Are we now to believe that God was unable to reveal the truth about creation in such a clear way that ordinary people could understand that truth right down through history?

The word ‘perspicuous’ here means clear—clear enough for you and I to understand it.

In an address at the Educational Convention held in Chicago under the auspices of the National Union of Christian Schools, in August of 1933, J. Gresham Machen spoke of “the tyranny of the scientific experts.” The purpose of this brief paper is what the writer sees as “the tyranny of theological experts.”

We now have several views of creation that are tolerated in conservative Presbyterian and Reformed Churches. Three of these, the Day-Age, the Framework Hypothesis, and the Analogical views, were invented to make it possible to accommodate some of the supposedly certain teachings of modern science as to the age of the earth (and the age of the universe).

Yet I, as a pastor now for sixty years, have yet to meet one of God’s simple people who can say they even understand these views, let alone believe them. No, it has been my experience that still to this day the vast majority of Bible-believing people remain convinced that (a) God has spoken to them clearly in the first two chapters of the Bible, and that (b) what he has said is that he created the universe in six days, each of which had one evening and one morning.

They seem to believe that God considered it very important for them to know this, and that God was able to communicate the truth about this in such a way that ordinary believers could understand him. Yes, they seem to be convinced that they can understand those first two chapters of Genesis better than some Professors and Scholars. And they seem quite unwilling to submit themselves to the tyranny of the experts.

The experts would have us believe that they have discovered things in the text that no one before them had ever noticed for many centuries. Genesis 2:5 says, “no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain…” This, according to one expert, is said to prove that God’s providential government of natural processes was the same then, as it is now.

And, on that supposed deduction from the text, a whole new theory of creation has been erected. But none of the older saints that I have ministered to ever saw this as a credible deduction—a deduction so important that it would overturn the supposed misunderstanding that God’s infallible word communicated to his church for two-thousand years.

Are we now to believe that God was unable to reveal the truth about creation in such a clear way that ordinary people could understand that truth right down through history? If that is the case then we will have to revise the section of our Westminster Confession of Faith (1:7) which says:

…those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto sufficient understanding of them.

It would be hard to think of anything more necessary to be “known, believed and observed” than the truth about those events described in the first few chapters of Genesis. And yet we now—by our tolerance of several different interpretations at distinct variance from one another—act as if this precious legacy of the Reformation is no longer true. We act as if our people today need experts to tell them what God really meant. What is that but a new example of ‘the tyranny of the experts?’

G. I. Williamson is a retired minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, living in the Orange City, Iowa area. He is the author of study guides on the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and the Heidelberg Catechism.