I recently read an essay (Six day creation & the cancer of liberalism) from CrossPolitic published a few year ago as part of a conference with the theme “The Politics of Six-Day Creation” held at Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter in 2023. This was an event associated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (see this article for my concerns regarding this group: A Plea for Gospel Clarity: Addressing the Errors of Doug Wilson’s Theology) In his article, Gabe Rench argues that rejecting a literal six-day creation is the opening move in a church’s slide toward theological liberalism. The image he reaches for is memorable: a ship that leaves the dock “one degree off” ends up, many miles later, stranded on an island no one can find. Abandon the twenty-four-hour days of Genesis 1, the argument runs, and forty years on you will have surrendered the resurrection, the authority of Scripture, and the gospel itself.
It a bold claim and I want to respond, not because the doctrine of creation is unimportant, but because the essay makes a specific historical claim that can actually be tested. Rench locates the headwaters of liberalism in the church today (the PCA in particular in this article) in a particular interpretive decision about the length of the creation days. If that genealogy is correct, we should expect to find that the Christians who fought hardest against liberalism were young-earth creationists, and that those who softened on the days were the ones who eventually drifted. The historical record points almost exactly the other way.
The Man Who Wrote the Book on Liberalism
If a single figure embodies conservative Reformed resistance to theological liberalism in the twentieth century, it is J. Gresham Machen. His 1923 book, Christianity and Liberalism, remains the defining statement of the conservative case—the argument that liberalism was not a variety of Christianity at all but a different religion wearing Christian vocabulary. Machen left a comfortable post at Princeton Seminary, founded Westminster Theological Seminary, and ultimately helped found what became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church rather than tolerate modernism in the church’s agencies. No one in the Reformed world has a stronger claim to be the architect of anti-liberalism.
And Machen was not a young-earth creationist. In The Christian View of Man (1937) he wrote plainly: “It is certainly not necessary to think that the six days spoken of in that first chapter of the Bible are intended to be six days of twenty four hours each. We may think of them rather as very long periods of time.” Those are not the words of a man one degree off the dock. They are the words of the most formidable opponent liberalism faced in his generation. If rejecting twenty-four-hour days were truly the first step toward apostasy, then the author of Christianity and Liberalism took that step himself—and then spent the rest of his life building institutions to keep liberalism out.
A Princeton Inheritance
Machen did not arrive at this position by accident or by compromise. He inherited it from the very tradition that trained him to fight. The Old Princeton theology of Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield—about as far from doctrinal looseness as American Protestantism ever produced—had already worked out a careful account of how an old earth, and even a form of evolution, could be held alongside a high view of Scripture. Warfield, who defended biblical inerrancy as vigorously as anyone in his century, concluded that there was nothing in the Genesis account that “need be opposed to evolution,” provided one preserved God’s freedom to act and to create the human soul (Warfield, 1915). When people wrote to Machen with questions about evolution, he routinely pointed them to Warfield.
This is the inconvenient fact at the center of the matter. The men who built the intellectual case against liberalism—Hodge, Warfield, Machen—held the age of the earth, and even the mechanism of creation, with an open hand. They distinguished, as the essay does not, between evolution as a scientific description of secondary causes and evolution as an atheistic philosophy that denies God altogether. The first they could entertain; the second they rejected absolutely. That distinction was not a concession to the fashionable crowd. It was the considered judgment of the most rigorous orthodox theologians the tradition produced.
I want to be precise here, because precision is what the subject demands. Machen was more cautious about human evolution than Warfield was; he drew back from the idea that the human body had descended from lower forms, and he believed there were real gaps in the evidence. But on the question that Rench makes the test—whether the days of Genesis must be twenty-four hours—Machen was unambiguous. Even the man who was more conservative than Warfield on evolution was not a six-day creationist.
What Machen Thought Liberalism Actually Was
Here we reach the heart of the disagreement, and it is a theological one. The essay assumes that the doctrine of creation, and specifically the length of the creation days, sits at the foundation of orthodoxy, such that everything else stands or falls with it. Machen did not believe this. For him, the line between historic Christianity and liberalism ran somewhere else entirely. It ran through the supernatural acts at the center of redemption: the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the substitutionary atonement, the deity of Christ, the historical facticity of the gospel events. Liberalism, in Machen’s diagnosis, was the denial that Christianity rests on what God actually did at a definite point in history. A gospel detached from history, he argued, is a contradiction in terms.
Notice what is, and is not, on that list. The age of the earth is not on it. Machen regarded evolution as a side issue compared to the battles he was actually fighting. The clearest evidence of how he ranked these questions comes from the Scopes Trial itself. When William Jennings Bryan invited Machen to come to Dayton in 1925 and testify as an expert witness for the prosecution, Machen declined. He recognized that his expertise lay in the New Testament rather than in geology or Genesis, and—more tellingly—he did not regard the creation question as the hill on which the war against liberalism would be won or lost. The leading anti-liberal of the age looked at the most famous evolution trial in American history and concluded it was largely beside the point.
