RBC Ministries doesn’t have an official position regarding the length of the days of creation. Our founder, Dr. M.R. DeHaan was an adherent of the “gap” theory. However, this doesn’t mean that we reject a literal day or day-age approach. Numerous members of our staff hold to both of these perspectives.
Our view of creation is based in Scripture and in conformance with positions taken by signers of The Fundamentals and the founder of Dallas Theological Seminary. The traditional Fundamentalist view is that the literal day, day-age, or gap hypotheses are all viable options for those upholding literal interpretation of Scripture. James Orr in made this clear in an essay in The Fundamentals:
“Few are disquieted in reading their Bibles because it is made certain that the world is immensely older than the 6,000 years, which the older chronology gave it. Geology is felt only to have expanded our ideas of the vastness and marvel of the Creator’s operations through the aeons of time during which the world, with its teeming populations of fishes, birds, reptiles, mammals, was preparing for man’s abode? when the mountains were being upheaved, the valleys being scooped out, and veins of precious metals being inlaid into the crust of the earth.
Does science, then, really, contradict Genesis 1? Not surely if what has been above said of the essentially popular character of the allusions to natural things in the Bible be remembered. Here certainly is no detailed description of the process of the formation of the earth in terms anticipative of modern science–terms which would have been unintelligible to the original readers–but a sublime picture, true to the order of nature, as it is to the broad facts even of geological succession. If it tells how God called heaven and earth into being, separated light from darkness, sea from land, clothed the world with vegetation, gave sun and moon their appointed rule of day and night, made fowl to fly, and sea-monsters to plow the deep, created the cattle and beasts of the field, and finally made man, male and female, in His own image, and established him as ruler over all God’s creation, this orderly rise of created forms, man crowning the whole, these deep ideas of the narrative, setting the world at the very beginning in its right relation to God, and laying the foundations of an enduring philosophy of religion, are truths which science does nothing to subvert, but in myriad ways confirms. The “six days” may remain as a difficulty to some, but, if this is not part of the symbolic setting of the picture–a great divine “week” of work–one may well ask, as was done by Augustine long before geology was thought of, what kind of “days” these were which rolled their course before the sun, with its twenty-four hours of diurnal measurement, was appointed to that end? There is no violence done to the narrative in substituting in thought “aeonic” days–vast cosmic periods–for “days” on our narrower, sun-measured scale. Then the last trace of apparent “conflict” disappears.” (The Fundamentals, reprinted by Kregel in 1990; pp.81-82; 133-134)
It is also demonstrated by the following statement by Lewis Sperry Chafer, founder of Dallas Theological Seminary:
Genesis clearly declares that there were six successive days in which God created the heavens and the earth of today. The best of scholars have disagreed on whether these are literal 24-hour periods or vast periods of time. From the standpoint of the ability of God, there is no question to be raised since He must be able to create all things in the briefest time. A literal 24-hour period seems to be applied when each is measured by words like, “and the evening and the morning were the first day,” etc. On the other hand, it is reflected in nature that much time has passed since the forming of material things, and the Bible does use the day symbolically when referring to a period of time. The coming kingdom of a thousand years is styled The Day of the Jehovah. Any point of time throughout the present age is known as the Day of Salvation. Peter declares: “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day with the Lord is a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day” (2 Pet. 3:8). So, also, Christ represented the present age as the hour that was coming “and now is” (cf. Jn. 5:25-28). (Chafer’s Systematic Theology)
Along with Orr, Chafer, and other historic Fundamentalist leaders, we consider the freedom to take any one of these three positions a matter of Christian liberty.
