The Westminster Confession of Faith
Chapter 4.1 - Of Creation





Confession teaches
o That the world is not self-existing or eternal
o That it derives its existence from the true God
o That he made all things out of nothing
o That he then formed the universe through process until it was very good in his sight
o That he did all of this for his own glory
Modern Scientific dogma teaches in contrast
o That the universe is self-existent or eternal
o That it does not have a derived subsistence - that it was not created out of nothing
o That the present form of the world is the result of a process of selection controlled not by
God, but by the principle of the survival of the fittest
o That there is no ultimate reason for it all
 There are those who reject the Christian view of creation, arguing instead for a kind
of self creation, a spontaneous generation in which things just pop into being
 It is one thing to mean that the universe came into being as a result of an
explosion caused by something other than the universe
 It is another thing to believe that the universe by its own power exploded
into being
Until the Enlightenment the most firmly established article of the Christians faith in the secular
world was that of creation
o It was established not only by revelation but also by reason
 To medieval philosophers the idea of something coming from nothing was absurd,
unscientific, and illogical
o Atheists and secularists in recent centuries have focused their attention on creation
 If they can undermine the certainty that we live in a created universe they can
undermine the argument for the existence of God
 If you do away with creation you do away with a creator
Classic Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo developed by Augustine
o Augustine taught that God spoke the universe into being out of nothing
 God did not take any pre-existing matter or substance and reshape or reconfigure it
into the present world - his creative activity is not like and artist
 Michelangelo's genius was his unique ability to reshape a block of stone
into a magnificent figure - but he had to start with some substance / material
o By what means did God create ex nihilo?
 By his speech - Augustine termed it divine fiat or divine imperative
 God spoke "Let there be" - meaning there must be and things appeared
 Power of his word that created
Perhaps the chief point at which it is commonly thought that science contradicts Scripture is the
process of forming the original stuff of creation into its finished state took place in six days
o Fossils are said to be proof
 It is assumed that God could not or would not have quickly produced the world
which so evidently bears the appearance of great age
 If God created Adam as an adult person, he would have appeared as an
adult appears to us now, and yet would really have had no long period of
prior development




We can see no good reason to doubt that God did create the world in six
brief days with the appearance of age in the things created
One of more controversial issues even with in theological circles is the when of creation
o In our day considerable theories have risen denying six 24 hour days
 Common to these theories is the acceptance of the dominate scientific view that the
earth and life on it are very old
 They are attempts to reconcile science and theology
Scholars have proposed four basic theories to explain the time frame of Genesis 1-2
o The gap theory - made popular by Scofield Reference Bible - Dispensationalism
 Scofield reads in Gen. 1:2 and the earth became without form and void and
darkness was upon the face of the deep - instead of was
 V2 describes what scholars consider the not yet ordered basic structure of universe
 Result - only v1 refers to the original creation - v2 refers to a cosmic
catastrophe which was originally good and properly ordered creation
became chaotic, dark and fallen
 After this period of darkness (the gap) God recreates the universe in six
days beginning with v3 - Gap explains millions of years of science
o Day-Age theory - each day of Genesis 1 may be an age
 2 Peter 3:8 one day in the Lord's sight is like a thousand years
 Hebrew word YOM - day - can mean something other than a 24 hour period
 Accordingly each day in Genesis 1 may refer to a thousand years, and
perhaps even to millions of years
o Framework Hypothesis - developed by Dutch Nicholas Ridderbos - literary form of the
book's first few chapters different from the latter chapters
 Beginning chapters of Genesis are a mixture of historical narrative and poetry
 Poetic structure being repeated - so the evening and the morning were the
first day - drama in seven acts - speaking serpent / tree of knowledge
o God's work took place in seven distinct stages - which incidentally
fit remarkable well in to the stages identified by modern theories of
cosmic evolution
 In America - disseminated by Meredith Kline - Westminster, Gordon-Conwell
 Some reformed Pastors today hold to a framework and yet hold to same
system of orthodox theology - Big debate today w/in PCA
o Reformation theology- Hermeneutic first option is to follow the plain sense of the text
 Must do a great deal of hermeneutical gymnastics to escape plain meaning of text
 This section uses the precise words of Exodus 20:11
 Declares that God performed the work of creation in the space of six days
 Bible narrative proceeds from the first day to the sixth, each time referring to the
evening and the morning and numbering the day
 Must view Sabbath as something other than a day in other views
All very good
o God's positive assessment of his created universe is on a collision course with other
worldviews and philosophies
 According to these world-views anything that its physical or material s inherently
bad