Seven Days that Divide the World, 10th Anniversary Edition

John C. Lennox

Paperback

Description: 

Now revised and updated--John Lennox's acclaimed method of reading and interpreting the first chapters of Genesis without discounting either science or Scripture.

What did the writer of Genesis mean by "the first day?" Are the seven days in Genesis 1 a literal week or a series of time periods? If I believe that the earth is 4.5 billion years old as cosmologists believe, am I denying the authority of Scripture?

With examples from history, a brief but thorough exploration of the major interpretations, and a look into the particular significance of the creation of human beings, Lennox suggests that Christians can heed modern scientific knowledge while staying faithful to the biblical narrative. He moves beyond a simple response to the controversy, insisting that Genesis teaches us far more about the God of Jesus Christ and about God's intention for creation than it does about the age of the earth.

With this book, Lennox offers a careful and accessible introduction to a scientifically-savvy, theologically-astute, and Scripturally faithful interpretation of Genesis.

Since its publication in 2011, this book has enabled many readers to see that the major controversy with which it engages can be resolved without compromising commitment to the authority of Scripture. In this newly revised and expanded edition, John clarifies his arguments, responds to comments and critiques of the past decade since its first publication. In particular, he describes some of the history up to modern times of Jewish scholarly interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative as well as spelling out in more detail the breadth of views in the Great Tradition of interpretation due to the early Church Fathers. He shows that, contrary to what many people think, much of the difficulty with understanding the biblical texts does not arise from modern science but from attempting to elucidate the texts in their own right.

- Publisher

About The Author: John Lennox is Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science, and Pastoral Advisor at Green Templeton College, Oxford. He is also an Adjunct Lecturer at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University and at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and is a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum. In addition, he teaches for the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme at the Executive Education Centre, Said Business School, Oxford University.

John Carson Lennox was born in 1943 in Northern Ireland, the son of a shopkeeper, and grew up in Armagh. He studied at the Royal School Armagh, Northern Ireland and was Exhibitioner and Senior Scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University from which he took his MA, MMath and PhD. While there, he heard lectures by C S Lewis on the poet John Donne. Lennox worked for many years in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Wales in Cardiff which awarded him a DSc for his research. He also holds an MA and DPhil from Oxford University and an MA in Bioethics from the University of Surrey. He was a Senior Alexander Von Humboldt Fellow at the Universities of Wurzburg and Freiburg in Germany. He has lectured extensively in North America, Eastern and Western Europe and Australasia on mathematics, the philosophy of science and the intellectual defence of Christianity.

Between 2007 and 2011, Lennox was involved in numerous public debates in the UK, US, and Australia, wherein he articulated an intellectually robust Christian case for the existence of God. His interlocutors have included Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and Peter Singer.

Lennox has written a number of books on the interface between science, philosophy and theology. These include God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (2009), God and Stephen Hawking, a response to The Grand Design (2011), Gunning for God, on the new atheism (2011), and Seven Days that Divide the World, on the early chapters of Genesis (2011). Furthermore, in addition to over seventy published mathematical papers, he is the co-author of two research level texts in algebra in the Oxford Mathematical Monographs series.

Lennox is multilingual, fluent in Russian, French, and German. He is married to Sally, and has three children and five grandchildren.

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Pages: 240