The Warfare Myth, Repeated
There is a deeper irony in building a defense of orthodoxy on the six-day test, and it has to do with where that binary came from. The notion that one must choose between “real science” and “real faith,” with no defensible ground in between, was not a Christian invention. It was popularized by Andrew Dickson White, whose 1896 History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom taught a generation of journalists and educators to see every dispute over evolution as another skirmish in science’s inevitable conquest of superstition. By 1925, that warfare model had so saturated public opinion that the press could cover the Scopes Trial in only one register: Reason versus Religion, with the believer cast as the enemy of progress.
The tragedy of Dayton, as I have argued elsewhere including the talk I gave at the Rhea County Courthouse on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the Scopes trial, was not the verdict but the voices that went unheard. The careful Princeton tradition, including Hodge’s distinction between evolution and Darwinism, Warfield’s openness to providentially guided development, the whole tradition of orthodox engagement with science, was simply absent from the courtroom and from the headlines. Bryan’s populist fundamentalism and Darrow’s secular modernism were allowed to stand as the only two options available. When a Reformed writer today insists that the church must choose between twenty-four-hour days and the slow death of liberalism, he is not showing or acknowledging his own historical roots or resisting that secular binary. He is reproducing it. He has accepted Darrow’s map of the territory and merely planted his flag on the other side of the same false line.
A Boundary in the Wrong Place
None of this is to say that the doctrine of creation does not matter. It matters a great deal, and Christians can disagree in good faith about how to read Genesis 1. What I am questioning is the decision to make one reading of the creation days a test of fellowship and a reliable predictor of apostasy. The essay goes so far as to claim there is no such thing as secondary doctrine. But that claim cuts against the very labor that made Machen useful to the church. Machen’s achievement was to distinguish the essential from the secondary. It was to identify precisely which doctrines a person could deny and still remain within Christianity, and which they could not. To flatten that distinction, treating the age of the earth as though it carried the same weight as the resurrection, is not a more rigorous orthodoxy. It is a less careful one.
The confessional tradition has, in fact, repeatedly declined to draw the line where this essay draws it. When the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America each studied the creation question in recent decades, both concluded that a range of interpretations of the Genesis days could be held within their confessional boundaries. These were not liberal bodies capitulating to the spirit of the age; they were among the most conservative Presbyterian denominations in the country, and they recognized that faithful, confessional Christians had long read the days in more than one way. To insist now that taking exception on this point is the first symptom of a spreading cancer is to indict Hodge, Warfield, and Machen along with everyone else.
If the OPC or PCA is “going liberal” it is not likely due to acknowledging the historically orthodox diversity of interpretations of the early chapters of Genesis.
My disagreement with Rench’s article is not about whether liberalism is a danger. It is about how the church guards against it. The history is clear enough: the men who resisted liberalism most effectively did not man the walls at the twenty-four-hour day. They concentrated their defense on the supernatural heart of the gospel and left room for honest disagreement about the age of the earth. As we marked the centennial of the Scopes Trial last summer, we might begin by drawing our boundaries where Machen drew his. We do so by first refusing the false choice that the warfare myth has been pressing on the church for more than a century.
Blessings,
Joel
Other writings and videos of mine related to this topic:
My Lecture From the Scopes Courtroom: A Century of Christian Responses to Evolution https://youtu.be/H2516kbjlvE?si=kCZlWrDQuCsdBZ0L
Ark Encounter Hosts Moscow Cult https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKFGXH_YUdWE-n9kSV5sg3Q
Long blog post about my concerns regarding Douglas Wilson: A Plea for Gospel Clarity: Addressing the Errors of Doug Wilson’s Theology
References
Hart, D. G. (1994). Defending the faith: J. Gresham Machen and the crisis of conservative Protestantism in modern America. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Larson, E. J. (1997). Summer for the gods: The Scopes trial and America’s continuing debate over science and religion. Basic Books.
Machen, J. G. (1923). Christianity and liberalism. Macmillan.
Machen, J. G. (1937). The Christian view of man. Macmillan.
Numbers, R. L. (2006). The creationists: From scientific creationism to intelligent design (Expanded ed.). Harvard University Press.
Rench, G. (2026, June 17). Six day creation & the cancer of liberalism. CrossPolitic. https://crosspolitic.substack.com/p/six-day-creation-and-the-cancer-of
Warfield, B. B. (1915). Calvin’s doctrine of the creation. The Princeton Theological Review, 13(2), 190–255.
White, A. D. (1896). A history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom. D. Appleton.
Naturalis Historia 
Comments or Questions?