The word of faith magazine
The Bible said that creation took place over the space of six days, and there was no reason to understand the Hebrew word for "Day"( yom) in any other way than its ordinary denotation of an actual day.īut all this changed with the coming of the Enlightenment, Newtonian science, and its stepchild, the theory of evolution. Through the Reformers' insistence on the plain sense of Scripture, the allegorical interpretation of the days of creation was overthrown and the Protestant church understood Genesis 1:1-2:3 to teach that God created all things in six normal days. The Modern "Scientific" Understanding of "Day" in Genesis 1-2 " 5 The Westminster divines, who held that the true sense of Scripture is not manifold, but one (i.e., the one determined by the grammatical-historical interpretation of the text), make a literal six-day creation part of confessional orthodoxy by stating that "God created the world and all things therein, whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days, and all very good." 6 Calvin, after asserting that violence is done to the text by the view that the world was made in a moment, and that Moses distributes the work of God over six days for the mere purpose of instruction, upholds the literal meaning of the Genesis account, saying, "Let us rather conclude that God himself took the space of six days, for the purpose of accommodating his works to the capacity of men." 4 Turretin rejects the allegorical view of Augustine because, "among other things, of the simple and historical Mosaic narration, which mentions six days and ascribes a particular work to each. "Just as the words read" - this was the perspective of Luther and the other Reformers. Augustine is concerned, I hold that Moses spoke literally and not figuratively or allegorically, telling us that the world with all its creatures was made within six days, just as the words read. Luther states: But since we cannot understand the details of these days, especially why God wanted to have this time distinction, let us confess our ignorance and not needlessly regard and interpret these words in a figurative sense. This approach to interpretation caused the Reformers to reject the figurative meaning that Augustine and others had given to the days of creation, and to advocate instead a literal understanding of the six days of Genesis 1-2. The fanciful exegesis (i.e., eisegesis) of the allegorical method that was often used in the interpretation of the Bible was set aside for a faithful exegesis of the text that focused on the meaning of the words of Scripture according to their ordinary, historical sense. But with the Reformation and the doctrine of sola Scriptura came a return to the grammatical-historical interpretation of the Scriptures.
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"Augustine understood these days as allegorical representations of angelic cognitions." 1 As Luther explains: "Augustine trifles with the six days in a strange way, making them days of hidden meaning, according to the knowledge of angels, and does not let them be six natural days." 2 Many in the church followed Augustine in assigning an allegorical meaning to the six days of creation, and it prevailed as a common interpretation of the creation account of Genesis. They taught that God's work of creation took place in a single moment, and that the days of the creation were not literal days. The Reformers' Understanding of "Day" in Genesis 1-2Īugustine, Bishop of Hippo, believed that the world and all that is therein was created at once and not in the course of six days. In spite of this, the "days" of Genesis 1 and 2 have not always been understood in the church to refer to normal twenty-four-hour days and the doctrine of six-day creation has subsequently been denied. day" and the creative activity of God on each day is described.
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Each day is numbered (the first day, the second day, etc.) each day is elucidated by the phrase, "And the evening and morning were the. A straightforward reading of the Biblical text leads one to believe that the days of creation were six, literal, twenty-four-hour days. Genesis 1:1-2:3 explicitly states that God created the world in six days.