The Genesis Cataclysm. W. Joseph Stallings
and theologizing, remembering, reasoning, believing, doubting and knowing, deliberating and choosing, introspecting, dreaming, playing, composing, writing, recounting and narrating (e.g. of history), preferring, being useful and resourceful for others, and being social and moral beings who can bring God praise, worship and adoration. In order for humans to be and to do—to participate in (a richly Platonic concept)—the full array of personhood with which God has made us, we have to have some way to be located at a somewhere and a somewhen, and to be distinguishable one person from another, yet re-identifiable as the same person over those somewhens. “A body he has prepared” for us. These embodied persons he has placed in a common, shared space, which we call our world. Before God could ever make us, he made the world first to provide us with a suitable environment, full of other living things, and incredibly, space and time, causality and regularity of law and action—a real world in which to live and move and have our being.
Once having created us, a part of God’s package-deal is that he would reveal himself to us. For, if he loves us with an unremitting love, and knows that there is no other way available by which we can be happy but by the knowledge and satisfaction of knowing God, he must show himself to us. How does a spiritual being like our Father do that when we are material beings whose atmosphere is that of a planet with a real live history and dynamic past, present and future?
Into that lawlike atmosphere, God gave us a revelation of himself, and even caused these truths to be written down through his “God-breathed” manifestation of himself by forty different authors over a 2000-year period, giving us in time what we would have as the completed Holy Scriptures.
But there is a problem: our rebellious sin has led to separation from God and to death. Who will save us from this bondage of sin and death? But thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom 7:24–25)
When one combines these above elements, one comes to understand what Joe gives us in this book: a desire that we humans have to take God’s sure revelation and to understand it in light of our shared empirically real world. How do we as humans understand our present and our future, still to be revealed? The past. We have to look to the past to receive and appreciate God’s revelation to us in the Bible.
I am very pleased to inform the reader that Joe has, as a matter of Christian conviction, made it a priority—indeed, an apriority—to see that God’s Word comes first no matter what theories we may entertain or construct concerning models of the past. In the book before the reader, Joe makes it his point of departure that God’s Word must determine the boundaries of any acceptable model of the Flood spoken of in Genesis 6–8. And Joe gives us a lot of cogent reasoning about why we should believe that the Bible speaks of a universal Flood event. Even if in the flurry of data to be considered there are some inconsistent accounts—and there are and will be—still, God says that the universal Flood is real, that it happened in real space-time history, that it is a part of complete Christian orthodoxy to believe this—without which other doctrines will not make complete sense.
But when did the Flood occur? Joe here takes these God-bestowed gifts above of reasoning, reflection, theologizing and philosophizing, and creates a paradigm for our consideration which says that Scripture must be first; and, there are some good reasons to think that the scriptural evidence for a universal Flood is plausibly consistent with what we do see in science. If all truth is God’s truth, we expect and hope for a coherence, a consistency. But can we make consistent an OEC view of the days of creation—and of a universal Flood event? I welcome you to Joe’s offering. It is a great read and great challenge that all believers need to study and consider. This book fills a niche in a unique way in the literature, and I hope the reader will strap in and appreciate the ride! Joe is to be commended for his patient and balanced treatment of a wide array of excellent sources and compelling arguments. A treat awaits you!
Edward N. Martin, PhD
Professor and Chair of Philosophy
Liberty University
Lynchburg, Virginia
Introduction
A number of years ago, when I first began the research that eventually became The Genesis Column origins correlation model, I had no intention of carrying out any deep exploration of the Flood of Noah. Though the event had always fascinated me and, over the years, I had read a number of books about it, including, of course, the broadly popular work by Balsiger and Sellier, In Search of Noah’s Ark (1976),1 it was never more than just a peripheral subject of interest. Certainly, I recognized that the Flood was an important divine action within the purview of biblical history and knew that the event would have to be addressed; yet, it wasn’t until I began seeing the details of the origins correlation model fall into place that I finally concluded that, in the greater scheme of things, the Noahic Flood was vitally significant in its own right and had major ramifications for our understanding of the terrestrial order. Thus, a related, but separate course of research began for me.
As I read and studied further, I became aware that the current views on the Flood and the various placements of the event in time were not to me satisfactory. While being a steadfast and indefatigable advocate of Old-Earth Creationism (OEC),2 I found myself at odds with many fellow OECs who typically held to a regional (usually Mesopotamian) Flood view. Of course, my understanding also found itself automatically in contrast with the advocates of Young-Earth Creationism (YEC) because of the narrow constraints of their time-line (including that of an extremely recent Flood placement). Furthermore, in light of the various advocations of OEC and Theistic Evolutionism that are based on (or otherwise associated with) the recent resurgence of the Framework Hypothesis of the biblical creation narrative3—and with that, often a symbolic or hybridic Flood view—there were just many elemental features inherent to these formulations that, to me, did not seem weighty and persuasive. In my understanding, none of these interpretations seemed to adequately fit either a wholesome reading of the Noahic text nor God’s bigger picture. With all this, I found myself being compelled to engage in a new and much different sort of exploration of the matter.
I must acknowledge that, being an investigator, my research of the subject has traversed across many variant perspectives and angles. In fact, in this text, I engage applicable scholars from some very diverse views and disciplines. The quest is accomplished simply with one goal in mind: the earnest seeking of truth.
A lot of different people—even many with greatly antithetical positions—can have much to say that adds richness to the subject at hand. Sometimes scholars can make important discoveries and wisdom-filled assertions that find their placement into our postulation in ways that would never have even remotely occurred to them; or perhaps, even in ways that they never would have intended nor desired. As I have sifted through the many works and the abundance of raw data, I have tried, with God’s guidance, to consciously remain open to these kinds of possibilities. When it comes down to it, it is always about frame of reference and about the way that things—however true those things may be on their own merit alone—are seen and understood in relation to other meritorious truths. Sometimes we miss the fullness of truth because we are not looking with both eyes open. And sometimes even undisputed facts can be incorrectly placed within the structures of a paradigm—even when the wider paradigm itself is quite plausible. There is a forest. And there are trees. Both. We do our level best when we don’t miss—or misappropriate—either one.
As I previously set forth in my first book, The Genesis Column (Wipf & Stock, 2018), it is my unwavering conviction that there exists a great divine meta-narrative of and within all created existence.4 God is both working in and revealing himself through history. God not only created everything that is, but is decisively going somewhere with all that he has created. He is working resolutely and purposefully in and through all of the space, time, matter, and energy of which his created order consists. Yet, that creation—originally perfect—is currently fallen. Our rebellious Adamic touch has tainted and marred the Edenic Paradise and everything that is part of that order has been afflicted. Therefore, the work of God goes on through a process whereby the restoration of fallen Original Creation will surely come to pass in the ultimate culmination of final New Creation. Until that point in God’s mysterious kairological time, “the creation [still] waits with eager