Understanding Genesis: Contemporary
Adventist Perspectives
ed. Brian Bull, Fritz Guy, Ervin Taylor
Published 1995: 327 pages
In his The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, the distinguished American historian, Ronald Numbers documented in detail the essential role that a devout Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) believer, George McCready Price (1870-1963), played in creating the initial set of modern fundamentalist arguments to support a so-called 'Flood Geology' as a means of explaining the geological column, a position that the scientific community totally rejects. In recent official pronouncements, the SDA Church continues to endorse an essentially literalistic interpretation of the Genesis creation narratives and a geologically recent (<10,000 years) creation and worldwide flood. What may not be known outside of the Adventist subculture is that there has been for many decades major criticisms and exceptions voiced by a number of moderate and progressive SDA theologians and scientists to many aspects of the traditional Adventist understandings promulgated by fundamentalist and conservative elements within the SDA faith tradition. Understanding Genesis: Contemporary Adventist Perspectives is a volume of papers written by SDA theologians and scientists, most of which hold faculty appointments at Adventist colleges and universities in North America. The various chapters provide a spectrum of views on a variety of topics, including non-fundamentalist interpretations of the Genesis creation and flood narratives, a consideration of theistic evolution or progressive creationism, the validity of the evidence dating the geological column and human prehistory, and other related topics.