Truth Unites - Would Augustine Embrace Evolution?

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

In this video I do theological triage with the doctrine of creation, suggesting that Augustine would probably embrace some form of evolution, if he were alive today. Check out my book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Retrieving-Augustines-Doctrine-Creation-Controversy/dp/0830853243/truthunites-20 Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

The title of this video is, would Augustine embrace evolution, colon, why I'm not a young earth creationist, colon, what did Jan say? I'll put up a picture if you're an office fan, you will know what I'm talking about. If you're not, you'll have no clue. So sorry, we'll move on. It's another story. I couldn't get that out of my brain as soon as I started thinking of a longer title. Anyways, I'm doing a series of videos on theological triage, which means ranking doctrines. I've done videos on the I idea of triage on Calvinism, baptism, end times, spiritual gifts, something else. I can't remember. There's one other I did. You can see there's a list of those videos on my channel. And then I wrote a book on this called Finding the Right Hills to Die on. This is really important to me. I think this is

really important right now in our culture, with all the polarization happening and the everything's becoming more extreme, it seems like. And I also, you know, it's interesting. This has become a big focus of my channel. It really fits well. I think with the broader ethos and goals of my YouTube channel, Truth Unites, which is an attempt to be a reconstructive and sort of reconcilitating voice in a time of polarization and disintegration. So I really believe in doing theological triage. The basic heart behind doing theological triage is we want to focus upon the gospel and major on the majors while at the same time not downplaying doctrine overall and not acting like the secondary and tertiary doctrines don't matter at all. So we're trying to have a balance, a healthy overall posture, not fighting too much, but not also being too wishy-washy.

So my addressing of creation issues in this series, I recognize will be a little bit controversial. This is one of the most controversial areas I found. It is just one of those tough ones. So, boy, you know, the last thing I want to do, I do this with fear and trembling, to be honest. The last thing I want to do is alienate people who are otherwise supporting my work. but I also, and I was thinking of praying about this, I don't want to shy away from topics just because it's going to be tough.

I think part of the whole heart behind triage is we need to find ways to talk about our differences without rejecting each other in our heart. And so I'm going to approach this in a spirit of love and concern for the truth and trying to do this in a way that will not step on toes more than it needs, but truly I hope it builds up the church. And I'm really, I really am passionate about this area because I think a lot of modern day, I'll just speak to my context, evangelical Christians in the United States. This might be true of other non-evangelicals and outside the United States to some extent, but I'll speak to what I know.

Evangelicals in the United States, I think, have a narrower bandwidth than most historic Christians when it comes to creation. And I do sincerely worry that this becomes a stumbling block to people, both outsiders and then also especially our young people when they go off to college. And the simple fact is this, the greatest theologian of the early church, perhaps the greatest, most influential theologian of all time, anticipated basically all of the current anxieties and questions about this doctrine. And so I think he's a helpful voice to bring into the conversation. So I want to basically argue that Augustine would be open to, though not necessarily committed to, but open to various forms of biological evolution as a process that God used for creation. I think Augustine

retain a historical fall and a historical Adam and Eve, but I think it'd be open to evolution. Now, by the way, whenever we say these Augustine would be, this is a thought experiment. Obviously, we can't be dogmatic and know exactly what he would say, because part of what forms people's beliefs is the historical context they're in. So this is just kind of a fun thought experiment. But it's interesting to think about. I'm going to give three reasons why. Number one is he rejected a literalistic reading of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 and 3, too,

actually. Number two is he affirmed animal death before the human fall as a good thing. And number three is he displayed a posture of humility before the natural sciences. At the end of this video, I'm going to give some implications and applications for things to draw out. By the way, all of this is coming out of my book, which if it's of interest, I'll put it in the video description. It's called Retrieving Augustine's Doctrine of Creation, Ancient Wisdom for Current Controversy. Didn't IVP do a great job with the cover. They've even got my name down here in cursive better than my own signature. So I'm really grateful for them as a publisher. But anyway, so the book is going to give a lot more case. I'm just a drive by here. Before I even get into Augustine, though, let me set the context a little bit,

because I realize a lot of people get very nervous if I start talking about evolution. And I really appreciate that. And I don't think they're wrong to get nervous. This is a tough area. But let me try to set the context a little bit by showing how we got to the present moment where this has been so controversial. My experience, when I talk about creation and doing triage in this area, is that many people assume that the conservative default Christian view that takes the Bible at face value and takes the Bible seriously is Young Earth Creationism. Young Earth creationism is the view that the days of Genesis 1 are 24-hour periods of time. The text is relatively straightforward. There's no gaps or anything like that between the days.

