Truth Unites - The Early Church on Genesis 1: A Forgotten Debate

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

Gavin Ortlund explores how the Church Fathers interpreted the days of creation in Genesis 1, revealing both diversity and depth in early Christian thought.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

This video is a survey of how the Days of Creation in Genesis Chapter 1 were understood within the early church. It won't be totally exhaustive, but we'll go pretty deep. It'll be a long video. I've put a lot of work into this, and I think you'll be fascinated by this topic. Their views are, it'll be different than you expect. I'm especially drawing from Andrew Brown's book, The Days of Creation. This is a really excellent book. And then I'm supplementing that with a number of other books, especially Craig Allert's book,

early Christian readings of Genesis 1, especially for Basel. and then I'm drawing from my own book, retrieving Augustine's Doctrine of Creation for the Augustine section and a few other bits from my book as well. And the goal here is not to advocate for one specific view of creation, but just to give accurate historical information.

Church history is tremendously valuable. Even if you don't think it is infallible, it is still valuable. It helps us understand the scripture, it helps us understand the truth, there's so much we can learn. And the interpretation of Genesis 1 is like a fascinating case study in this.

This is such an important text, especially in science versus faith tensions that we feel today. And so I hope this video will give fresh light onto this text and also just sort of speak to larger questions of method of how we work through things. In like science, faith dialogue especially. We'll go in seven chapters, fittingly enough, since we have the seven days of creation. We'll talk about Jewish influence, early Christian views, Alexandrian allegory, cappadocean literalism, other patristic testimonies, Augustine and the late patristic synthesis. I can start by stating my overall thesis up front by quoting from Andrew Brown's book, quote, any way the modern reader reads this creation account is almost incapable of being truly new. In other words, it's all been done. There is so much diversity.

You can find it all. And at the very same time, there are significant differences between the early views in church history and the contemporary ones because of differences of context. So we'll get into that at the very end. At the very end, I'll draw implications for the current creation debates, just two very modest implications. So I hope that'll be helpful. So stick around for that if you're interested in kind of the cash value of this. Before we dive right in a quick book recommendation, the gospel after Christendom, an introduction to cultural apologetics. Kevin Van Hoosier calls this book the best introduction to cultural apologetics on the market. I was honored to contribute one portion to this. Mine is not the best. Several others in here are so good. But if you, this book is hot off the press,

and I really believe in this project. I'm honored to be connected to the Keller Center of Cultural Apologetics. And it's, these essays are so, so good. I'm not talking about my own. It's awkward to talk how good this book is. And then I'm like, well, I'm not trying to talk about my own. But the point is, it really helps us think about how do you share the gospel differently now? Now that Christendom is fading, how do we defend Christianity? There are unique challenges and pressures now, but there are unique opportunities. And these chapters are so helpful. If you've wondered about the idea of subversive fulfillment, what does that mean?

How does Christianity relate to the culture like that? Challenging, but also then fulfilling. Read Christopher Watkins section. How does beauty point to Christianity? read Rachel Gilson's chapter. How does Augustine in the city of God outnarrate the critiques of Christianity? I like that word outnarrate. Read Josh Chetro's section in the book.

They're so good. Check it out. And it really leaves you with hope as well. So I'm going to put a link in the video description. I really want to commend this book. It just came out, and it's really, really helpful. All right, let's dive in. Let's start with talking about background Jewish influences upon Christian interpretation.

of Genesis 1, and there's lots, but we'll just mention two that represent two different trajectories. So Josephus and Philo. So, boy, I just pulled my two copies off the shelf, and you go to the beginning sections of each of these additions of their works, and you'll get a treatment of Genesis 1. So these are two important first-century Jewish thinkers. Josephus, I did a wonderful interview. I said wonderful. I did an interview with a wonderful scholar about Josephus recently, so you may recall that.

But Josephus has a huge impact upon subsequent Christian interpretation of Genesis 1 and other things as well. And if you just pick up the very first page of his famous Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, seems to assume a literalist reading of Genesis 1. And it's kind of interesting. He says it's only after the seventh day is over, starting in chapter 2, verse, four, that Moses begins to talk philosophically. Kind of an interesting comment there. That's one trajectory of interpretation that stands in the background before you even get into church history, but the other is philo. He advances a non-literal reading of Genesis 1, and in the process

introduces at least three important themes that will persist in Christian interpretation. First, numerological speculation. So a huge portion of Philo's work on the creation concerns the symbolic significance of the numbers six and seven, something that Christians are going to come back to a lot, especially the number seven. Second, he makes a strong distinction between material creation versus immaterial. So day one for Philo isn't about the creation of the physical world. It's the creation of the perfectly unified intellectual realm that is then the prototype for the creation of the physical world. And that in different sorts of ways will become a huge emphasis of Christian views, especially when you're trying to locate the creation of angels, which is a perennial question of

how do you relate the creation of angels to Genesis 1? That's the big medieval debate. After what we're going to cover here. Thirdly, Philo introduces this category of instantaneous creation. So ultimately, he has an idealist interpretation in which God creates all things at once. I'll put up a passage on the screen, and you can read through this if you'd like to see it. Essentially, Genesis 1 is describing the arrangement or organization of the different parts of the world according to our understanding, but it's not a literal account of how it actually fell out in time. God made it all at once in one instant.

