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Podcast: Is the Age of the Earth a Hill to Die On? (Gavin Ortlund)

July 15, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Can Christians Disagree on the Length of the Creation Days?

In this episode, Gavin Ortlund discusses the Genesis creation account, what the Bible really teaches on the days of creation, and whether there is room for disagreement on this topic within Christian orthodoxy.

Finding the Right Hills to Die On

Finding the Right Hills to Die On

Gavin Ortlund

Pastor Gavin Ortlund uses four basic categories of doctrine to help church leaders consider how and what to prioritize in doctrine and ministry, encouraging humility and grace along the way.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:10 - An Angst That Led to Compassion

Matt Tully
Well, Gavin, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Gavin Ortlund
Happy to be here, Matt. Thanks.

Matt Tully
Speaking about the doctrine of creation and more specific issues like the age of the earth or the nature of the days of Genesis 1, those are topics that probably all of us have thought about it a little bit and we all kind of know the stereotypes about conversations on those issues. But you write, “No issue has been more challenging to fellowship and ministry relationships than these.” What does that look like for you?

Gavin Ortlund
A couple of different scenarios come to my mind. One would be beloved friends of mine who have left the faith. We maintain good friendship, but in some cases, disagreements that they had with Christians on the doctrine of creation were one factor in their experience. And so I’ve tried to be a good friend and listen to their perspective, to their concerns. And that’s really deep in my heart because one of my passions in life is to be a friend to those who are working through doubts. And that sort of grieves me wondering, What can I do to help a friend on this topic?

Matt Tully
Where does that come from? You said that’s a passion of your life. Where has that emphasis come from? Have you struggled with some of these doubts yourself?

Gavin Ortlund
I have. I’ve been through two seasons of what I call “angst.” I like that word more than doubt because I wasn’t really actively doubting, but it was just where you have that basic question of, Am I right about this? Let me think it through more deeply. Let me go back and study it more. And you’re realizing how complicated something might be. And in each of those seasons, the angst was there. One of the benefits of that is I think God gave me a compassion for people. The Bible says “have mercy on those who doubt” in the book of Jude. We see in Matthew 28 that some of the disciples doubted Christ. It always helps me to remember that Thomas is not Judas, as sometimes we treat every Thomas as though they’re a Judas. Thomas doubted, and yet he wasn’t Judas. He was a true Christian and an eventual martyr. We just have to be able to help those that doubt. In fact, I think I could say that’s the greatest vocational passion of my life: to help people who are working through doubts, angst. That’s what I’m trying to do underneath everything else on YouTube and my writing. I want to be a friend to people, to point them toward Christ, that they would have an assurance of salvation and assurance of his love. So that is a big piece of this. And then the other side of it would be having seen dissension sometimes within the church, disunity and suspicion that so many times has seemed unnecessary. There are some hills to die on, and even within the doctrine of creation there are things that we should be willing to die for. But then there’s lots of times where unfortunately we divide and we don’t need to. And so both of those experiences really are deep in my heart. I say, “Lord, help me to be a help to others who might be working through this.”

Matt Tully
And I think as we’re going to explore together in this conversation, would you say that sometimes our propensity to divide over things that maybe aren’t worth dying over, that actually has the effect of even pushing people away from the faith at times?

Gavin Ortlund
Absolutely. I’ve been doing some talks recently on deconstruction and trying to help Christians think about how to relate to our friends or maybe our children or whoever it might be who is going through that experience. I think one of the biggest factors is what we call “theological triage.” And so many times I hear the story over and over where someone deconstructs their faith, and a big piece of that is they were not given the tools to know how to make distinctions between the first rank issues—and I know we’ll talk about these different categories—but just the more central matters of Christian orthodoxy, and then the more peripheral matters.

Matt Tully
We’ll get into that in just a minute. Tipping your hat a little bit more specifically to where you stand on some of these issues related to creation, you write, “Being a pastor in conservative evangelicalism in the United States but not a young earth creationist, how can I describe this? It’s felt like attending the University of Tennessee while being a diehard Georgia fan.” I think college football fans will know exactly what you’re saying there. But maybe for the person who’s not a huge college football fan, what’s another analogy for the way you have felt sometimes on this issue?

