Gospel Made Visible

"Christian proclamation might make the gospel audible, but Christians living together in local congregations make the gospel visible (see John 13:34-35). The church is the gospel made visible." -- Mark Dever in his book entitled The Church.

In the Beginning

Rob and I started reading a new book together called, In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Gensis, by Henri Blocher. We're only at the beginning of the second chapter, so we're not real deeply into it yet, but I like what I've read so far. 

The first chapter is essentially explaining how he believes Genesis should be approached --> Scripture should be the overarching authority, illuminating other sources of information (and not the other way around). He gets into the discussions of "Who wrote scripture?" "What place does science have in this discussion?" and "What is the relationship between the two descriptions of creation in the Bible?"

The second chapter begins addressing commonly held beliefs/theories among Christians on how the universe was created. 

• Literal Interpretation: The days in Genesis 1 are 24 hour days.
• Reconstruction Theory: (Which I had always heard called the Gap theory.) God created the universe over a very long period of time (Genesis 1:1), then he destroyed it (vs. 2), and remade it in 7 literal days. 
• Concordist Theory: The days in Genesis 1 are really ages or geological eras. 
• He didn't name this one. The stinker. But the fourth view is that the description of the 7 days in Genesis 1 is a literary device. 

We still have to get into the nitty gritty of it all. But I thought I'd post the four views that he lays out in case anyone was interested. I've previously posted 6 views that were presented to us by my geology teacher when I was in 9th grade. It looks like Blocher is leaving out the diluvialist theory (unless he's merging that with Gap) which is interesting because I've heard Christians mention the diluvialist theory as something they believe as recently as within the past decade. 

Since I haven't included any nitty gritty here, let's not get into any of that just yet. But if you have thoughts on his 4 main theories/beliefs, feel free to pipe up.