And an important point here is that Philo thinks six is the purpose. perfect number. Some argue that this idea of instantaneous creation, with Genesis 1 then functioning as a kind of extended metaphor, has its origin in Philo. In the 17th century, the Jesuit scholar Francisco Suarez identifies Philo as the first proponent of this view. This opinion that everything was created at once and that the first six days are to be interpreted as a kind of metaphor originated from Philo-Judaists. We're going to see this idea of instantaneous creation come up again and again in church history. Chapter 2, early Christian views. Now, the earliest Christians didn't develop sustained and systematic treatment of Genesis 1. So we're just picking up bits of information

here and there. We want to be really careful. Sometimes what we get is ambiguous, so we want to speak with caution. But in general, the earliest generations of Christianity didn't seem to show a lot of interest in the same questions that we debate today. The big questions back then were Creation X, knee-he-he-lowe, creation from nothing, the goodness of creation, the contingency of creation, those are the things they were fighting battles over. Insofar as the second and third-century Christians showed an interest in the nature of the days, fascinatingly, it tended to be with a view to what we call a World Week interpretation. And this is the idea that each day represents a thousand-year epic of human history. So, for, you know, rightly or wrongly, these early

Christians treated Genesis 1 as a prophecy, a prophetic text. And they'll often quote the dictum with the day, a thousand years, or it's been a long day already. I'm going to misspeak, I'm sure, here. With the Lord, a thousand years is like a day, and a day is like a thousand years. That's from Psalm 90 and 2nd Peter 3. And so they'll quote that, and then they'll treat the days of Genesis 1 as predictive of 6,000 years of human history. The seventh day then represents the millennium. and then you have this idea sometimes coming up that the eighth day is when the new world begins. So this is, I mean, I'm not trying to say this is always the same thing. This is teased out in different ways.

That's the broad idea. And it's not the same thing as a day-age view. There actually is no precedent that I'm aware of in church history that I found for the exact idea of a day-age view, where each day represents a huge long period of time prior to human history. This view, this World Week idea, is talking about human history, not pre-human history. It's, you know, so totally a different idea. And this idea had also been present in Jewish texts, but you first find it in church history, to my awareness, in the epistle of Barnabas, which is an anonymous epistle, probably maybe like early second century, something like that. It quotes Genesis 1 about the Sabbath and then says, attend my children to the meaning of this expression.

He finished in six days. This implies that the Lord will finish all things in six thousand years. For a day is with him a thousand years. And he himself testifies saying, behold, today will be as a thousand years. Therefore, my children, in six days, that is, in six thousand years, all things will be finished. So there you get a clear expression of this idea. And then the seventh day is the second coming when true rest is established, the Sabbath rest. That's how this epistle keeps going after what I quoted there.

And this idea will surface a lot. Sometimes it will be included with the idea that the days of creation are literal 24-hour periods. That looks to me like what Ironaeus is saying, for in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded. And for this reason the scripture says, thus the heaven and earth were finished and all their adornment, and God brought to a conclusion upon the sixth day the works that he had made, and God rested upon the seventh day from all his works. That's a quotation of Genesis 2-2.

This is an account of the things formerly created, as also it is a prophecy of what is to come, and then you get the 2nd Peter 3 quote there. So for Ironaeus, Genesis is both history and prophecy. It looks backward with literal days and forward with millennial days. But in other Christian readings, the World Week idea is advanced such that the Creation Week itself extends throughout time. This is what you see with Methodius, who advocates that God's work of creation continues up to the present time. He says God like a painter is at this very time working at the world, and he will speak of God's creative work in Genesis 1 being completed, but then he also maintains that the forward-looking aspect of Genesis 1

isn't just prophetic. It's the further act of creation proper. And so to develop this later in the banquet of the Ten Virgins, that's this book from Methodius, he uses the Feast of Tabernacles in the seventh month where there's the rejoicing to frame the seventh millennium. And he describes this as when God will have completed the world. When this world shall be terminated at the 7,000 years,