And so you have a world that's roughly six to 10,000 years old, something like that. Then you have old earth creationism and evolutionary creationism. If we're trying to get a taxonomy of the broad views, you can think of Answers in Genesis and Ken Ham as a young earth creationist representative group and voice old earth creationism. You might think of Hugh Ross and reasons to believe, a wonderful ministry here in Southern California. You could check out their old earth creationist. And you could think of something like biologos as evolutionary creationist. Now, actually, as you get into it, you quickly see it's more complicated than just three options. There's a spectrum of little finer nuances you could get into as well. But that

situates us a little bit to start. And so the point I'm making right now is many Christians seem to think that it's the young earth creationism. That's sort of the standard classical default, conservative, faithful Christian view, and then in the modern era, these weird new alternatives have started to develop. And I want to encourage us with a bit of historical context to give us a bit more openness to, as we approach this issue before we even get to Augustine so that we're not isolating Augustine too much, as though he's way out there. He's not. Among conservative Protestant Christians in the United States, views on creation have gotten way more polarized today, I would say, you know, especially in the 20th century, you think of the Scopes trial in the 1920s

as like creation versus evolution as becoming this more publicly visible flashpoint within the culture, where you think of, really, I would say, it's since the 1960s, with the launching of what we could call the Young Earth Creationist Movement. And you think of the publication of the book, The Genesis Flood. I'll put up a picture of that by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris. That really, and since that time, it's gotten huge, but it wasn't always so huge until the last two generations or so, two to three. Just look at like the fundamentalists in the early 20th century and the 19th century, you know, or the conservative Christians at that time.

The Schofield Reference Bible, incredibly popular, incredibly influential throughout the 20th century that advocated for the gap theory. That's a species of old earth, creationism. William Jennings, Brian, who represented the prosecution at the Scopes trial, held to a day-age view. That's an old-earth creationist interpretation of Genesis 1, that the days are long periods of time. I mentioned a few of these things in a video I did recently, which was the springboard for this video on Angelic Fall Theodicy. And I said I'd follow up and talk more about these issues. So I'm doing so.

Come what may. But, you know, it's interesting. Even that book, the Genesis flood was very controversial. Moody Press, a very conservative publisher, declined to publish it out of a concern that firm insistence on six literal days could offend their constituency. So this, you know, Younger creationism has been more controversial. I'm not saying it was totally absent, but it was more controversial. Just look at like, you know, the, you think of like the most kind of famous conservative Christians responding to theological liberalism. You think of Jay Gresham-Machin, who wrote the classic text, Christianity and liberalism, opposing theological liberalism, affirming a supernatural

Christianity. He was an old earth creationist, and frankly, he was pretty open-minded about questions of triage, you know, other questions too. That book is really good, Christianity and liberalism. It's a very sensible and careful book. B.B. Warfield, if you think of anybody, you know, who do you think of more than anybody else who defended a high view of scripture in the face of modern criticism. You think of the great bearded face of B.B. Warfield, right? And Charles Hodge and people like that. Old Earth creationists open to various forms of evolution. Just, you know, just look back throughout church history, even just in the modern era, you've got Charles Spurgeon, the Baptist preacher, the Scottish churchman, Thomas Chalmers,

the Reformed Dutch theologian, Hermann Bavink, evangelicals in Britain like John Stott and in America like Carl Henry. You just think of like leading Christian thinkers who are not liberal and almost all of them are some in the realm of old earth creationist or to some extent some of them are open to evolution to a degree. Here's Spurgeon as an example. Four years before Darwin published the origin of species, Spurgeon is preaching, he's quoting Genesis 1-2 and he says, we do not know how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be. Certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam. Our planet has passed through various stages of existence, and different kinds of creatures have lived on its surface, all of which have been fashioned by God.

