Review of "The Misted World of Genesis One" by Michael Drake

Wycliffe Scholastic, Auckland New Zealand October 9, 2020

Section 1 A True Text, Section 2 A True Message

339 pages including bibliography, general index and Scripture index

$12.50 paperback, $9.95 Kindle

“In July 2013 two distinguished biblical scholars separately visited Auckland New Zealand and spoke on Genesis One” (p. 3). They were Professor John Walton of Wheaton College and Professor John “Jack” Collins from Covenant Theological Seminary.    Michael Drake, the author of The Misted World of Genesis One, is founding principal of a grade 1 – 13 Christian School in Auckland, New Zealand.  His publications include books and papers on biblical theology, Christian education and practical Christianity.  He found his belief challenged that Genesis One describes six 24-hour days.  He listened to their lectures, read their written works and viewed and listened to their recordings, which are representative of respected contemporary evangelical Old Testament scholarship, characterized by an awareness of Ancient Near Eastern literature and culture, genre and other language conventions.

Here is his conclusion, “The result was a clarity I have never before known as to the meaning, message and significance of Genesis One.”  Translation: Genesis means exactly what it says!

Having reviewed other contemporary evangelical Old Testament scholarship, Drake found a spectrum of views from conservative to liberal, but “the plenary inspiration of an infallible Bible that expresses timeless propositional truth in the plain words used is no longer one of them.”

Yet those theologians want to be known as evangelical and use an evangelical vocabulary for ideas that are not part of historical evangelicalism but are instead heavily influenced by current philosophical trends like post modernism, scientism, commitment to evolution, and “sentimental Christian existentialism that displaces doctrine in favor of relationships” (p. 4).

“The fraternal of scholars redefining evangelicalism find in the expanding knowledge of ancient cultures, languages and literature, tools for understanding God’s Word as God’s Word.”  Aside from believing in God’s Word, they sound just like the old liberals.  “Virtually nothing is untouched: The Bible’s plenary inspiration, its verbal inspiration, its epistemological priority, its transcendence and its conveying of the truth” (p. 4). Apparently if you have expanding knowledge, you have to apply it.

Why is Genesis One being targeted as incomprehensible without obtaining special knowledge of cultural and linguistic studies?  Why not the virgin birth or the resurrection of Jesus?  There is something special about the claims of Genesis. If you say, “I believe God created the heavens and the earth in six days, several thousand years ago,” you are instantly looked on as certifiably weird.  Believing in miracles can be excused as part of the mind game of religion, but don’t mess with things confirmed by science, like evolution and millions of years.

But can they be confirmed?  After Whitcomb and Morris’, The Genesis Flood was published, a flood of peer reviewed creationist literature began.  Design in life was supported quickly and easily communicated to open minded people by comparison with human design.  Support for the Biblical timetable was slower in coming, but to those of us who came out of some form of belief in long ages, it took answers to a number of questions before we felt confident of supporting the idea to a potentially skeptical audience. 

To a non-scientist, who accepts “the executive summary of evolution,” it all fits together so neatly that any one of a number of “problems for the creationist” is considered fatal to that position.  That would be the fossil record, the presence of missing links, the evolution of whales or horses and distant starlight.  The answers to these, while not as straightforward as comparing life to design in a watch, are eminently answerable.  A non-scientific person, however, will likely be uninterested in what they consider a long or complicated explanation.  A scientific person, in an academic environment may risk his livelihood by even showing interest.

Intellectuals, whether or not they identify as Christians, find that simple answers are not particularly valued.  It is a point of pride to be able to tolerate ambiguity.  But inextricably, tolerance can turn into a downright affinity.  Thus “deep” arguments are admired.  And in cases where the argument is not supported by data or argument, ambiguity is essential.  

John Walton has produced a deep theology in which death before sin is covered by the idea that God was most concerned with assigning functions to whatever was somehow mysteriously happening in the background. “God does not give details of how things have been formed” (p.77). A plain reading of the text surely indicates that God made them!

Walton, however, insists that the truth is hidden from all except the enlightened elite, contrary to the principle of the Reformation that the Word of God, in the hands of the believer, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, can arrive at the truth that God wants us to have.

What he misses is that Genesis One is not an example of Ancient Near Eastern culture’s creation myths, where gods fight for supremacy in a pre-existing cosmos and man is created from fragments of a slain god laced with spit (p. 95). 

Genesis is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!  God existed before anything else and created it all.  Man, male and female, in the image of God, were made of the created material.  Their function was assigned with their creation, to be fruitful and multiply and to rule over the creatures.  And it was very good!  

It is ironic that present day scholars, under the influence of present-day culture and language conventions, have managed to lose their way through Genesis One and never get to Genesis Three, where the arch-typical temptation, which parallels their own, is first exposed:  question God’s Word, tell a lie, then question God’s motivation.  Spin the result.

Ross S. Olson MD

ross@rossolson.org

Published by permission of Creation Research Society Quarterly