Most
Christian colleges, even in America, don’t subscribe to the philosophy of Young
Earthism – this is confirmed even by a fundamentalist as fanatical as Answers in Genesis theme park boss, Ken
Ham. See here and here as evidence of this. For good
measure here’s another more recent affirmation by Ham along these lines (My
emphasis):
With the increasing erosion of
biblical authority even within most
Christian colleges, it’s never been more important for your student to
attend a college that stands firmly on the Word of God. (See
Ham’s post at this address https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2016/11/01/college-expo-one-stop-christian-college-shop for the above quote)
By
“erosion
of biblical authority”
Ham is most likely to have in mind those Christians who do not interpret
Genesis 1-10 using a Young Earthist world view, a view upon which the rationale
of the AiG theme park is based.
Recently
Ham’s outraged denunciations of his fellow Christians has reached a crescendo.
Although he has always questioned the quality of the faith of those who don’t
go along with Young Earthism there has been a recent spate of posts by Ham
expressing his righteous indignation with those Christians who reject his Young
Earthist philosophy. Rather than let this recent flurry of bad mouthing slip by
I’m using this post to note it and store it for the record so that I can access
it in one place for future reference. But why exactly this outburst of holy
censoriousness has occurred of late I can only guess. Is it because regime
change in the US has boosted his confidence? Does he now see a chance to screw down
on those Christians of the academic establishment who are of a more liberal
frame of mind than himself?
In
the following quotes I underline the bits where Ham is engaged in the activity
of accusing Christians of the most heinous of sins. As I have said before, fundamentalists tend to go for the spiritual "nuclear button" straight away probably because:
a) They are convinced of the divine authority of their opinions and believe those opinions are being willfully rejected.
b) They believe they act in the name of the Almighty.
Having studied fundamentalists for many years I find I am all too familiar with what follows. Ken Ham typifies the fundamentalist mental complex; an outcome of that complex is that in attempting to justify the security and certainty of their position they are forced to go out and lay charges of compromise and/or heresy on other christian communities. My experience tells me that as a general rule fundamentalists genuinely believe that the world around them is a nasty place of conniving hypocrites (Christian and non-Christian) who deserve every censure they (the fundamentalists) can hand out; a bad conscience is not one of their faults! More's the pity!
a) They are convinced of the divine authority of their opinions and believe those opinions are being willfully rejected.
b) They believe they act in the name of the Almighty.
Having studied fundamentalists for many years I find I am all too familiar with what follows. Ken Ham typifies the fundamentalist mental complex; an outcome of that complex is that in attempting to justify the security and certainty of their position they are forced to go out and lay charges of compromise and/or heresy on other christian communities. My experience tells me that as a general rule fundamentalists genuinely believe that the world around them is a nasty place of conniving hypocrites (Christian and non-Christian) who deserve every censure they (the fundamentalists) can hand out; a bad conscience is not one of their faults! More's the pity!
1.
Christians accused of attacking
the Character of Christ
See
https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2017/01/16/christians-who-accept-millions-years-undermine-gods-word/
for the following quotes:
Can Christians believe in
millions of years? Yes, inconsistently. Christians who believe in
molecules-to-man evolution and millions of years are undermining biblical
authority and thus are undermining the Word of God. Of course,
salvation is conditioned upon faith in Christ alone, so you can be a Christian
without holding to a young earth. But an old earth undermines God’s Word!
Those Christians who say God
used evolution are actually saying God calls death and disease
(e.g., cancer as seen in fossils) as “very good.” Death is an intrusion
because of our sin. God describes death as an “enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26).
God didn’t use death to create—death is the judgment for sin.
Christians who believe
evolution are really attacking the character of Christ by blaming Him for
death, suffering, and disease! Sin is to blame, and our Creator Jesus
Christ paid the penalty for our sin (death) by dying on the Cross, rising from
the dead, and He now offers the free gift of salvation.