What's interesting to me about that quote is how little anxiety. You know, you read Spurgeon's sermons on this question of creation, as I have done. It's amazing he doesn't even feel the need to defend it. Can you imagine preaching like that today? Just throwing out, oh, the earth is millions of years old, lots of creatures have lived and died before human beings, and you don't even feel a need to address that? I can't imagine doing that. When I preach on these issues, I have to be very careful. My point is, things have changed in the last couple of generations. In my opinion, the bandwidth has narrowed unreasonably. And I want to show that, especially from St. Augustine, what I've said thus far is simply an attempt to kind of create some space for us.

My hope right now is that someone out there watching might be willing to say, okay, yeah, If you've got people like Warfield and Machen and Spurgeon and so forth, all of whom are kind of open-minded to go outside of the Young Earth paradigm, maybe it's not such a crazy idea, at least to just get us thinking about this. And so now I want to get into Augustine. And this is where I think historical theology can be so helpful. Sometimes we just assume that the bandwidth in our context for what a conservative or liberal position is, is, the same as what it's always been. And many times historical theology or theological retrieval can help inform that because it helps you start to see. Actually, we have some eccentricities for how we function in the modern era, and especially in more recent decades in the United States.

There's all kinds of examples of this where views we think of as like the normal view, the safe view, are actually incredibly isolated and rare all throughout every other context. The other example of that would be issues like the rapture and the millennium and end times issues like that. I've talked about that in my video on that. So the point thus far is let's approach Augustine with an open mind here because, by the way, it's not just Augustine as we'll talk about. So let me work through these three reasons why I think he would be open to various forms of evolution. I think he would approach it with an open mind. I've gotten to know him pretty well on this.

I've read, I've spent many, many hours struggling with Augustine on this. question. And all of this is just drawing from my book just summarizing. The first is that Augustine didn't interpret Genesis 1 or Genesis 2 and 3 in a literalistic manner. Now, by the way, I use that word literalistic very intentionally as distinct from literal. The word literal is very tricky. I mean, Augustine writes his famous final literal commentary, but he's not advocating for a view like what we mean by the word literal. I have a whole section in the book on this, but briefly what Augustine means by the word literal

is concerned with history, concerned with what actually has happened in the world, not a particular literary genre of how you tell history. Okay? So he's not saying that like a literal reading of Genesis means it happened in this like blow by blow pictorial account that's showing you exactly how it fell out. rather he's contrasting that with allegorical or like a more spiritualist kind of way of interpreting things.

That's what he means by the word literal. So I'm using the word literalistic, different from literal here. To refer to like, you know, you take things in the most exact possible sense. And Augustine not only rejected that, it actually was a major stumbling block for his own Christianity. Put it like this. Augustine's experience with Genesis 1 is so similar to so many people today. and it's why I'm burdened about this. Basically, as a young person, he moves to the city to study.

I start off the whole book explaining this, and he leaves Christianity because he thinks that Genesis 1 and other passages in the Old Testament are not consistent with the most sophisticated intellectual trends of the day. Then, later on, he becomes aware, oh, there's other ways to interpret the scripture. And a big factor in that is hearing Ambrose, another one of the great church fathers in 384 preach an allegorical sermon on Genesis 1.

And he realizes, oh, there's other ways to interpret this passage. And that's a key piece of him finding his way back to orthodoxy and leaving manichaeism, which was a non-Christian religion. And then throughout his career, he retains this incredibly strong interest in the doctrine of creation and an incredible concern about those kinds of what we would call like apologetics-type questions. And so creation comes up over and over. You know, it's just amazing. This is how I got into this. It's wondering why is his most important book, perhaps the confessions, why does it climax into a discussion of creation in Genesis 1 and divine rest in Genesis 1? It seems like kind of a random turn

