Sabbath School: 30 September 2012
Audio from the Sabbath School class of 30 September 2012 is available here.
In this class we continued our discussion of the actions of the 40th General Assembly of the PCA, looking at the Assembly’s decision not to adopt a clarifying declaration in relation to Evolution and Adam. Adopting the overture from Potomac Presbytery, the Assembly affirmed instead that the truth of the Word of God on this subject is sufficiently expressed in our confessional standards, particularly at WLC #17, so that a clarifying statement is not necessary.
The PCA General Assembly has previously received a ‘Creation Study Report’ which stated, in part,
We affirm that Genesis 1-3 is a coherent account from the hand of Moses. We believe that history, not myth, is the proper category for describing these chapters; and furthermore that their history is true. In these chapters we find the record of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth ex nihilo; of the special creation of Adam and Eve as actual human beings, the parents of all humanity (hence they are not the products of evolution from lower forms of life). We further find the account of an historical fall, that brought all humanity into an estate of sin and misery, and of God’s sure promise of a Redeemer.
The Savannah River Presbytery requested that the General Assembly adopt the language used by the old Southern Presbyterian Church on this issue in statements they adopted in 1886, 1888, and 1924, as follows.
That Adam and Eve were created, body and soul, by immediate acts of Almighty power;
That Adam’s body was directly fashioned by Almighty God, without any natural animal parentage of any kind, out of matter previously created from nothing.
This overture and a similar one from Rocky Mountain Presbytery were answered in the negative by reference to the overture from Potomac Presbytery.