My comment:
I’m not going to answer Ham’s criticisms here: My purpose in this
document is to expose and record Ham’s tendency to lay the most extreme charges
at the door of other Christians. Like an interrogating inquisitor he does this
by thrusting his straw man reasoning, his twisted logic and his words into the
minds and mouths of other Christians. Ham is too suspicious an operator to accept that the case against his “logic” is anything other than deceitful pleading by
those he is accusing. He really seems to
believe that Christians who reject his Young Earthist world view are secretly
as persuaded by his logic as Ham is himself and they must therefore be covering up bad consciences. True to the fundamentalist personality Ham just can’t accept that other Christians (like for example Denis Alexander) can hold an intellectually sophisticated
contrary position with a clear conscience. The fundamentalist mind can’t but
help believe there are dubious motives lurking behind the scenes of the
Christian academic establishment. Given this almost paranoid behaviour one can
see why fundamentalists are such fertile ground for conspiracy theorism.
2.
Christians accused of attacking
God’s word and undermining the Gospel.
See
https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2017/01/21/join-me-bob-jones-university-free-conference-series/ for the following
God’s Word is under attack,
not just by secularists and the media—many Christians (and particularly many
church leaders and those in Christian academics) attack God’s Word when they
compromise the clear teachings of the Bible with man’s ideas. We see this
especially in regards to Genesis and issues such as the age of the earth,
Creation, and the global Flood of Noah’s day.
Biblical creation is being
rejected even within the evangelical church, and secular and atheistic
philosophies about earth’s origins are taking its place. This is undermining
the foundation of our doctrines—including the gospel—and opening the door
for more compromise.
My Comment: Yes, many, many evangelical
Christians are definitely undermining the foundation of the alleged divine
authority of Ken’s opinions! But I don’t see these evangelicals having any less
faith in God and his word than does Ken! To recycle a well-known saying: Same Biblical facts, different
interpretation! What Ken thinks of as Biblical facts, are actually interpretations.
We
can see from the second sentence in the above quote that “compromise” is a term
Ken largely uses of those Christians who reject his interpretation of Genesis chapters 1 to 10, an interpretation based as it is on
a world view which posits the dichotomy “God did it” vs. “natural
forces did it”.
In particular notice also the reference to Christian leaders and academics who
in the main reject the Young Earthist philosophy. Ken’s rejection of the Christian
establishment has parallels with Donald Trump’s campaign against the political establishment, so perhaps, as
I have already submitted, Ken’s recent focus on bad-mouthing Christians has
been spurred on by Trump’s recent accession to the presidency. After all, it is
quite likely that the more reasonable evangelicals, especially evangelical
academics, would not be Trump supporters. So perhaps Ken is trying to hit them
while they are down. What seems to have completely passed Ken is that his
holy-than-thou censoriousness is not the way to win friends and influence
people! But having said that Ken’s threatening spiritual language will be
welcomed by his followers.
3.
Christians accused of attacking
the Gospel and totally undermining scripture.
See
https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2017/01/22/adam-myth-get-answers-new-resource/ for the quote below:
One of the most attacked
biblical figures of our day is the first man, Adam—the head of the human race.
Increasingly secularists and, sadly, even many Christians (including seminary
and Bible college professors), claim there never was a literal Adam. But a
historical Adam is foundational to the gospel!
An attack on Adam is an
attack on the gospel. You see, if there never were an Adam, there
was no first sin and there was no original sinner. And if there were no first
sin and original sinner, then why did Jesus have to come as a man and die to
pay the penalty for our sin (Romans 5:12; 1 Corinthians 15:22)? After all, if
man evolved over millions of years, death and bloodshed existed prior to sin,
so why did Jesus die? Believing in millions of years of bloodshed and death
before sin totally undermines the Scripture which says, “Without shedding
of blood there is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22).
The gospel is grounded in literal
history!
My comment: Notice once again how Ham, like
an inquisitor, projects his perverse logic and thinking into the minds of Christians
who disagree with him: He just can’t believe that Young Earthism is anything
other than the plain teaching of scripture and therefore to his mind those Christians
who disagree must be harbouring ulterior motives and/or bad consciences. Ham questions the faith of those who question
his world view. But let me reassure him
that from my observations the Gospel of Grace is quite safe in the hearts of
those evangelicals who don’t view scripture through his Young Earthist lens. They therefore don’t construct the logic in
quite the same way that we see in Ham’s quotes!