at the end of the book. And so that's how I got into studying Augustine on this topic, because creation is so important throughout all his works. But this one of the basic things he comes to, he writes five separate commentaries on Genesis, those early chapters in Genesis, the final one, this lengthy book that's his literal interpretation, he deals with the question of how do you interpret the days of creation? And even though it's a literal commentary, he says he doesn't interpret them in what we would call a literal way. He doesn't think they're 24-hour periods of time. When he addresses it, he first just starts by talking about how difficult the question is. He says, it is indeed an arduous and extremely difficult task for us to get through to what the writer meant with these six days,

however concentrated our attention and lively our minds. Now, just that alone should give us patience. You know, there are so many people who just assume that interpreting Genesis 1 is easy and obvious. It's a matter of common sense. The only reason anyone would depart from their view is because of willful deceitfulness or something like that or just they're not thinking about it or something like that, they think it's so easy. And I think already, even if you disagree with Augustine, the very fact that the greatest and most influential theologian in all of church history agonized over this passage should give us more humility and caution. When you read through his final, this is his mature work on it after four other attempts, if you include the city of God

and confessions as commentaries, he's still just, I mean, the whole, it's so, it's so, interesting to me, the whole of book one of this final and fifth work, he's just going on and on and on, emphasizing the difficulty. And basically, I've argued in the book, trying to induce humility in his readers to say this is a difficult chapter. Over and over, there's this word rashness. It's the Latin word tameritas, which I remember doing a study on that word throughout his writings. And it comes up so many times. He's constantly warning about rashness. You know, he's calling for humility because the interpretation of this passage and the whole issue of creation, because it, because of the very nature of what creation is, is a difficult question. That alone should help us

already. Ultimately, basically Augustine's view of the creation days is that he says they're not like 24 hour days. He says, we must be in no doubt that they are not at all like them, but very, very dissimilar. And then he basically, it says, affirms instantaneous creation. So he thinks God made the world just in the blip of an eye. And the depiction of God's work of creation in terms of these seven days, or really six days, is an accommodation to human understanding. It's a kind of literary framework.

The author of Genesis is comparing God's work of creation to a human work week, an ancient Hebrew work week, to try to help the original hearers of the text understand. And he involves the idea of angelic knowledge a lot throughout his, in terms of why it's laid out in the specific ways that it is. That's a really interesting view. So the issue here is not really whether Augustine thinks the world is young or old. He had no reason to think it was very old. The important point is he didn't interpret Genesis 1 in this literalistic way as though it's telling you exactly how it happened. And

Augustine had reasons in the text that have nothing to do with modern science for that. In the book, I focus on three of them, though there are a few others I found as well. The first one, is the problem of lights before the luminaries in day four. He just agonizes over that. You know, where does the light come from in those first three days? The second is the problem of dyschronology in Genesis 2, 4 to 6. Basically when it says when no shrub had yet appeared, he's saying, but shrubs have appeared. So why, you know, how do you take it in the sequential, literalistic way? And the third is the issue of God's rest on day seven. And he's talking about in the book of Exodus where it says God rest and refreshed himself on the Sabbath.

And he's saying, you can't interpret that in a literalistic way because God doesn't get tired and he doesn't need to rest. And then there's other reasons he says as well. But basically he comes, you can check out chapter three of my book if you're interested in the fuller case, but basically the overall effect, here's the thing is Augustine doesn't just arrive upon that and not feel deeply about it. He's very concerned about the negative impact of overly literalistic. renderings of Genesis 1, even apart from the challenges of modern science. And the confessions,

here's how he describes his testimony of coming back to the Christian faith through the influence of Ambrose. He says, I began to see that the Catholic faith, for which I had thought nothing could be said in the face of the Manichaean objections, could be maintained on reasonable grounds. This, especially after I heard explained figuratively, several passages of the Old Testament, which had been a cause of death to me when taken literally. Many passages of these books were expounded in a spiritual sense, and I came to blame my own hopeless folly in believing that the law and the prophets could not stand against those who hated and mocked at them.

