of these core doctrines, tweak them a little bit, rearrange some things, emphasize certain things that maybe aren't emphasized in scripture, ignore some things, downplay them that are emphasized in scripture, but aren't very compelling.

And so we went over Tim Keller's hermeneutic and his inconsistent hermeneutic, really. And now we're coming to the point of talking about evolution. Now, I wanna talk about this from my own perspective just a little bit before we get into Keller's view on this, just so people know a little bit of where I'm coming from.

On this particular topic of creation and evolution, I grew up in a house that was very anti-Darwinian evolution. My dad would even make comments when we were at museums. I was looking at maybe a display case and he would share the biblical view right in front of other people that contradicted what we were seeing.

And so it was important. Both my parents had science backgrounds and that was a big thing for them. And so I was pretty grounded in, I would say a young earth creationist view from when I was pretty young.

I did have some Christian friends who did believe otherwise, whether it was old earth creationism or it was theistic evolution. And I had some family members in that category as well. And I think the saving grace in my mind was I would console myself with the idea that they were just ignorant and hadn't really thought through things enough because they would take Genesis 1 as figurative.

It wasn't literal. We shouldn't take it literally. It's not a historical narrative. But then when it comes to the gospels or the Exodus narrative, of course, the rules changed. So I thought, well, they're just being inconsistent and they're still Christians and everything.

They're not heretics, but they just haven't thought through things, right? Well, when I got to seminary, that whole paradigm that I had relied on for years was challenged by professors who really had thought through things.

At least they should have. And there were multiple professors that disagreed, not just with young earth creationism, but they held to forms of theistic evolution. Darwinian evolution merged with the creation account.

And I remember being in class once and I had a professor who was open to theistic evolution and I think held at the very least to old earth creationism. And there was only one other student who I remember was willing to stand with me against what the professor was saying in a nice way.

But I was surprised in a class of maybe, I don't know, 30 students or so, there was only one other student who was willing to say something. It was just interesting to me. I was a little surprised. These are people who are studying to be missionaries and pastors.

And I remember another professor, I went to a Bible study at his house, basically ripping into Ken Ham and ripping into young earth creationism as just not true. And I was sitting there and I thought, wow, I wonder if it occurred to this professor that there might be people, yours truly, who would agree with young earth creationism.

And the intellectual disdain that I saw, which it took me back because I was used to that at secular university. I remember, especially in biology class, there were a few Christians who attended who were also creationists.

And we challenged the biology professor. I mean, it became one of those fault lines, probably one of the most definitive fault lines that I noticed in college between Christians and non-Christians was this belief in creation.

And when I saw in the higher levels of Christian academia, the same disdain, condescension, pride that I was used to seeing. In fact, I didn't even see it quite as bad, perhaps, in university. My professors who are ardent evolutionists weren't quite as arrogant as some of the theological professors that I ran into who were pro-evolution or old earth creationism.

So anyway, this kind of threw me back and I had to start thinking through, what do I really believe about this? Do I think that people who have really thought through this and have come to the conclusion that God used the biological process of evolution of natural selection to bring about the human race, do I really think that those people are Orthodox believers and this is a secondary issue or is this a primary issue?

And I've come to the conclusion, this is just for everyone's benefit. So you know where I'm coming from before I get into this situation with Tim Keller, because I'm really making this video primarily for people who already see things the way that I see them, or at least in general.

I'm not making a video here to reinvent the wheel and to give you a lot of good information on creationism because it would take way too long. It would be a series, right? And so I'm kind of, I wanna give you the assumption that I'm bringing to the table already.

And that is that I think there's significant problems on a whole host of levels, but most notably theologically, I think there's a significant problem when you adopt a belief that has death before sin, the curse before the reason for the curse.

And there's all kinds of other areas that this touches. This touches, I mean, Moses believed in a literal six day creation. I mean, this is what the whole concept of the seventh day resting and the Sabbath is based upon.

You have Jesus who seemed to treat the Genesis narrative as a literal historical event. If you deny that the Genesis narrative is a literal historical event, you start running into problems in your theology in these other places.

You can, I think, make mincemeat out of other passages because you've already set a precedent in Genesis. And so it affects the whole way you view scripture. And so my goal in reading scripture, including Genesis, is to try to, to the best of my ability, exercise a grammatical historical hermeneutic to understand what the author meant, understand in context what is being communicated, and not to try to take modern ideas and popular sentiments and cram them into the text or eisegetically read things that would be convenient for Christians in the academy or in other places hostile to Orthodox Christianity into the Bible so that I can somehow save Christianity or make Christianity look good or palatable to people who believe otherwise.

