Author/pastor Tim Keller may be (and is) wrong about how Christians can accept evolution yet preserve the Gospel’s integrity. But there are equally wrong ways to address concerns about this compromise — methods of criticism that flaunt Scripture’s admonition to consider someone a false teacher only if he disregards the truths of the Gospel, just as much as Keller disregards Genesis.

More of the same dismissal of Scripture for the sake of Fixing a Problem won’t help.

Yes, even if it’s a real problem, as Biblical-creation-rejection is.

In Keller’s case, his viewpoint — which I would argue is based on simple ignorance of the issues — minimizes the truth of Genesis.

But in certain critics’ cases, their pushbacks against Keller minimize the truth of Scripture’s admonition to oppose false teachers only if they get the actual truth of the Gospel wrong. Missing or being confused about vital supporting doctrines, such as creation — as important as that is — is not the same as rejecting the Gospel itself.

This issue is flaring up further after Ken Ham, famous (or infamous) Answers in Genesis founder and creation-apologetics wonk, firmly yet carefully considered Keller’s recent restatement about his origins beliefs.

Tim Keller ( Senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan) again endorses evolution:  “Belief in evolution can be compatible with a belief in a historical fall and a literal Adam and Eve.”

You can read the entire sad article at:  http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2011/06/06/sinned-in-a-literal-adam-raised-in-a-literal-christ/

And one can read Ham’s note, on Facebook, here. He goes on to list what a Christian evolution-acceptor must believe, then concludes:

It is so hard to understand why so many men of God who preach so solidly on God’s Word–as soon as it comes to Genesis in this era, they (like Tim Keller) are willing to give up their stand on the authority of Scripture and adopt a different hermeneutic for the sake of accommodating man’s fallible ideas (man’s religion) of millions of years and evolution.

Again, I emphasize–this is not a salvation issue but an authority issue.  Though in a sense it is a ‘salvation’ issue for the coming generations, as it affects they way they view Scripture, and thus could be a great detriment to them acknowledging their need of salvation as many are put on a slippery slide of doubt leading to unbelief in regards to the Word of God

We need to pray for people like Tim Keller, that the Lord will open his eyes to this glaring inconsistency in his compromise on God’s Word in Genesis.

(Boldface emphases added.)

In response, I expressed my appreciation for Ham’s commitment to Scripture, both in Genesis, and in how to correct a Christian brother when he’s wrong about an issue.

Ken, I appreciate your very gentle tone yet Biblical admonition to Tim Keller, and others, who are solidly Scriptural in every other area and are clearly Gospel-driven, and perhaps being protected by the Spirit from taking their evolution acceptance to its logical conclusion! Perhaps you, like me, have benefited from Keller’s books and ministry. Yet I echo your hope and suggested prayer that he would reconsider his views and practice consistent belief in Scripture’s authority when it comes to origins.

Because of Keller’s “city” emphasis, I wonder if he meets a lot of Christians from rural areas who have been taught to be six-day creationists, but only Just Because, and were not taught to think Biblically and defend their faith with reason. I wonder if that is why he wishes to push back against that — but has only rejected a weaker, illogical form of just-so creation belief. Yes, I know that does exist, but isn’t advocated by AiG at all.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, and perhaps on the broader topic of Christians who do accept Biblical creation (thank God!) but don’t know why, and are therefore vulnerable.

[...]

Keller did give some good reasons for accepting that Adam was a historical person, anyway. That prompted blogger Frank Turk to link to the review over Twitter and comment: “Let’s see if his friends at BioLogos post this at their website.” But still — [Keller is] inconsistent.

Again, I’m quite sure it’s because Keller has encountered former literal-Biblical-creation believers who were taught what to think, but not how to think, which is unfortunately a persistent problem. But he’s overcorrected for it.

