Thomas Chalmers

The Ruin-Recon-struction interpre-tation of Genesis was the bread and butter Creation doctrine of the Protestant Fundamentalist movement in the early part of the 20th century. The interpretation has mainly been credited to the Scottish theologian, Thomas Chalmers, who began to preach it back in the early 19th century. However, there were theologians who also held this view long before Chalmers' days. Contrary to Young Earth Creationist allegations, Chalmers did not invent the Gap Theory as a compromise of the Word of God to accommodate science and the theory of evolution. That gap has always been in the Scriptures since the day Moses penned the book of Genesis. However, only in post-New Testament times and only after man's knowledge about Earth's natural history increased greatly, has the Spirit opened people's eyes to its existence. And only by rightly-dividing and gaining true knowledge through the Lord Jesus Christ can the reader start to comprehend the doctrinal significance.

"These are the generations [plural] of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,"
(Genesis 2:4 KJV)

This Ruin-Reconstruction interpretation of Genesis was the bread and butter Creation doctrine of the Protestant Fundamentalist movement in the early part of the 20th century. The interpretation has mainly been credited to the Scottish theologian, Thomas Chalmers, who began to preach it back in the early 19th Century. (Chalmers died in 1847, 12 years before Darwin's On the Origin of the Species was published in 1859.)

Source: http://www.kjvbible.org/gap_theory.html