So I'm okay with Christianity or the biblical account offending people. That's not a problem for me. I don't feel embarrassed by it. I feel, in fact, in some ways embarrassed that there's a lot of educated people out there who think that we all evolve through this process that is without basis, that is so far-fetched, that is really very fantastical.

And yet some of these same people will claim to deny miracles because for the same reasons they'll say. It's too fantastical. It's just far-fetched and they can't conceive of it. So I think that believing we came from a rock 4 .6 billion years ago and we came from this primordial soup and we have never really observed this.

We've observed speciation and microevolution, but we've never observed this kind of, I'm gonna use the biblical term of kinds, one kind becoming another kind. We've never seen this, but yet there's a whole lot of faith in that, that that explains who we are today.

And of course this has other implications, a social and moral implications. And so I feel sorry for people who believe that. It's not a lot of stability. It's honestly kind of a dismal outlook in life.

And I just don't see any basis for it being true. So now that you know where I'm coming from, and I don't think it's biblical either, in case I didn't say that. Now you can either turn off this podcast or if you're in agreement with me, if you see things this way, we can now examine what Tim Keller believes about this particular subject.

Because you're gonna find his belief is very different than what I just described my belief as being. And I want to start off, I debated whether I should start off with the contents of this book, because it's a short chapter, but I wanna give you the author's critique.

That's what I've been doing all along. Or if I should just start with about a 10 minute video that I prepared of some clips from Keller talks, and we should go over it. And I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start off with the Keller video.

Normally I end with the Keller video, but I'm gonna start with the Keller video. We're gonna watch it together. And I'm gonna give you some thoughts as we go through. And then I'm gonna take you through a presentation on what the author in engaging with Keller has to say about Keller's view of theistic evolution.

So let's start here. This is a talk from Tim Keller. It was posted on YouTube on November 11th, 2019, but I'm pretty sure this is an older talk. And I don't know when it was from. It's just the quality of the microphone sounds to me like it was probably in the early 2000s or maybe before 2010.

I'm just not sure. But this is a leader talk, according to the YouTube video that Tim Keller gave on evolution and science. And I wanna listen to some of this.

Keller's Appeal to New Yorkers Against Modern Creation Science

Every person in New York is under the impression that anybody who has a high view of the Bible thinks the Bible is the word of God and that sort of thing has to hold to modern creation science, MCS. And this belief is regularly conveyed in the media.

First of all, the New York Times gives you the impression all the time, if you're born again Christian, you believe in creation science. And the proponents of creation science give you the very, very same impression.

And they do this all the time. So when the New York Times and a whole lot of Christians are working together, it's gonna be effective because it's not many of the things that they are in agreement on.

And that is a lot of Christians say, if you really hold a high view of the Bible, you also have to believe in modern creation science. I'm just here to tell you in about three or four minutes, that's just not true and I'm proof because I don't believe it.

And all you have to know is that not all Christians believe it in order to just go move back onto more central issues in the gospel.

Now, I wanna just point out that two things. First, Keller is starting this off with, and this is probably just the subject of his talk. So it's about communicating Christian truths to an audience that's honestly hostile.

It's New Yorkers and that's what he says. And he's framing things for that particular audience, hostile New Yorkers or secular New Yorkers, people who would not be inclined to readily accept the claims of Christianity.

And so this is, Keller's view is very tailor-made for those kinds of people. He's forming his view with them on the mind. And I think that that's a dangerous place to start any theological discussion.

This is where you have to be careful if you're into apologetics and your goal is to just really come up with super great answers that are, sound good and can be used effectively. Because if you, instead of starting with the question, what is true?

What does the Bible teach? What does Christianity teach? If you start off with what is the main objection that others have and how can I rearrange this teaching or communicate this teaching or tweak this teaching to make it acceptable to them or less offensive to them, then you can get in very dangerous waters very quickly.

So the question Tim Keller wants to start off with here, the second thing I wanna point out is whether or not you can be a Christian and believe in this, in theistic evolution. Or really the way he puts it is in a more of a negative.

Can you deny young earth creationism or creation science? I think is what he says. And can you be a Christian? And so here's the obvious answer, I think, that even a young earth creationist is gonna tell you, yes.

I mean, you can be a Christian and you can lack a belief in young earth creationism. In fact, it might be something that you haven't thought of yet or creation science, we'll say. In fact, there's probably a lot of other fundamental doctrines that you might lack any view on and any developed view and still be a Christian.

Is the new Christian who's just been saved, who's just heard the gospel for the first time and repents and puts their faith in Jesus Christ and God does a work in their life and they have the Holy Spirit, but they've never really thought through, let's say the Trinity.