Then came the critic, who — though writing somewhat restrained, compared to some cyber-zealots I’ve seen! — exclaimed this:

“Tim Keller is certainly not a man of God. We need to stop treating these men with kid gloves and kick them out of the Church if they do not repent of their sin. I do not care how good they can preach. Any man who denies Genesis is not of God, he is what paul [sic] calls ‘An Apostle of Satan’.”

My response to this critic:

@Malcolm: No, I prefer Ken’s approach. Keller has shown he is solid on the Gospel, and has (so far) not compromised on that to be more consistent with his compromise on Genesis. Belief in Biblical creation is not what saves. AiG has been clear on that. Yet Malcolm, I fear that with your statement you’d give some credence to the common slander that AiG and Biblical creation-believers claim “you must believe our version of creation, along with the Gospel, to be saved.” Don’t add to the Gospel.

Keller and others like him are solid in the faith where it counts. Where they err is in the areas that the Church has forsaken for too long. AiG is opposing real, disgusting compromise where it counts, and knowing when to gently admonish rather than simply yelling at everybody. Let’s discern better how to discern and take into account real ignorance contrasted with overt truth-rejection.

Addendum: Paul didn’t condemn people who messed up on Genesis (as vital as that is) as servants of Satan and heretics. However, he did have strong words against those who equated their own favorite add-ons with the importance of the Gospel.

Genesis is my favorite add-on too. So is belief in a literal, future, physical New Earth. Both are essential for growing in Christ. Yet one can be saved, despite disbelief in both, even if they miss out for a while on the blessings of understanding how God created the world just as He said in Genesis, and how He will restore the world to that paradise. Don’t condemn where God has not condemned. But I also hope that such folks will see their own inconsistencies and thereby be able to grow more in truth.

What do you think?

Some of these myths I’ve never heard about. Have you?

• Thinking that to this day, women have more ribs than men because God took a rib from Adam’s side to make Eve.
• Believing that archaeologists have found the bones of giants (a la Goliath’s race) in Saudi Arabia.

Regardless, Answers in Genesis is on the case, doing more iron-sharpening-iron and not just picking on the obvious Bad Guys (as some apologetics organizations are wont to do). As of this month, their new series Arguments Christians Shouldn’t Use has included quick rebuttals of the men-have-more-ribs and giant-bones-in-desert notions.

Explains Dr. Tommy Mitchell in the series’ introduction:

Why would we advise against using some arguments that appear to support creation? Simply put, some arguments are wrong, even if what they are arguing for is ultimately right. We would do a disservice to our witness for Christ by knowingly using bad argumentation—effectively bearing false witness—even if those arguments are used to support the truth of the Bible.

I happen to know AiG takes some hits for writing columns like this. You’re taking away all our favorite arguments! some people say. Yet as Mitchell later admonishes, ignoring real refutations of a favorite “evidence” or rhetorical point doesn’t help Biblical faith. If an argument is wrong, we must throw it out, and use only Scripture — the foundation of all good reasoning — as our basis.

No matter how attractive a “favorite” argument is—no matter how “perfectly” it seems to explain something in the Bible—if it does not hold up to scrutiny, it should be avoided. Casting aside a flawed model is not the same as casting away Scripture.

Some frequently used arguments are based on inaccurate historical data. Some are based on scientific models that were attractive at one time, but have been found to be unsupportable after further analysis. Some arguments are no more than mere speculation from the outset and should be avoided.

Further reading: Searching for the ‘Magic Bullet’ by Ken Ham, and AiG’s more-detailed inventory of Arguments We Don’t Use. Perhaps this new series will further address two poor arguments:

1. Evolution is just a theory. (“Theory” has a stronger meaning in scientific fields than in general usage; it is better to say that evolution is just a hypothesis or one model to explain the untestable past.)
2. Microevolution is true but not macroevolution. (People usually mean that we see changes within a kind but not between kinds; however, the important distinction is that we observe changes that do not increase the genetic information in an organism.)

The second one, especially, gets around a lot in Biblical-creation circles. But because of its vagueness, and implication that some kind of new-information-producing evolution does occur, Christian should retire it.

