Theistic Evolution Examined (Part 1)

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Theistic Evolution Examined (Part 2)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the
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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.
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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her
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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is
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Mike Abendroth, and today is going to be a very interesting show. I'm going to do something
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I haven't done before in No Compromise Radio ministry, and that is introduce you to a message that was preached at Bethlehem Bible Church by someone else, by someone other than me, and that person is
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Rick Phillips. Rick Phillips is a pastor, a Presbyterian pastor, author, speaker, and he was at the church,
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Bethlehem Bible Church, in November, and he preached a series of sermons. He talked about the masculine mandate on Friday night.
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He talked about how we should stand up for substitutionary atonement, penal substitution.
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He talked about men's roles and women's roles, but he specifically talked about theistic evolution and how it's made inroads in evangelicalism and how people are abandoning
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Scripture, basically. They're saying Genesis 1 is poetry. Yes, it's not like any other Semitic kind of poetry, but it's poetry because if anybody is going to believe us, if we're going to get inroads as Christians to higher learning establishments and people, we could never come across as six -day creationists, and so we've got to give that in order to get a broader scale.
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And he specifically addresses Tim Keller and Tim Keller's article on Biologos Forum about how
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Tim is ascribing to theistic evolution and how Genesis 1 is a certain kind of poetic genre, and we should not take it as a literal six days.
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And so today we're going to hear Rick Phillips, Bethlehem Bible Church, speaking about theistic evolution on No Compromise Radio, and we will do that today, and then we'll do part two probably next week, same time, same day.
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Rick Phillips, theistic evolution, and should we follow Tim Keller in giving up such a large portion of Scripture?
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Well, I've been asked to speak on another topic that is surprising to me, that this is a topic
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I've had to study up on and speak on. This is my first time speaking on this.
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No, it's my second time speaking on this subject, but I think I'm going to be speaking on it a lot more.
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And this is the embrace of theistic evolution by evangelical and Reform theologians, and my text for this message is going to be, again, 2
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Corinthians 4 .2, because that's what we're doing today. We're seeing why we need to take to heart
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Paul's word. These are just instances of it. We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways.
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We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God.
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What I more than anything else want to do is I want to critique these presentations of evangelical evolution in light of that teaching of God's word.
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So let's pray together. Father, help us now to do some harder work, and let us do it in a spirit of joy and love, even though there's some alarming things to it, and I'm going to be critical,
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Lord. But we think about how Jesus had to do the same thing, and we will have to do that. Paul warned us against it.
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Some of our own brothers who we love are involved in these things. Help us to warn ourselves and to warn others not to tamper with the word of God on so important issues like this.
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We pray in Christ's name, amen. The Reformed world was rocked in a minor way a few months ago when eminent
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Old Testament theologian Bruce Waltke was fired from Reformed Theological Seminary.
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Many would consider him the finest technical Old Testament scholar in the
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Reformed world. I sat under some of his lectures at Westminster Seminary, and this guy is brilliant with an incredible knowledge of Hebrew and of the
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Old Testament, but Dr. Waltke went on a website called biologos .org.
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The Biologos Foundation is a well -funded movement to promote theistic evolution among Bible -believing evangelicals, and he put up a video that said the scientific evidence for evolution is so overwhelming and so incontestable that for Christians to continue to deny evolution will be the death of our movement and will render us to be an irrelevant cult not worthy of consideration in our culture.
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That's how I felt. Say what? First of all, I actually wrote a couple of pieces on Reformation 21 about that, and I was criticized for, who are you to criticize so eminent an
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Old Testament theologian? My response was, he's not arguing the Old Testament. He's arguing science, at which he is no more qualified than I am.
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And the gist of his argument is that the science is right and the Bible is wrong. And I applaud the officers of Reformed Theological Seminary who, after many years of fruitful relationship with Dr.
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Waltke, they found it necessary to ask for his resignation. Of course, he was quickly hired by another purportedly
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Reformed Seminary, Knox Theological Seminary, that couldn't wait to snatch up a guy because he's famous like that and has excellence in many ways, even though he denies theistic evolution.
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Now, I am not here to argue with you the science of evolution, although, let me just say,
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I'm not qualified to do so. I'm a preacher of the Word of God, not a scientist. There's others who can do that better. Let me just say, for my sake,
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I am not persuaded of Dr. Waltke's claim that the science of evolution is beyond contesting.
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I actually have come to the other conclusion, but that's not what I'm going to argue. Now, more recently,
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Tim Keller from Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York published a paper that was also on biologos, which
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I hold in my hand, titled Creation, Evolution and Christian Lay People. And many of you, no doubt, are familiar with Tim Keller, his very effective ministry of the gospel in New York City and the growth of the
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Redeemer Network, which has done many good things. But this paper is promoting the acceptability of theistic evolution.
