The Westminster Assembly On The Days Of Creation: A Reply To David W. Hall

by William S. Barker

Dr. William S. Barker is vice-president of academic affairs and professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Rev. David W. Hall is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His claims of twenty-one Westminster Divines who hold, explicitly or implicitly, to six twenty-four-hour days of creation have been published electronically and in print and are being cited widely as having proven the position of the Westminster Assembly. The author, as a member of the PCA General Assembly’s committee on the days of creation, has found it necessary to respond to these claims.

Subscription to our doctrinal standards, the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, is a matter to be taken seriously. The second ordination vow of the Presbyterian Church in America asks: “Do you sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of this Church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures; and do you further promise that if at any time you find yourself out of accord with any of the fundamentals of this system of doctrine, you will on your own initiative, make known to your Presbytery [Session, in the case of ruling elders and deacons] the change which has taken place in your views since the assumption of this ordination view?”

In the last few years the claim has been made by some that, if one does not hold to a view that the days of creation in Genesis 1 are six twenty-four-hour days, then one should declare an exception to the Westminster Standards’ language that God created the world “in the space of six days” (WCF, IV. 1; cf. LC, Q. 15 and SC, Q. 9), and some presbyteries have indicated that they would not allow the teaching of any such exception. This claim has been bolstered by the evidence offered by David W. Hall that up to twenty-one Westminster Divines either explicitly or implicitly supported six twenty-four-hour days, with at least nine of them explicitly advocating this view.[1] David Hall has done the church a service by gathering this evidence. It is my belief, however, that his conclusions go farther than the evidence allows.

In a brief four-page statement on the days of creation adopted by the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary on March 1, 1999 the argument was made that the phrase “in the space of six days,” rather than simply “in six days,” was consciously adopted by the Westminster Assembly in order to disassociate itself from the view of instantaneous creation, as espoused by Augustine and others, just as John Calvin used the expression “in the space of six days” in his Commentary on Gen 1:5 in order to distance himself from Augustine’s instantaneous view. The Westminster Seminary statement says:

Even though Calvin, Ames, and the authors of the Westminster Standards, with few exceptions, if any, undoubtedly understood the days to be ordinary days, there is no ground for supposing that they intended to exclude any and all other views, in particular the view that the days may be longer. Such views are outside their purview; their concern, in fact, moves in the opposite direction, against the instantaneous view that denies any length. 

This point bears emphasizing within the context of the current debate about the days of Genesis. To establish that the Standards mandate the six 24-hour day view requires more than demonstrating that the Divines, perhaps even to a man, held that the days were ordinary days. To demonstrate that of itself establishes nothing. What needs also to be shown, which we believe cannot be shown, is that they intended to exclude the views that the days are longer in some respect or that they represent a literary framework.

David Hall has misunderstood this statement to mean that some Westminster Divines actually taught or entertained a view of long-age days or of a literary framework,[2] but all that the statement is claiming is that the language “in the space of six days” does not exclude such possibilities, as further exegetical work might be pursued as to the nature of the six days of creation in Genesis 1. The issue is not whether any of the Westminster Divines held a view of long ages or of a literary framework, as Hall repeatedly claims, but whether the confessional language requires a view of six twenty-four-hour days and nothing else.

The Westminster Divines were, of course, aware of Augustine’s writings on the days of creation. Wrestling with the philosophic aspects of eternity and time, the great North African theologian had commented in The City of God, “What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive.”[3] Puzzled as to when God created time, with the sun (by which our normal days are measured) created only on the fourth day, Augustine opted for instantaneous creation, with the “days” of Genesis 1 being treated as six repetitions of a single day or days of angelic knowledge or some other symbolic representation—a view which both Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected.

Such a view of instantaneous creation was, however, still current at the time of the Westminster Assembly, being advocated by Sir Thomas Browne, an Anglican physician, in his Religio Medici, published in 1643, the year of the Westminster Assembly’s beginning.[4] The Westminster Divines would have good reason, therefore, to stress the duration of time in the days of creation.

