What’s more, the assumption that a doctrine of biblical inerrancy demands a literal biblical hermeneutic was not shared by Warfield. Indeed, for Warfield, it was self-evident that a commitment to biblical inerrancy left open the question of how any passage of Scripture was to be interpreted correctly. There was no fundamental reason why an inerrantist could not adopt a non-literalist interpretation of the early Genesis texts, if that appeared to be the manner in which that text required to be understood.

AN ANCIENT HERMENEUTIC

Yet many would want to go back further, and explore the interpretation of the opening two chapters of the book of Genesis provided by the early Christian writer Augustine of Hippo (354-430), widely regarded as the most influential theologian of all time. God brought everything into existence in a single moment of creation. Yet the created order is not static. God endowed it with the capacity to develop. Augustine uses the image of a dormant seed to help his readers grasp this point. God creates seeds that will grow and develop at the right time. Using more technical language, Augustine asks his readers to think of created order as containing divinely embedded causalities which emerge or evolve at a later stage. Yet Augustine has no time for any notion of random or arbitrary changes within creation. The development of God’s creation is always subject to God’s sovereign providence. The God who planted the seeds at the moment of creation also governs and directs the time and place of their growth.

Let’s explore these points in more detail. Augustine’s basic exegetical principle is that the first Genesis creation account cannot be interpreted in isolation. It must be set alongside the second Genesis creation account, as well as every other statement about creation found within Scripture. Augustine, therefore, does not limit God’s creative action to the primordial act of origination. He argues that God’s work of creation includes both the initial origination of the world and its subsequent development. There are two “moments” in creation: a primary act of origination, and a continuing process of providential guidance. Creation is thus not a completed past event. God must be recognized to be working even now, in the present, sustaining and directing the unfolding of the “generations that he laid up in creation when it was first established.”⁹

Augustine provides us with an understanding of creation which owes nothing to scientific advances since Darwin, but is grounded in an engagement with Scripture. Augustine also offers us a way of reading Genesis that affirms that God created everything from nothing, in an instant. However, the universe has been created with an inbuilt capacity to develop, under God’s sovereign guidance. The primordial state of creation does not correspond to what we presently observe. For Augustine, God created a universe that was deliberately designed to develop and evolve. The blueprint for that evolution is not arbitrary, but is programmed into the very fabric of creation. God’s providence superintends the continuing unfolding of the created order.

Earlier Christian writers had noted how the first Genesis creation narrative spoke of the earth and the waters “bringing forth” living creatures and had drawn the conclusion that this pointed to God endowing the natural order with a capacity to generate living things. Augustine took this idea further. God created the world complete with a series of dormant powers, which were actualized at appropriate moments through divine providence. Augustine argues that Genesis 1:12 implies that the earth has received the power or capacity to produce things by itself: “Scripture has stated that the earth brought forth the crops and the trees causally, in the sense that it received the power of bringing them forth.”¹⁰ Where some might think of creation in terms of God’s insertion of new kinds of plants and animals ready-made into an already existing world, Augustine rejects this as inconsistent with the overall witness of Scripture. Rather, God must be thought of as creating in that very first moment the potencies for all the kinds of living things that would come later, including humanity. This means that the first Genesis creation account describes the instantaneous bringing into existence of primal matter, including causal resources for further development. The second Genesis account explores out how these causal possibilities emerged and developed from the earth. Taken together, the two Genesis creation accounts declare that God made all things simultaneously, while allowing for the various kinds of living things making their appearance gradually over time.

The image of the “seed” implies that the original creation contained within it the potentialities for all the living kinds that would subsequently emerge. This does not mean that God created the world incomplete or imperfect in that “what God originally established in causes, he subsequently fulfilled in effects.”¹¹ This process of development, Augustine declares, is governed by fundamental laws that reflect the will of their creator: “God has established fixed laws governing the production of kinds and qualities of beings, and bringing them out of concealment into full view.”¹²

Augustine would have rejected any idea of the development of the universe as a “random” or “lawless” process. For this reason, Augustine would oppose the Darwinian notion of random variations, insisting that God’s providence is deeply involved throughout. While the process may be unpredictable, this does not mean that it is random.

We should not be surprised Augustine approached his text with the culturally prevalent presupposition of the fixity of species. No scientific authority of that age known to Augustine held any other view, and Augustine found nothing in the Genesis texts to challenge him on this point. Yet the ways in which he interacts with his scientific authorities suggests that he would regard his views as being open to correction in the light of changing scientific opinion. After all, he argued, there was a serious danger that Christian biblical exegesis could become locked into the scientific world of one specific generation — thus alienating it from later generations, who would have a different understanding of science.

CONCERNS ABOUT SCIENTIFIC REDUCTIONISM

A major theme in the 1980s revival of evangelical anti-Darwinism is the perceived reductionism of the sciences in general, and evolutionary theory in particular. This revival has mainly been led by influential evangelical pastors, parachurch organizations, and media activists, rather than theologians and scientists. The fear of reductionism is that evolutionary theory reduces “God” to a purely natural phenomenon and therefore discounts belief in God. Unfortunately, this fear has often led to issues of science being reduced to the question of whether they appear to offer a reductionist account of reality!

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