Southern Asia Division of Seventh-day Adventists

Content Page: Former Director of Biblical Research Institute GC. Author of Understanding the Scripture.

The Bible’s claim to be the expressed will of God is under heavy fire, occasionally even among Adventists.

Adventists must undertake a reassessment of where we are and explore once more the authority of the Bible. This includes the questions of whether the message presented in the Scriptures will recapture the deepest wellsprings of the Adventist spirit, and if so, just how it can come to pass. Given the historic Adventist insistence on grounding all things in God’s Word, this question is of high importance. The erosion of biblical authority is so significant that it overshadows many of the issues being tossed about.

No one since the Reformation has had such an impact upon the study of Biblical chronology as James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh in Ireland. In 1658 the English edition of his Annales established the evening of October 22, 004 B.C. as the beginning of Creation week! John Lightfoot, a Greek scholar and vice-chancellor at Cambridge, had achieved an even greater precision a few years earlier by declaring that man had been brought into existence at 9:00 am. On a Friday Morning, 3928 B.C.

Ussher’s date for Creation, based in part on Old Testament figures and in part on astromical cycles, eclipsed the figure suggested earlier by Lightfoot. His date of 4004 B.C. for Creation appeared in the margin of an English Bible in 1701, and his chronology, popularly known as the “Received Chronology,” provided dates for most Bibles during the next two centuries. The Cambridge University Press printed his dates in its university Press until 1910.

Some have suggested that Scripture can always be trusted on moral matters, but it is not always correct on historical matters. They rely on it in the spiritual domain, but not in the sphere of science. If true, however, this would render the Bible ineffective as a divine authority, since there, the spiritual is often inextricably interwoven with the historical and scientific.

A close examination of Scripture reveals that the scientific (factual) and spiritual truths of Scripture are often inseparable. For example, one can not separate the spiritual truth of Christ’s resurrection from the fact that His body permanently vacated the tomb and later physically appeared (Matt. 28:6; 1 Cor. 15:13-19). Likewise, if Jesus was not born of a biological virgin, then He is no different from the rest of the human race on whom the stigma of Adam’s sin rests (Rom. 5:12). Likewise, the death of Christ for our sins cannot be detached from His shedding literal blood on the cross, for “without shedding of blood there is no remission” (Heb. 9:22). And Adam’s existence and fall cannot be a myth. If there were no literal Adam and no actual fall, then the spiritual teaching about inherited sin and eventual or physical death are wrong (Rom. 5:12). Historical reality and the theological doctrine stand or fall together.

The Bible is recorded with the historicity of God’s creation. The record is brief, but plain, inclusive, sure and well understood. The record classifies the act of God’s creation into two phases. First the creation of the heaven and the earth, second, the creation of the world.