The understanding that the sun was created only on the fourth day lingered in the interpretation of the Reformers and Puritans. Calvin in his Commentary on Gen 1:14 says of the fourth day:

God had before created the light, but he now institutes a new order in nature, that the sun should be dispenser of diurnal light, and the moon and stars should shine by night. And he assigns them this office, to teach us that all creatures are subject to his will, and execute what he enjoins upon them.[5]

Commenting on the creation of light on the first day in Gen 1:3, Calvin pursues the same theme of God’s sovereignty:

It did not, however, happen from inconsideration or by accident, that the light preceded the sun and the moon. To nothing are we more prone than to tie down the power of God to those instruments, the agency of which he employs. The sun and moon supply us with light: and, according to our notions, we so include this power to give light in them, that if they were taken away from the world, it would seem impossible for any light to remain. Therefore the Lord, by the very order of the creation, bears witness that he holds in his hand the light, which he is able to impart to us without the sun and the moon.

Then he goes on to say:

Further, it is certain, from the context, that the light was so created as to be interchanged with darkness. But it may be asked, whether light and darkness succeeded each other in turn through the whole circuit of the world; or whether the darkness occupied one half of the circle, while light shone in the other. There is, however, no doubt that the order of their succession was alternate, but whether it was everywhere day at the same time, and everywhere night also, I would rather leave undecided; nor is it very necessary to be known.

With the same characteristic reticence Calvin skirts the issue of the exact nature of the days of creation in the 1559 edition of his Institutes:

Therefore, that we may apprehend with true faith what it profits us to know of God, it is important for us to grasp first the history of the creation of the universe, as it has been set forth briefly by Moses [Gen. chs. 1 and 2], and then has been more fully illustrated by saintly men, especially by Basil and Ambrose. From this history we shall learn that God by the power of his Word and Spirit created heaven and earth out of nothing; that thereupon he brought forth living beings and inanimate things of every kind, that in a wonderful series he distinguished an innumerable variety of things, that he endowed each kind with its own nature, assigned functions, appointed places and stations; … But since it is not my purpose to recount the creation of the universe, let it be enough for me to have touched upon these matters again in passing. For it is better, as I have already warned my readers, to seek a fuller understanding of the passage from Moses and from those others who have faithfully and diligently recorded the narrative of Creation [Gen. chs. 1 and 2].[6]

Discouraging speculation, Calvin thus refers his readers in a straightforward manner to the text of Genesis and to the help of such earlier commentaries as Basil’s Hexaemeron and the Hexameron of Ambrose. Ambrose is explicit about twenty-four-hour days, but both he and Basil clearly state that the sun is created only on the fourth day.[7]

The implication of the sun’s being created on the fourth day apparently was lurking in the mind of the great Puritan theologian of the late Elizabethan period, William Perkins, who wrote in his Exposition of… the Creede:

… some may aske in what space of time did God make the world? I answer, God could have made the world, and all things in it in one moment: but he beganne and finished the whole worke in sixe distinct daies. In the first day hee made the matter of all things and the light: … in the fourth day hee made the Sunne, the Moone, and the Starres in heaven: … and in the ende of the sixth day hee made man. Thus in sixe distinct spaces of time, the Lord did make all things… .[8]

Perkins’ paraphrasing of “six distinct days” with “six distinct spaces of time” appears to be an acknowledgment that the nature of at least the first three days may not be clear. Whatever their length of time may have been, they were not solar days since the sun was created only on the fourth day.

With that background for the Westminster Assembly, whose members were well acquainted with the works of Calvin and of Perkins as well as of William Ames and their respected contemporary Anglican Archbishop of Ireland James Ussher, what are we to make of David Hall’s claim of twenty- one of the Westminster Divines who either explicitly or implicitly supported a six twenty-four-hour day view of the creation account? As Hall has indicated, I have been willing to grant that five of the Westminster Divines held to six twenty-four-hour days: John Lightfoot, John White, John Ley, George Walker, and William Twisse—all prominent members of the Westminster Assembly.[9]

First of all, it will not do to claim for the six twenty-four-hour day view those who merely refer to six days of creation. This is to beg the very question of the nature of the six days spoken of in Genesis 1. This removes some of the Divines from Hall’s list, including Stephen Marshall and John Wallis, and also the works by Thomas Vincent, The Shorter Catechism Explained from Scripture (1674) and by John Ball, Short Treatise Containing All the Principle Grounds of Christian Religion (1650), which were endorsed by some Westminster Divines.

