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