Hope we can all feel, even if where you wouldn't agree with Augustine, or you might want to approach, because Genesis 1 is one of the most, is maybe the central passages talking about there. There were others as well, that this over, this overreactual. literalism does great spiritual damage in Augustine's mind. And that's something for us to wrestle with. Okay. By the way, in that conviction, Augustine was not alone. There's plenty of people before him. He was not the first person. Sometimes I have to clarify this when I'm talking about Augustine doing something. I'm not saying he's the first person who had a non-literalistic reading

of Genesis 1 and he certainly had a massive influence on everybody who came. I mean, Augustine shapes the whole world of meaty, evil thought. There's just so much, even beyond that, Galileo Galilei, in defense of his theories, quoted from Augustine's commentary on Genesis more than 10 times, for example. If you want a survey of church history on Genesis 1 and how many people had anticipated some of the modern interpretations, check out this book by Andrew Brown called The Days of Creation. And he just goes through and, you know, erred right out of the gate at the beginning. on page four, he says, anyway, the modern reader reads this creation account is almost incapable

of being truly new. And so that goes against this idea that people always read it in a literalistic way and now we're changing. I'm just, I'm not trying to pay, play fast and loose with the Bible. I'm trying to be faithful to the Word of God. I'm just deeply concerned that there are negative effects when we insist upon these overly literalistic ways of interpreting Genesis 1. and my time soaking in the thought of Augustine has really impressed that upon my heart. The second reason is Augustine affirmed animal death before the fall, and he didn't just reluctantly do so. He almost sort of glories in it. It's so fascinating.

Again, here's the point where we just have different instincts. Today, we tend to just assume that animal death is an evil thing that needs to be explained. But Augustine, responding to the criticisms of the Manichaeans, vigorously, emphatically defended the goodness of animal and plant death before the fall. There's so many examples of this. Here's just one from the city of God. It is ridiculous to condemn the faults of beasts and of trees and other such mortal and mutable things

as are void of intelligence, sensation, or life, even though these faults should destroy their corruptible nature, for these creatures received at their creature's will in existence fitting to them. In my book, I work through two reasons why he thinks animal death is good. The first is temporal beauty, and the second is perspectival prejudice. That's a big word. A mouthful.

Temporal beauty is basically the idea that just as there's a beauty in the passing from autumn to winter to spring to summer, so also there's a kind of beauty in certain creatures passing in and out of existence. Perspectival prejudice is the idea that basically we see parts, not the whole. and that's why animal death sometimes seems evil to us. Trying to be brief and succinct. I go into all that in the book. You've got to read. If you read anything else, it's so hilarious reading.

I have so many quotes that I found about frogs, spiders, lizards, insects, all kinds of bugs. Augustine just delights in insects. And in all these reptiles, scorpions, he's absolutely fascinated with the, if the planet earth documentaries were around in his day. He would have been a fan. He would have watched him. He loved the natural world. He delighted in all these creatures God has made, flowers and waterfalls and but also the animal kingdom and insects and bugs as well. It's hilarious to read through how he's like glorying in mice and frogs and bugs and so forth. So you can see all those passages in chapter four in my book if you're interested. By the way, on the idea that animal

death is not evil and didn't come about in Genesis 3, Augustine is not alone. That's the more common view by my awareness to my investigation. Here's Basel, who wrote another significant text on creation. Warning against, again, here's that word rash, judgments against God. He says, let nobody accuse the creator of having produced venomous animals, destroyers, and enemies of our life. Else, let them consider it a crime in the schoolmaster when he disciplines the restlessness of youth by the use of the rod and the whip to maintain order. In the medieval era, here's Thomas Aquinas. Quote, the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin,

as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others would then have lived on herbs like the lion and the falcon. He's just so clear. He's saying, you know, it's not the case that everything was a herbivore until Genesis 3. And Augustine's great metaphor on this, which I probably should have quoted, but it's okay, I'll describe it, is basically when we judge, when we say like, oh, that lion can eat me, therefore it's evil and God shouldn't have made it. And it couldn't have been there in Genesis two. Basically what he's saying is that that reflects rashness. You're judging it from a self-referential

