by William Trollinger

Answers in Genesis (AiG) is a “creationist juggernaut” that “produces a mind-boggling flood of print, media, and social media material” (Righting, 11). Remarkably, this deluge is generated by a very small cadre of creationists – one sees the same few names again and again. But among this cadre of hyper-industrious young Earthers, one figure has displayed an almost-superhuman productivity and a mind-boggling versatility that stands him above all the rest: Ken Ham’s son-in-law, Bodie Hodge.

An indication of how prolific Hodge is that, when one visits the AiG online store and types in “Bodie Hodge,” one gets 88 results (including DVDs and curriculum kits). A look at some of the titles gives one a feel for Hodge’s unabashed enthusiasm for speaking on topics far away from his M.S. in mechanical engineering (specialty: advanced materials processing) from Southern Illinois University: A Biblical and Historical Look at Halloween; Tower of Babel: The Cultural History of Our Ancestors; The War on Christmas: Battles in Faith, Tradition, and Religious Expression; Confound the Critics: Answers for Attacks on Biblical Truths; and, World Religions and Cults, a three volume set edited by Hodge and AiG colleague Roger Patterson in which one learns that “the Catholic Church is not the true church of Jesus Christ but is a false church that enslaves hundreds of millions of people in a false gospel” (I: 110) and that “by the rejection of God’s Redeemer, Jesus the Christ, many Jews have been pruned from the tree of Israel” (I: 229) (emphases ours).

The best place to get a feel for Hodge’s willingness to range across disciplines and make pronouncements is his writings that appear on the AiG website. Here are three examples:

Ethics: In response to a question as to whether someone should lie to Nazi soldiers to save the life of a Jew hiding in their house:

Consider for a moment that we are all already sentenced to die because we are sinners (Romans 5:12). It is going to happen regardless. If a lie helps keep someone alive for a matter of moments compared to eternity, was the lie, which is high treason against the Creator, worth it? . . . Since we are all sinners (Romans 3:23), death is coming for us, and there is an appointed time (Ecclesiastes 3:2). (Hodge, A Righteous Lie?)

Philosophy:

UNESCO promotes . . . World Philosophy Day, meant to honor and respect the world’s varied philosophies as equal truth and to encourage people everywhere to study philosophy. However, one cannot miss that all philosophies are intrinsically tied to religions . . . [and] all of the religious philosophies are wrong, save one. In a subtle way, UNESCO is asking you to celebrate falsehood . . . Does UNESCO promote this day as Biblical Christianity Day? No. Instead, they would rather suppress the truth and revel in the false (Romans 1:18). (Hodge, One Glaring Problem with World Philosophy Day)

Biblical Studies:

To attack the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Old Testament then is to attack the truthfulness of the rest of the biblical writers and Jesus Himself . . . We think it very likely that Moses was working with written documents because the second toledoth [i.e., “these are the descendants”] reads ‘this is the book of the generations of Adam’ where ‘book’ is a translation of the normal Hebrew word meaning a written document. Also, the account of the Flood after the third toledoth (Genesis 6:9) reads like a ship’s log. Only evolutionary thinking would lead us to conclude that Adam and his descendants could not write. (Hodge and Mortenson, Did Moses Write Genesis?)

Adam was literate. Noah kept a ship’s log on the Ark. Moses combined twelve tablets written by Adam, Noah, et al. to write the Book of Genesis. All philosophies are false except the one true philosophy, which is Biblical literalism. True Christians would tell the truth to Nazis about Jews hiding in the house since God commands it, and anyway, we are all going to die.

Bodie Hodge’s Creation World. Perhaps you feel as if you have entered an alternative logical universe, one that is wonderfully well suited for today’s world of fake news and bizarre conspiracy theories. But then there is his understanding of history. More on that in the next post.