Gavin Ortlund
I went to the University of Georgia, so I can relate to that metaphor. Maybe another one would just be going to a foreign culture, where your instincts are a little bit different from the instincts of others on various matters of how you communicate, what is considered polite, things like this. You kind of realize—

Matt Tully
I’m out of sync.

Gavin Ortlund
Yes. You’re out of sync, and you realize all I’m trying to do is follow Jesus. And yet the conviction that God has led me to on this issue creates a sense of distance and suspicion at times. And so you’re trying to figure out what you can do to try to address that and help that and try to be humble and to listen to the concerns that people have and say, Maybe I’m missing something. But at the same time, you never want to have unnecessary division or even unnecessary distance within the body of Christ. Sometimes we have to divide, but my passion is that we never unnecessarily divide. And unfortunately, that does happen a lot in the church today.

Matt Tully
Where would you say this interest of yours in the doctrine of creation has come from? Because if anyone knows you and knows your writing, both your published writing but also writing you’ve done in other contexts, and knows your YouTube channel, Truth Unites, you talk a lot about the doctrine of creation and a lot about these maybe intramural debates and even fights that Christians often have on these issues. Where did that interest come from?

Gavin Ortlund
I think a starting point could be when I was in college at the University of Georgia, and several of my close friends there were not followers of Jesus. I remember one particular comment. It was said in a sort of rolling of the eyes kind of way: “Oh Christians, people who believe the world is only 6–10,000 years old.” And this idea that the world was that recent was just utterly incomprehensible to this person, and it was a major barrier for them taking Christianity seriously. Now whether that’s right or wrong, just the fact that that is such an issue for that person began to set me on a process of doing my own study, doing my own research. And then there’s been lots of episodes along the way like that. I’ve been through my own time of wrestling with this. I’m really interested in science/faith dialogue. So I remember I read through the book Contact by Carl Sagan a few years back. Some listeners might remember the movie that came out in the late 90s from this book. Carl Sagan is a famous agnostic who’s looked up to as kind of a father figure in many scientistic circles and skeptics.

Matt Tully
What do you mean by scientistic?

Gavin Ortlund
People who look at science as the ultimate way of discerning truth. Beyond just being an atheist, really looking at science as being able to deliver the ultimate answers. And people of that mindset really look up to Carl Sagan. And I remember reading that book, which is filled with themes in the book of the dialogue between faith and science. And if people have even seen the movie, a lot of those come out in the movie. And I remember just being fascinated by those questions. And the other piece of it would be being a pastor and seeking to pastor people who are scientists. People in my church, people in my previous church, many of them very scientifically inclined. We often talk about demographics that are uncomfortable within the church. Sometimes scientists struggle in the church, and they wonder, How do I hold together my work as a scientist and my faith? What does that look like? Those have been frequent conversations as well. So I’m just fascinated by this whole topic and how it plays out. And again, the burden is a pastoral one of trying to help people and trying to alleviate any unnecessary anxiety whenever I can.

09:30 - What Is Theological Triage?

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about that. We’ll get into some of your specific beliefs and convictions around things like the age of the earth and the days of creation in just a minute. But you would rank this whole topic—the topic of the age of the earth, the nature of the days, and a few other related issues—you’d rank those as third order doctrines. I wonder if you can explain what that means in particular, and even take a step back and unpack this whole framework around theological triage. That’s this term that you use. What are you getting at when you say that?

Gavin Ortlund
Theological triage is just a way of ranking different doctrines in importance. It’s not saying that doctrines outside of the first rank are unimportant. We’re not just trying to be minimalists who don’t care about doctrine. On the contrary, it really is trying to take all of Scripture seriously and just be a wise theologian. So just to sketch it out a little bit, first rank doctrines would be those that are necessary for being a Christian. They mark out the boundaries of orthodoxy. You might think of something like the Trinity as a first rank doctrine. Second rank doctrines are important enough to break fellowship over.

Matt Tully
That means you maybe don’t worship in the same church.

Gavin Ortlund
That’s right. An example might be that your view of baptism might be a denominational barrier between a Baptist church and a Presbyterian church or something like that. But they don’t make you a Christian or not. People can disagree and still be brothers and sisters in Christ. The third rank issues are still important, but you can have fellowship despite disagreements about them. And that is where I locate a specific question like whether Genesis 1 is teaching a young earth or an old earth or something like that. And then we could even add on fourth rank doctrines, which are just things that don’t matter at all.

