THE RELIGION OF THEISTIC (“CHRISTIAN”) EVOLUTION
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Theistic evolutionists (TEs) believe that God created through evolution – natural selection. This means that sin and death were present almost from the advent of life. This implies several things:
1. There was no Fall (Genesis 3).
2. God designed natural selection (the survival-of-the-fittest) to bring us gradually into existence, instead of His creation being “very good” (Genesis 1).
3. Sin and death pre-dated Adam and Eve, if they even existed.
4. Jesus could not be the second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:21-22, 45) if all didn’t die through Adam’s sin.
5. The Bible is giving us double-signals. If the deaths that occurred as a result of natural selection were part of God’s chosen and “glorious” plan, then no one can blame Cain for killing Abel (Genesis 4), since he was arguably the fittest of the two. Instead, God should then have commended Abel.
In light of these problems, Kreeft and Tacelli have written:
∑ If the Fall really didn’t happen in history, then God rather than humanity is to blame for sin, for God must have created us as sinners rather than as innocents. If there was never any real unfallen state, then we were sinners from the first moment of our creation, and God was wrong to declare everything he made “good.” (Handbook of Christian Apologetics, 213)
In many ways, TE preaches an unbiblical and biblically contradictory religion. Just consider a few verses in which the NT affirms the historicity and theological centricity of the Fall:
∑ Matthew 19:4-6: He [Jesus] answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Jesus here affirmed the good provisions of the creation account which took place “from the beginning.”)
∑ Romans 8:20-22: “For the creation was subjected to futility [not created in futility], not willingly, but because of him [God] who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption [the Fall] and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
∑ 1 Timothy 2:13-14: For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. (Paul also confirmed the creation account along with the rebellion – Gen. 3)
Each of these sets of verse not only records history, but they also demonstrate that doctrine depends on this history. These are doctrines that the religion of TE cannot affirm, since it denies these historical events.
We cannot separate theology from its historicity any more than we can separate the redemption of the Cross from the history of the Cross. If Jesus had not actually died for us (history), there can be no theology of the Cross – salvation and the forgiveness of sin.
In so many ways, TE undermines both the Biblical account and its inseparable theology that it must be regarded as another religion and another gospel.
New York School of the Bible: http://www.nysb.nyc/
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