They haven't really learned about who God is in God's fullness. They just know that they're saved, that Jesus saved them and that Jesus is the perfect sacrifice and they know that he's God perhaps, but they haven't really thought through the Holy Spirit and God the Father and the connection between these three persons.

Are they Christians? Well, we would say, yes, of course they're Christians. They just haven't gotten there yet. They are gonna be discipled or they're gonna read the Bible. They're gonna learn about that stuff.

Would it be appropriate for me then, let's say we lived in a world where that was the real sticking point. It's not in our society as much, but let's say it is. Would it be appropriate for me to say, well, it's just not true when someone tells you that you need to believe in the Trinity in order to be a Christian?

Though that'd be very misleading. I mean, technically I could say, well, yeah, of course, I guess you can lack a belief in the Trinity and still be a Christian as possible. I can think of a young Christian who might just not have thought through those things, but to phrase it in such a way that seems to suggest that one can continue and in fact, Tim Keller himself being a pastoral figure here, you can continue for years and educate yourself on this particular topic of the Trinity and then deny it.

Well, that's a little bit different, right? And so I think that Keller, the way he's framing this is to his advantage very much so with an audience of hostile New York City people, because it makes it seem, really what it does is it takes that objection, I think, out of their hands.

It says, look, if you object to creation science, hey, that's not really an issue. You can deny or object to it and still be a Christian. So don't worry about that. And you can move on to other supposedly more important things.

I would say that actually this is a focal point. This is, I'm not saying you have to make every witnessing encounter this, but if it comes up, that's not a bad place to have your encounter. Now, if you wanna try to get to Christ and what Christ has done, but if you have someone who has such a fundamental objection that they don't even believe, let's say that God created this world, or they just, they have such a hang up over the veracity of scripture because of its teaching on creation, then that might be the place you need to actually have the discussion.

I think that's a smarter way to go about this apologetically. If you have a Muslim, let's say, who denies the Trinity, that might be the place you need to have your discussion instead of trying to just put that on the shelf and say, well, listen, you can be a Christian and not hold to a Trinitarian belief or to be ignorant of a Trinitarian belief and just see past that and let's talk about Jesus right now or something like that.

That could be incredibly unhelpful because you're not addressing what's going to be a nagging problem for them. It's gonna be a fundamental issue. And it could be the very thing that God uses, actually, to bring them to a knowledge of himself and to gain confidence in the word of God.

And so I think what Keller's doing and what he's proposing is a strategy for getting around this objection. And what I'm suggesting is that, actually, this objection is where perhaps you need to focus if it's coming up and if it's such a barrier.

See, so take a look. Here's how the Defeater works. They think, look at this little paragraph. People think all Christians believe in MCS, but we know that modern Christian science is absurd. Therefore, three, classic Christianity can't be true.

And that's, a lot of people in New York are walking around like that. The tragedy here is it's unnecessary. We've seen that macroevolution, the big issue, everything has evolved. Everything's evolved from the simplest forms.

It's all an accident. That, of course, is a paradigm that you can't believe and be a Christian. But, just look up here, I won't read this part. It doesn't mean that you couldn't be a Christian and believe in microevolution.

There are people who believe, for example, that God started evolution and brought most things into effect through evolution, that he directed it. That's kind of where the official Roman Catholic Church teaching is.

Secondly, there's a lot of people who believe in what you might call special creation or progressive creation, that there were a series of creative acts by God over time. Now, turn over to page nine. If you wanna know, what I'm telling you at the bottom of page eight and nine, again, just look up here.

I just wanna say, it is confusing in this particular talk. Keller defines macroevolution as more of a worldview, a way of looking at all of, I'm paralleling it with some of the writings that he's made.

But it's a way of looking at the entirety of life through this evolutionary paradigm. And I think that's what he means by macroevolution in that everything is explained through this naturalistic process.

Microevolution, he seems to suggest, you could have, it is biological evolution where you can have one kind turning into another kind over the process of time and natural selection. Which generally, in my mind, that's what macroevolution is.

So he's using terms in ways that are different than the way I think most of us are probably used to hearing these terms. Generally, macroevolution or speciation is the differences that we can see in, let's say, different dog breeds or the finches in the Galapagos Islands that Darwin saw, they had different size beaks, but they're still all finches.

That's generally what macroevolution is defined as, or my understanding, at least, that I've heard my whole life from people on both sides of this. Keller's confusing here, but I just want you to know, I think what he's saying, because he's said this in other places as well, is that you can hold to a Darwinian belief, you just can't hold to it so tightly that it becomes a worldview for you and that everything is explained through it.