Matt Tully
What would be in that category?

Gavin Ortlund
For theological purposes, in the book on triage I give examples like how many angels exist. So it’s interesting to think about, but it’s not really consequential. Whereas with Genesis 1, you could say it’s important. The important thing there is the third rank doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. It just means you don’t have to break fellowship over it. And that’s important because we never want to break fellowship more than we need to.

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful. And unless people get the sense that this whole schema is sort of on the path towards liberalism or some kind of progressive Christianity, you get this term, “theological triage” from none other than Al Mohler. Not exactly the paragon of liberal Christianity.

Gavin Ortlund
And we could even think of Jesus, who spoke of the weightier matters of the law, or the apostle Paul, who is functioning in one way in Galatians 1, where he’s very strident. But then in Romans 14, when it comes to other topics, he’s happy to say, “Don’t pass judgment on disputable matters.” So I just think it’s unavoidable to recognize some things are more central and important than others.

Matt Tully
There’s a biblical precedent for this approach to various doctrinal issues. But even with that said, even if people agree with that, what would you say right now to the person listening who is like, That just makes me nervous. The emphasis on sort of trying to find the lowest common denominator of important doctrines feels like the wrong approach to take to these questions. It feels like it’s going in the wrong direction rather than in a direction towards greater theological fidelity?

Gavin Ortlund
I want to affirm that concern. I think that’s an important concern. Because it can be done really badly to where we start to minimize issues. But if someone could imagine two Christians who are disagreeing on a third rank issue, and they’re fellowshipping with one another, but they are going toe to toe, arguing about it and trying to convince the other side of their view, they’re doing it in a spirit like the Bereans, searching the Scripture to see what is true. Isaiah 66:1–2 talks about trembling before the word of God. They’re doing it in a spirit of trembling before the word of God, so they’re not minimizing it. But at the end of the day, they’re recognizing our unity in Christ is one of those essential doctrines. So if someone wants to say, Because you care so much about this and because you’re trying to convince someone of this, therefore we should break fellowship. That is also a theological compromise, because the New Testament calls us to seek unity with other Christians. I think sometimes people under appreciate the importance of unity in Scripture. John 17, for example. It’s so important.

Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s not just an additional add on. It actually should be a priority in how we think about even other doctrines.

Gavin Ortlund
Exactly.

14:14 - Can the Bible Be Interpreted Literally?

Matt Tully
Before we walk through a few very specific issues related to the biblical creation story, we should first talk about how we approach the Bible. You mentioned the Bereans, and that’s the mindset we want of searching the Scriptures and trying to honestly understand what they say. And one critique that conservative young earth creationists will often have against people like you, old earth creationists, people who embrace an older earth, is that you’re not interpreting the Bible literally. And if you were to interpret the Bible literally, you would have to arrive at a distinctly and unambiguously young earth position on this doctrine. How would you respond to that?

Gavin Ortlund
There are a couple things to say, but the main one is to make a distinction between reading the Bible literally and reading the Bible as fully truthful. At the very beginning here I do want to extend my love and sympathy to people who have this concern. I get it. It can be nerve wracking if you start to feel like someone is playing fast and loose with Scripture. And that’s not the intent here. But if I could just make an appeal that this is an issue in biblical hermeneutics, meaning how we interpret the Scripture, the simple fact is no one can read the Bible literally 100 percent of the time. There are many passages that are intended to be read in a non-literal way. We can think of the book of Psalms. We can think of the book of Song of Solomon. We can think of Revelation and Daniel and even words of Christ, like the apocalyptic literature in Matthew 24, for example. There’s so much in the Scripture like this. You think of the song of Deborah in the book of Judges. Historical events can be relayed in non-literal ways. And I actually think that Berean posture should recognize that and appreciate that. Otherwise, we’re demanding that the Bible function as we want it to function, rather than submitting to its own forms of communication. So I think part of submitting to the Scripture is submitting to how it communicates. And that isn’t always in the most literal possible way. And then there’s probably more we could say about this to kind of nuance this word “literal” a bit, because sometimes that can get us into trouble.