when God shall have completed the world, he shall rejoice in us. So like creation is this ongoing thing, even as it has already, there's been a one-time creation, but then God is ongoing, creating in an ongoing manner. This is how Brown reads Methodius, this creation week is sort of extended through time. He says, this is an unusual blending of literal and figurative uses. The days of creation have actually become thousand-year ages within human history. Again, this is not the same as the day-age view that you've maybe heard of in the contemporary discussion. Hippolytus of Rome, in his commentary on Daniel, advances this World Week idea, as you can see on screen, if you'd like to pause through and read that. You also have Cyprian of Carthage,

when he's discussing the significance of the number seven in the Bible. He'll reference the first seven days in the divine arrangement containing 7,000 of years. So this World Week interpretation is very common early on, and it persists all throughout the patristic era. You find it in John of Damascus in the 7th century. You find it in Bede in the 8th century, both of whom are hugely influential on medieval interpretation. They both develop a World Week view more fully, and so that just continues to rumble on. It's a huge view throughout church history, fascinatingly, though we don't, a lot of us probably haven't heard of that today. Now, it's already instructive that that would be the focal point for the early Christians. They didn't argue that much on whether the days were literal. The emphasis was

on their being prophetic. Paul Blowers puts it like this. Genesis 1 was already for patristic exegetes a tableau or montage of the whole divine economy and pointed ahead to the mystery of salvation and the appearance of the new creation. However, you do see interest in how literally to take these days in what is often framed as an emerging debate between the Alexandrian school, which favors allegory, and the Antiochian school, which favors a more literal reading. So Alexandria in Egypt and then Antioch, two huge Christian cities in the early church that have these differing tendencies. Though as we go, we're going to see this contrast between the two is a little too simple.

Nonetheless, it's helpful as a way to organize our thinking. Chapter 3, Alexandrian allegory. Let's go here first and talk about these views that are bubbling up in Alexandria. Now, second century Alexandria was a hotbed for Gnosticism. So you might expect a huge portion of what is going on among early Christian writings in that context is fighting against Gnostic ideas. Interestingly, though, this is where you get the least literal readings of Genesis. Let's just survey four early Alexandrian theologians, Clement, Origin, didomis, Athanasius. Clement of Alexandria is a very important early influence, especially his indirect influence through Origin. Origin was one of his pupils who then outgrew him in his own influence. And he's very influenced by Platonism, very philosophical, very early on, survives just into

the third century. And he insists upon an instantaneous creation, has some similar similarities with Philo's view. He finds a lot of significance in the number seven, and he thinks that the days of Genesis 1 are symbolic rather than sequential, with the number seven representing fullness and perfection. And a key verse for his view is Genesis 2-4, which references the day, singular, in which the Lord made the earth and heavens. That's going to come up again a lot throughout others that we'll survey. Clement, like others later, thinks that that sheds light on the temporal framework you get prior to that in chapter 1 verse 1 to chapter 2 verse 3. Leading up to this verse, quote, that then we may be taught that the world was originated and not suppose that God made it in time. Prophecy adds, and then he quotes Genesis 2.4, for the expression when they were created, intemates an indefinite and dateless production.

This idea is going to come up again with Augustine. It also comes up with Origin, who was influenced by Clement, and he develops a little bit, for he kind of sort of extends this non-literal reading of the days of Genesis 1. He sees Genesis 1 as a text full of mysteries, that force of figurative reading, and he's responding to a pagan critic of Christianity named Selsus, who just mocks the creation account and so forth.

You can see a little bit of a summary, In fact, I'll just read this. By far the most silly thing is the distribution of the creation of the world over certain days before days existed. For as the heaven was not yet created, nor the foundation of the earth yet laid, nor the sun yet revolving, how could there be days? So that's how, that's what Celsius is saying. And he's mocking Genesis 1. This is essentially what we're going to call the light before luminaries problem, since the way we measure a day is 24 hours because of the earth's rotation. in relation to the sun. But if you don't have the sun yet, then why are days one, two, and three, 24 hours? This is the challenge we have here in Genesis 1, that light is created on day 1, but the luminaries are created on day 4. So where's the light coming from on days 1, 2, and 3? And why do you have mornings and evenings when you don't even have the sun yet? And so Celsius is making fun of Genesis 1 on this account. And Origen's response is to say, these are not literal days. This is just figures. quote, for who that has understanding will suppose that the first, second, and third day,

and the evening and the morning existed without a sun and moon and stars, and that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky. I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance and not literally. He says that about other things, too, like the Garden of Eden, which is controversial. Notice that the reason origin and Clement give for rejecting literal days is in the text. We've seen two reasons so far, the day singular of Genesis 2-4 and how you relate that to what's just come previously, and then the late before luminaries issue, these are going to come up continuously, and these concerns come up in didomis the blind as well.

