Archive for February, 2012

Grudem: Old Earth vs. Young Earth

I think this is a healthy approach to the issue of the age of the earth:

How old is the earth then? Where does this discussion leave us? [Davis] Young’s arguments for an old earth based on many kinds of scientific data from different disciplines seem (to the present writer at least) to be very strong.

Although our conclusions are tentative, at this point in our understanding, Scripture seems to be more easily understood to suggest (but not to require) a young earth view, while the observable facts of creation seem increasingly to favor an old earth view. Both views are possible, but neither one is certain.

Given this situation, it would seem best (1) to admit that God may not allow us to find a clear solution to this question before Christ returns, and (2) to encourage evangelical scientists and theologians who fall in both the young earth and old earth camps to begin to work together with much less arrogance, much more humility, and a much greater sense of cooperation in a common purpose.

Progress will certainly be made if old earth and young earth scientists who are Christians will be more willing to talk to each other without hostility, ad hominem attacks, or highly emotional accusations, on the one hand, and without a spirit of condescension or academic pride on the other, for these attitudes are not becoming to the body of Christ, nor are the characteristic of the way of wisdom, which is ‘first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty or insincerity,’ and full of the recognition that ‘the harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace’ (James 3:17-18).

— Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, p. 307-8.

(HT: Take Your Vitamin Z)

2012
02/16
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
TAGS




Leave a comment

As kingfishers catch fire

While we’re on poetry, here’s one I love:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I do is me; for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—

Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

2012
02/11
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
TAGS


Leave a comment

A Poem of Love, for Love (not a Sonnet)

The Speaker said to Spoken, “Once upon a time,

there lived a Man and Woman who were spoken as a rhyme.

The words, He said, were diff’rent, in their content and their style,

but as a Sonnet’s couplet lines, they tended to beguile.

Though spoken well, the couple was, their one-ness notwithstanding,

a bit too quick to cultivate their lack of understanding.

When tempted, thus, to “take and eat” by serpent’s tongue deceiving,

the second line, a rhyme quite fine, did find her last word wrong.

Analogies break down when Persons are involved,

and stories wrought with “once-upon-a”s do need conflicts to fix.

A poem lost with rhymes gone wrong needs help to so defeat

a foe who’s crafty as formless void, a fruit with nectar tart.

For this, My Son, I send You now, to death with sorrow great,

to change her last word radically from “wrong” before ‘s too late.

2012
02/11
POSTED BY
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
3 comments