Two popular topics among Evangelical Christians for the past several
decades have been origins—especially young-Earth creationism—and
dispensational end-times eschatology (eschatology is the doctrine of
the last things, including the return of Christ and the final
judgment). Young-earth creationism has certainly been the prevailing
dogma in Evangelical Christian education and in many churches and
Christian colleges. Go to a Christian home school convention or book
fair, and books presenting any kind of old-Earth perspective will be
difficult or impossible to find. At the popular level, books on the end
times, such as Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and Tim Lahaye’s Left Behind
series, have been mega best sellers. Many look at these two viewpoints
as grounded in Scripture, and as firm evidence for the truthfulness of
the Bible. Other Christians look at them as questionable, harmful, or
at times downright goofy.
The premise of Beyond Creation Science (subtitle: New Covenant Creation from Genesis to Revelation)
by Timothy Martin and Jeffrey Vaughn is that Evangelical Christians are
wrong about both ends of the Bible. They do an excellent job of laying
out a Biblical case against young-Earth creationism, with its 6000-year
old Earth and global flood. People who only read materials from the
young-Earth organizations, such as Answers in Genesis and the Institute
for Creation Research, are generally quite unaware that there is a vast
amount of conservative, Evangelical Biblical scholarship that shows
that the Bible requires neither a young-Earth nor a global flood, and
Martin and Vaughn do a good job of presenting this case.
I’ll give my thoughts on Martin and Vaughn’s full preterist eschatology in part 2 of this book review.
I have many positive things to say about the authors’ Biblical analysis
of young-Earth creationism. They point out that modern geology, with
its view of billions of years of Earth history, was not devised as an
attack on the Bible or Christianity. Few Christians voiced opposition
to an ancient Earth while the concept was being developed in the 1700s
and 1800s, and many of the most eminent geologists of that time were
themselves Christians...
click here to read part 1
...The basic idea of full preterism is that all of the “end
times” prophecies of the Bible, including those in the Old Testament,
the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24-25 and parallel passages in Mark and
Luke), and in the book of Revelation, were fulfilled in the AD 70
destruction of Jerusalem. In other words, Jesus has already returned
and the resurrection has already happened.