He's an important fourth century Alexandrian theologian who wrote a commentary on the book of Genesis that was discovered in like 1941. And he builds upon the work of Clement and origin, but he attempts to balance literal and allegorical a little bit more. But like them, he affirms non-literal days and an instantaneous creation. Quote, we must not think of the six days as intended to be understood as a temporal duration, but as an apt way to describe the creative act of God. And didomus's rationale for this view is once again, the light before Luther, Luminaries issue, quote, by no means then, let us say that with six revolutions of the sun, six days passed, for the sun was not yet in existence in the first three days. You also see this

idea of instantaneous creation in another fourth century Alexandrian theologian, whom you've probably heard of, and that's Athanasius. He's, of course, famous for his defense of the deity of Christ, but in his orations against the Arians, Athanasius also writes, no one creature was made before another, but all things originate subsisted at once together upon one and the same command. Though his concerns in that text are basically just opposing the Arians and affirming the deity of Christ and saying Christ is uncreated, that's the focus. So he doesn't really develop this comment at all. But it seems pretty clear. At points with Athanasius, you're wondering, is he just talking about, um,

an original creation, and then there's an unfolding in Genesis 1, but the comments like this make it sound like he thinks all things were created at once. And that would kind of fit the context he's working in as well. So you have this tradition of non-literal readings really rooted in Alexandria, but that contrasts with much of what you see in the Christian East. Let's talk first about the Cappadocian fathers, Chapter 4. And this, you may be familiar with Basel of Cessaria, Gregory of Nisa, his brother, Basel's brother, and then Gregory of Nazianzus, three great defenders of Orthodox trinitarian theology.

Basel is the most significant of these three with respect to creation. He, his hexameron, which literally means of the six days, is a series of nine homilies or sermons, expounding Genesis 1, and this became the most important. influential, one of the most influential, but not as much as Augustine, but very influential upon both on the East and the West. And it's really wonderful to read. He's describing the created world in this vivid detail, and he just, he's praising God for the different, you know, every single thing that God made. It's very pastoral. He's just going around looking at the grass and the trees and so forth and drawing these moral lessons from it and also just saying,

everything should make you praise God. Quote, I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that everywhere, wherever you may be, the least plant may bring you to the clear remembrance of the Creator. This is one of those basic things. It's just a little bit of a pastoral aside, but it really is wonderful to have your heart in such a state. The doctrine of creation really does move us to worship. But to have your heart in such a state that the least leaf on a tree or blade of grass moves you to worship God. This is the same instinct I find in Augustine. When he's praising God in confessions, he talks about watching flies, getting eaten by lizards and spiders. And he's saying, there's no excuse not to worship God when I watch the

artistry of this. It doesn't matter that they're tiny. It's still wonderful and God made this and so on and so forth. I'll say more about Augustine. But I love this sense of attentive delight to creation in these figures. Now, with regard to the days of creation, Basel resists the allegorizing tendencies that we've seen in Clement and origin. He rejects an instantaneous creation. He's totally untroubled by the light before the luminaries issue. He just references a primitive light that God determined. So he doesn't see this as a problem. And so he is rightly classified as literal in his approach. He seems to assume 24-hour days. Nonetheless, what he means by literal differs from some modern appeals to a literal reading. First, Even though Basel will warn against the dangers of excessive allegorizing, he still includes allegory in his own reading.

Like so many of the Church Fathers, he was comfortable having multiple layers of meaning embedded into the biblical text and kind of having a goal-oriented approach to exegesis, especially in pastoral contexts. So he's just comfortable kind of looking at it from different angles, you might say. I talk about this a lot in my book on Augustine, and Augustine how it's so funny because he goes from allegorical to literal. And he writes five different commentaries on Genesis. Early on, he writes an allegorical one. His final summative work is a literal commentary, and yet in the literal, he's still doing allegory. And that's the same with Basel.