Matt Tully
A lot of it depends on definitions. How do you define literal vs. literalistic perhaps, or a concrete reading of Scripture vs. maybe focusing on the authors? It sounds like you’re kind of saying you want to focus on the author’s intended meeting, and not just the human author, but even God himself as the divine author. That’s the focus of your interpretive efforts, not just a literalistic or surface-level reading of the text itself.

Gavin Ortlund
That’s right. The way I put it is I believe in biblical inerrancy. I think the Scripture is fully true. And I think the truth is determined by the meaning, and that meaning is determined by what the author meant the original audience to receive. So we have to kind of not interpret the Bible as this timeless book, though it is relevant to all times, but it has a historical context. So we need to pay attention to the genre of different books of Scripture and get into the weeds of these difficult hermeneutical issues. Sometimes people are impatient with the complexities of interpreting the Scripture, but there’s really no way around that. If we want to take the Bible seriously, I think we have to submit to the difficult task of seeking after the original meaning of the text.

Matt Tully
It strikes me that that’s harder to do sometimes than just taking a first pass. You read the Bible in English. It says what it says. It says “days” in Genesis 1, and so that’s obviously 24 hours. I’m just going to sort of accept that on face value.

Gavin Ortlund
Right. Sometimes people, and this is why I mentioned that the word “literal” is kind of tricky, sometimes people by “literal,” what they really mean is how it strikes me when I first read it.

Matt Tully
Without really any study.

Gavin Ortlund
Exactly. And they’ve not read other ancient Near Eastern cosmologies or other ancient Near Eastern creation texts. Nor have they necessarily really delved into the literature, into the commentaries, into the original language. And so I think we just need a lot of humility to have patience to kind of work at this topic and not assume we always know exactly what the text means.

18:29 - How Important Is Creation Ex Nihilo?

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about creation itself. I’d love to hear your take on how we should think about a number of specific issues, both from a biblical perspective, what the text is actually trying to tell us, but also from the perspective of engaging with people who might have different views. What rank order is this particular facet of our doctrine of creation? So first up, let’s talk about creation ex nihilo. That’s a term that maybe we’ve heard before. Maybe some people are familiar, maybe some aren’t. What does that mean, and how important is that idea?

Gavin Ortlund
It means creation from nothing. It’s a way of prioritizing the creator over the creation. I would say this is a first rank issue. You can look back in church history and see some early Christians, like Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Christians who wondered about a different model. There’s this idea in the ancient world of God kind of shaping matter, and that’s creation, but it was pre-existing. The early Christians faced that question, and that was really more of their focus than on the specific question of what’s the nature of the days. They talked about that. Maybe we’ll get into that a little bit. But the battles they were willing to fight were more over this topic that creation is from nothing, therefore it is contingent, which means not necessary.

Matt Tully
Creation is contingent.

Gavin Ortlund
Creation is contingent. God did not have to create. It’s not as though God and creation are these two opposing forces that must exist. God is self sufficient. He didn’t need to create, and that creation is good. That was another thing that the early Christians were willing to fight over.

Matt Tully
The physical creation around us is actually a good thing.

Gavin Ortlund
Exactly.

Matt Tully
That’s so interesting because that reflects their own day. That reflects maybe the controversies, the philosophical ideas of their own day, whereas for us, we can sometimes assume those things are obvious to us, that the physical world isn’t inherently bad or that we believe in creation out of nothing. It’s just interesting that so much of our attention on a passage, even like the creation account, is wrapped up in the culture around us and what we experience.

Gavin Ortlund
Exactly. It’s very sanctifying to go to the early church and immerse ourselves in that different context and see the battles they fought and the way they fought those battles. And it really sets the battles we’re fighting today in a broader context that I think is helpful to see.

20:53 - Old Earth vs. Young Earth

Matt Tully
We’re going to talk a little bit more about church history and the value that can have as we think about these doctrines in a minute. Next topic: How about the age of the earth? How should Christians approach that? As you said, many Christians probably listening right now who grew up in maybe a more conservative type of church context will say, I was just always taught that the earth is 6,000–10,000 years old. I’m pretty sure if you count up all the genealogies, that’s sort of where you land. I’ve kind of always accepted that and haven’t really known how to fit that with what we hear in science classrooms. How do you think about that issue?

