Originally posted by rogue06
View Post
For instance, the great and highly respected Baptist theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong used the term "brute" and spoke of the brutish ancestry of human beings saying that such an ancestry was in no way incompatible with our excelling status as creatures in the image of God.
IIRC it is in his Systematic Theology (which has been a mainstay of Baptist theological education even today and still required reading in some conservative Christian colleges) where Strong drew an analogy with Christ's miraculous conversion of water into wine saying that
"The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to its creation."
And at the 17th Annual Sessions of the Baptist Congress held in the Delaware Baptist Church in Buffalo, New York during November of 1898 Strong stated
"That man is the offspring of the brute creation does not prevent him from being also the offspring of God."
Another well regarded Baptist, the Rev. Billy Graham, who is arguably the greatest evangelist of our time, is of a similar mind as Strong, stating in his autobiography Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man (written with the help of David Frost)
"I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man ... I personally believe that it's just as easy to accept the fact that God took some dust and blew on it and out came a man as it is to accept the fact that God breathed upon man and he became a living soul and it started with some protoplasm and went right on up through the evolutionary process. Either way is by faith and whichever God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man's relationship to God."
And this wasn't something that Graham has only recently come to believe. Nearly 50 years prior to this Graham is quoted in the United Church Observer in July of 1966 that
Benjamin B. Warfield, rightly regarded as the great apologist or champion of biblical inerrancy and whose influence can be seen in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (in that he was probably the most vocal advocate of that doctrine), held that there was nothing in the first chapters of Genesis that could not be properly interpreted in a way consistent with the evolutionary development of the present world. He explained that
"If under the directing hand of God a human body is formed at a leap by propagation from brutish parents [that is, per saltum evolution (evolution by mutation)], it would be quite consonant with the fitness of things that it should be provided by his creative energy with a truly human soul."
IOW, God created the matter of the universe with the forces of nature ex nihilo, through evolution he providentially formed man, and by a special act of mediate creation he created the soul of humans.
George Frederick Wright, who pastored Congregational churches in Vermont and Massachusetts before becoming professor and later professor emeritus of New Testament language and literature at Oberlin Theological Seminary, pointed out that Genesis truthfully portrayed "an ordered progress from lower to higher forms of matter and life" that left room for God's creation of life forms with "a marvelous capacity for variation" -- and for Adam and Eve as well.
He held that the biblical creation accounts were meant to teach theological truths, and thus should not be expected to reveal scientific knowledge.
The Rev. George Macloskie who wrote in his Theistic Evolution in 1898 that
"It has been recognized that man may have been both created and evolved, that his creation may have been effected under divinely directed evolution, either as a natural development or possibly as a development with supernatural incidents and expediated."
Elsewhere he remarked that "the theory of the Predamites does not affect the unity of the race" while simultaneously noting that the "Bible seems to set forth Adam as our first father."
James Orr, yet another influential defender of evangelical doctrine and a contributor to The Fundamentals, who was a vocal critic of theological liberalism with his writings and lectures upholding the doctrines of the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus, and the infallibility of the Bible, was also open to the idea. He once noted that
This view was echoed by others like William L. Poteat, President of Wake Forest University who defended the teaching of evolution as the "divine method of creation", arguing it was fully compatible with Baptist beliefs.
The last great conservative and utterly orthodox Christian thinker that I'll cite is G.K. Chesterton, who wrote in his classic of Christian apologetics, Orthodoxy:
"IF evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time."
There are a good many others with the above list being anything but an exhaustive list.
A few others include the Congregational evangelist R. A. Torrey, one of the three editors of The Fundamentals[2], the series of essays that gave its name to what came to be called "fundamentalism," and who accepted the idea of pre-Adamites.
Gleason Archer was yet another one who believed in pre-Adamism. Gleason writes in his 1985 book titled A Survey of Old Testament Introduction:
"To revert to the problem of the Pithecanthropus, the Swanscombe man, the Neanderthal and all the rest (possibly even the Cro-magnon man, who is apparently to be classed as Homo sapiens
And the well known Anglican cleric John R.W. Stott[3] also believed that God could have created Adam out of some supposed pre-Adamite "hominid".
So it seems that I'm standing on pretty firm ground here.
1. or at the very least consider it a distinct, viable possibility
2. A.C. Dixon, was another editor of The Fundamentals), is cited much in the same way Charles Hodge is (see post #130 including the footnote) for his comments against "evolution" -- but his target was actually Spencer and the Social Gospel. As one biographer, Brena M. Meeham, wrote:
"Dixon upheld the possibility that Darwinian evolution could find a place in the Bible, with God as Evolver and evolution as his method of creation."
3. Stott was one of the authors of the Lausanne Covenant (a 1974 Christian religious manifesto promoting active world-wide Christian evangelism and one of the most influential documents in modern Evangelical Christianity. It was written and adopted by 2300 evangelicals at the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, from which it takes its name). Time Magazine ranked John R.W. Stott among the top 100 MOST influential people in the world in 2005.
Comment