Basel sees all a manner of mysteries in Genesis 1. You see this in others two. Theophilus is like this. Deodor of Tarsus is like this, where they're urging a literal reading, and then they're doing allegory along the way. So what that tells you is, by the way, with Augustine, what he means by the word literal has less to do with the exact degree of exactitude that the text is working with. It's more that it has historical reference. So allegory will mean you're just sort of drawing from the text without a view to its historical reference to do pastoral application and so on and so forth,

but literal means, no, this actually happened. But it doesn't necessarily. necessarily say as much about how exactly it happened. Hopefully that's about Augustine. But Basel will do allegory. So when he's commenting on Genesis 1-11 and the vegetation and plants and seeds and so forth, he launches into a discussion about how the human soul is a vineyard and all the various ways that God calls the soul to grow and adorn fruit and so on and so forth. As you can see on the screen, just a flavor of that. There's lots of that. If you want to fuller treatment of Basel and how Basel's literalism differs from contemporary young earth creationist literalism. See Craig Allert's book. He's got a whole chapter, chapter four, is all about Basel,

that exact point. And the second thing about Basel is that he recognizes that the intention of scripture is not to answer all scientific questions. He references discussions among cosmographers in his own day about the shape of the earth. Is it a sphere or is it a cylinder? or is it a disc or is it like a basket? And Basel's basic response is to say, Moses is silent as to shapes. He simply didn't go into these questions. And then he provides the rationale for why Moses was silent.

Quote, he has passed over in silence as useless all that is unimportant for us. Shall I then prefer foolish wisdom to the oracles of the Holy Spirit? Shall I not rather exalt him who, not wishing to fill our minds with these vanities, has regulated all the economy of Scripture in view of the edification and making perfect of our souls. So for Basel, Genesis 1 is not exhaustive. It has a very specific purpose. It's not there to answer every question we will bring to the text. It's there to bring edification to our souls to tell us what we need to know.

And so this is one of the reasons why Basel's hexameron is not a convenient tool for modern-day concordists. the idea that you're trying to correlate all the details of Genesis 1 with later scientific discoveries. Basel has a lot more caution than is reflected in those approaches. A third way Basel is different from contemporary literalists is that he affirms the goodness of animal predation and animal death. This is a vigorous emphasis throughout the Hexameron. He's going on talking about all these carnivores and he's saying, God made these, they're good and they're here to teach us moral lessons. Quote, let nobody accuse the creator of having produced venomous animals, destroyers, and enemies of our life, else let them consider it a crime in the schoolmaster

when he disciplines the restlessness of youth by the use of the rod and whip to maintain order. So lions and tigers are like the schoolmaster having a rod to keep the students in line. That's Basel's way of thinking. And you find the same thing in Ambrose, whose own hexameron was significantly influenced by Basils, and Ambrose spends a lot of energy, just like Basel does, expounding God's goodness and wisdom in creating bears and lions and poisonous serpents and other dangerous animals. And this becomes a common view all throughout the Christian tradition.

Later in the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas writes, The nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others would then have lived on herbs, like the lion and falcon. So the idea that, you know, I'm just trying to highlight some of the differences, just so that we understand. If you think of Basel as literal in his reading of Genesis 1, there's a sense in which that's very much true, but you also have to appreciate that's going to mean different things than what people today typically mean by literal, a literal reading of Genesis 1.

Boswell certainly does not think that every animal was a herbivore until the human fall. And Adam and Eve fell and then carnivores came about. And that's what a lot of people today think. I have a whole chapter in my book on Augustine, on Augustine's view of animal death, and I talk about how much he delighted in and expended energy, talking about worms and flies and ants and rats and fleas and frogs and larger predatory carnivores, physical pain, thorns and thistles, even death itself. All of that, Augustine says, is good. It's a part of God's good

creation. Whether they're right or wrong, I'm not trying to justify right now. I'm just trying to say, that's what they believed. And so when contemporary views appeal to literalism as though their view is just a continuation of these early church fathers, we need to understand the differences, nonetheless, let's also be clear that Basel does assume a 24-hour day view of unfolding creation according to 24-hour days. Gregory of Nisa follows in his brother's footsteps, though he takes a more philosophical approach and tries to engage the science and natural philosophy of his day a bit more.

Gregory seems to assume that the days of creation are real, but he focuses less on the chronology than on their logical order. In Gregory, we find both instantaneous creation as well as the unfolding of creation in time. and like many others in the early church, he draws from the stoic idea of seminal principles, which is the idea that creation is in seed form, with certain potentialities that can then unfold according to time. Quote, God's power over all things in the beginning came into existence by one impulse of creation

for his power seminally contained every created being and came into existence through one initiative. So you have instantaneous creation combined with a temporal unfolding. Think of it, like a simple example of this would be if God creates a tree simply X-Ne-Hillow, just poof, there it is, just out of nowhere, just makes the tree. You know, at 1 o'clock, it's not there, and at 101, it's there fully formed. That's one way God can create. But if God uses a seed and water and sunlight and time and organic processes of growth that unfold and can be studied scientifically, God is no less the creator of that tree. I can still say to my child, God created that tree. God can create through means like this. So, by the way, Catholic University of America Press recently published the first translation