Gavin Ortlund
The position I’ve argued for is that it is not a first rank issue. In the book on theological triage that we’ve talked about before as well, I even put that into the third rank category. There’s so much to that, but just a few things to say. One is with regard to Scripture, when we’re seeking after what the author meant, I would say with genealogies, they are not intended to be an exhaustive timeline. They do skip generations at times, and that’s pretty uncontroversial. People recognize that with genealogies you can’t always just add them up and get to the exact year. Also, of course, the earth is older on any model than humanity. It might be a little bit older or a lot older. So even if you add up all the genealogies, that doesn’t give you the exact timeframe, unless you’re assuming that the days are twenty-four hour periods of time that are sequential. One of the factors for me is there’s lots in Genesis 1 that I think alerts us to the fact that this is not intended to be as we might think of like a modern scientific portraiture account that’s telling you exactly how you can picture it all happening. But also a factor is church history and just seeing how many other even early modern Christians, people that we think of as very conservative—I’ll just give one example here. J. Gresham Machen wrote the wonderful book Christianity and Liberalism. He’s a staunch defender of biblical inerrancy.

Matt Tully
He’s a pillar of Christian orthodoxy in the twentieth century.

Gavin Ortlund
Absolutely. One of the people you think of as defending, really at that time, you could even call it the fundamentalist cause. At that time, in the 1920s. He was an old earth creationist, and he didn’t even have much anxiety about defending that. It just wasn’t as much of a battle. It was there, but it wasn’t as intense at that point. You can go back earlier to people like Charles Spurgeon. He was an old earth creationist. Sometimes people have forgotten this, but a lot of these conservative, stalwart Orthodox Christians were able to look at Genesis 1 and say this isn’t trying to give us that much information. The purpose of the text is something other than giving you an exhaustive timeline.

Matt Tully
Like a chronology that you could just like plot out. So then what do you make of the day, the language of “days” in Genesis 1? Again, in a plain reading of the text, we come to that and we see “there was morning and there was evening, the first day. . . . the second day.” And you kind of just think, Well, I guess that just means a normal day. So what is it about the text that would lead you to question if that’s actually how we should be interpreting that?

Gavin Ortlund
Genesis is one of those passages where the more decades that go by, because I’ve been thinking about this now for about twenty years, since I was in college and it started, the more I see some of the nuances and subtleties in the text that make it not so straightforward. One that was significant for Saint Augustine—he was a great early Christian who I’ve done some research on in relation to this topic—and he pointed out that there’s light before you have luminaries. So there’s days one through three with light, and then you get the light- making bodies on day four. So he was saying, Why were the first three days twenty-four hours to begin with? Because you didn’t have a sun yet. What happened there?

Matt Tully
What do young earth creationists say to that question? I’ve heard that question before. What would be the typical response from someone who really wants to hold to literal twenty-four hour days?

Gavin Ortlund
There are various responses, and I always want to try to steel man the young earth view.

Matt Tully
Rather than straw man.

Gavin Ortlund
Yes. I want to try to put it in its best light and make it as cogent as possible. And there are multiple answers to that, and they have answers to that. They can explain that in various ways. Some will say the light came from God, for example, but I just raise it as a question not to kind of settle it, but it’s a gesture towards some of the issues that as you’re reading through you realize this isn’t so straightforward. It’s not so obvious. And there are a couple of things like that in the passage, several of which were picked up by Augustine as giving him some pause and saying, This is tricky to interpret this.

Matt Tully
And that’s important hitting on Augustine, because oftentimes you’ll hear young earth creationists want to say that these concerns or these new-fangled interpretations of the Genesis creation account are really driven not by textual issues. They’re really driven by modern scientific “discoveries,” and it’s inappropriate to allow those extrabiblical issues to dictate how we interpret Scripture. But Augustine wasn’t operating in a modern scientific perspective.