Darwin first showed up and posited the theory of evolution. The fact is, the average conservative Christian was ambivalent and open to it. Like R .A. Tauri, who was the editor of The Fundamentals. Now, you know what The Fundamentals are?

The Fundamentals were a series of books put out in the early, like 1910 to 1915, and they are the books that gave us the word fundamentalist. They're the books that talked about the virgin birth and the inerrancy of the Bible, and this is what Christians believe.

And the editor of The Fundamentals thought that, he says, you can believe in the infallibility of the Bible and be an evolutionist of a certain kind. B .B. Warfield, who taught at Princeton Seminary and was the great hero and defender of the inerrancy of the scripture, he believed in evolution of a certain kind.

But then there was a few guys, now look at the top, page nine, George McCready Price, who was a Seventh-day Adventist, and a couple other people, began to teach something way back, and very few people believed it.

But then a guy, then John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris put out a book in 1961 called The Genesis Flood, and that began a movement amongst evangelical Christians, and they adopted creation science. And creation science has two basic pillars.

The first is a young earth. They believe that basically the earth happened only a few thousand years ago. And the idea of long, long periods of time is a fiction, it's an illusion. And the second thing they believe in is a worldwide flood.

Now some of you may say, wait a minute, where I came from, all Christians believe this. Look, look at me, I'm a Christian, I don't believe it. And all you have to do is know that.

The issue, as I said before, is that instead of starting off with what is true, what does the Bible teach, how do we communicate it, he's starting off with a different question. How do we get around this objection that worldly people have in New York City to Christianity?

And that's the barrier of denying Darwinian evolution and believing in some kind of a modern creation science. And he's trying to give them ammo by saying, well, you can point to me, you can at least cite me, even if you believe in this creation science stuff, at least you can tell people, well, Tim Keller doesn't.

And so if Tim Keller doesn't, then he's a good Christian, he's a believer, you can still be a believer and maintain your belief against creation science and for Darwinism, and then that's perfectly acceptable.

And so it doesn't actually answer any questions, it's just, it's a man-centered approach. It's just trying to make things palatable, take down barriers or objections that people might have that are legitimate questions that honestly should be answered and smart people should be asking those questions.

I mean, if you have a Bible that is lying to you about the creation account and about a worldwide flood, then why believe what it says about Jesus being a true man who lived on this earth, 100 God, 100 man, died on the cross for your sins, was raised the third day.

Why should you believe any of that either? I mean, it's a valid question, right? So I think Keller's actually giving his people a handicap by trying to get them to approach it this way. But I do wanna say this, when it comes to B .B. Warfield and to R .A. Torrey, I don't really know exactly what Torrey's beliefs were.

There was some kind of an openness there, I suppose, to some sort of older creationism or theistic evolution, I'm not sure exactly, and with Warfield, I'm pretty sure he was more positive about Darwinism.

Those guys aren't the standard. Now, one of the things I do wanna say, I don't know if this is 100 an answer to this objection that why are there theologians from the past who seem solid in other areas who seem to be open to Darwinian evolution.

One of the things that I do think about in regards to this is the fact that these men lived at the turn of the century, that he's citing at least, and it was a time when evolution was very popular, Darwinian evolution.

It was taking over all the biology departments, and if you were a scientist, that was the thing you really needed to believe. It was just extremely popular, and there wasn't a lot of resources out there like there is today.

There's a lot more resources today on this particular subject. There's been more research done. There's been more, I would say, even research into, or development, I should say, would be the better word, into what the Bible teaches on this subject than there was back then.

There's more accessible resources, and so that doesn't excuse someone like a B .B. Warfield, but I think it does at least give you somewhat of an understanding or a little more of a sympathy for people in that position at that time.

I don't agree with them. I don't think they should have gone down that road. I think they should have seen clearly that this was a threat to the biblical text and to a very straightforward understanding of it, but given the times in which they lived, it is a little bit more understandable back then than it is, I think, today with the resources we have, even just available, if you have an internet connection, on this subject.

So they're not the standard, but I figured I'd at least mention that. Let's keep going here and listen to what more Tim Keller has to say here.

Well, I believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. All you gotta do is know that, because when you talk to somebody who says, well, I can't believe that creation science stuff, if you say, well, you have to if you wanna be a Christian,.

I mean, you may not say that,.

But if you even begin to argue at that point, you know, you are saying that. Just, see, I'm trying to be practical and pastoral here. When you argue for creation science, when you argue and say, I can prove evolution is wrong, you are saying to this person, if you want to become a Christian in my church at Redeemer, you're gonna have to buy this whole thing.

