ABSTRACT
In the history of controversies about the age of the earth, few modern scholarly studies of particular episodes take the religious dimension seriously and at the same time give full attention to the social uses to which rival viewpoints were put. This chapter outlines the changing interpretations of earth history since the Middle Ages and suggests how rival religious and social meanings have been expressed through those interpretations. It argues that the quantitative figures that have been given at various times for the age of the earth are far less significant than the qualitative patterns that have been discerned in, or attributed to, the whole history of the earth, of life, and of mankind. The chapter summarizes the tradition of biblical chronology that formed the temporal component of the geocentric picture of the cosmos. It then describes the new enterprise that was termed the "theory of the earth" and its relation to the rise of critical methods in biblical interpretation.
