The book mentions him too. He draws a straight line from William Miller to Ellen White to George McCready Price to John Whitcomb and Henry Morris.
He also makes an interesting point that David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus Critically Examined has as much to do with the rise of YEC as Darwin's Origin of Species did. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined caused a massive backlash against more modern interpretations of scripture. This eventually led to the rise of fundamentalism in the early 1900's.
All of this church history is fascinating to me. There's a lot of stuff I did not know. I'll try to find a copy of The Creationists when I'm done with Saving Darwin. Thanks for the suggestion.
Try
Darwin's Forgotten Defenders for a look at how early Fundamentalists, and evangelicals in general, initially reacted to evolution - they were plenty willing to accommodate both an old earth and evolution where it seemed prudent. The book is also short and sweet, a fait bit shorter than
The Creationists.
Yes literalism is often an easy but ultimately pricey backlash at a challenge to the interpretive norm of the day. Most people don't realize that the theological reasoning behind the persecution of Galileo was that at the Council of Trent, in response to the Reformation, the Catholic church ultimately decided that the only theologically allowable interpretation of Scripture was that which coincided with the Church Fathers' - and the Church Fathers had been unanimously geocentrist, thus making it impossible for Galileo to both obey the Council of Trent and maintain his heliocentric views.
If this published view is valid, then there is no difference between scientific concordism and evolutionary creationists.
I still await an answer to the question, what is the difference between an old earth creationist and a theistic evolutionist. It appears to me to be the denial of special creation, the view of progressive creationists.
I suppose an "accord" between Scripture and science is too vague. I certainly believe that Scripture
rightfully interpreted can never contradict science
rightfully concluded.
Concordism is, more narrowly speaking, the insistence that a
literalistic interpretation of Scripture is the one that science must agree with, and that any difference between this interpretation of Scripture with any science is one in which science must ultimately yield, the wrongness of Scripture's interpretation not being an option.
The main difference between OECs and TEs is concerning the manner in which life came about. OECs generally accept the geological record as evidence of actual events undergone by Earth, but see life in the geological record as being specially created by God (i.e. God poofed fish into existence in the Devonian, poofed large mammals into existence after the Cretaceous, etc.). By that count I suppose you could, if you wished to be pedantic, classify me and a few others here as OECs on account of the fact that we think some supernaturalistic element must have been involved in the creating of (to borrow John Stott's interesting classification)
homo divinus, man who is able to relate to God.
The thing is, OECs as a lobby group are not very active in terms of wanting to legislate evolution out of textbooks. Most OEC articles position themselves as conservative rebuttals of what they see to be YEC extremism, without necessarily going the whole hog of embracing evolutionism. And to YECs, the OEC acceptance of such views as the antiquity of Earth, animal death before the Fall, and typically some kind of local flood viewpoint, makes them just as much unbiblical compromisers as TEs. So even though OECism is theoretically a separate position on origins (and indeed was largely held in American evangelicalism as the initial reaction to evolution), for the purposes of most groups involved in the origins discussion they are rarely substantial enough to be addressed on their own.