4.
Christians accused of turning the
Gospel into myths and lies
See
https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2017/01/24/genesis-myth-or-history/
for the following quote:
It’s becoming increasingly
popular among many Christians to claim that Old Testament characters,
especially Adam and Eve, and events such as the worldwide Flood weren’t literal
people or historical events. They claim they were just figures or stories
created to teach some kind of theological lesson. But does biblical revelation
support this position?
Well, the writers of the New
Testament, or those whose words are recorded in it, certainly wouldn’t agree
with these Christians. Paul, writing by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,
clearly speaks against biological evolution and the idea of a nonliteral Adam
and Eve when he states,
For Adam was formed first, then
Eve. (1 Timothy 2:13)
In 1 Corinthians he again
confirms the Genesis account of Eve being made from Adam:
For man is not from woman, but
woman from man. (1 Corinthians 11:8)
The New Testament writer Jude,
in his short epistle, lists Adam as an historical individual:
Now Enoch, the seventh from
Adam. (Jude 14)
Others claim that the account
of Noah and the Flood is not history but was borrowed from ancient Near Eastern
cultures to teach a theological truth about God. But if that's true then the
Apostle Peter, the author of Hebrews, and Jesus Christ—the Creator God in the
flesh!—all lied because they
taught that Noah was a historical individual and that the Flood really happened
(Matthew 24:37; Hebrews 11:7; 2 Peter 3:5–7).
If Genesis is myth then the
gospel—as it's foreshadowed in Genesis 3:15 and 21—is myth also. The
gospel is founded in Genesis and grounded in a literal Adam who literally
sinned and brought literal death into creation as the penalty for sin. If Noah
is a myth, then so are all those listed in Hebrews 11, such as Abraham, Isaac,
Joseph, and others. Genesis is literal history!
GENESIS IS LITERAL HISTORY!
Thanks for stopping by and
thanks for praying,
Ken
This item was written with the
assistance of AiG’s research team.
My comment: Yet again Ken is slandering Christians by placing his quite
outrageous logic in the heads of his Christian detractors: Viz …they are making the gospel writers liars and
the gospel fiction! In Ken’s illogical head it seems to follow
quite logically that if Genesis is a myth then so are the NT gospel events!
Ken’s coup-de-grace is his attempt to manoeuvre those who disagree with him
into the position where they are saying the apostles all lied! This is a familiar
fundamentalist tactic I’ve recorded before: Viz A certain Andrew Holland, a
fundamentalist of whom I’ve quoted on this blog
before, tries to
make out that those who disagree with him are making God a liar:
….the historical parts of the
Bible, such as Genesis, should be taken at face value, otherwise it is tantamount to calling God a liar! Thus the account
of creation, Noah's flood and Jonah's adventures are accurate and can be
completely trusted. They are all verified in the New Testament. (Andrew Holland, my emphasis)
5.
Christians accused of
recommitting the original sin
See
https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2017/01/25/choosing-to-resist-genesis-3-attack/
for the quote below:
The very first attack, what
I call “the Genesis 3 Attack,” was on God’s Word: “And [Satan] said to the
woman, ‘Has God indeed said?’” (Genesis 3:1). Satan used the ploy to get Eve to
question God’s Word, thus creating doubt that ultimately led to unbelief. That
same attack on God’s Word has never let up and continues each day.
Sadly, many Christians
accept evolution and millions of years, the foundation of the secular religion.
This evolutionary religion attacks the Word of God by undermining what God
plainly told us. It’s like Satan is whispering in our ears once again: “Has God
indeed said . . . ?”
Compromising Genesis with
evolution and millions of years undermines the authority of the Word, because
this involves taking ideas from outside of Scripture and forcing those ideas
into Scripture. When they do this, Christians are making themselves
(fallible man) the authority over God’s (infallible) Word! Basically
we’re saying that we know more than God and that we can reinterpret and edit
His Word to adjust it to man’s ideas. But a Christian should never knowingly
compromise God’s Word.
How should Christians view
God’s Word?