standpoint. The fact that it can cause pain is not the same as saying it's evil per se. And what Augustine says basically is that's like imagine a layperson goes into a mechanics workshop and they don't know what any of the instruments do, and so they touch one of the instruments and cut their hand on it. And then they conclude, well, this instrument must be evil. Augustine says, that's what it's like when we judge the animal kingdom of carnivores as evil, because we don't know God's purposes for how it's all designed to work. And so we need more humility. That word humility is the single word that I derive from Augustine. I was blown away by this great theologian, by the humility he displays in his treatment of this topic. It's unbelievable. That leads to my third point. Augustine's humility before the

natural sciences. Now, my experience is that many Christians, in light of the culture wars we have right now, have kind of a negative view about science, or at least an ambivalent view, and they've seen things done in the name of science that are really overreaches. And I'm sympathetic to those concerns, we should oppose scientific overreach. But we need to be careful not to overreact by dismissing legitimate science. This is where we can all see once you think of some of the dangers here. If you think of geocentrism and flat earthism, some of you actually may hold to those views too. Those are not as uncommon as you think. There's plenty of people who appeal to the texts in the Bible and historical precedent to say basically, you know, geocentrism, the

earth, the sun is rotating around the earth, not vice versa. And they go to Psalm 104, and they go to Joshua 10 and so forth. So, but I would just ask people to appreciate that the scientific evidence against those and against young earth creationism, forgive me if I offend, but I need to say this because we need, we need to feel it. It's really bad. The scientific evidence against those things, not just overreaches from science, but legitimate scientific evidence. I wrote, it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. Top to bottom, left to right, through and through. It's just unanimous and overwhelming consensus that the earth looks older than six to 10,000 years. And, you know, and I think I wrote a response to Ken Ham. This is just coming to me right now where I go through

some of those points and even just things like stalactites forming in caves. if you know what those are. The very starlight. I mean, just anytime you're looking at the stars, any time, you're seeing that which is very, very old. And you have to posit something like God created the light on route to us or something like this if you want to try to get around that.

It's just, you know, the, what's accumulated at the bottom of oceans. I don't know. I go through a bunch of the examples, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming. Now, here's what I'd like to say about that, is that I think Augustine's posture would encourage us,

us to be careful to not dismiss that. Science, you know, there's a real danger. Some Christians, I understand that we can feel a little bit on our guard against science based on how it's misused at times. But there's a real danger in the other direction, too, of being too dismissive. In his literal commentary on Genesis and in his other writings, Augustine is very respectful to what he calls philosophy, which you could translate as natural philosophers. Basically, he's talking about scientists. Augustine shows a great interest in topics like what we would call geology. He's exploring different theories about things like the phases of the moon and things like that. He'll even pay attention to what he calls doctors will say about the mind when he's discussing the body-soul

relation. He's very respectful to all of those disciplines. And throughout, there's a lot about this. I'll cut to the main point. Throughout book one of his final summative literal commentary on Genesis, The whole point is this, to be careful to not dismiss science. And I argue in the book that this is a climactic, thematically central passage where he's being very tentative and then he's showing why we should be tentative. And here's what he says. There is knowledge to be had, after all, about the earth, about the sky, about the other elements of this world, about the movements and revolutions, or even the magnitude and

distances of constellations, about the predictable eclipses of sun and moon. about the cycles of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, fruits, stones, and everything else of this kind. And it frequently happens that even non-Christians will have knowledge of this sort in a way that they can substantiate with scientific arguments or experiments. Now, it is quite disgraceful and disastrous, something to be on one's guard against at all costs, that they should ever hear Christians spouting what they claim our Christian literature has to say on these topics and talking such nonsense as they can scarcely contain their laughter. Maybe you can feel the forcefulness of his concern here, those words,

disgraceful and disastrous. You could translate even stronger. This is, you know, and it's almost a cartoonish image of Christians spouting nonsense, and then people, you know, the non-Christian scientists can scarcely contain their laughter. So you can feel the kind of concern he has. Now, here's why that's so troubling for him. His concern is that this is going to cause the Christian, faith itself to be misrepresented. He says, what is so vexing is not that these misguided people

should be laughed at, as that our authors should be assumed by outsiders to have held such views, and to the great detriment of those about whose salvation we are so concerned should be written off and consigned to the waste paper basket as so many ignoramus. By the way, I've talked in other places about Edmund Hill's translations. He's got the most hilarious, colorful expressions and his translations. It's really funny. Augustine continues, whenever you see they catch some members of the Christian community making mistakes on a subject which they know inside out in defending their hollow opinions on the authority of our books.