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And it's very interesting. I want to work through his paper and critique it biblically as well as I can. And the first thing is,
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I know to the beginning of the paper, he identifies the problem. And as Keller articulates the problem, it is this that we have in our churches, particularly in a sophisticated church like Redeemer in New York and downtown
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New York. By the way, I have NASA scientists in my church in the South, too. But he says, you know, these people operate in a scientific world where,
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I mean, if you don't believe in evolution, I mean, you really can't play in the scientific world. And so these people are, it's very hard for these people who have to embrace evolution in their secular world to be forced to believe a creationistic view coming out of a literalistic reading, also known as a reading, of Genesis chapter 1.
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And the problem is, how are we constructing the problem? The problem is not how to set forth the truth boldly in all its clarity, but that we've got a tension.
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And the way to resolve the tension is we've got to find a way of giving equal space to the scripture and to the claims of science.
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Now, we're already in deep trouble. If that's the purpose of our endeavor, and I don't think I'm misrepresenting, that is the purpose.
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And Keller in this paper works out four issues that he sees as being a barrier to the acceptability of evolution as the explanation for the source of life within a theistic framework, also known as theistic evolution.
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You know, theistic evolution says we believe there's a God, but we believe that God chose to use the biological processes of macroevolution in order to create the species and ultimately to create man.
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That is, thank you for that puzzled look on your face, because it's internally, evolution is a theory of replacing
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God. But the theistic evolution says that, well, no, there is a God and he created everything, but the way he created it is through evolution.
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Now, here are the four issues as Keller lays out, and he's writing in favor of theistic evolution.
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And I want to just kind of present his argument, then go back over it. First, he says, to believe in creation requires us to have a non -literal reading of Genesis 1, to believe in evolution.
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Now, that's a true statement, that a literal reading of God created the world and all there is in six days and all very good is not evolution.
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And so if we're going to allow evolution, then we have to be willing to say, well,
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Genesis 1 should not be taken as being an accurate unfolding of the history as it happened.
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And here's his argument. He argues that Genesis 1 is not historical narrative, but it is poetry.
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Now, very interestingly, he admits that it does not have the structure normally associated with poetry.
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Hebrew poetry is not a random thing. It has a literary structure to it. The two primary things are repetition parallelism.
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Hebrew poetry will usually state something and then restate it in a different way.
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A stair -stepping parallelism often is a chiasm where it works inwards and works outwards.
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And he admits that that's how normally you have Hebrew poetry, and that's not what you see in Genesis 1.
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But Genesis 1 nonetheless should be considered not a literal historical account, but poetry because of the rhythms in it.
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Because it says, and there was morning and evening, and day one and day two, and it was all very good.
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You see this repetition, and then that is poetry, even though he admits that's not how Hebrew poetry works.
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I'm just presenting the argument. And he says, really, what we ought to take it as, the term he uses is exalted prose.
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And he says, what Genesis 1 is really like, it's like the song of Deborah in Judges, or the song of Miriam in Exodus 15.
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Open your Bibles to Exodus 15, just to give you an example of what he's talking about. You know, this is a song of Moses, and I will sing to the
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Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously. The horse and the rider, he's thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song.
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He has become my salvation. This is my God. I will praise him. My Father is God, and I will exalt him. And he says, now, that's the kind of literature that Genesis 1 is.
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Now, you may already have noticed that's not how Genesis 1 actually reads, but that's the argument, that it may not, it's not poetry per se, but it's a poetic expression of the theme and not an unfolding of the sequence of events.
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And he will argue, based upon that, that we need to come to grips, and his thing is we're not replacing the
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Bible. We're reading the Bible as it should be read, with sensitivity to genre and forms of literature.
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And he actually says in his paper, in fact, an honest reading of the Bible as it is, does not allow a literal reading of it.
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It is wrong to take it literally. It is exalted prose in a way that is not unfolding.
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In fact, he argues that Genesis 1 is essentially agnostic. Basically, Genesis 1 does not address the issue of how the creation took place.
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Therefore, that being the case, it is not in conflict with scientific theories towards it because Genesis 1 is about theology.
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It's about God being the creator. It's an apologetic track, and this is all true, by the way. It's a theology of the land and the sea that's worked out, and that's all in covenantally.
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That's all true, but he makes the claim that, let's just say, is not the traditional Christian claim, that Genesis 1 really is not telling us how things were made.
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One of the big arguments he will make, and others will too, is that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 treat time differently. And he makes a big deal of, you know, look at the opening words of Genesis 2, starting in verse 5, really.
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When no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the face of the whole ground.