of Gregory of Nisa's work on creation, which is really cool. Check it out here if you're interested. A really great book. Gregory of Nazianzis doesn't write as much as Basel and Gregory of Nisa on this topic on creation, though when, because both Gregory of Nisa and Basel wrote their own kind of whole work on this. But when the days of creation does come up, he simply specifies that creation unfolded according to days in accordance with God's ineffable reasons. And he also is simply untroubled by the light before luminaries' objection. He notes that the light of days one through three is not from the sun. Quote, God did not display this light at the beginning, in my opinion, some instrument like the sun. It was disembodied, unconnected with the sun, only later was the sun given

the work of shedding light on the whole earth. So fascinating, a disembodied light for days one through three. That seems to be different from what Gregory of Nisa had said on this concern. He wrote, quote, I believe it is good to perceive the intent of the six days of creation where clear knowledge with regard to the sun is lacking. That is, this luminous body is not mentioned along with the rest of the stars after three days, we are unable to distinguish the measure of day by morning and evening unless the sun had set and risen at dawn. Now, I could be reading him wrongly. I am not sure. But it sounds like Gregory of Nisa here seems to think that the sun was created on day one, not with the other stars on day four. I'd welcome, if someone is an expert on this and knows more,

that is how I'm reading him here. So it seems like the two Gregory's go in a different direction on that question. But nonetheless, neither are troubled by it. All three of the Capodotian fathers reject instantaneous creation, and their views really only differ in the details, and they seem to assume these are just 24-hour days. Chapter 5. Other patristic testimonies. In other areas of the Christian East, not just among the Capodotian fathers, you find this explicit rejection of the idea of instantaneous creation.

Acacius of Cessaria, for example, felt it necessary to write that the things that came into existence on the sixth day did not yet exist on the fifth, nor the things of the fifth day, on the fourth, and so on and so forth. So he's trying to say, no, there is sequence, there is unfolding, one day is building and having new things created that didn't exist on the previous day and so forth. You also find explicit rejections of allegory in Genesis 1. That's true, not just in the city of Antioch, but actually lots of places in the east. For example, Ephraim the Syrian is opposed to allegorical readings. Quote, let no one think that there is anything allegorical in the works of the six days. No one can rightly say that the things that pertain to these days were symbolic, end

quote. So in the east, you really have these two different strands. You've got the Alexandrian impulse over here toward allegory, but then you've got lots of other views that assume the days are literal and sequential and oppose that tendency. In the West, we often find attempts to kind of reconcile of these two, instantaneous creation with a temporal unfolding. Hillary of Poitiers, the Athanasius of the West, affirms that each act of creation had its proper order, but, see what I boldened here, the creation of the heaven and earth and other elements is not separated by the slightest interval in God's working. Now, Martin Luther read Hillary here as advocating for instantaneous creation. That is disputed in the scholarship.

some people read him that way. I think Andrew Brown reads him that way as well. But this can also be, others have suggested this can be read as affirming just an instantaneous creation of the basic elements and then a temporal unfolding of creation from there. So that would be similar to seminal reasons or seminal principles you see in Gregory of Nisa and Augustine and others. I'm not 100% sure how to read Hillary either. I welcome comments from those who know Hillary better, than I do. But that's similar to what you find in Ambrose. A instantaneous creation, strong emphasis upon that, and then a temporal unfolding of days. You have a kind of ontological foundation and then a temporal adorning of creation. So Ambrose is able to see layers of meaning in Genesis 1. He wants to see,

he wants to work with both of these. And that is going to bring us to Augustine, and I'm going to enfold my comments on Ambrose in with Augustine because Augustine was hugely influenced by Ambrose on this topic. Chapter 6. Longest chapter, maybe the most important, Augustine. Creation was very important to Augustine. He wrote five separate commentaries on the book of Genesis. In my book on the topic, I suggest that it's a little bit of an overstatement, but it's almost true to say that what justification was to Luther and divine transcendence was to Carl Bart, creation, was to Augustine. That is, that area of theology that really becomes kind of a linchpin for their thinking about everything else. It was a very emotional doctrine for Augustine. He talked a lot about

how the doctrine of creation explains the longings of the human heart. There's so much about, this is one of my biggest passions, and I spend the whole first chapter doing this in my book on Augustine, there is so much more to the doctrine of creation than just how long it took. and this is what you're going to get into in the early church. You're going to read Augustine. You're going to see 98% of it is about human happiness, not just the details of how it fell out. Because to be a creature is to be dependent, is to be contingent, is to be longing for God. You can't even understand Augustine's famous statement. You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you without its doctrine of creation. That word made is right there in that sentence. And that's actually a good

