[E]very generation of Christianity has its own stigma by which the believer’s faith is severely tested. … The most hotly contested issue of any day is that which makes the minority view look foolish and makes the believer look a fool. Athanasius stood alone in his day when he stood for the full deity of Jesus Christ. The world is against you, they would say to Athanasius. Flashing his black eyes, he retorted: ‘If the world is against Athanasius, the Athanasius is against the world.’
Things are no different today. We may think that our issue is unprecedented in weightiness in its threat to the Bible. We may fear that at long last the Bible will be disproved and Christianity made extinct. But there is nothing new under the sun. …
The stigma of our generation then, it seems to me, is to reject the theory of evolution and stand unflinchingly for creation by God:’that things which are seen are not made of things which do appear.’
R.T. Kendall, “Faith and Creation,” Should Christians Embrace Evolution?, pgs. 109-110)
A Daughter of the Reformation 
I do not think that we can say that there is only one issue. At a minimum, I would say that there are three: Science (Evolution in particular, but in general it expands beyond this), the promotion of Homosexuality, and Abortion.
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Rachel,
Thanks for posting this quote. It sounds good on the surface, but….
Rejecting evolution and/or theistic evolution is not the same thing as embracing and promoting Biblical creation. Grudem and Walton are not Biblical creationists. Both men hold to a standard chronology of billions of years. Their version of the Genesis flood lacks “depth”, if you know what I mean. The “Biblical authority” that may be in view in this book is an “authority” that does not impose upon the “findings of modern science.” I haven’t read the book, only the preface. It doesn’t seem to be calling a generation of Christians to reject the various and sundry compromises styled as “anti-evolutionistic”. Loud chest-thumping for (a modified) Biblical authority coupled with a clarion call to jettison evolution and/or theistic evolution apart from a plea to embrace the cosmology and early history detailed in Gen. 1-11(i.e. recent creation, global flood, etc.) is hollow, vain and hypocritical. Might it even be disingenuous to slam evolutionary creation (i.e. the new theistic evolution) while at the same time promoting some form of theistical punctuated equilibrium or other old-earth cosmology minus certain unacceptable “baggage”? One grows gun-shy after only so many articles and books that employ the “bait-and-switch” technique (i.e. one form of compromise for another).
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Jon~ I have actually read the whole book. It’s excellent and uncompromising. While I am aware of Grudem’s views on creation, I’m not sure why he was asked to write the foreward. He doesn’t have a chapter in the book, and his views are not what the book promotes.
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Rachel,
Thanks for your reply. I really appreciate your blog. Grudem didn’t have a chapter in the book, but John Walton did. So does the book promote recent creation, no death before the fall, a global flood, a common language prior to Babel? Or, does it just shoot holes in evolution and theistic evolution? Phillip Johnson masterfully dismantled Darwinism, but he is not a Biblical creationist. The debate is not simply “evolution or creation” but Biblical creation vs. everything else. How did John Walton, an OECist, handle his subject?
I see where a national Reformed ministry is having its 2013 National Conference in Feb., 2013, entitled “No Compromise: Standing for the Truth of God’s Word”. Unless I missed something somewhere, there is no mention at all about the watershed issue of our day related to the authority of God’s Word-Biblical creation. How can you have a conference on the authority of the Word of God without addressing this critical issue, at least tangentially?
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Jon~ the chapter in question in by John C. Walton, a professor of Chemistry at the University of St. Andrews, not John H. Walton, professor of Old Testament at Wheaton.
All of the authors are from the UK, so none are very familiar here in the US. You can read the chapter by Michael Reeves on the historical Adam and Eve here. http://www.bethinking.org/science-christianity/advanced/adam-and-eve.htm
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Rachel,
Thanks!….especially for the correction about Walton. I’ll take a look at the chapter online.
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