Forever, O Lord, Your word is
settled in heaven.” (Psalm 119:89)
For I trust in Your word.
(Psalm 119:42)
I will delight myself in Your
statutes; I will not forget Your word. (Psalm 119:16)
Before I was afflicted I went
astray, But now I keep Your word. (Psalm 119:67)
And remember how important it
is to preach the Word with authority:
So then faith comes by hearing,
and hearing by the word of God. (Romans 10:17)
You see, man’s word (like
evolutionary ideas) changes nearly every day, but God’s Word never changes. We
need to choose to trust God’s Word and ignore the lie of “Has God indeed said .
. . ?”
Thanks for stopping by and
thanks for praying,
Ken
This item was written with the
assistance of AiG’s research team.
My comment: Ham continues to stuff his
perverse logic into the heads and mouths of other Christians thereby justifying
to himself why he can dish out the utmost censor on them. In his attempt to
avoid looking like a common-or-garden Christian cultist Ham is often at pains
to stress that he’s not saying that belief in Young Earthism is a salvation condition. But I think this is
just a piece of lip service; in the final analysis he’s certainly making Young
Earthism a very stringent faith test and goes as far as he possibly can in
rubbishing the faith of other Christians who fail it; so much so, in fact, that
the question of whether he actually considers them to be Christian is academic.
For example, in the quote above we find Ham going as far as to suggest that
those who contradict him are listening to Satan and repeating the devastating
sins of the fall! As usual he more than hints that he believes these Christians
to be knowingly compromising God’s word. This is the language of character defamation
and is
exactly the kind of thing one gets from the Jehovah’s witnesses when they are talking about ex-witnesses.
So in my books Answers in Genesis,
unless it should be headed up by a less bullying leader, classifies as all but
cultic in ethos. As I have said before I
don’t recommend Christians have contact with fundamentalists; they are spiritual
empire builders who do not shy away from using spiritual pressures to build their
social network. See also his comments I've recorded in this post where Ham makes it clear that he regards anything other than young earthism to be an "attack on the cross" and effectively preaching a "Jesus different from the Jesus of the Bible".
Postscript I
The
Bible is “God’s word” in as much as it
is a conduit for information about God’s personality and salvation; it is part of the
divinely managed signalling medium through which revelatory information passes to the recipient
and takes root in his/her psyche. As I have pointed out before natural language,
such as we find employed in the Bible, doesn’t contain meanings; rather it delivers
meaning by way of connotation. That
is, it triggers meaning in the neural association complex of the reader, an association
complex that is a function of its cognitive traits, culture, and history. Thus the whole process, if it is to deliver
theological truth, only has a chance of doing so if it is under immanent divine management from start to finish. Unfortunately
as a rule Western fundamentalists often have a “natural forces” vs “divine
interventions” view of God’s relation to his world. They therefore find the immanence
of God difficult to take on board. Because of God’s intimacy with his created
order the Bible is organically jointed to the rest of creation and transmits
and delivers information like any other signalling medium in God’s world.
Of
course, the process of Biblical information delivery can, and clearly does, go
wrong (as does any other signalling system) at any stage along the transmission line especially at the destination where interpretations are generated. Therefore the Bible doesn’t deliver
certainty. Trouble is, the insecure conspiracy theory touting fundamentalist
mentality is liable to feel that anything less than 100% truth equates 100% uncertainty
– a position which we know to be untrue. Information carrying signals need not return the statistics of certainty to convey information; e.g. we can’t be absolutely
certain when we board an aircraft that it won’t be involved in a major crash,
but nevertheless we consider the safety statistics of air travel to convey information
about high reliability, and this we regard as useful information.
We
can see that Ken Ham is light-years away from understanding just how natural language
works when he says this (See above):
Compromising Genesis with
evolution and millions of years undermines the authority of the Word, because
this involves taking ideas from outside of Scripture and forcing those ideas
into Scripture. When they do this, Christians are making themselves
(fallible man) the authority over God’s (infallible) Word! Basically
we’re saying that we know more than God and that we can reinterpret and edit
His Word to adjust it to man’s ideas. But a Christian should never knowingly
compromise God’s Word.