Gavin Ortlund
Exactly. And Augustine’s view was not his alone. There’s a great book by someone named Andrew Brown called The Days of Creation. It’s a historical chronology of all of church history on Genesis 1. And Augustine was one among many figures in the early church. And then many following Augustine agreed that the days are not twenty-four hour periods of time. His view became a common medieval view. And I want to clarify because people will often say, But Augustine wasn’t an old earth creationist. And I would agree with that.
He had no reason to think the universe was super old, but the most relevant point is he didn’t read the text as teaching twenty-four hour days or giving you an exact chronology. So he just said you’re sort of open for how you would define that.

Matt Tully
It’s not really the point of the text.

Gavin Ortlund
Right. Exactly.

Matt Tully
I think it’s important to highlight here too your posture in all of this is you have your perspective, you think the earth is old, you don’t think the days of creation in Genesis 1 are meant to be taken as twenty-four hour literal days, and yet you want to maintain an openness to those people who hold those opinions. How would you distinguish between how you would approach these issues and maybe how the young earth creationist who feels like this is a really central issue for them would tend to approach it?

Gavin Ortlund
And within all the different camps, you can find different levels of intensity that a view is held with. I’ve got wonderful young earth creationist friends who it almost feels like we’re on the same team in that we’re both saying this is not actually a matter of orthodoxy, or even, you know, distinguishing those who have a high view of Scripture versus a low view of Scripture or something like that. So my heart for this is not that I’ve got to convince others to think just like I do. I recognize this is a complicated issue, and I just believe that people who hold to an older earth and a younger earth can have unity in the gospel. That is really as simple as it is for me.

Matt Tully
That’s the main priority in all this.

Gavin Ortlund
Exactly. The main priority is that we seek the truth on this topic. And as we seek the truth, it does not disrupt Christian unity and Christian witness. And that happens way too much, in my opinion.

28:07 - Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?

Matt Tully
Let’s go to another related doctrine here, that of Adam and Eve and even the fall itself—the narrative of them sinning for the first time, and then all the results from that. How do you think about that particular issue, and how central is that to our doctrinal fidelity?

Gavin Ortlund
I’m glad you asked about this because sometimes people assume that if you’re not affirming a young earth, therefore you must not be affirming a historical Adam and Eve. But I think affirming a historical Adam and Eve as real people and a historical fall is very important. And the reason for that is several things. One, I think it’s the most faithful reading of Scripture. I think that in Genesis 2 and 3, there are some nuances that we have to work through for how it’s relating the historical fall. Augustine gets into those, but there are two people. Adam, for example, is included in genealogies in the Bible. And it tells us how old he was when he died and how old he was when certain children were born. So I think that’s the best way to read Scripture. Another thing is we have to account for human uniqueness, and I think that’s the best way to understand human uniqueness. Another is we want to avoid having a problem of evil with respect to human nature. If you don’t have a historical fall, a time at which human beings were good and then became bad. But if you have, rather, human beings were just created as fallen from the beginning, which is what you end up with without a historical fall, that creates a major problem for what we call theodicy, which is answering the problem of evil. So I think a historical fall is important from that angle as well. So for lots of different reasons, I think we want to retain that. Now, there are some who think you can have a historical Adam and Eve and a historical fall, and they will want to maintain that even alongside some forms of evolution. And so there are people who go that route. And even people like John Stott, for example, would be in that direction. So I’m just wanting to flag people’s attention to be aware that’s out there. But the issue of Adam and Eve and a fall, to me, is important.

30:09 - What about Evolution?

Matt Tully
Speak about that topic of evolution and how that fits in. So often when it comes to questions of the age of the earth and what have you, there can be the sense that we’re always moving towards this maybe boogeyman doctrine, if you put it that way, for the conservative Christian type. How have you sought to navigate the broader questions around evolution?

Gavin Ortlund
It’s a very tough issue because the very word raises concerns immediately and fears, but the term can mean so many different things. Because everybody believes in evolution to some degree. And some of our young earth creationist friends even have pretty ambitious forms of evolution for after the flood, because—not all young earth creationists—many think that after the animals got off of the ark, there was a rapid evolution to repopulate the world with the animal kingdom. And then even those who wouldn’t go that far, we all recognize that evolution is just, to some degree, it’s just a function of living in a world where things are changing. And so people sometimes will distinguish microevolution from macroevolution—change within a species versus change from one species to another. And so I think the important point to recognize is that certain forms of evolution can exist that are not the capital E evolution, which is where you have it as the driving paradigm and it explains everything, and it’s even kind of a philosophical worldview for understanding reality. So I think it’s important to distinguish the more modest forms of evolution from a full-blown paradigm.

