Heresies I'm Considering

Recently, Jeff posted an article on heresy. It was kind of strange to see, because I have been thinking a lot myself about heresies that I am mulling over. So he inspired me to go ahead and admit to some of them. I'm going to take one at-a-time, in part to give all of you the chance to recover from each before I go on to the next.

What I mean by a heresy is simply a perspective that many in the evangelical community would reject without even considering its merits. On the big issues: the nature of redemption, the person of Jesus, the authority of Scripture, I'm not going anywhere. But I think about lots of different issues, and read extensively, and for some reason lately I have been seeing more and more people writing "outside the box." Evangelicals. It warms my heart, because we as a group tend to transfer authority, just as Jeff said. So it's nice to know that there are thinking evangelicals as well.

Recently, I read a book entitled The Age of the Universe: What are the Biblical limits? by Gorman Gray. Now, the book itself was very difficult to read (he really needed a good editor), but his premise is interesting: he proposes a reading of Genesis 1:1-2 wherein the entire cosmos, along with an incomplete Earth, are created first, followed by an unspecified time period before the 6 day creation of the biosphere between 6,000-8,000 years ago.

His proposal requires a global flood to explain the fossil record, but there are good arguments in the book. Maybe he's right, maybe the universe is very old, but the biosphere very young. The reasons to believe in a very old universe and earth are very compelling, and for the all research on a young earth done at ICR, their results are still very limited in scope. It's not necessarily because they are wrong, they just have phenominally limited budgets. But I cannot get excited about much of their work, as it is mostly model building at this time.

And right now, things like supernovae, and red shifts, and billion year old radioisotopes are more easily explained by a really old universe.

So I'm thinking about the age of the universe, and considering the possibility, considered heretical by many, that the universe may be really, really old. No evolution here, no pre-adamic races, nothing like that. Just maybe a God who isn't afraid to let processes run for a while. One who created and waited, just like in my life He so often moves and then allows the process to play itself out before He intervenes.

Somthing like that, anyways.

I probably shouldn't talk about this publicly, but we're all friends here.