Secondly, the mere support for the chronology of James Ussher of a date for the creation of man of around 4000 b.c. also does not serve to indicate a commitment to six twenty-four-hour days of creation, for the estimate for the date of creation is derived from the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11.[10]

This eliminates several more from Hall’s list, including Thomas Goodwin[11] and Jeremiah Burroughes, plus such corroborative material as Zacharias Ursinus’ Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism (1616).[12]

Thirdly, endorsement of another person’s book does not mean support for every view expressed in that book. Hall adds to his list the names of Westminster Divines Joseph Caryl, Edmund Calamy, and Thomas Case because their names were included in a list of forty notable Puritans who endorsed Vincent’s The Shorter Catechism Explained from Scriptures (1674). Beside the fact that Vincent’s language that God “took six days’ time” does not prove the necessary point, the endorsers give indication in their “Epistle to the Reader” that some of them had not even read the entire book: “And having, to our great satisfaction, perused it ourselves in whole or in part, do readily recommend it to others… .”[13] The basis for five others being included on Hall’s list is similar endorsements of other writers’ works: Simeon Ashe, Thomas Gataker, Daniel Cawdrey, Charles Herle, and Herbert Palmer.

Finally, the evidence offered for John Arrowsmith and Adoniram Byfield has to do with creation by God’s direct word and not by natural processes, a subject that does not necessarily affect the nature of the days of creation in Genesis 1. As a result, Hall’s list of twenty-one Westminster Divines is down to seven—the five whom I have acknowledged plus William Gouge and Thomas Gataker, whose additional material cited by Hall has not been available for me to examine in context.[14]

Of the remaining Westminster Divines who explicitly supported six twenty- four-hour days of creation, some were very explicit on additional details, claiming more than the Scriptures make clear and certainly more than the Westminster Standards say. John Lightfoot, for example, deals with creation in a half-dozen very brief treatises or notes, making such assertions as that the first day was thirty-six hours long, that the creation took place on the autumnal equinox (rather than the vernal equinox, as George Walker affirmed), and that the fall of Adam and Eve occurred on the sixth day, Adam having been created around 9 a.m. and Eve having been tempted around 12 noon. Some of Lightfoot’s reasons for his positions are fascinating—for example, he believes the creation took place on the autumnal equinox because all things were “created in their ripeness and maturity: apples ripe, and ready to eat, as is too sadly plain in Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit”—but they were merely his opinions and did not become the position of the Westminster Assembly as expressed in the Confession of Faith or Catechisms. Although Lightfoot said, “That the world was made at equinox, all grant,—but differ at which, whether about the eleventh of March, or twelfth of September; to me, in September, without all doubt,” the Assembly did not see fit to require agreement to such speculation, which goes beyond what Scripture makes clear.[15]

A similar caution may have governed the Assembly with regard to any requirement of agreement to twenty-four-hour days of creation. Consider the possibility of the following imaginary scenario:

George Walker: Mr. Assessor, I move that we describe the creation as taking place “in the space of six 24-hour days.”

William Gouge: (occupying the chair in the absence of the ailing Dr. William Twisse): Is there a second to the motion?

John Ley: I second the motion, although I recognize that the Hebrew word for “day” (yom) is not itself decisive.

John Lightfoot: I move an amendment that we add that the creation took place on the autumnal equinox, since God’s creation would be in full ripeness.

Walker: I object to this amendment. It must have been at the vernal equinox, since God’s creation would have the freshness of spring.

Gouge: The amendment is out of order because it goes beyond what Scripture clearly teaches or what might be drawn as a necessary inference.

Unidentified Divine No. 1: I have the same problem with the main motion. Since the sun is created by God on the fourth day, can we be sure about the nature of these creative days?

