The Official Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Response to the Creation-Evolution Debate
(Reproduced from Samuel Koranteng-Pipim, ed., Here We Stand [2005])
[In 2001, in response to questions being raised by some within our ranks about the Seventh-day Adventist teaching on Creation, the General Conference Executive Committee at an Annual Council authorized a three-year series of Faith and Science conferences. These “Faith and Science” conferences were begun in 2002 (Ogden, Utah) and concluded in August 2004 (Denver, Colorado) with an “Affirmation of Creation” report. Prepared by the Organizing Committee of the International Faith & Science Conferences 2002-2004, the report was presented to and received by the General Conference Executive Committee at the Annual Council in Silver Spring, Maryland, October 11, 2004. Upon the reception of the “Affirmation of Creation” report, the church leaders who...
Key Theological and Methodological Issues
By
Samuel Koranteng-Pipim, PhD
Director, Public Campus Ministries, Michigan Conference
[Excerpted from author’s Here We Stand]
Very few people can deny that there are divergent and incompatible views within the Seventh-day Adventist Church over its doctrine of Creation. Based on naturalistic interpretations of scientific data and through the use of contemporary higher criticism in the interpretation of the Bible, some Adventist scholars now:
(a) hold a long, rather than short, chronology for the age of our earth (i.e., they measure the age of the earth in millions, instead of thousands, of years);
(b) advocate views that reinterpret the days of Creation to represent millions of years, instead of the six literal days taught by the Bible;
(c) argue for gradual, uniformitarian deposit of the geologic column in millions of years, instead of catastrophism (such as described in the Biblical account of the...