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Now, he'll point out that, you know, that depicts a normal biological process of growth.
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There was no bush because there was no plant, because there had not been rain, and no one had planted it.
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And they'll argue, now see, that's showing a normal biological process, not creation by fiat.
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And so, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 present two different theories of creation, therefore the
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Bible is not... In fact, if we're going to take either of them literally, we take Genesis, this is actually the argument he makes, we should take
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Genesis 2 as the literal account, and that should cause us to say that Genesis 1 should not be read literally, it's a poetic, exalted prose, kind of celebrating
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God as Creator, but not telling us how it goes. And therefore, the educated and sophisticated exegete knows that theistic evolution is not in conflict with the
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Bible, because Genesis 1 is not a creation account answering questions about creation.
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I'm going to come back to that. On the other hand, he says, one of the problems is people associate, and I think there's some truth to this, of course.
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People associate evolution with the grand theory of everything. In the secular world, this is what we're used to seeing, you're
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Stephen Jay Goulds and you're Richard Dawkins and these people, for them evolution is the theory of everything.
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And they explain everything with evolution, the grand theory of evolution. And of course, the grand theory of evolution is there's no
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God, it's all about there being no God, life is meaningless, there is no morality, random events, chance and all that.
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And what Keller argues is, well, okay, we don't buy that. And one can believe in, what does he call it?
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He calls it evolutionary biological processes, EVP. You can believe in that evolution does describe the biological processes of life without making that the grand theory of everything.
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Do you follow that? And he says, what we need to do is we need to avoid that, and so when we teach evolution, we should not make it the grand theory of everything, because that's really against Christianity.
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But the idea that evolutionary processes is how God made things, that in itself is a valid biblical approach.
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That's the argument. Now thirdly, Keller points out the argument that you would think would come up is, isn't it true that if we believe in evolution, that that is incompatible with the
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Bible's teaching of salvation and of the fall? And Keller argues, yes, that is true.
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And he basically argues, very interesting in his paper, that we cannot hold a view of theistic evolution that removes a literal historical
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Adam and Eve. Why? Because the New Testament plainly believes in a literal historical
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Adam and Eve. Romans 5 is a particular problem. There's no question that Paul teaches a historical
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Adam and Eve, who is the first covenant head, and Jesus is the second covenant, the second man, the new
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Adam, and so, and the historical fall. I mean, you would think that if evolution is true, then there was not an original couple.
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This is what the evolutionaries say. And therefore, there wasn't an Adam. There was not a fall.
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Well, the problem is, the fall in Genesis 3 is the problem about which Christianity is the answer, and it seems that you'd lose the whole religion.
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And Keller rightly says that that's not the case. Now, he makes the point that let's not make that an ultimate issue, and he points out that C .S.
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Lewis did not believe in historical Adam and Eve. Look, C .S. Lewis is great, but he's not our theologian.
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I mean, so let's not make it an ultimate issue. Well, I thought we just said it was an ultimate issue, but anyway.
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And Keller argues that the trustworthiness of Scripture requires a historical
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Adam and Eve. We will agree with that. That if there's no Adam and Eve, then the Bible is wrong like a lot, and not just in Genesis 1, and not just on the periphery of our faith, but at the center of faith.
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We agree with him. Secondly, he notes a thing that I think is very important, and I'll come back to.
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Christianity is a historical religion. Unlike Buddhism, which is just ideas,
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I mean, who Buddha was and what Buddha did is irrelevant to Buddhism.
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It's just ideas floating in one's mind, but Christianity is a historical religion.
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We believe things are true because they happened, and we believe that there is a resurrection because Jesus was raised from the dead.
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And as Paul said, if Jesus didn't actually write, if the historical fact is not true, then we are the most despised of all men.
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And so if we're going to drive a wedge between the history declared by the
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Bible and the theology related to that history, we lose the Christian faith. Now, that's one of the biggest points
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I want to make, and Keller actually points out that that is true. So, how then do you have evolution and an
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Adam and Eve? Well, you'd have to read it for yourself. What follows is a convoluted argument of remarkable special pleading trying to make the
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Bible's account of creation, of Adam and Eve, actually work out to evolution. In short, it works out this way.
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Genesis 2 .7, it is argued, we talked about this last night, Then the Lord God formed the man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living creature.
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It says, now we assume, as I preached last night, that that's a special act of God, that God made
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Adam on day six. And God did what that said.
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They go, no, no, this is poetry, remember that. Although I thought Genesis 1 was poetry, but we're in Genesis 2 now. But, that's describing in poetic form the evolutionary processes that brought us to Adam and Eve.
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And they say, you know, we don't really know, but hypothetically, maybe there were, you know, starting with a snail and working our way up over millions and billions of years.
