Destined to Live: A Theology of Redemption from an Old Earth Perspective

By Don McLellan

Can Christians believe in a thirteen-billion-year-old universe and still call themselves evangelical?

Don McLellan believes he can. He takes the Bible as the final, truthful, and reliable authority for his faith while not denying facts of cosmology, geology, and paleontology. He then shows how its teaching enables men and women

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sugartown Publishing
• Release date: Jan 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781639887828

Book preview

DESTINED

TO

LIVE

Don McLellan

DESTINED

TO

LIVE

A THEOLOGY OF REDEMPTION

FROM AN OLD EARTH

PERSPECTIVE

atmosphere press

© 2023 Don McLellan

Published by Atmosphere Press

Cover design by Ronaldo Alves

No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author except in brief quotations and in reviews.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.®

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

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My dear Deborah,

Rachel,

Sarah,

and James,

four outstanding children any man would be proud of,

I pray that these words will help you to understand

where your Daddy is coming from,

and going to.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Why this book?

Chapter 2: On theology and truth

Chapter 3: The Question of Revelation

Chapter 4: Creation ex nihilo

Chapter 5: Death and its biblical significance

Chapter 6: The Resurrection – An event in history

Chapter 7: The Resurrection in Theology

Epilogue: Destined to Live!

Appendix

Chapter 1: Why this book?

Conflicting thoughts about creation have dogged me for much of my life.

In my youth, my father rejected the theory of evolution and owned many books supporting the idea that the earth is about 6,000 years old. As a young Christian I read these avidly and took on what they taught. Dad’s brother was a high school maths and science teacher, and he was incredulous when Dad revealed his commitment to a young-earth theory. Uncle Gordon thought there must surely be a corollary: Do you believe the earth is flat? Dad replied that the Bible does not teach this, and cited Isaiah 40:22, He sits above the circle of the earth … That was good enough for me then. I now have quite a different understanding of what that text is saying.

I still have grave difficulty with theories of evolution, even as one is posited by some Christians in the form of fully gifted creation. People who hold this view believe that God created matter in such a way that it would ultimately form life, and life could evolve into its myriad species. There are some genuine evangelicals among those who support this theory, although the Young Earth camp would probably accuse them of liberalism at best, heresy at worst. I simply cannot look at anything we know of the universe, including earth’s life forms, and believe that any of it was left to chance, gifted that way or not. The more science delves into the physical universe at every level, particularly into life forms, the more it reveals amazing, complex, clever design. And putting it simply, design this sophisticated implies an intelligent designer, one involved in every step from design to end product. In my mind, this makes me a creationist.

As the years went by however, I began to doubt the Six-Day creationists, and the doubts grew over time. They became critical when a senior pastor of our denomination recommended a creationist professor from the USA to give talks to the young adults in the Australian church where I was a relatively young pastor. I respected this brother highly, so I issued the invitation. The creationist gave two talks, one of which was, Did Adam have a navel? His answer was that he did, because all humans have them. The other talk answered an equally banal and pointless question. Incredulous and bemused, I asked some searching questions in the Q&A time that followed, and he struggled to provide cogent answers. After everyone else had left the building, he chided me for asking them. I had made him look foolish. That was never my intention, and the incident made me question my assumptions about the reasoning of young-earth experts.

Soon afterwards I had an exchange of letters with a young-earth creationist who had been a friend when we were teenagers. By then he was the editor of Creation Ex Nihilo, a periodical published by a young-earth creationist group. I asked him to explain where the light on Days 1-3 came from when the sun was not created until Day 4. In reply he simply sent me a back issue of the periodical. Obviously, the answer in it went, God used a different light for the first three days before switching on the sun. There was no explanation of what the light was or why God did that, let alone any attempt to address some basic realities of the solar system. This did not satisfy me, and I felt fobbed off.

My father, concerned that I might be developing theologically liberal tendencies, began to forward me his copies of Creation Ex Nihilo. This did not help at all. Sometimes, in their enthusiasm to support young-earth theories, they made analogies that plainly didn’t fit. In one example I recall, the magazine used the phenomenon of calcification to prove that petrification could happen in a brief time span. Even with my limited knowledge of geology, I knew these are quite different phenomena. I was also increasingly disturbed by the frequent inference, and occasional outright assertion, that scientists who declare that the universe is old are all part of a vast demonic conspiracy with an agenda to destroy Christianity. I know that all men are liars (Psalm 116:11), and I don’t exonerate myself, but the method of science is to identify phenomena, suggest explanations, find ways to test these extensively, and then take the best explanations as the ones most likely to be true. This is the well-known process of verification and falsification, and it is open-ended. Who knows how many scientific facts have been overturned by later research?¹ It makes sense to doubt old science, and that is what good scientists never stop doing. But it makes little sense to reject explanations that are much more cogent than alternatives. Although they often did well in pointing out the sheer absurdity of the proposition that complex designs do not need a designer, articles in Creation Ex Nihilo frequently failed the test of best explanation for phenomena. They amounted to special pleading because of a commitment to biblical inerrancy, the idea that the Bible cannot be trusted if it is not true in every assertion it makes.