summation of some of his points on that. But creation is also important to Augustine because it was a stumbling block for his faith, like it is for many young people today. The Manichaeans, this is another religion at that time, had mocked the Old Testament, including passages like Genesis 1, and this really threw Augustine off balance, and he was struggling. And he was helped back to, he became a Manichaean for almost 10 years. One of the things that brought him back to Orthodoxy was Ambrose's sermons. So Augustine got to Milan, where Ambrose was the bishop in 384, and was very impressed with Ambrose, partly for his rhetoric and his eloquence, but over time, and also his godliness and his personal kindness to him, but over time he noticed that Ambrose is interpreting

scripture allegorically rather than in a crudely literalistic way. And for example, he would explain difficulties in Genesis, not as childish myths, but as containing profound spiritual truth. truths. And for Augustine, this just blew off the ceiling, and it helped him get through some of his struggles. Listen to how he described the impact of Ambrose's sermons. Quote, I began to believe that the Catholic faith, which I thought impossible to defend against the objections of the Manichaeans, might fairly be maintained, especially since I had heard one passage after another in the Old Testament figuratively explained. These passages had been death to me when I took them literally, but once I heard them explained in their spiritual meaning, I began to blame myself for my despair. The concerns reflected in

that experience reverberate into his own writing on Genesis. And in my book, I give a more thorough overview about all of this and what he means by the word literal and so much, really briefly, let's just sum up the big idea here. What is Augustine's view of the creation days and why does he hold it? In his final commentary, his summative and conclusive final commentary, which is his literal commentary, Augustine emphasizes the ineffability of the act of creation and how difficult it is for our minds to even comprehend what creation is. It is indeed an arduous and extremely difficult task for us to get through to what the writer meant with these six days, however concentrated our attention and lively our minds.

And he's constantly cautioning the humiliating. I have a whole chapter in my book on the humility of Augustine in how he relates to science, what we call science, and how he relates to scripture and how he does theology. He's constantly urging, be careful, especially when you step out of the rule of faith. Be very careful. He's saying, we don't have direct access to this ineffable act of creation that God and his infinite power did. Quote, now clearly in this earthbound condition of ours, we mortals can have no experiential perception of that day or those days which were named numbered by the repetition of it. Already, that caution alone is relevant to the current discussions. Because a lot of people treat Genesis 1 as just a matter

of obviousness. It's just, do you believe it or do you not? And when we do that, we're actually saying, St. Augustine, the greatest theologian of the early church, was either unintelligent or stubborn or something like that. He saw something other than just sheer obviousness in this passage. In fact, ultimately, in developing his own view of the creation days, he emphasizes the difference of the days of Genesis 1 from ordinary days. We must be in no doubt that they are not at all like them, but very, very dissimilar. And he argues that the creation events depicted in Genesis 1 occurred in one instantaneous moment. So not only is he distinguishing the days of Genesis 1 from ordinary days, he distinguishes God's initial creative act, which is instantaneous,

from his subsequent activity in creation. You can read the quote on the screen to better understand that. But it's very clear that these are not ordinary days. So then you say, okay, wait a second, if God made all things instantaneously in one moment, why is it described in terms of six days of an ordinary human work week? And the answer is accommodation. Quote, the scriptural stuff comes down to the level of little ones and adjusts itself to their capacity. Accommodation is the notion that God has adjusted his revelation so that it is comprehensible. For example, he'll use language, ordinary human language, so that we can understand what he's saying. That does not mean there are errors in the text. That's not what accommodation means. Rather, it's adapting your communication

so that it can be understood. And that's what Augustine thinks is going on in Genesis 1. It's an instantaneous creation, but is depicted in this sequential manner to help our limited brains understand what is going on. At one point, Augustine wonders whether perhaps the days of Genesis 1 were arranged in the way that they were, quote, as a help to human frailty and to suggest sublime things to lowly people in a lowly manner by following the basic rule of storytelling, which requires the storyteller's tale to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. So what kind of of accommodation specifically does Augustine see in Genesis 1? Ultimately, he thinks that the ordering of days is not according to any temporal sequence, but rather according to angelic knowledge. I know this is

going to seem weird, but follow me here on this one. Angels are huge in Augustine and in this doctrine of creation. He thinks the angels are the light of Genesis 1.3. On the first day on which light was made, the setting up of the spiritual and intelligent creation is being announced, under the name of light, the nature of this creation being understood to include all the angels and powers. So the light of day one is angels for Augustine. And Augustine develops this three-tiered account of the logical order of creation. First, things are created things exist in the word, the capital W word, the second member of the Trinity. Second, they exist in angelic knowledge. And then finally, they actually come into being. And with reference to the creation,