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And then you get closer to Adam, you got the Geico caveman guy, and he's not really man, he's getting close.
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And only when you get to Adam do you have man, and then God specially breathes the image of God.
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So when Adam and Eve, and then Eve, by the way, Eve is taken out of the,
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I mean, the Bible insists a historical account of an event that happened that God took the rib out of the man and fashioned it into the woman.
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This is not evolution. And they actually admit that, and we really can't get around that, but God, but there were women anyway.
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And by the way, that's why there's all these, you know, when you get to Genesis 5, there's all these nations. Where'd they come from?
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Well, it's like cavemen. So we're not all necessarily descended from Adam and Eve, because there's this whole evolutionary process.
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But God just kind of decided that this couple would be the first, and an argument sometimes is made that, well, they were the first spiritual couple into whom
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God breathed their spirit. And even though they weren't the only sort of humans around at the time,
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God by divine fiat made him the covenant head. And when Adam fell in sin, then the whole sort of race fell with him.
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It's not working well, I know. What's going on here? A desperate attempt to cunningly work the text of scripture so that it fits the secular theory, the point of which is to deny
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God. Remember 2 Corinthians 4 -2? I don't think we can turn to 2 Corinthians 4 -2 and go, hey, we refuse to manipulate the text of the word of God, but we set forth the word of truth openly to the consciences of men.
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Notice the special pleading, the brilliant creativity, actually that's an argument proposed by the scholar
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Derek Kidner. And Keller said maybe that's not right, but there's ways in which from the text of Genesis 1 and 2, we can make evolution fit with a historical
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Adam and Eve. That's his ultimate answer. So Keller's going to say, yes, it's true that if evolution threatens
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Adam and Eve, we've got massive problems, that doesn't work, Christianity's overthrown then, but we can work it out.
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We haven't figured out how, here's some approaches to it, and that's what we're going to say.
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Fourthly, it is argued against evolution that evolution involves a process in which death is creative and good.
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I mean, how does evolution die? The survival of the fittest, and so the race, the species moves forward because inferior models die, and so under evolution,
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God looks down, under theistic evolution, God looks down and says everything is good, and one of the things
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God says is good is death, right? Evolution works by means of the creative power of death, so if God's doing evolution in Genesis 1 and 2, and if God says in Genesis 1 and 2, this is very good,
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God is calling death very good. What's the problem? That ain't what the New Testament teaches. Death is the enemy. The last enemy to be defeated is death, and death in the new
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Genesis 3 says is the result upon not just the race, but the cosmos as the penalty of sin.
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Death is not part of God's creation. I always preach when Jesus at Lazarus' tomb,
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Jesus wept, what's he weeping about? Why is he angry? The word means an angry passion, because death is an intrusion upon the cosmos that he made good.
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Well, theistic evolution says, no, no, death is good. Forrest Gump, what did Forrest Gump's mother say?
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Dying is just a part of living. Christians don't believe that dying is just a part of living.
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Christians believe that death is an offense, an enemy that enters into living in a way that is the work of sin and Satan against God.
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Now what Keller says, he admits that, and he goes, well, but want me to say that the fall is just spiritual death?
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So Adam and Eve suffer a spiritual death, and that's the way that sin relates to death.
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So that's the art. I'm giving you an example of a reformed evangelical pastor scholar of strong repute saying we can make evolution work out so our scientists aren't leaving our churches because they're persuaded that evolution is right, and therefore the
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Bible must be wrong. No, the Bible, evolution, we can make them equal sources, they can coexist. We will argue that Genesis 1 is not a literal creation account.
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We're not talking about a grand theory of everything, just evolutionary biological processes, that works.
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We can fit in a historical fall in Adam and Eve, and we can work out death so it's not that big a deal.
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That's the argument. Let me now attempt to critique it. Again, the problem is the way the problem is being conceived.
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We must not approach the Word of God seeking ways to accommodate the culture around us.
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You know, Nine Marks Ministries, Mark Dever likes to say that we are not to be shaped by the culture, but the church is to be shaping the culture.
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And what we see is the culture shaping the church, and the church out of fear of the big bad world.
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We're going to be mocked. We're going to be called idiots. Right. Get over it. Aren't you Christians? Don't you know?
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Didn't you know that? That you're not going to be able to be accepted as a sophisticate? That they're not going to give you a seat of honor at Harvard and let you sip from the memorial tea glass?
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Didn't you know when you came to Christ that that was going to happen? Because it's the truth. And we need it.
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The great tragedy of our day is that the evangelical leaders are going to curry the favor of the pagan world that increasingly hates the
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Lord Jesus Christ. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.
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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.
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You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.
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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.