Unidentified Divine No. 2: We clearly want to express duration of time, in order to oppose the concept of instantaneous creation, as advocated by Augustine and so recently promoted by Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici.

Unidentified Divine No. 1: I therefore move an amendment that we strike the words “24-hour days” and merely employ the phrase “in the space of six days.” That is the expression of John Calvin in his Commentary on Genesis and also of Archbishop Ussher in the Irish Articles of 1615, and William Perkins also wrote of creation “in six distinct spaces of time.”

Unidentified Divine No. 2: I second the motion. The phrase “in the space of six days” will express the description of duration of time in Genesis 1 and yet will not go beyond Scripture in deciding the exact nature of these creative days.

Gouge: All in favor of the amendment say aye. All in favor of the motion as amended say aye. The phrase “in the space of six days” is adopted.

Admittedly, this scenario is imaginary. For one thing, the Assembly strove not to include references to theologians as authorities in order to focus only on Scripture. But could not the confessional phrase have been arrived at by such a thought process? I believe this is in accord with the available evidence.[16]

Because the phrase “in the space of six days” does not necessarily mean six twenty-four-hour days, it would not be necessary for a candidate for licensure or ordination to declare an exception if his only question concerns the length of the days of creation. As one who has publicly advocated honest subscription to the Westminster Standards, openly declaring one’s exceptions to the appropriate church court (in a forum with Dr. Morton H. Smith at the Twentieth General Assembly of the PCA in Roanoke, Virginia in 1992 and also in various publications) and allowing that court to determine whether one is still faithful to the second ordination vow, and as one who has conscientiously expressed exceptions in three areas of the Standards to three different presbyteries of the PCA of which I have been, and am, a member in good standing (whose teaching has not been restricted as a consequence), I do not regard it necessary for me to declare an exception to the phrase “in the space of six days.” I believe that this is what Genesis 1 says, but the nature of those days of creation remains an open question for further exegetical study for Christians who adhere to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and to the special creation of Adam and of Eve.