About then, I realised that most young-earth proponents accept that the furthermost galaxies in our universe are some 13.7 billion light years away. If the estimates of cosmologists are right, by definition we are looking at light that emanated from those distant galaxies 13.7 billion years ago. There are young-earth proponents who have ways of explaining away this apparent age of the universe, but their explanations are not cogent, and again, almost all of them fall into the category of special pleading. The inescapable conclusion is that the universe is old. It has been around for at least 13.7 billion years. The human race has only been documenting its own history, at varying levels of sophistication, over the past 10,000 years or so – a mere sneeze in the time frame of the universe. Only now is humankind beginning to appreciate some of the enormous complexities of the earth and the cosmos.

So here I am, convinced that the universe is very old and inconceivably vast but equally convinced that there is a God who created it and whose hand has been in every single aspect of creation along the way.

This would probably not matter much if young-earth proponents merely held a different opinion. But many of them insist that if the earth was not created in six revolutions of the planet about 6,000 years ago, the doctrine of atonement through the death and resurrection of Christ cannot stand. In other words, there is theological skin in the matter. In part, this is because they believe God introduced death after the fall to facilitate our salvation.

I am writing to show that this is not necessarily so. I have good reasons. There are people who find it difficult to accept the gospel if they must first agree that major earth sciences are misleading. Geology, cosmology, and palaeontology are among the many sciences, almost all of whose experts are so convinced that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, that most of them take it for granted. If a person cannot be saved unless they embrace young-earth paradigms, a lot of thoughtful people will never be saved. People who think all evangelicals deliberately ignore facts are not likely to find the gospel attractive, especially if the gospel appears to be linked to the idea that the earth is young and there was no death before Adam. I see this as a very serious problem. It is no less than a stumbling block to honest seekers I have encountered, and in my experience, a significant factor in young adults from Christian families abandoning evangelical Christianity when they go to college and university.

As I have developed these views, fears have also developed that many conservative evangelicals I love dearly may feel I have betrayed them. It is my conscience that compels me to write this book. Its purpose is not merely to contribute to the old-earth / young earth debate, but to explore the concept of redemption and resurrection, to see if they can fit into an old-earth belief system. It may seem a long journey to get to the resurrection from an old-earth creationist position, but I hold the view that good theology is all of a piece. In theology classes I have often told my students, Sound theology all starts in Genesis 1. The sequence is creation, fall, covenant, redemption, and glory. The resurrection of the righteous to bear the human nature of the resurrected Jesus seems to me to be the end game of the whole reason for us being here. The human race was created to enjoy eternal fellowship with God, not merely to pass on their genes and then rot in the ground. To understand this amazing future, we must begin by looking at the past.

My first task is to establish how my theology is done. Theology must be based on fact as far as fact can be determined, hence my opening reflection on the nature of truth. As an evangelical Christian, the final authority for what I believe and practice is the Bible. I must also consider things like traditional interpretations, the role of the human intellect, and the role of human experience.

This book aims to show that the gospel of Jesus Christ can be explained cogently, even if the universe is very old. We do not need a young earth, six literal days of creation, and no death before Adam, to understand the redemption God has provided in Jesus Christ. I publish it with the prayer that my young-earth friends will accept my position, or at least respect that I remain firmly evangelical. But more importantly, I publish it in the hope that honest seekers will understand the gospel and respond to the claims of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Don McLellan.

Dubito ergo credo*

*The Latin motto means I doubt, therefore I believe.

Chapter 2: On theology and truth

Truth matters. This is a primary assumption of the theological task. People may attempt to build their theology on the proposition that the moon is a large blob of Philadelphia cheese, but few would believe them. Truth matters so much that, before anything else, we must explore what it is, how it functions, and why it matters. Here are eleven propositions on truth that govern my approach to theology.

Truth is fact communicated. No more, no less.

A fact is something that simply is. Philosophers have struggled with this, asking whether things exist in themselves or only exist in the mind of the observer. Renée Descartes pondered whether our very existence is a delusion, and finally articulated his conclusion: Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum—I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I exist. This didn’t end the matter. Some philosophers were still not convinced. Thankfully, some wag wrote a wonderful limerick in response:

A nihilist thinker from Deal

once said, "Although nothing is real,

when I sit on a pin

and it punctures my skin,

I don’t like what I fancy I feel."²

Things do not cease to exist when they are out of sight, nor do they