“In Genesis 1-3, we find the record of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth ex nihilo; of the special creation of Adam and Eve as actual human beings, the parents of all humanity (hence they are not the products of evolution from lower forms of life).”

In 2000, the Creation Study Committee submitted a report to the 28th PCA General Assembly on the issue of creation. The report is extensive and covers many topics including various views of the length of the creation days and the original intent of the Westminster Assembly in regards to interpreting Genesis 1–3. The most important part of the report comes from the advice and counsel portion at the end of the report. While acknowledging there to be different opinions within the PCA regarding the nature and length of the creation days, they found considerable unity on the issues of “vital importance to our Reformed testimony.” Here is the statement from the committee:

All the Committee members join in these affirmations: The Scriptures, and hence Genesis 1–3, are the inerrant word of God. That Genesis 1–3 is a coherent account from the hand of Moses. That history, not myth, is the proper category for describing these chapters; and furthermore that their history is true. In these chapters we find the record of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth ex nihilo; of the special creation of Adam and Eve as actual human beings, the parents of all humanity (hence they are not the products of evolution from lower forms of life). We further find the account of an historical fall, that brought all humanity into an estate of sin and misery, and of God’s sure promise of a Redeemer. Because the Bible is the word of the Creator and Governor of all there is, it is right for us to find it speaking authoritatively to matters studied by historical and scientific research. We also believe that acceptance of, say, non-geocentric astronomy is consistent with full submission to Biblical authority. We recognize that a naturalistic worldview and true Christian faith are impossible to reconcile, and gladly take our stand with Biblical supernaturalism.

The report explains, in great detail, four main interpretations of creation that are common within the PCA. These views are: the Calendar Day interpretation, the Day-Age interpretation, the Framework interpretation, and the Analogical Days interpretation. According to the committee, these views are all different, but all are in agreement with the affirmations made by the committee. In the report, each of these interpretations is described and strengths and weaknesses of each are addressed.

The Calendar Day interpretation is fairly easy to define. It can also be called the literal, the traditional, or the twenty-four-hour view:

The Calendar-Day view may be described very simply. It accepts the first chapter of Genesis as historical and chronological in character, and views the creation week as consisting of six twenty-four hour days, followed by a twenty-four hour Sabbath. Since Adam and Eve were created as mature adults, so the rest of creation came forth from its maker. The Garden included full-grown trees and animals, which Adam named. Those holding this view believe this is the normal understanding of the creation account, and that this has been the most commonly held understanding of this account both in Jewish and Christian history.

Those who hold to this view believe that it is important to take Genesis 1 literally. The report quotes Dr. Syd Dyer:

Forsaking the literal interpretation of Genesis 1 reduces its revelatory significance. The literary framework hypothesis reduces the entire chapter to a general statement that God created everything in an orderly fashion. How God actually did create is left unanswered. We end up with too much saying too little. The literal interpretation, on the other hand, takes the entire chapter in its full revelatory significance. Rather than seeing Genesis 1 as presenting God as a creative author, it sees God as the author of creation, who brought it into being by His spoken word (Sid Dyer, “The New Testament Doctrine of Creation” in Did God Create in Six Days?, ed. Joseph A. Pipa, Jr., and David W. Hall, [Taylors, SC: Southern Presbyterian Press and Oak Ridge, TN: The Covenant Foundation, 1999], 237).

Ultimately, the report states that those who hold the Calendar Day interpretation “look upon the Church’s shrinking from acceptance of the plain meaning of the creation account, no matter how innocent the intent, as opening the door to the undermining of the credibility of her gospel message.”

Strengths of the Calendar Day view include: being the most plain reading of the text, affirming the historicity of Genesis 1–3, affirming the historicity of Adam and Eve and the Fall, denying the presence of death before the Fall, being the most widely held view in the Reformed church historically, and being consistent with the view of the New Testament authors. On this last point, the report states:

The New Testament in its various citations of and allusions to Genesis 1–11 clearly assumes the “plain, historical/chronological” understanding of the creation, the establishment of the family, the fall, the curse and the unfolding of the coming redemption. This favors the Calendar-Day view of Genesis 1. Douglas Kelly cites Hubert Thomas, who has examined the New Testament allusions to the creation as follows:

In effect three main points are demonstrated by reading the list we provide. These three points confirm that the New Testament can in no case whatsoever be appealed to in order to sustain any sort of evolutionary theory. First, without exception, references to creation and especially the citations of Genesis 1 to 11 point to historical events. It is no different than the historical death of the Lord Jesus Christ on Golgotha. As far as the New Testament is concerned, creation ex-nihilo and the creation of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, there is no legend and no parable; all deal with persons and events of historical and universal significance.

