Framework Hypothesis

History

Roots

The church never fixed the length of the creation days. Augustine thought God made everything at once and treated the six days as a teaching device, and framework writers sometimes claim him as a forerunner. Augustine did not, however, propose a topical arrangement of the days. The pairing of the days is also old. The OPC creation report (2004) notes that some medieval commentators already divided the six days into works of “separation” and works of “adornment.”

The view itself is Dutch and twentieth-century. Arie Noordtzij of the University of Utrecht set it out in 1924 in Gods Woord en der Eeuwen Getuigenis. Robert McCabe, a critic, calls this the view’s first statement and notes that it “did not initially gather many adherents” (DBSJ, 2005). N. H. Ridderbos gave it a wider audience in Is There a Conflict Between Genesis 1 and Natural Science? (English translation 1957). The OPC report quotes Ridderbos quoting Noordtzij: the six days are “the sum of two triduums” whose parallelism places “in bold relief the surpassing glory of man,” and “the author consciously used days and nights, evenings and mornings, as a literary framework.”

The era here is 1924, when Noordtzij first stated the view. Meredith Kline’s 1958 article gave it the form most people now argue about, and that date would be the right choice for its spread in America.

Causes

Kline opened “Because It Had Not Rained” (Westminster Theological Journal 20, 1958, text) by noting that the debate over Genesis 1 was heating up. His first footnote names the two books that had provoked it: Bernard Ramm’s The Christian View of Science and Scripture (1954) and Ridderbos’s book. Both of the inherited conservative readings, 24-hour days and long day-ages, assumed that the order of the narrative is the order of events. Kline argued that the text itself rules this out.

He did not frame the article as a concession to evolution. He wrote that Genesis 1 “contradicts the idea that an undifferentiated worldstuff evolved” into the present universe. His concern was exegetical: how God’s ordinary providence worked during the creation period.

Influence

The view spread mainly through Reformed seminaries. Henri Blocher adopted it in In the Beginning (1984); the PCA report says he “basically follows Kline.” Mark Futato extended Kline’s Genesis 2 argument in “Because It Had Rained” (WTJ 60, 1998, PDF). Lee Irons summarized the case for church officers in Ordained Servant (2000), and with Kline wrote the framework chapter in David Hagopian, ed., The Genesis Debate: Three Views on the Days of Creation (2001). Mark Ross defended it in Did God Create in Six Days? (1999), a volume otherwise largely given to the literal-day view.

The PCA report observed that it “was not widely held at the founding of the PCA” and only lately became controversial. Debates over it in conservative Presbyterian churches fed two denominational study reports (see Key controversies). Because it leaves the age of the earth open, it is also counted among the readings that allow an old earth, beside the views covered in Old Earth Creationism and Evolutionary Creation.

Key ideas and contributors

Two triads. Days 1–3 make the spaces and days 4–6 fill them, each in the same order: light (day 1) and luminaries (day 4), sky and seas (day 2) with birds and fish (day 5), dry land and plants (day 3) with land animals and humans (day 6). Kline called these “creation kingdoms” and “creature kings.” The seventh day belongs to God as Creator King (Kline, 1996). Blocher took his key from Genesis 2:1: “the heavens and the earth” (days 1–3) and “all the host of them” (days 4–6), as summarized in the OPC report.

Genesis 2:5. This is Kline’s distinctive argument. The verse explains that no plants had yet sprung up “for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground.” The explanation assumes that God was sustaining the world by ordinary means: plants need water. Kline argued that “the modus operandi of the divine providence was the same during the creation period as that of ordinary providence at the present time” (1958). A 24-hour reading then has land that only emerged from the sea that morning covered with vegetation by evening. A day-age reading has plants thriving for an age with no sun. Kline concluded that “Genesis 2:5 forbids the conclusion that the order of narration is exclusively chronological.”

Day 4 recapitulates day 1. Day 1 already divides light from darkness and makes day and night. Day 4 gives the luminaries the same job, “to separate the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:14–18). Futato read this as the Hebrew technique he called synopsis and resumption: tell the event briefly, then return to it with more detail, as Genesis 2:8 and 2:15 do with Adam’s placement in the garden. Day 4 describes the mechanism behind day 1’s result rather than a later event.

Two-register cosmology. In “Space and Time in the Genesis Cosmogony” (Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 1996, text), Kline added a second argument. Scripture describes an upper register (God’s heaven) and a lower register (the visible world). The upper is pictured in images drawn from the lower. The creation week, he argued, “belongs to the upper register and is, therefore, to be understood figuratively.” He drew the conclusion that “the scientist is left free of biblical constraints in hypothesizing about cosmic origins,” at least on duration and sequence.

The open seventh day. Day 7 has no “evening and morning.” Hebrews 4 treats God’s seventh-day rest as still open for believers to enter (Hebrews 4:4–10). If the seventh day is not a solar day, framework writers argue, the other six need not be either. The PCA report credits the view with drawing out the covenant, image-of-God and Sabbath themes of the passage, themes central to Kline’s Covenant Theology.

