Is Calendar-Day Creation an Essential of the Faith?

From RTB:

https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/voices/read/voices/2018/11/05/is-calendar-day-creation-an-essential-of-the-faith-what-christian-creeds-reveal-about-ancient-and-traditional-church-beliefs

@Patrick, thank you for posting this article.

However, I am afraid that the crux of its argument:

The data seems clear: the apostolic church never considered six-day creation a Christian essential. Furthermore, this attitude continued with every major Christian organization for almost two millenia.
…
Hence any modern revival of six-day creationism is not based on Christian tradition or history.

won’t persuade many YECs. Most YECs are protestants, and protestants do not regard the “tradition or history” of the Church to be in any way binding, especially ones that are “amost two millenia” old. As such, this argument won’t have any force of persuasion against them.

3 Likes

This article is strange because if it’s taken to its logical conclusion, most of the major tenets of rtb wouldn’t have much basis either. As far as I know, none of the early Fathers saw scripture as “predicting” scientific discoveries.

They never used the word inerrant and if inerrancy would have been used, it would only have applied to the SPIRITUAL meaning of texts, and not the literal meaning before Diodore of Tarsus came along. According to both Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, the historical meaning could contain contradictions and descriptions of events that never actually occured.

The existence of Adam was never the topic of debate at an ecumenical council either. And yet rtb has chosen a specially created Adam with no evolutionary precursors as the sole progenitor of the entire human race as its hill to die on.

I’m not sure how well this article actually supports rtb’s mission. They are majoring on far more than just the ecumenical councils.

5 Likes