Matt Tully
The materialistic view of evolution that intentionally eliminates God from the equation altogether.

Gavin Ortlund
Exactly.

31:59 - Was There Death before the Fall?

Matt Tully
One more particular doctrinal issue that often is raised in conversations about the age of the earth, and I think it seems it is raised mostly by people who would advocate for an old earth. Part of that advocacy would entail accepting the idea of animal death before the fall. And I think that can be a really big stumbling block for a lot of Christians who feels like it’s kind of crossing a line, where we would say all death is attributed to the fall. And so to have any kind of animal death—maybe plant death is left a little bit more ambiguous—but any animal death feels like there’s a theological problem at that point with accepting that pre fall. How do you respond to that?

Gavin Ortlund
There’s so much to this, but just to hit maybe like two of the big issues that come up here, one would be we start to appreciate the complexity of this, where you try to make the cutoff of what kinds of death are okay and what kinds aren’t. Some will say plant death is okay, but animal death isn’t. But then there are other forms of organic life you have to define, like fungi or protists or other things that aren’t in the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom. And that even within the animal kingdom, a lot of young earth creationists are open to there being insect death. So then you start to say, well, like invertebrate animals maybe could die. And it’s hard to know where to make that cutoff. And what that shows us is we’ve all got to wrestle with this a little bit. What kinds of death are okay before the fall? In Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, Paul teaches that death came into the world through sin. But I think a good case can be made that he is thinking specifically in those contexts of human death because of the Adam-Christ typology and the language about “all will be raised” and “all died . . . all shall be made alive.” That seems like it’s talking about the resurrection through Christ. It looks like it’s talking about human beings in those passages. And actually, throughout the Scripture you have a lot of discussion of animal death where it doesn’t seem to be a part of something that’s always evil. Psalm 104 talks about God providing food for the lions. I think sometimes in the modern world, we have a more emotional reaction to animal death. I can sympathize with that because this has been a part of what I’ve struggled with on this topic. But I’ve gotten to a point where, for example, what’s helped me, and this is the only other thing I’ll mention on this, is the pre-modern Christians had a completely different set of instincts about this. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Basil, and these other great early Christian leaders, they all said that carnivores didn’t start at the fall, that God created carnivores from the beginning. In other words, they all affirmed animal death before the fall. They said lions and tigers were not vegetarians before Genesis 3. They all said that. I’ve not found anybody who’s gone against that. So to me, that alerts us to the need to be self-critical about our modern instincts. And sometimes I think we’re a little bit sentimental in the way we think about it. I don’t know that it’s 100 percent clear that all animal death is necessarily evil. I think we need to be careful with that, especially because sometimes the charge is then we’re making God the author of evil. And I just think I’m not convinced of that. I think we need to be careful before we make that charge.

Matt Tully
It seems like part of that could be that it comes back to anthropology, where we maybe have, ironically, we’ve imbibed a modern scientific view of the world where humans and animals are sort of equivalent. We’re kind of like extra special animals, whereas I think in a biblical worldview, humans are categorically a different thing than animals. So it might make sense for animal death to be categorically a different thing—ethically, morally—than human death.

Gavin Ortlund
That’s right. You think of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and Adam is naming the animals, and they have to have some kind of understanding of the word “death” in order to understand the threat of “on the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.” And what a lot of people have argued is that they would have understood the concept of death from looking out at the non-human world around them.

35:53 - Are We Focusing on the Wrong Things?

Matt Tully
Oh, interesting. So one of the things that I found very helpful from the book that you point out is that sometimes when we inappropriately elevate a tertiary, like some of these creation doctrines, or even a secondary doctrine to a place of primary importance, when we make it something that we divide over and that we start to question someone else’s salvation over, that ends up having a deformative impact on those doctrines themselves, and even on our theological system as a whole. You write, “It’s a historical irony that American evangelicals have tended to divide over the peripheral aspects of creation and eschatology while ignoring the more central aspects of these doctrines.” I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit more for the doctrine of creation. In what ways has maybe our historic obsession with some of these doctrines and the ways we’ve even divided as Christians maybe distracted us from the more central elements of this doctrine?