So what apologetics arguments would you retire, whether ones commonly used to advocate Biblical creation science or Christianity altogether?

Phil Johnson has just asked people not to debate the Age of the Earth on his Facebook page, after he Tweeted/posted this:

What to do with Dr. Mohler’s Ligonier message? Biologos is fumbling and scrambling: http://bit.ly/95ie0x

This gives me great relief, because I’m very busy today and had to fight the dreaded Debate Draw! But now I have better reasons to ignore and move on, not engaging some of the popular ideas that have recurred there.

That includes this one:

I’ve always held to an old earth idea…after all, Jesus did make aged wine at the wedding feast…so its not beyond God to make things that are aged already.

Yet if one assumes this is true, consider a few points and questions:

1. Why didn’t God reveal the Earth was far older than we’d thought?
If God did create Earth to “look old,” He also inspired His primary revelation in a written Word that gives us the “appearance” of a “younger” Earth. Why include lists of generations (likely without significant gaps¹) that when added together in ways the original authors would have meant, yield ages of thousands of years, not millions/billions?

2. How does “God made with appearance of age” help anyway?

John’s Gospel reveals the wine Jesus made was superior in quality, so we might guess it did seem to be old (John 2: 1-11). However, Jesus made this wine quickly — it was, in fact, young. If the “God made with appearance of age” idea has any merit, it would still prove the “young-earthers’ ” point: that despite whatever things appear to be, the world is not that old and was made in six short days.

3. So what does on “old earth” look like?

Do we have a version of Earth that we know for sure is old, so we can compare it with this Earth? Without historical witnesses, who decides the age? And why should we accept conclusions about history based on the words of scientists who

a) were not there to witness and record it?

b) decide a priori that evidence shall not be interpreted according to views that integrate God or Biblical truth, but instead with Only Naturalism Allowed presupposed rules?

c) make little distinction between present-day operational science and their own constructs of unobservable, nonrepeatable history?

4. What did the Flood do?

If God made the Earth with “appearance of age,” and that age included fossils, the global Flood would have destroyed them all anyway. Some try to get around this by positing a “tranquil flood,” or even less Biblical, a local flood. But again God is left surely guilty of deceiving His readers, for the constant repetition of the flood’s worldwide nature in Genesis 6-9.

5. Will we ever get past the same old “science vs. religion” myths and the even bigger myth of “neutral” scientists?

Some may never understand this, but the argument really isn’t over millions or thousands of years anyway. Rather, does the book of Genesis mean what it says, based on its genre and how its Author, and the human authors He inspired, intended it?

A Christian cannot add the secular-origins-science belief in millions of years into Genesis without also adding death, disease and suffering, for both animals and whatever human-like creatures preceded Adam and Eve. Such addition not only fails to respect Genesis, or actually reconcile the Biblical account and evolution-based origins science, but results in a greater difficulty for the Gospel: in such a view, a “loving” God approves of death, disease and suffering.

There’s less (or no) reason to oppose death, disease and suffering now.

By comparison with historical “fact” of particles-to-people evolution, the doctrines of God being love and creating His world with love sound senseless and pathetic.

The same God created using millions of years of death and suffering, then called it “good,” acted as though Adam’s and Eve’s sin was the problem, not Him, then inspired a book that misleads us.

Conclusion

I’ve written this quickly, and it could sound more callous than my usual style.

Christians can certainly believe in secular-science notions of history, and I know many good Christians who do. Maybe they haven’t thought about it, or maybe they have studied the issues and come away legitimately convinced in mixing evolution-based history constructs with Biblically based history constructs.

But taken to its logical conclusion, adding millions-of-years evolution to Scripture erodes the Gospel’s foundation and cheapens the very reason Jesus needed to die for His people.

Yet it’s a testament to God’s grace that He keeps such people in the faith, loving them and using them mightily for His Kingdom, regardless of such Gospel-eroding beliefs. I suppose either way, He gets the glory.