On what ground are they going to trust those books on the resurrection of the dead and the hope of eternal life and the kingdom of heaven when they suppose they include any number of mistakes and fallacies on matters which they themselves have been able to master either by experiment or by the surest of calculations. It is impossible to say what trouble and grief such rash, there's that word, self-assured no-walls, cause the more cautious and experienced brothers and sisters.

Boy, what a passage, you know. Do you see what he's saying? He's saying, these non-Christian scientists are going to assume that, well, the whole Christian religion must be as foolish as what those Christians were saying about this scientific matter. And so he's saying, be careful. Be so careful. So I don't think it's hard to appreciate the relevance of that passage in our modern world. Now, as I'm filming this video, I'm realizing I really haven't developed from my chapter on Adam and Eve.

In the fifth chapter of my book, I deal with Adam and Eve. And basically what I try to argue for there is that Augustine's thinking is similar to somebody like John Stott's view. It's kind of a conservative form of evolutionary creation. It's evolution, but with a historic, Adam and Eve, a historic fall, and kind of an openness to not force a paradigm, if that makes sense. And so in chapter five of my book, you might be interested if you want to really get more into the weeds. I guess maybe I should have entitled this video why Augustine would be open to just something outside of Young Earth creationism more generally. Though some of these principles

could get you maybe a little further. But if you want to get into the nuances, I guess you need to get into that chapter. But hopefully what I've said thus far, though, does give you a broad sense of Augustine's profound relevance to this topic. Now, let me draw from all that two conclusions. The first is we need to study other aspects of creation than just how long it took. This is what the first chapter of my book is all about, and I'm basically showing, you know, not only is creation so controversial, but it's actually a neglected doctrine. John Webster calls it an atrophied doctrine. Creation is about so much more than just how old the world is

and how specifically it all happened. You know, in my book, what I say is creation was to Augustine, what justification was to Luther and divine transcendence was to Carl Bart. In other words, this was that central animating core interest of a theologian's life that tended to reverberate out into everything else they did. It's risking overstatement just a little, but creation was so important to him. And what I'm drawing out there is that basically creation was the key to the deep longings of the human heart.

And so I talk about the passage, you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you, which is probably the most famous St. Augustine quote of all time. And it comes at the beginning of creation. And I talk about that word rest. Very key motif. in that book and in his thought, this idea of God's rest on day seven is key for Augustine. Augustine has this massive vision of creation as good but imperfect.

Augustine thinks that God created the world is good, but not yet in its final state. I use the image of when a potter is constructing pottery and the pot is completed in its shape but hasn't had the glazing put on it yet. So it's not yet kind of finalized. And I talk about how for Augustine there's so many passages where basically, to summarize it, I'm talking about the ontological shape of creation and the implications of that for the human heart. But basically we're all in this kind of imperfect state, not just because of sin, but because of our creaturely status.

And we're awaiting our participation in God's immutability, which means his changelessness. Now that is a fascinating way to think about creation. You might not even agree with it all, but maybe we could still see how there's so much more to explore with the doctrine of creation. We tend to not think about createdness as much. We tend to just think about being sinful, but not necessarily being a creature. But being a creature is hugely significant for our theology. Everything else falls out of that. And then there's so many practical things that fall out of the doctrine of creation like vocation, culture.

What does it mean that we are embodied? How do we relate to the arts? The doctrine of common grace. There's so much to creation. And we've got to just get out of the tunnel vision of just thinking about the warfare issues of how long did it take and that kind of thing. The second conclusion I want to draw from St. Augustine

is that we need more humility when it comes to the doctrine of creation. And I hope that Augustine's perspective would encourage a little bit more of an open posture, even if you're not convinced, even if you're not settled, even if you disagree with Augustine. To not be dismissive of that and assume that everybody outside of the Young Earth paradigm is a liberal would be a good thing. Think of it like this.