Second, without exception creation is always mentioned as a unique event which took place at a particular moment in past time. Creation took place; it was accomplished. Events occurred which corrupted the world, and now it awaits a new creation which will take place in the future at a given moment. Third, the details and recitations of the creation given in Genesis 1 to 3 are considered to be literally true, historical and also of surpassing importance. The New Testament doctrine based upon these citations would be without validity and even erroneous if the primeval events were not historically true. For instance: consider the entry of sin into the world. If Adam were not the head of the whole human race, then Jesus Christ [the last Adam] is not head of the new creation (Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change, Genesis 1.1-2.4 in the light of Changing Scientific Paradigms [Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 1997], 45).

Weaknesses or objections include: accusations of being “anti-intellectual,” how to explain the creation of the sun after light, and how to harmonize the apparent contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2. Each of these objections is answered in the report. For example:

Some have asserted that this view “seems not to take science seriously and impugns the veracity of God because, on the one hand, it dismisses central conclusions of the current scientific consensus on cosmogony and, on the other hand, it supposedly requires one to view the general-revelation evidence as to the age of the earth as misleading.” This criticism is based on the assumption that man is able to interpret general revelation correctly without the light of special revelation. That assumption reverses the proper principle of Biblical interpretation, which is, that special revelation must govern our understanding of general revelation. Those of us who hold the Calendar-Day view make no apology for arriving, after careful consideration of the facts, at conclusions that differ from this so-called consensus. It is not the veracity of God which is impugned but the evolutionary presuppositions of the majority (not consensus) of the scientific community whose assumptions are regularly passed off as facts. Furthermore, it seems disingenuous to fault the Calendar-Day view for differing with current scientific dogma when creationists of all stripes claim to reject the most dominant aspect of that dogma, namely, evolutionary origins of the species. One unique strength of the Calendar-Day view is that it leaves no room to accommodate any version of evolutionism, Theistic or otherwise, while some other theories seem bent on finding some common ground with it.

The Day-Age interpretation holds to six days of creation of indefinite length. This interpretation comes from the use of the Hebrew word “yom” or “day” to refer to periods longer than 24 hours. For example, Isaiah 11:10–11 uses the phrase “in that day” to refer to a period of time. According to the report, the six days of creation, in this view:

are taken as sequential, but as overlapping and merging into one another, much as an expression like “the day of the Protestant Reformation” might have only a proximate meaning and might overlap with “the day of the Renaissance.” While exponents of this view might be willing to concede a rough parallel between day one and day four, day two and day five, day three and day six, they would tend to deny that this is an intended parallel by Moses as author, as is commonly claimed in the Framework interpretation.

Those who hold to the Day-Age interpretation want to be clear that this view is not merely a reaction to Darwinian evolution:

Much of the negative sentiment brought against the Day-Age theory of creation within the reformed church has been engendered by a strong reaction against the teachings which grew out of Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the “Origin of Species.” In its so-called neo-Darwinian form, this teaching holds that random mutations, which are continually occurring within the population gene pool of any species, can confer a survival advantage on individuals within the species, and that gradually over long periods of time, this increased biological fitness leads to the emergence of new species with more complex biological systems, through an unguided process termed ‘Darwinian Evolution.’ Extension of this concept back in time to an initial primordial elemental soup (which arose some time after the ‘Big Bang’) that gave rise to the first ‘life’, has substituted for the Biblical account of creation in the proud minds of men. This view has been so aggressively taught within our schools and colleges that it is the predominant view of the origins and diversity of life. Consequently, we in the church today find ourselves in such a reactionary stance against this incessant tide of unsubstantiated indoctrination of our children, that we ‘blame’ Darwinian evolution as the evil that gave rise to such interpretations of the Genesis account of creation as the Day-Age theory. This is not so, however, as we can clearly appreciate from the discussion under question 3) above where we see that a view open to the possibility of creative days of unspecified length was held by prominent and influential church fathers, some of whom lived long before Charles Darwin.

