EVENTH-DAY ADVENTISTS HAVE THE greatest stake in the creation-evolution controversy—maybe more than other Christians. Two of our foundational doctrines, the Sabbath and the three angels’ messages, are inseparably linked to the Creation account. While the Sabbath is a memorial of Creation, the first angel’s message calls on every nation, kindred, tongue, and people to worship the God who created “the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water” (Rev. 14:7).¹

If for Adventists the Creation account is inextricably entwined with the eternal gospel, then it is highly significant that in the Bible it also does not stand by itself, but is intimately linked with the theme of redemption. Thus Isaiah 45, like Revelation 14:7, joins God’s creative power with a call to salvation. “For this is what the Lord says—he who created the heavens, he is God. . . . Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth” (verses 18-22). The same connection between Creation and redemption can also be found in Isaiah 42:5, 54:5, and Psalms 89, 104, 136.

Similarly, in the New Testament John 1:1-16 implicitly links the role of the Word in Creation and His role in redemption. Colossians 1:13-20 also makes the same indirect linkage. But 2 Corinthians 4:6 makes the most explicit connection between Creation and redemption: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts.” Here the miracle of Creation is conflated with the miracle of conversion, of the new creation in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). While at Creation God breathed the breath of life into dead forms and they became living beings (Gen. 2:7), at conversion God makes sinners alive through the Holy Spirit.

It is clear that in the Bible God’s creative activity is not limited to the genesis of the world. Rather it is an unbroken continuum that embraces His redemptive work in human history. In other words, Creation and redemption are identical activities. This explains why Hebrews 11:3 (“By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command”) is a preamble to a chapter that narrates the power of faith in the lives of patriarchs and prophets. Implicit in Hebrews 11 is the idea that the same creative power manifested at Creation was evidenced in the lives of patriarchs and prophets.

To be sure, the central event in the lives of patriarchs and prophets—the event that shaped their faith—was not the Creation, but the Exodus. For the Israelites, God was first and above all the Redeemer God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who rescued them from the shackles of slavery. And it’s not without significance that the Exodus was the foundation of Israel’s faith. While all people in the world have their Creation myths (and evolution is one), the Exodus is unique; it stands alone in religious history. “Ask now about the former days, long before your time. . . . Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation . . . by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds?” (Deut. 4:32-34).

A More Solid Foundation
We should note, however, how the Exodus parallels the Creation. Out of the nothingness, the chaos, of Egyptian slavery God literally created a new nation, a kingdom of priests (Ex. 19:6). In this way, the Exodus is a creative act. Even more, through it God demonstrated His sovereignty over nature.

So convincingly did the Israelites experience God’s power over nature during the Exodus that they could now “by faith . . . understand,” as Hebrews 11:3 says, that God created the world. In other words, their experience of redemption became the foundation upon which their understanding of Creation was built. And, in my view, that is a more solid foundation than arguments from design (so-called “creation science”) upon which modern Christians base their faith in Creation. Indeed, while it is impossible to offer irrefutable evidence for Creation, evidence for “a new creation” in Christ cannot be gainsaid. While creation is what God did in the primordial past, redemption is a present reality; it is what God is doing now!

To put it differently, whereas the Creator God might be regarded as remote and abstract, the Redeemer God is immediate and concrete; He lives in our hearts. As John pointed out, “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us”

(1 John 4:12). And Jesus Himself said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35, NRSV). The message here is clear: the invisible God becomes visible only through Christians’ love for one another.

And Christian love—by transcending racial, ethnic, linguistic, and national barriers—powerfully testifies to the oneness of humanity and its common origin at the feet of the Creator God. Apparently the doctrine of Creation leads logically and inexorably to the self-evident conclusion reached by the American founding fathers that “all men are created equal.” If the doctrine of Creation inexorably leads to the principle of human equality, then the theory of evolution inexorably leads to the principle of human inequality.

The Consequence of Falsehood
As it is, the theory of evolution gave birth to social Darwinism, a racial-biological ideology that inspired class and racial hierarchies. It is social Darwinists who coined the term survival of the fittest and described social life as a struggle for existence, in which only the fittest survive and deserve to survive. According to them, the inferior races occupied an intermediate position between the superior races and the animal world. They represented arrested development in evolution, species that had failed to evolve to higher stages.

Social Darwinists thus attributed the development of Western civilization to the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxons and explained their domination of other peoples—Africans and Asians—as a natural right. As the Pan-German Association pointed out, “racial-biological ideology tells us that there are races that lead and races that follow.”² This division of humanity into inferior and superior races buttressed American slavery and European colonialism in Africa and Asia. But it was the German Nazis who took social Darwinism to its logical conclusion when they defined Jews as subhumans and exterminated 6 million of them in gas chambers during World War II.

Nazis also attempted a euthanasia program to eliminate mentally and physically retarded Germans, and a eugenics program to breed superior ones. So grotesque, so atrocious, so dreadfully devilish is the legacy of social Darwinism that it defies explanation. Yet it is a logical and inevitable consequence of substituting the law of the jungle for the law of love. The horrific legacy of social Darwinism should alert Christians that the most pernicious influence of the theory of evolution has been to give warrant to predatory individualism, racism, and genocide.

We Can’t Reject Just One
As such, Christians must completely reject the racial ideology of social Darwinism as much as they passionately repudiate the atheism of biological evolution. In any case, the two are inseparable. Insofar as racism is underpinned by social Darwinism, to accept its tenets is to believe the credo of biological evolution. And equally, it is to disbelieve the truth of creation, that “the God who made the world . . . gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, . . . so that they would search for him” (Acts 17:24-28, NRSV).

That humanity would seek Him—this is the purpose of Creation—a purpose frustrated by the Fall, but redeemed by the death of Jesus. Since through the death of Jesus “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21), redemption is the central theme of Scripture. It affirms both the common origin of humanity in Jesus and its common destiny in Him.

Linked in Origin and Destiny
Our common origin and our common destiny: these two themes converge powerfully in the first angel’s message (Rev. 14:6, 7). Whereas worshiping the Creator God reminds us of our common origin, the eternal gospel proclaims our common salvation and our common destiny. Even more significant, in the proclamation of the gospel to “every nation, tribe, language and people” (verse 6) we see God shaping a new nation, a kingdom of priests (Rev. 1:6; 5:9, 10). In this way, the three angels’ messages replay both the Creation and the Exodus.

Just as the Israelites were called from the chaos of Egyptian slavery, so the remnant is called from the chaos of Babylonian slavery. That in this world torn apart and overflowing with ethnic animosities and racial hatreds God will bring forth a people whose only distinguishing mark will be their love for God and for one another is a creative act of the first order. It will prove to the whole world that God exists and that He created the world.

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¹Scripture references, unless otherwise indicated, are from the NIV.
²Quoted in Horst von Malitz, The Evolution of Hitler’s Germany (New York: MacGraw Hill, 1973), p. 33.

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Elijah Mvundura is a member of the Glendale Seventh-day Adventist Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is a former history and sociology lecturer at Solusi University in Zimbabwe.