Norm Geisler concludes:

After seriously pondering these questions for over a half century, my conclusions are: (1) The Young Earth view is not one of the Fundamentals of the Faith. (2) It is not a test for orthodoxy. (3) It is not a condition of salvation. (4) It is not a test of Christian fellowship. (5) It is not an issue over which the body of Christ should divide. (6) It is not a hill on which we should die. (7) The fact of creation is more important than the time of creation. (8) There are more important doctrines on which we should focus (like the inerrancy of the Bible, the deity of Christ, the Trinity, and the death and resurrection of Christ, and His literal Second Coming. As Repertus Meldenius (d. 1651) put it: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty, and in all things charity.” And by all counts, the age of the earth is not one of the essentials of the Christian Faith.

Norm Geisler was a member of the committee that published the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. He said the committee voted to exclude YEC from being a biblical inerrant teaching. That was in a 2014 paper and I hope to quote from it in a related article.

About the quote “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty, and in all things charity.” I have encountered quite a number of folks who promote YEC as the only true biblical theory of origins. In all of them I only found perhaps five who recognized “in non-essentials, liberty.” The rest insisted I must kiss their ring to be saved, otherwise God would condemn me eternally. In other words, they did not recognize that any Christian could reject YEC. As far as I know this latter teaching comes from the followers of Henry Morris, and Hovind, and Ken Ham. They are convinced of a creed, where creed means belief required of all Christian believers. And they are very insistent, and would split churches wherever necessary. In other words they break communion.

That contradicts “in non-essentials, liberty.”

The core tenet here is “YEC is essential.” They do not recognize it as non-essential.

Some of them, Gale Anderson is an example, told me YEC itself goes all the way back to Jesus himself and has always been the standard belief of all Christians. My investigations into bible, history, and inerrancy do not support that claim. (More articles to come on that subject).

Anderson claimed Hovind as his muse and denied ever having heard of Ham.

Others use non-essentials as a test for Christian fellowship. That was my experience for 30 years in the Converge denomination in Minnesota. Why they cancel people based on non-essentials remains an unexplained mystery. I personally witnessed a culture of many people being harmed by requiring them to believe non-essentials fabricated by parishioners. In that culture figuring out what church doctrine is does not seem easy to do. There is a doctrinal statement at Berean Baptist. To be a member you must affirm inerrancy. But what does inerrancy mean? Getting a coherent answer leads me to study the Chicago Statement and the basis for it.

So, I am reading Hugh Ross, Rescuing Inerrancy. Hugh Ross, founder of Reasons to Believe, is considered to be a heretic by most YECs I have met.

The problem is YEC teaches that 6 24 hour days of creation IS ESSENTIAL. And if you don’t go along with that you are to be denied communion.