Strengths for the Day-Age interpretation include: affirmation of the historicity of Genesis 1–3, affirmation of the historicity of Adam and Eve and the Fall, and compatibility with the much of the scientific evidence for the age of the earth and fossil record.

Weaknesses or difficulties with the Day-Age interpretation include: how to handle the issue of death before the Fall and reconciling details from Genesis 1–3 with their interpretation.

The Framework interpretation has many different variations. The report details the position that Meredith Kline held. The basic idea is that the week of creation should be viewed as a metaphor. Moses, therefore, used the metaphor of a week of creation to model Israel’s week. Days 1–3 represent the creation of the kingdoms and these are paralleled with Days 4–6 which represent the creation of the kings of those kingdoms. “Adam is king of the earth and God is King of creation.”

Bruce Waltke states it this way:

[I]t is a literary-artistic representation of the creation. To this we add the purpose, namely, to ground the covenant people’s worship and life in the Creator, who transformed chaos into cosmos, and their ethics in his creative order. (Bruce K. Waltke, “The Literary Genre of Genesis, Chapter One,” Crux 27 [1991] 9)

Strengths for the Framework interpretation include: affirmation of God as Creator, affirmation of the historicity of Adam and Eve and the Fall, denial of evolutionary origins, and harmonizing Genesis 1 and 2.

Weaknesses or objections include: affirming historicity while denying the literal sequence of Genesis 1, what genre Genesis 1 is, and the relationship of passages like Exodus 20:11 that refer to the days of creation to the Framework interpretation of Genesis 1-2.

The Analogical Day interpretation defines the 6 days of creation as “God’s work-days, which are analogous, and not necessarily identical, to our work days, structured for the purpose of setting a pattern for our own rhythm of rest and work.” In this view, “the six “days” represent periods of God’s historical supernatural activity in preparing and populating the earth as a place for humans to live, love, work, and worship.”

Therefore, according to this interpretation, the length of time for the days or week of creation are “irrelevant to the communicative purpose of the account.”

Herman Bavinck described it this way:

So, although . . . the days of Genesis 1 are to be considered days and not to be identified with the periods of geology, they nevertheless—like the work of creation as a whole—have an extraordinary character . . . The first three days, however much they may resemble our days, also differ significantly from them and hence were extraordinary cosmic days . . . It is not impossible that the second triduum still shared in this extraordinary character as well . . . It is very difficult to find room on the sixth day for everything Genesis 1–2 has occur in it if that day was in all respects like our days . . . Much more took place on each day of creation than the sober words of Genesis would lead us to suspect (Herman Bavinck, In the Beginning, Foundations of Creation Theology, edited by John Bolt, translated by John Vriend [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1999], 120-126).

Strengths for the Analogical Day interpretation include: affirmation of the historicity of Genesis 1–3, affirmation of the historicity of Adam and Eve and the Fall, affirmation of the New Testament authors’ believe in the historicity of Genesis 1–3, and harmonizing Genesis 1 and 2.

Weaknesses or objections include: the relative modernity of the interpretation and the lack of other Scriptural examples of time indicators used analogically.

In summary, the report declares that there is diversity of opinion regarding the nature and length of the creation days, but that there is considerable unity on “the issues of vital importance to our Reformed testimony.” The report defines the orthodox view to be:

The orthodox view includes the following elements: that Scripture is the inerrant Word of God and self-interpreting, the full historicity of Genesis 1–3, the unique creation of Adam and Eve in God’s image as our first parents, and Adam as the covenant head of the human race. A necessary corollary of this view is the fact that the curse and the resultant discord in the universe began with the sin of Adam.

As stated both at the beginning and end of the report, evolution of the species (macro-evolution) is excluded from any orthodox view.
______________
Rachel Miller is a member of a PCA church in Houston, Texas. This article first appeared in Johannes Weslianus and is used with permission.

[Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]