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Trusting the Genesis Genealogies

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For a very long time, people accepted the genealogies in Genesis as accurate chronologies: chronogenealogies. After Christians began ceding science to secularists with the advent of deep time and Darwinism, excuses were found to deny their accuracy.

There are many problems with this, including casting doubt on God's preservation of Scripture, his care for us, trusting Jesus, and a tacit denial of the truth of God's Word from the beginning. People have lost sight of the purposes of the genealogies.

After Christians ceded science to deep time and evolution, people grew to doubt the Genesis genealogies. They are important to understanding theology.
Unsplash / Priscilla Du Preez
On a somewhat side note, someone was hawking his book about leaving atheism and coming to Christ. Since he is in the flaming liberal United Methodist denomination (in which I was raised and my father was a pastor for fifty years), I suspect he has some serious theology problems. His reaction to my comment says a great deal:
Context is vitally important to understanding Scripture, and that not only includes the immediate text, but how passages are treated elsewhere in the Bible. Scripture interprets Scripture. Also, we need to remember to whom it was written, and why, and how it applies to us today. Filtering it through secular opinions and mythologies do violence to the meaning and to the theology presented in the chronogenealogies. Compromisers and fifth column theistic evolutionists tear down the faith.
Many people alive today do not believe that the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 present actual history. Also, many professing Christians do not believe that these genealogies contain a complete sequence (without gaps) of the generations from Adam to Abraham. For example, in a piece that appeared on the BioLogos website in July (2021), Richard Middleton asserted, “[I]t would be a mistake to use the genealogies in the primeval history (Genesis 1–11) to calculate the age of the earth or the human race.”1 He claims that reading the Genesis genealogies in this way imposes modern expectations of precision on an ancient text that was written for different purposes. To the contrary, it is current scholars (like Middleton) who impose modern interpretations on the ancient text. Ancient Jewish scholars and essentially all Christian scholars before the mid-19th century understood that these genealogies presented a complete list of the patriarchal names and generations from Adam to Abraham.

You can read the rest and increase your understanding by reading the rest of "The Genesis genealogies: Historical records with deep theological significance."