Is the Seventh-day Adventist church entrenched in a civil war?  Some describe the increasing polarization in the church along these lines.  However, to portray the very real differences in Adventist perspective as engaged in a power struggle to define and control belief is to completely misunderstand and therefore misrepresent the Kingdom of God.  Power plays, political maneuvering, intolerance, and exclusion of others are anathema to the way of Jesus Christ. 

“The Grand Narrative of Creation” is the imagination capturing title of the last chapter in Collins and Giberson’s book The Language of Science and Faith. I eagerly plunged into the chapter anticipating an inspiring story of God’s creation from an evolutionary creationist perspective. Instead, I found their rather dry, mechanistic description of creation, interrupted occasionally with de-contextualized Biblical passages, nearly as uninspiring, dated, and disjointed as an old VCR manual.

My apologies, this summary got lost in email and should have been posted two weeks ago after the conclusion of the Adventist Forum | Spectrum conference. —AC

On Sunday morning, following a delicious breakfast buffet with inspiring views of Lake Michigan, we reconvened for a presentation by Brian Bull and Fritz Guy discussing their new book, God, Sky & Land: Genesis 1 as the Ancient Hebrews Heard It (available for purchase from Spectrum). The multimedia presentation was complete with photographs of their time studying at Tyndale House at the University of Cambridge. 

There is so much packed into an Adventist Forum weekend that it is impossible to relate all that happens in a few short blog posts.  That is especially true because some of the most significant conversations happen in between presentations, in the hallways, and over shared meals.  
 

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This common ground at the opening of the book of beginnings is valued by liberals and conservatives alike. Genesis 1:1 is therefore a natural and harmonizing way to begin the introduction of The Language of Science and Faith.

The controversy over creation and evolution has brought the relationship of faith and science into sharp distinction within our Adventist community. Our traditional literal interpretation of the creation account in Genesis is in direct conflict with the increasingly strident new atheists who assume a purposeless origin of life through purely naturalistic evolutionary processes.

The issue of how to properly interpret the texts of Scripture lies at the heart of the increasing polarization throughout Christianity as exemplified by the current creation vs. evolution debate in our Adventist community. My own exploration of the issue has clarified for me that there are two basic hermeneutical methods being used to evaluate this question: the historical-critical method and the historical-grammatical method. But what do these terms themselves “mean”?  

I was doing a pelvic examination as a fourth-year medical student. My patient complained of a vaginal discharge. The resident was carefully observing me from behind my right shoulder. Peering with unusual interest over my left shoulder, her new husband enthusiastically exclaimed, “You guys have the best job in the world!” 

You are a materialist.  Actually, we all are.  From God-fearing young earth creationists to atheistic evolutionists, all of us assume a material ontology.  That is, we understand the existence of the universe from the perspective of how the material got here.  This perspective has been dominant since the time of the enlightenment and the rise of modernity when Sir Isaac Newton described a mechanistic universe ruled by a God who is the biggest, most skillful mechanical engineer in… well, in the universe.