What Extension to Old Age do Old Agers Permit Themselves?

If you pretend to believe the Bible, there are two different options.

• 1) extending the time before Adam was created;
• 2) extending the time covered by Biblical history since then.

These options are not equal. Let's consider them in turn.

If you consider "all creation" may in certain contexts mean only all of human creation, then you might venture to pretend that option one does not conflict with Mark 10:6, since creatures before Adam were outside the human creation.

"If so ye continue in the faith, grounded and settled, and immoveable from the hope of the gospel which you have heard, which is preached in all the creation that is under heaven, whereof I Paul am made a minister."
[Colossians 1:23]

Does this mean only human creation, or does it include animals, plants, and minerals?

A Protestant may pretend, it includes only human creation, one doesn't hold sermons for guinea pigs, and so Mark 10:6 could allow for long ages before Adam was created ... supposing of course no life forms dated to before then were to be considered human.

A Catholic would reply that preaching the Gospel is not restricted to holding sermons, and in fact, while a priest blessing a guinea pig doesn't enlighten the guinea pig's reason (it hasn't any), it is in the guinea pig still preaching at least to the owner's reason and emotions. Therefore "all the creation that is under heaven" really includes not just men, but also animals, plants and minerals.

So, option one is ruled out at least for Catholics. Too bad Fulcran Vigouroux didn't comprehend that, too bad there were dispensations to think otherwise, but both gap theory and day age theory are ruled out for Catholics in principle. The ones who thought otherwise either weren't attending to Mark 10:6, or they were plagiarising a "permission" from a Protestant reading of Colossians 1:23.

But option 2 is really totally off the hook. I don't mean things like chosing LXX over Masoretic chronology, long stay in Egypt over short, or things like that. I mean pretending the distance between Adam and Abraham is far greater than Genesis 5 and 11 allow for on the face of it.

It can neither please Catholics nor any Protestants who pretend to believe the Bible, for two reasons:

• a) gaps in the genealogies, like, if LXX and standard reading of Luke 3 are correct, a single generation gap for second Cainan, or like the four ancestors omitted from Christ's genealogy in Matthew 1 are gaps in what is mainly a genealogy, but to get to old age results, like Adam living 20 to 40 millenia before us (as I think Hugh Ross pretends), you'd need to have more gap than genealogy, which is simply doing violence on the text;
• b) whether or not it could be arranged, it would remove the original human witnesses of Genesis 2 and 3 so far back in relation to Abraham that it would make the historical knowledge of them very hazy. This would be the ruin of Biblical history.

So, extending the time substantially after Adam's creation is a nono for both Catholic and Protestant alike, except to rank apostates.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Anselm of Canterbury
21.IV.2021