CONCORDISM. - A method used by those who sought to determine the lines of a positive concord between the Bible and the modern sciences. With the rise of the natural sciences, especially geology and paleontology, the effort to find in the Bible the new data for scientific hypotheses led to the elaboration of a new system of interpretation of the Hexaemeron (Gen. 1:1-2:3) and related passages. From its attempt to demonstrate the concord between the Bible and science, it was called concordism; while from the more important question then under discussion, namely the geological epochs and periods, it was also called "periodism." Its beginnings can be traced back to Cuvier (1821).
The periods of geology were found in the "days" of creation, giving the word jōm the meaning of period, epoch, and adducing in support certain passages of the Bible where jōm means an indeterminate period of time (Gen. 2:3, 4; Ex. 10:6; Lev. 7:35, 36; etc.). To obviate the difficulties of the biblical account, an attempt was made to demonstrate that the light appearing before the stars must be understood as the nebula of Laplace; that the creation of the sun and the moon in the fourth period or "day" (while the plants had already been created on the third), would correspond to the cessation, with aqueous precipitations, of dense layers of vapor. Such an effort, at first appearing praiseworthy and successful, was destined to fail. In fact, with the progress of the sciences, the concordist exegetes found themselves compelled to modify their exegesis in order to adapt it to new scientific hypotheses. The fundamental error of this system, both in its more rigid and in its more mitigated form (combated among us by A. Stoppani), is that of reading the Bible as a book of science, whereas St. Augustine had already warned against such a criterion (De Genesi ad litt.). It can now be considered as having set for ever.
Bibliography3 works
Giorgio Castellino