May I suggest "
Man: Ape or Image?," "
Reasonable Christianity" and "
Green Eye of the Storm" all by Dr T. John Rendle-Short. Dr T. John Rendle-Short, or ‘Prof’ as he is affectionately known by many, was Foundation Professor and Head of the Department of Child Health in the University of Queensland, Brisbane, a post he held for 24 years.
Though he has not actively taught for some years, his influence is still felt by this generation of medical students. His book
A Synopsis of Children’s Diseases is still being used as a pediatric textbook at the University of Queensland Medical School at the time of writing.
His academic and clinical prowess earned for him the distinguished status of Professor Emeritus, which means he is, in effect, ‘Professor for Life’ of the University.
Prof had the inestimable advantage of being born into a Christian family with a long evangelical tradition. His father, Arthur Rendle Short (his father’s name was spelt without the hyphen), became professor of surgery in the University of Bristol, England. As well as impeccable surgical qualifications, he had the rare distinction of having degrees (high distinctions, with gold medals, from the University of London) in physiology and geology. Besides medical books, he wrote many books on Christian apologetics, with a special interest in creation and evolution. He was much in demand as a speaker in Brethren and InterVarsity Fellowship circles.
Of his father’s writings which promote theistic evolution, Prof says,
‘It must be understood that in England in the first decades of the 20th century, Darwin was triumphant. No thinking person seriously contemplated six-day creation or that the Flood really covered more than the then known world.’
It is little surprise therefore that John Rendle-Short himself was a theistic evolutionist for more than 40 years. He says,
‘I have every sympathy with those Christians of a past generation who felt compelled to try to find a way to cope with evolution. For them, there seemed to be very little choice—all the science they were told of pointed to evolution—the alleged long age of the earth, Piltdown man, and so on.’
From personal notes of his father’s which turned up years later, Prof discovered that the elder Rendle Short’s peace with evolutionary theory was always an uneasy one. The Fall in particular was an agonizing ‘impasse’ for him. Prof asks,
‘How could the Fall of man have brought sin and death into the world, if the fossils were showing a creation ‘groaning’ for millions of years before man? How could man be both a rising ape and a fallen image? These were agonizing questions for my father.’
It was a great encouragement to Prof to discover strong indications from his father’s private notes that as time went on, Arthur Rendle Short increasingly shifted toward belief in a six-day recent creation, although he made no written comment about the extent of the Flood.
Sadly, Piltdown man, a cleverly conceived hoax which seemed to have been a powerful influencing factor in Arthur Rendle Short’s acceptance of evolution, was only revealed as a fraud in December 1953, some two months after Prof’s father died.
For Prof himself, educated at Cambridge and brought up with his father’s writings, theistic evolution (or its variant, progressive creationism) was the natural direction for him to take. His odyssey to being chairman of one of the most effective creation science outreach ministries in the world was overseen by the Lord’s hand in countless ways, both large and small.
An encounter with the late Prof. Dr Arthur Wilder-Smith on a bus in Toronto was the starting point. Prof says,
‘Here was a man who had three earned science doctorates, who was a convinced believer in the literal truth of Genesis. When he told me this, I was flabbergasted.’
After many years wandering in the ‘wilderness’ of theistic evolution, Prof found it a great joy to be part of a ministry strengthening the Genesis foundations of Christianity. He was particularly thrilled at being instrumental in establishing Creation Science Foundation (UK) in his beloved mother country.
Prof. Rendle-Short is acutely aware of the harm done to Christianity by evolutionary compromises. Some years ago he met a pastor who, on finding that Prof was now a ‘full on’ creationist, reacted strongly. He said that many years ago, he had heard Prof espouse theistic evolution. This had started this pastor on a downhill road which, he exclaimed, ‘nearly destroyed my faith.’
The Rendle-Short name is well known to publishers of both medical and Christian works. For example, one medical publishing house has now had something written by either Prof or his father in print continuously for over 80 years!
Source:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v19/i2/creation.asp