If you make 24-hour-day interpretations of Genesis 1 as the only safe view within your theological circle or within your church or within the Christians that you trust, then the following Christians are now outside of your orbit, Charles Spurgeon, B.B. Warfield, Carl Henry, and St. Augustine. and a lot more. You know, that doesn't seem right. This seems like exactly the kind of situation where doing triage would are just to be cautious. And I want to say that I think we can happily coexist within the church amidst differences on the specific question of the how long did it take and how precisely did it come about. Now, I'm not saying that we can abandon a historic fall.

In my book, I say that's actually really important to defend an engagement. Augustine did. Oh, boy, maybe I should do another video on Augustine on Adam and Eve because he's really nuanced even on that. I mean, he has an openness there, but he still wants to say the core essence of that Adam and Eve were real people and there was a real historic fall is really important. So he's very relevant to those conversations happening today as well. So that's not, but the broader question of just how long did it take, that's not a good hill to die on. And yet we die on that hill way more than Christians in other times. So in my video, my pastoral burden for the church is that we make a distinction between the more central aspects of creation, some of which,

a lot of which, most of which, have nothing to do with how old the world is. The most important thing about creation is not how old the world is. The most important thing is that God is necessary, but the world is contingent. That is the driving thing, the priority of God. And that's what Augustine spent so much time on. Creation X. Nehalo. That's the distinctive Christian contribution. In the history of thought, not totally exclusive,

but that's the main contribution that Christianity has made that is so important that God made the world for nothing. That's the hill to die on. And then there's other important things. I mentioned that, you know, so, But I want to distinguish those things from the questions we tend to focus on, questions about how it all happened and how long it took. And so that's my burden. That's my proposal.

And that's based upon 15 to 20 years of struggle, what I am commending and encouraging. And I will finish with just sharing my own testimony on this. I'm like Augustine. When I was in college, I struggled with what do I do? with what I had been taught implicitly to be more dismissive of, but I came to see is actually pretty substantial, namely scientific evidence for a very old universe. And, you know, I would say of the last seven years,

where I've come to also have to recognize as well for the theory of biological evolution broadly construed. There is some pretty powerful data to support that. And I've wrestled with that. That one has taken me into as much angst as anything has in my intellectual life trying to sort through things. Augustine has been a breath of fresh air for me because he's opened up the door to say, number one, you're just focusing a little bit too much, you're over-focusing on some issues.

The doctrine of creation is actually more interested in other things. And number two, there's more space there. Just like Augustine found, this was a death to me, but then I realized you don't have to interpret it so literally and it became a source of life to me. And I'm willing to talk about this because I'm concerned that like me, many others probably face the angst about these kinds of questions. If you don't agree and if you think that's wrong, maybe you can at least, maybe we can at least try to find ways to keep talking where we don't, we're not overly suspicious of each other. And maybe there's at least ways where we can try to keep the conversation

going so that we're not rejecting each other in the meantime while we disagree about this. And maybe Augustine, the fact that he's like the most influential, when I say greatest, I mean, most influential Christian theologian of all time. And the fact that he was pretty open-minded, even on questions like how did God construct the body of Adam? He's pretty open-minded. I think that should induce a lot of caution and humility in how we think about these things. All right, I hope that is helpful to people or of interest. And I would love to know what you think in the comments. If you're interested in my book, I'll put a link to that, and I just wanted to conclude by mentioning one other great book. I have so many great books out there.

I should mention Matthew Levering's book. Great book, Engaging the Doctor of Creation. It's on my shelf right over there. Another good one is John Collins. Jack Collins. I've interviewed him on my channel way back when my channel first started reading Genesis well. Put up by Zonderman, a really helpful book. If you're wanting to get strictly into like the text of Genesis.

That book is a great one I would recommend. It's an academic book, so be aware of that, but it's a great book, great resource. All right, I'm finishing off. Time to head home. Thanks for watching, everybody. Have an awesome day.