The BioLogos Forum. It has a very cool name, and I can just see its shiny Starfleet-style insignia on a letterhead or uniform. Its mission: to “promote and celebrate the integration of science and Christian faith.” But according to Phil Johnson yesterday, so far it’s pretty lame.

[A]bout two weeks ago, Darrel Falk (president of The BioLogos Foundation) Fedexed me a copy of a letter he wrote to John MacArthur. It seems the staff at BioLogos had been reading a series of posts about Genesis and the biblical account of creation on the Grace to You blog and they were convinced MacArthur’s critique of uniformitarianism missed the mark.

[…]

Mr. Falk’s letter to John MacArthur informed him that BioLogos was about to do a three-part response on the subject, defending uniformitarianism. So I figured I would wait and read what they have to say.

What a disappointment. It seems to me the whole BioLogos response is merely a drawn-out way of saying “Nuh-uh!” You can read their responses for yourself: here, here, and here.

In the first article, Stephen O. Moshier essentially argues that uniformitarianism itself has never really been uniform. He says the term “as it is used by geologists today [is different from] the 19th century definition.” Supposedly, Dr. MacArthur did his readers a disservice by not chronicling the evolution of uniformitarian definitions.

That’s fine, but utterly beside the point. Don’t the curse and the flood still refute the uniformitarian presupposition? Biblical arguments are missing from Moshier’s article (oddly titled “The Biblical Premise of Uniformitarianism”).

Well, OK, biblical references are not entirely missing. I should mention Moshier’s one lame appeal to the words of the sage in Ecclesiastes 1:9: “That which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.”

As if that disproved the Genesis account and settled the dispute on the side of the skeptics in 2 Peter 3:4.

I’m still wondering: why are some Christians so determined to let evolutionary ideas, based upon only allowing non-God assumptions about history, dictate how we understand the Bible?

This isn’t the same as disagreements over end-times beliefs or baptism. Proponents of those views can find Biblical support for their side, and that is the basis of whatever arguments they use. But in this case, it’s Christians (some of whom just don’t know) accepting inherently anti-God biases and then trying to interpret them as if they were made by objective observers.

And by the way, few people claim a Christian who believes evolution is a heretic. But if you follow the logical conclusions of believing Genesis is only metaphor, you run into so many core-doctrine problems: death before sin, God saying disease was “good,” the flood account being twisted into a “local” flood instead of the clearly described global cataclysm that it was — and ultimately the very reason why Jesus needs to redeem this world.

As I recently wrote to a family member:

Why accept the secular scientists’ “rules of the game” anyway? They’ve already presupposed that God has little or nothing to do with origins worldviews and interpret evidence accordingly. Moreover, origins worldviews have nothing to do with finding or presenting different sets of evidence that speak one way or the other. For unobservable events in the past, such as creation or evolution, all we have are present-day evidence in the present. Which presuppositions best explain it? Let’s admit we have them. More here.

[In the God-used-evolution notions,] creatures on Earth would be living, dying, killing each other, getting bone disease and cancer (as fossils show). Was this before God created the first humans? If so, how could He pronounce this world “very good”? Yes, one can be saved without believing in a literal Genesis, but despite that disbelief, not because of it. We reading Scripture naturally everywhere else; why avoid that in Genesis? The creation account is irrevocably intertwined with all other Scriptural truths: Who owns us, His goodness, what caused sin, why we need to be saved, why marriage is what it is, why public nakedness isn’t cool, and many more.

BioLogos is apparently sticking true to the idea of uniformitarianism. Maybe after millions of years of changes, they will be using the actual Bible to defend evolution-based beliefs.

So far all they have is a nice series of hypotheses about how God somehow used evolution and worked His way up to the first humans. It’s a fun story, with intelligently designed ideas about another world, but it isn’t about the world God actually gave us, the world He created — after which He was kind enough to share with us in Genesis about the process He used.

Also I do wish Tim Keller, even if he isn’t sure how to understand or explain anti-God assumptions about man’s origins compared with the Bible, would get out of this shindig.