What
Ken fails to see is that meaning is ultimately sourced in the recipient. i.e.
the reader. Meaning doesn’t exist inside the symbols of the transmitted Biblical text:
Meaning is an extrinsic rather than intrinsic property of the Word. As such the
Word is a trigger of meaning and therefore it is fallible (wo)man that assigns meaning
– but it is an infallible God who manages this highly complex process of
meaning delivery. The irony for Ken Ham is that in a sense meaning always comes
from the reader, the reader who must be correctly initiated in order to make the
right interpretation. Of course I don’t expect someone as lacking in subtlety
as Ken Ham to ever understand this. Ken Ham
doesn’t live by faith; he lives by what he estimates to be certainty.
Some
links on the nature of language:
http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/another-exploration-of-fundamentalist.html
Note:
It's worth reading this AiG article by Ham:
https://answersingenesis.org/the-word-of-god/help-us-start-something-big-this-year/
Ham's righteous anger at Christian acdemia is plain to see in this article. In many ways it's encouraging that he paints such a bleak picture of what to his recriminating mind is rampart "compromise" among Christian academics. Obviously Ham's futile fulminations aren't going to hold much weight with Christian academics. But they will have weight with other fundamentalists, who are assured by Ham that they will be on the receiving end of divine displeasure should they be tempted by "compromise". Ham is almost shaping up to be classified as a cult leader; compare the Watchtower who control their publishers, like Ham, using character defamation and the threat of divine displeasure to intimidate their followers.
Note:
It's worth reading this AiG article by Ham:
https://answersingenesis.org/the-word-of-god/help-us-start-something-big-this-year/
Ham's righteous anger at Christian acdemia is plain to see in this article. In many ways it's encouraging that he paints such a bleak picture of what to his recriminating mind is rampart "compromise" among Christian academics. Obviously Ham's futile fulminations aren't going to hold much weight with Christian academics. But they will have weight with other fundamentalists, who are assured by Ham that they will be on the receiving end of divine displeasure should they be tempted by "compromise". Ham is almost shaping up to be classified as a cult leader; compare the Watchtower who control their publishers, like Ham, using character defamation and the threat of divine displeasure to intimidate their followers.
Postscript II
Ham does
his best to stop short of positioning himself as part of an exclusive sect. He
actually wants the best of both worlds i.e. He wants to appear to belong to the
mainstream and yet at the same time goes as far as he can in condemning in the
strongest possible spiritual terms those in the mainstream who contradict his
beliefs. Ham wants to keep his followers on the right
side of "righteousness" and this is achieved via spiritual threat as can be seen in the above blog post; here we see Ham accusing Christians who don't believe his message of sins that under most circumstances would just about disqualify one from the faith. However, in this post I wrote:
Ken Ham’s position, as
he has stated on many occasions, is that YEC is not a salvation issue, but an
authority issue and on this basis he asks Hanegraaff to withdraw his
“accusation”.
As we can see from this quote Ham tries to make claim to being part of the Christian mainstream. But if we compare this with the contents of this blog post we can see that Ham's
claim of YEC not being a salvation issue is a kind of necessary lip service. This is very much part of the Ham sect dynamic: Viz: claim that one is part of the mainstream and yet at the same time threaten using the kind of exclusive language one expects to hear from cult leaders.
http://www.joeledmundanderson.com/ken-hams-already-compromised-part-3-of-my-book-review-why-christian-professors-are-anti-intellectual-enemies-of-god/?fbclid=IwAR2NqMC2X8FtD2fKBHhEvuqzIuTF9ReSFs3zVyMqsSyogXomosFMx72R028
Addendum 18/01/2019
The following web article takes Ham to task for the double speak of accusing Christian scholars of heinous sins tantamount to blasphemy and yet at the same time he tries to maintain that he's not questioning their salvation. http://www.joeledmundanderson.com/ken-hams-already-compromised-part-3-of-my-book-review-why-christian-professors-are-anti-intellectual-enemies-of-god/?fbclid=IwAR2NqMC2X8FtD2fKBHhEvuqzIuTF9ReSFs3zVyMqsSyogXomosFMx72R028
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