Okay, that's where it gets ridiculous in my mind. Tim Keller is, think about the Trinity. I drew that parallel earlier. I said, all right, you could be a Christian and not believe in the Trinity, right?

Or at least you lack a belief because you just haven't read the Bible yet. You haven't developed your view of who God actually is. It hasn't come together, all right? Let's say you went to someone and you started saying, well, look, if you're a Christian, you need to believe the Trinity.

Is that a true statement? Yeah, it's a true Christian belief. It's very fundamental Christian doctrine, actually. And so, yeah, if you're a Christian, you do need to believe the Trinity. Does that mean that you're not a Christian until you believe in the Trinity?

No, but it's just basic Christianity. It's basic Christian teaching. You can't deny the Trinity and still say you're an Orthodox Christian. So, I mean, this presents a challenge. So Tim Keller seems to now make a switch here.

He's saying first that you can, he's implying you can lack a belief in creation science and that's fine, you're still a Christian, but now he's turning it to, and if you try to give someone the impression that they need to believe this, that this is part of Christianity, well, you're to be condemned.

You're in the wrong and you need to stop doing what you're doing. And that's where I would say, no, hold on. If it's true, right? And he's talking to people here by, you can tell that might be mixed on this.

Some people might believe it, some people might not, but he's trying to transcend this disagreement. But for the people who actually believe this and think the Bible teaches this, they don't have that option.

This is a very fundamental understanding. I mean, it's really at the base of the entire Bible. It's the first two pages of your Bible. Three pages of your Bible are gonna be this foundational story about where we came from.

And a worldwide flood even brought that into it. He denies the worldwide flood. I mean, this is getting into the nature of God's judgment itself. I mean, like I said, this touches a lot of other things.

And this is where, I can't prove this 100%, but I get a sense that Keller's fearful when he talks like this. He's, maybe he's embarrassed, I don't know, but he doesn't like it when people representing Christianity go out there, even from his church.

You'll hear later in the talk. And they start giving people the impression that they need to believe in young earth creationism or creation science, or the deny Darwinian evolution completely. He doesn't like that.

He doesn't want, he thinks it's something that people should not be focusing on. And that's his focus, really, that's his message. Don't focus on that. And that's where there's a problem. And he's sidestepping the whole discussion of, is it true?

Is it true? What does the Bible teach?

Fair, it's not right.

I think it'd be a whole lot better to say, you don't have to buy that. You may even say, here's what I believe, but a lot of other Christians believe differently. And that's all you need to know, actually.

And if you wonder about that, what I've done here, at the bottom, see, here's what's interesting. I don't know much about evolution. I don't know much about science.

Don't know?

Anyway, but I do know something about the Bible. I am a professional in the Bible. And I want you to know that Genesis 1 is written in an unbelievably different style than Genesis 2. Genesis 1 is a chant.

There are 50 repetitions. And there was light, and it was good, and the evening and the morning, and the evening and the morning, and the evening and the morning. You get to Genesis 2 and it all stops.

None of the repetition. It is an utterly different style. Utterly different. One is a chant. One is a historical narrative. Second thing is that the order of things in Genesis 1 and the order of things in Genesis 2 is different.

In Genesis 2, it says that God could not put vegetation out there yet because it hadn't rained. So Genesis 2 is assuming that God doesn't have to do it. It's assuming a natural order to things.

Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as Two Different Creation Accounts

Let's stop right there. There's two things Keller just said that I want to point out. One is that Genesis 1 is unbelievably different than Genesis 2. He wants a big barrier there, a big separation between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 on the basis of literary genre instead of on the basis of focus.

The focus of Genesis 1 is different than the focus of Genesis 2. Genesis 1, if you read it, in fact, I can challenge you, if you haven't in a while, maybe stop the video and go read it. It's very straightforward.

It is a description. It is sequential. It is very factual. It tells you details. If there is a poetic element, it's not like the poetry we're used to in Hebrew parallelism in the Psalms. It is giving you what happened.

And I mean, just read it. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

Then God said, let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good. The whole thing is this happened, and here's how it happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And it gives you the days of creation.

Now, if you go to Genesis 2, what's the shift? Is it a literary shift? It's a completely different genre of literature now that has a different rule of interpretation, or is it actually focusing more on one of the days of creation, the sixth day?

And I think a straightforward reading is gonna show you it's just focusing on the sixth day. It's zooming in on what man was doing at that time, what pertains to man, the day that God created man, what happened that day.

And Keller, the second thing is, he wants to try to put a wrench in this gear system of creationists by saying, well, look at the difference between the plants in Genesis 2 and Genesis 1, because in Genesis 2, it says in verse five that no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not yet sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.