Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Institutes of the Christian Religion (text only) Revised edition by J. Calvin,H. Beveridge > Status Update

(1) Humanity’s stupidity, it's "sluggish and groveling intellect" so prone to absurd fictions regarding how creation came to be, rendered it necessary for God "to furnish us with a most intimate knowledge... of a history of the creation." A history "marked so as to enable the faithful to ascend by an unbroken succession of years to the first origin of their race and of all things."

To ask what God was doing before creation is frivolous and most impertinent. "It was a shrewd saying of a good old man, who when some one pertly asked in derision what God did before the world was created, answered He made Hell for the inquisitive." This "should repress the tickling wantonness which urges many to indulge in vicious and hurtful speculation." Let us willingly hedge our minds in to God's Word and know that we insult Him whenever any higher reason than His will is demanded.

(2) "Moses relates that the work of creation was accomplished not in one moment, but in six days." God thus deliberately and systematically divided up the work into six days. In this work, not His bare essence, but rather His eternal wisdom is set before us, "in order that we may not dream of any other God than Him Who desires to be recognized in that express image."

My thoughts: As someone who once taught the Literary Framework view of creation at many times and in various settings, I can't condemn it as heresy or question the faith of those who hold to it. I can, however, say that the view is very unwise for a number of reasons (many of these points will also apply to the Day-Age view, and perhaps the Gap view as well):

First, the fact that the Bible uses the word Yom (day) elsewhere to figuratively describe longer periods of time is well noted, but it does not mean that every Scriptural use is then up for grabs. As we do with English words, we should assume the common use unless strong contextual evidence indicates otherwise. No such figurative signposts are present here. The constant refrain, "and there was morning and there was evening," and then the deliberate numbering point in the exact opposite direction.

Second, God explicitly uses His work-week as the pattern of man's. Importantly, He uses it as the basis for the prescribed Sabbath rest (Exo 20:8-11), fundamental to the time-pattern rhythm that was to shape the life of His covenant people. It would be odd indeed for Him to have His people pattern themselves after something He did not actually do (and why would He not actually do it anyway? No one but the angels were there to see most of it).

Third, I do not see any contextual reason to lengthen the time (for that is the goal of all these views), except if one is attempting to harmonize God's Word with another "authoritative" source of knowledge (e.g., Science). This is the very heart of syncretism. Beware placing any source of truth above the Bible such that it has the power to alter what is being said.

Science and the Bible are not at odds, indeed, they have the same Author and so will agree in the end, but whole anti-God systems have been meticulously developed by rival worldviews over the last 200 years to challenge God's Word (and thereby His authority) at every conceivable point. As Christians, our ultimate authority should be God's Word, and if "the Science" disagrees, we should learn to laugh at the scientists and believe God anyway. In the end, these Old Earth theories just seem to give too much ground to people we should learn to joyfully scorn for being big-brained fools.

Fourth and finally, I believe compromise here disciples us into learning how to compromise everywhere else with the spirit of the age. We discover how to "piously" play all kinds of manipulative games with the text so that its really not all that offensive or counter-cultural after all, reading out of it what no saint in history had seen before 150-200 years ago.

We suddenly discover the church has been all wrong all along about: homosexuality, patriarchy (gender roles), Eschatology, the paideia of our children, government, tolerance, baptism, and on and on. Adeptly using all kinds of hermeneutical tricks to make the problem passages disappear.