Which Missing Link?

This is IOPNA’s 4^th article out of 6 in the ‘Missing Link’ series.

Here is Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy who was fetched from Africa by Presbyterian minister Samuel Phillips Verner and displayed in an orang-utan’s cage in New York’s Bronx Zoo in 1906.                                                      

Sadly, by age 32 Ota felt he’d had enough and committed suicide. Can you blame him?                                                                       

But is the ‘missing link’ to be found in the jungles of Africa or in the pages of theologians’ Bibles?

                                                  

This ‘Gap Theory’ that was taught in theology lectures at Oxford University – let’s see what it’s about and where it came from.

Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) …

is hailed as Scotland’s greatest 19^th century churchman, being the moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, a university mathematics lecturer and a champion of social causes including education. He popularised the Gap Theory by publishing it in the Bridgewater Treatises in 1814.

The Gap Theory claims that millions of years elapsed between the first two verses of Genesis 1, during which evil forces ruined God’s first attempts at creation, hence fossils, so a reconstruction had to take place.           

How old was young Charlie Darwin when Thomas Chalmers published the Gap Theory? 
A 5 year old in short pants.

Wherever did this idea come from? Well, how far back would you like to go?                         
How about Ancient Greek philosophy – or even earlier.                                                   

We know that scientists have been searching for that elusive 'missing link' in the ‘evolution of Man’, but theologians have had their own 'missing link' for centuries with the Gap Theory, still ‘alive and well’ in Bible seminaries throughout the western world.     

(Doesn’t the Bible warn us in several places not to add anything or delete anything?)             

So what have we found so far?                                                             

Eventually the Church publicly embraced the Gap Theory from ancient philosophy and promoted it to university students who used the ‘millions of years’ to develop the ‘theories of evolution’ from their hobbies of geology and biology.

For instance, the reference Bible published in 1917 by Oxford University Press and edited by Cyrus Ingersoll Scoffield D.D. (1843-1921) supplies this ‘missing link’ between Genesis 1, verses 1 & 2:

“Earth made waste and empty by judgment”                                              

cross referenced to Jeremiah 4:23-26 where another note is supplied: “Without form and void” (Gen1:2) describes the condition of the earth as the result of the judgment (Is 24:1) which overthrew the primal order of Genesis 1:1.                                                                   

What does all this mean?                                                                    

For the Gap Theory of ‘millions of years’ to be true, not only did God cover up the failure by not telling us the whole story, he must be a liar for claiming His creation was very good while Adam and Eve stood on top of millions of fossils of dead animals and furthermore Christianity’s teaching in Romans 5 about sin and death must be a lie: “…by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for all have sinned.” In fact, you can’t rely on the Bible now – throw it away! – those preacher guys are lying.

So how many young people have given up their Christian heritage because of this?............ and we wonder why.                      

Acknowledgements: Dr. Carl Wieland, One Human Family, 2011, Creation Book Publishers, Atlanta                    
Photo credit: en.wikipedia 

Coming soon:                                                                      

So what has been the legacy of the ‘theories of evolution’?                                          

Who ran with these theories and could anybody count how many people have lost their lives because of it?            

            (The ‘Missing Link’ series to-date can be found on hotspuds.blogspot.com.au)                               

NEXT: About turn!