Real days, figurative week. Framework advocates do not read yom as an age. Irons argued that each day is presented as an ordinary day, but the whole picture of God working a week is a figure, with the creative acts as real events. The framework literature’s own image, quoted in the OPC report, is that the days are “like picture frames.” As the OPC report puts it, the view has two parts: a nonliteral element and a nonsequential element.

How it differs from other readings

The day-age view keeps the sequence and stretches the days into eras, trying to match the order to geology. The framework view keeps ordinary days inside a figurative week and drops the sequence. Kline said his 1996 argument also “refutes the harmonistic day-age view,” and Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, a leading day-age advocate, has defended concordism against non-concordist readings (“Defending Concordism”).

The analogical-day view of C. John Collins shares the idea that God’s week is the model for ours, but holds that the days are “broadly sequential.” The OPC report notes that the two views “appear almost indistinguishable” until the question of day 1 and day 4.

John Walton’s cosmic temple reading (The Lost World of Genesis One, 2009) also refuses to read Genesis 1 as a sequence of material events, but for a different reason. Walton holds that the text describes functional, not material, origins. He takes the days as “seven twenty-four-hour days” given to “the inauguration of the functions of the cosmic temple,” as quoted by Ross. According to Ross, Walton rejects the framework view along with day-age and gap readings. Framework writers argue from the literary shape of the text and Genesis 2:5. Walton argues from ancient Near Eastern ideas of what it means for something to exist.

Key controversies

History or figure. The main objection is that a narrative with numbered days, evenings and mornings, and a chain of past-tense verbs reads as history in sequence. The PCA Creation Study Committee report (2000) recorded that the view “has been severely criticized for rendering Gen 1 non-historical.” It answered that Kline “explicitly affirms” Genesis 1–11 as “a genuine record of history.” It still granted that “affirming historicity while denying sequence is difficult” and that the view “opens the interpretation to the abuse of those who wish to deny the historicity of the events.”

Genesis 2:5. Critics ask whether one verse can carry the weight. The PCA report put the question: “Could God not have dried the land supernaturally before the situation described in Gen 2:5?” If God sustained creation by extraordinary means during the week, the argument fails. E. J. Young criticized Kline’s reading in Studies in Genesis One (1964). Blocher, Kline noted in 1996, judged that Young “misses the main point.”

Exodus 20:11. The fourth commandment grounds Israel’s week in God’s: “in six days the LORD made heaven and earth.” Many critics, the PCA report says, find this “decisive.” Kline answered that the human week is a copy of a divine original, and called the literalist reading of the verse “gratuitous” (1996).

Does the parallel hold? Young-earth critics argue the triads do not line up. Robert McCabe and Tim Chaffey (Answers in Genesis, 2011) point out that the waters exist before day 2, that the luminaries of day 4 are placed in the expanse of day 2, and that the birds of day 5 fly across the same expanse. Reordering the days, they say, “breaks down into absurdity.” They also deny that the missing evening-morning on day 7 shows it is unending. McCabe’s longer critique ran in the Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal (2005, part 1).

Motive. Young-earth writers hold that the view exists to make room for deep time. McCabe and Chaffey quote Kline’s 1996 statement that rebutting “the literalist interpretation … propounded by the young-earth theorists” was “a central concern” and ask how an inerrantist could want scientists “free of biblical constraints.” Advocates reply that Noordtzij and Kline argued from the text, and the OPC report credits the view with making “a more serious effort to base itself on objective exegesis” than day-age concordism.

Confessional limits. The Westminster Confession says God made the world “in the space of six days.” Within the Reformed churches that hold it, the framework view is a minority position and a recurring point of conflict. Joseph Pipa’s “From Chaos to Cosmos: A Critique of the Non-Literal Interpretations of Genesis 1:1–2:3,” in Did God Create in Six Days? (1999, which he co-edited with David Hall), is a standard confessional critique. The PCA report named the 24-hour, day-age, framework and analogical views as “the four most prominent views of the creation days in the PCA,” noting that the framework view “was not widely held at the founding of the PCA.” The OPC’s 2004 report described all four. Its General Assembly did not name any view as unacceptable. It told presbyteries to examine candidates “whatever his view of the days of creation” on creation from nothing, Adam’s federal headship, the covenant of works, the Sabbath and the historicity of the creation account. Some critics, the report noted, are uneasy that the view is a twentieth-century novelty and hard for ordinary readers to follow.

What remains unresolved

Both sides agree that Genesis 1 is carefully structured and that God really created. They disagree on whether literary structure can override the plain sequence of a narrative. The framework view’s strength is that it does not bend the text to fit geology. Its weakness is that its two main arguments, Genesis 2:5 and the upper register, each rest on a reading that critics simply do not share. If Genesis 2:5 assumes only ordinary providence, the sequence breaks. If it does not, the view loses its strongest support and falls back on the triads alone.