Whether he knows it or not Dr. Giberson has surfaced an issue upon which we agree: This is a matter of authority. Who will have the final authority? God’s divinely given Word or an ill-defined company of “scholars?” While Giberson is alarmed at the prospect of Christianity losing “many of its scholars” he’s rather sanguine about the possibility of losing the very metanarrative of God’s Word upon which rests the gospel itself.

Dr. Karl Giberson is not happy that so many Christians believe what the Bible says about creation, human origins, and the fall. In an article posted in The Daily Beast, Dr. Giberson laments the fact that the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) has not reached a consensus fully embracing the theory of evolution by natural selection. He seems scandalized that there are those within the CRC who still hold to the truthfulness of the biblical narrative.

In one quite revealing passage Giberson acknowledges that faculty at Calvin College (a CRC institution) are required to sign a confession of faith which includes an affirmation of the biblical creation narrative specifying the special creation of man and an historic fall. Apparently, however, it is naïve and retrograde to expect science faculty at Christian universities to honor their vows. Writes Giberson:

Theologian John Schneider told The Daily Beast that when he first came to Calvin in 1986, he asked senior faculty “What do you mean when you sign your names to the Canons of Dort?” The typical response was, “When I sign, obviously, I do not mean to adhere to each and every point of doctrine. No college could operate that way.”

We could write a great many pages on honesty at this point. We could, for instance, point out the fundamental hypocrisy of taking a paycheck from an institution whose statement of faith you actively undermine after vowing to uphold it. But that is a matter for another day.

Dr. Giberson seems to believe that serious scholarship is possible only if one is ready to jettison whole portions of the Bible. And for a confessional Christian institution to hold its faculty accountable to the vows they take amounts to persecuting Galileo all over again.

Yes, he went there. Giberson raises the specter of Galileo. That’s sort of like opponents of Calvinism crying “Servetus!” It gets an emotional reaction and may be effective for the ill-informed but actually has nothing to do with the issue at hand. In the case of Galileo, the Church of Rome was committed to a cosmology that the Bible never once affirms: Geocentricity. Let me repeat: The Bible never once teaches, suggests, or passively implies that the earth is the center of the universe. It does not follow that just because the Medieval Church taught something not found in the pages of the Bible that we should now be willing to jettison what the Bible most obviously does teach.

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