Creationism - National Center for Science Education

law, both scientific and political. Hunt and other pre-mills, they say, are preaching that
we must passively await for Armageddon and for Christ to straighten things out for us.
Reconstructionist authors DeMar and Leithart have struck back at Hunt with The
Reduction of Christianity: Dave Hunt’s Theology of Cultural Surrender (1987).
While many pre- and post-mills openly denounce each other’s eschatologies,
many other conservative and evangelical Christians mix these doctrines, or seem to
ignore their implications, thus confusing the issue (and illustrating the fundamentalist
capacity for tolerating certain inconsistencies and paradoxes). Jerry Falwell asserts that
he is a straight pre-tribulationist premillennialist, but tolerates considerable post-mill
influence (for instance, he has endorsed Reconstructionist Gary North’s Biblical
Blueprint Series, and the chairman of the government department at his Liberty
University is a Reconstructionist sympathizer). Pat Robertson, as Cumbey points out, is
strongly influenced by the Reconstructionists also, though he too claims not to have
forsaken premillennialism. Reconstructionist leaders Rushdoony and North have been
frequent and prominent guests on his 700 Club. Herb Titus, dean of the Schools of Law
and Public Policy at Robertson’s CBN University, though he is now a pre-millennialist,
has endorsed much of the Reconstructionist program. Joseph Kickasola, a CBN
professor of Public Policy, is an avowed Reconstructionist.
Confusing the issue further is the paradoxical status of Pentecostalists, who are
often accused by strict “Bible only” fundamentalists of succumbing to demonic powers.
Jimmy Swaggart strongly endorses dispensationalist premillennialism, and he champions
Dave Hunt’s (also Dave Wilkerson’s) crusade against the post-mills. But many other
Pentecostalists have become “operationally” post-mill while professing to retain
dispensational belief. Many charismatics (Robertson being a good example) support the
Reconstructionist agenda.
The significance of this with regard to creationism is that the Reconstructionists
accuse pre-mills of being soft and largely ineffective opponents of evolution: a corollary
of the general accusation of passivity and fatalism. In God’s Plan for Victory: The
Meaning of Post-Millennialism (1980), Rousas Rushdoony, the leading figure of modern
post-millennialism and chief theoretician of the Reconstructionist movement, says that
pre-mills tend to succumb to accommodationist views with respect to evolution. Morris,
in his view, has been a strong and effective opponent of evolution in spite of his premillennialism.
Recall that it was Rushdoony who persuaded Craig’s Presbyterian and
Reformed press to publish Whitcomb and Morris’s Genesis Flood in 1961, when other
fundamentalist publishers considered it too radically uncompromising in its insistence on
young-earth creationism and Flood Geology.
Reconstructionists, with their emphasis on total reconstruction of society on a
strictly biblical basis, consider creationism of utmost importance. Rushdoony’s book
The Mythology of Science (1967; Craig Press) is mostly concerned with the fallacy of
evolution; it contains a chapter titled “The Necessity for Creationism” (reprinted in the
Creation Social Science and Humanities Quarterly [1980], as a BSA pamphlet, and
elsewhere). Citing Van Til, Rushdoony writes:
Men will either presuppose God, or they will presuppose themselves as the basic reality of being. If they
assume themselves to be autonomous and independent from God, they will-then wage war against God at
every point. There is no such thing as an area of neutrality: men will either affirm God at every point in
their lives and thinking, or else they will deny Him at every point. [1967:47]