Notes

1. David Hall’s views were presented orally at the twenty-sixth General Assembly of the PCA in St. Louis in 1998 and now are published in two chapters of Joseph A. Pipa, Jr. and David W. Hall, eds., Did God Create in Six Days? (Taylors, S.C.: Southern Presbyterian Press and Oak Ridge, TN: The Covenant Foundation, 1999), 41–52 and 267–305, which is a collection of papers presented at a conference sponsored by the Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Greenville, SC, March 9–11, 1999.
2. Ibid., 292-96. David Hall takes issue with the statement’s claim that a six twenty-four-hour day view “never seems to have been regarded as a test of orthodoxy in the reformed churches” by asking on 293, “What evidence to the contrary do they have to support their claim that the divines did not regard statements in the confession as tests of orthodoxy?” But the faculty’s statement explained earlier, “The Seminary has always held that an exegetical judgement on this precise issue [twenty-four-hour days of creation] has never of itself been regarded as a test of Christian orthodoxy or confessional fidelity, until some have sought to make it such in the modern period.” One can sincerely believe that God created all things out of nothing by the word of his power in the space of six days (as Genesis 1 says) without holding that these days are necessarily twenty-four hours long.
3. City of God, XI, 6. Augustine treats the subject of creation in several places, including two early anti-Manichean works: in the Confessions, Books XI-XIII; in On Genesis Literally Interpreted; and in The City of God, Books XI-XII. Understanding creation not to be in time, nor to take time, Augustine can nevertheless say that “according to Scripture, less than 6000 years have elapsed since He [man] began to be” (City of God, XII, 12, ed., Whitney J. Oates, Basic Writings of St. Augustine [New York: Random House, 1948], II, 190) and yet can also say a few pages later, “I own that I do not know what ages passed before the human race was created” (City of God, XII, 16, ed., Oates, II, 196).
4. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Consolation of Philosophy (New York: Modern Library, 1943), 345, 358, 369. For a discussion of Browne (1605–1682), see Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933, 1967), 67–69. Religio Medici was probably written in 1635, first published by a friend in 1642, and then as authorized by Browne in 1643.
5. Calvin’s Commentaries, 22 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1979 reprint). His Commentary on Genesis is Volume 1, translated by John King. It was originally published in Latin in 1554 and in French in 1563.
6. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.xiv.20, 2 vols., ed., John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960).
7. Basil, Hexaemeron, Homily VI, 2 (82–83 in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd Series, Vol. VIII); Ambrose’s Hexameron, Book IV, Sixth Homily, Chap. 1 (125 in Fathers of the Church, Vol. 42). There is a large amount of “hexaemeral” literature (writings about the six days of creation) from the pre-Reformation and Reformation eras. Some of this is described, with particular emphasis on the early thirteenth-century Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grossteste, in Robert Letham,“‘In the Space of Six Days’: The Days of Creation from Origen to the Westminster Assembly,” WTJ 61 (1999) 149-74. In Frank Egleston Robbins, The Hexaemeral Literature: A Study of the Greek and Latin Commentaries in Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912), an annotated “Index of Names” describes 139 authors on hexaemeral literature (not including Grossteste) on 93–104.
8. William Perkins, Works, 3 vols. (London, 1612): Vol. 1, 143.
9. For biographical information on these and several other Westminster Divines, see William S. Barker, Puritan Profiles: 54 Influential Puritans at the Time When the Westminster Confession of Faith Was Written (Fearn: Ross-shire: Christian Focus Mentor, 1996).
10. Peter Martyr Vermigli’s sixteenth-century commentary on Genesis cautions that the date of the creation of Adam and Eve should not be estimated from the genealogies because, as Augustine commented, the sons listed might not be first-borns and also because the Hebrew manuscripts and the Septuagint do not agree on some of the numbers. (This reference has been provided by Westminster Ph.D. student Clark Stull, who is working on a translation of this Latin commentary by the Reformer, who taught at Oxford, 1548–1553.)
11. It is interesting that Goodwin, in the same Exposition of the Epistle to the Ephesians that David Hall cites, makes an analogy between the days of creation and the “days” of the new world since Christ has come, in which “we are under the second day’s work, if I may so express it” in the seventeenth century (The Works of Thomas Goodwin [Eureka, Calif.: Tanslic Publications, 1996], Vol. I, 520).
12. Did God Create in Six Days?, 289, note 45.
13. Thomas Vincent, The Shorter Catechism Explained from Scripture (Edinburgh and Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, 1980), v, emphasis added.
14. Did God Create in Six Days?, 45 and 47.
15. John Lightfoot, Works (1822), Vol. II, 71, 73, 74, 333–34, 335, 413; Vol. IV, p. 64; Vol. VII, pp. 372, 373-76, 377–79.
16. We do not possess much in the way of commentaries on Genesis by the Westminster Divines or even by other contemporary Puritans. One by George Hughes (1603–1667), published posthumously in 1672 appears to support twenty-four-hour days of creation. On the other hand, Thomas Burnet (1635–1715) in his Telluris theoria sacra or the Sacred Theology of the Earth (Latin version 1681, English 1684), according to Stephen Jay Gould in his book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999), 18, “argued that God’s six ‘days’ might represent periods of undetermined length, not literal intervals of twenty- four hours or physical episodes of one full rotation about an axis.” Burnet was a chaplain to King William III until dismissed for some of his views on Genesis and also a friend of Sir Isaac Newton, who praised his book. Those who have worked with the Minutes of the Westminster Assembly know how frustratingly sketchy they can be. There is one instance where the question of including the phrase “twenty-four hours” for the Sabbath came up and was rejected: “Resolved upon the Q., ‘God in His word hath appointed one day in seven for a Sabbath to be kept holy unto Him.’ “Ordered—‘which from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ was the last of the week, and … from the resurrection to the end of the world the first of the week.’ “Resolved upon the Q., These words, ‘consisting of twenty-four hours,’ shall be waived in this place.” (Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly of the Divines, ed. Alex F. Mitchell and John Struthers, 1874, reprint by Still Waters Revival Books, Edmonton, Alberta, 1991–216 for Session 615, April 6, 1646).