Gavin Ortlund
I’m so glad you asked about this because what I see is that at the same time as we are often fighting too much over the specific question of the age of the world, important as that is, sometimes we’re neglecting what’s more central to the doctrine of creation. I’ll give some examples. The idea of vocation. Sometimes Christians haven’t really given enough attention to the idea of vocation, the importance of vocation, the importance of calling in the idea of creation in God’s image. Most Christians have heard of that, but the implications of that for how we address social issues today. Another would be the fact that we’re bodily creatures. We are embodied. That actually is very significant. There’s a profound relationship between how we treat our body and how our soul is affected. And so we need to think about those kinds of things. I imagine people listening to this probably have lots of different kinds of professions and careers. Maybe someone listening to this is a tennis player or something like that. Or maybe someone’s a teacher or a scientist. If we have a robust doctrine of creation, that will give us categories to understand the legitimacy and importance of all of those different vocations. And at the same time, as we sometimes fight so much, sometimes we’re just not harnessing the riches that we have in this doctrine for how it equips us to live as creatures in God’s world. Even just that category, sometimes we think of ourselves as Christians, and we never think as much about that we’re human beings. We’re actually creatures. And so that profoundly affects our Christian life and profoundly affects every day of our life. How we even treat basic things like exercise and sleep, how we think about friendship and the importance of friendship. In a perfect world, Adam was still lonely and he needed a helper. So there’s so much to creation that can enrich our lives that is worth exploring and giving more attention to.

Matt Tully
It strikes me that so many of the big cultural flashpoint issues that we see around us today, often the pressure points that we as Bible-believing Christians can feel in our prevailing secular culture around us—things like gender and sexuality and marriage, the good life, what does that look like?—for so many of those, the Christian roots for our understanding of those go back to the garden itself and what God was doing there. But we sometimes don’t, as you said, mine the riches of that as well as we could.

Gavin Ortlund
If Christians had a glorious, wonderful, beautiful vision of creation, of how good it is that God has made us as embodied, that the goodness of marriage as an institution that God created, if we started from that standpoint of the goodness of creation, I think that would equip us for then doing the further work we need to do in all those issues.

39:46 - The Pursuit of Peace for the Sake of the Gospel

Matt Tully
Maybe last question. Sometimes when it comes to contentious theological issues, like the doctrine of creation, we can think that true courage or true strength is most clearly evidenced in our willingness to fight. To boldly stand up against compromise and defend what we see as the truth from Scripture. And yet you write, “We should eagerly pursue the kind of theological strength and conviction that’s willing not only to fight for the truth, but also to avoid fighting in order to promote the gospel. That’s the best kind of strength.” What do you mean by that?

Gavin Ortlund
Well, in that sentence there are the words “not only.” So I am commenting that there are times to fight. There are times to say, like Martin Luther when he said, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” I think all of us will have issues like that, where we need to basically just say, I’ll take the consequences. If I get thrown into jail, if I lose my friends, I’ll stand for the truth of the gospel. But sometimes we can be doing that from a fleshly motivation, when it feels like it puffs us up and makes us feel important. And sometimes we don’t have wisdom in how we do that, and we can have that posture toward every issue. And that is not wise, and that is not even really courageous a lot of the times. So what I mean by that is just having the wisdom to make those distinctions, and there are lots of times when what actually takes more courage, perhaps, will be the vulnerability of listening and slowing down. And really, sometimes it actually takes courage to consider a different perspective. That is not always comfortable and easy. And so I just feel that the ability to have a principled Irenicism. The word Irenicism, meaning you’re aiming for peace with other people, especially other Christians. There’s not a compromise. It’s principled, but it is Irenic. I think that does take courage. There are many times where you will be criticized for that. We live in a polarizing world. You’ll take a lot of backlash at times for that, but it seems to me to be the way of Christ. And it seems to me to be the way that will most effectively serve God’s kingdom in the days in which we live.

Matt Tully
Gavin, thank you so much for walking us through this difficult doctrine, the doctrine of creation. It’s a foundational doctrine. Thank you for helping us navigate some of these controversial issues.

Gavin Ortlund
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Matt.

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