of heaven, for example, Augustine writes, the fashioning of heaven, on the other hand, or the sky. The heaven of heavens for Augustine means where the angels live, where deceased Christians go, but heaven just means the sky, was first made in the word of God in terms of begotten wisdom, then it was made next in the spiritual creation, that is, in the knowledge of the angels, in terms of the wisdom created in them, and only next after that was the heaven made. So threefold order here. I know this seems crazy. But an analogy you can use is imagine, okay, this is going to seem weird. A wizard is creating rabbits. And he's creating them by looking into a crystal ball. And he's got a bunch of associates who are also looking into the crystal wall. Okay, so that means the

associates are going to see the rabbits before they're actually made. Similarly, the angels incessantly gaze upon and adore the son of God. And therefore, they know what is in him, which is the idea of creation before creation actually comes about. So that's the idea here. Now, what does that have to do with Genesis 1? Augustine argues that the phrase, and God said let there be throughout Genesis 1, refers to creation in the Word, in the second member of the Trinity, and the phrase, and thus it was made, corresponds to the angelic knowledge of that.

and then the phrase, and God made this and that, corresponds to the actual creation of that object. So creation happens instantaneously, but God gives us a sequential account as an accommodation, and what this accommodated view is ultimately expressing is the angelic knowledge of creation. Yeah, why would anyone hold that view? Three reasons. Number one, the light before luminaries conundrum, which we have already seen. First, Augustine is wrestling with the nature of the light in days one through three before you get the luminaries on day four. He really struggles with this.

He, the first several books in his literal commentary, he's just going on and on. I mean, he keeps circling back to it and kind of giving different answers at different times. You can tell he kind of needed a good editor because he'll give different answers and it's kind of confusing at times. But he notes this phrase in Genesis 114, let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. years. And he says, who can fail to see how problematic is their implication that times began on the fourth day, as though the preceding three days could have passed without time? And he's very, he really struggles with this. He calls this a mystery. He calls this a secret. He says, it doesn't really work that God would just arbitrarily suspend light for portions of time on days one, two, and three.

quote, it can scarcely be supposed, after all, that it was put out so that nocturnal darkness might follow, and then lit again so that morning might be made before the sun took on this task, which, as the same text testifies, was made to begin on the fourth day. Ultimately, he seems to arrive upon uncertainty. What mind, therefore, is capable of penetrating the mystery of how those three days passed before times began, times which are said to have begun on the fourth. day or whether indeed those days passed at all. In book four, he finds himself dragged back again to this. It's funny because you think he's got to, he's just said, well, I don't know, but then he comes back

and, you know, it's like, you just said you don't know and now you're coming back to it. He says, we find ourselves slipping back into the same problem and having to ask how light could circulate to produce the alternations of day and night, not only before the lamps of heaven, but even before heaven itself called the solid structure was made. His ultimate conclusion is that the light before luminaries issue is so troubling that these simply cannot be ordinary days. In the city of God, he says, our ordinary days have no evening, but by the setting and no morning, but by the rising of the sun, but the first three days of all were passed without the sun. And therefore, he maintains here that morning and evening on days

one through three are not different times. They're just references to the angelic knowledge and praise. So these are not ordinary days. It's basically, if you know the term a framework view or a literary hypothesis view, Augustine thinks this whole work week of God in Genesis 1 is a framework. It's just a literary framework to describe what happened in an instant like that. The second reason he holds that view is relating Genesis 2 versus 4 to 6 to the Genesis 1 text, which extends a little bit into chapter 2. this really weighs upon him, particularly what we've already seen, the word day in the singular in Genesis 2.4, but also what comes after in Genesis 2.5, where you've got no bush is yet there, and no plant has yet sprung up. And you can just imagine Augustine at his desk tearing his hair out of this.

I mean, he devotes the entirety of book five of his literal commentary to this question and the challenges it raises. And he basically says, this confirms the doctrine of instantaneous creation, which he'd previously argued for just from Genesis 1. And now he says, Genesis 2 confirms this. He basically says, how do you already have plants on day three? And yet, then you get to chapter 2, verse 5, and it says, there's no plants. And on this basis, he says, it is beyond a shadow of doubt that the days here are not successive. They don't follow each other in time. In fact, he says the very reason that the greenery of the field here in chapter 2 verse 5 is mentioned is to confirm and drive home the point that these are not ordinary days. So if anybody didn't get the point from chapter 1,

that these are not 24 hour periods of time, this will be very clear once you get to chapter 2 versus 4 to 6. Quote, if readers should happen to understand here one of our ordinary kind of days, they would be corrected when they recall that God said the earth should produce the greenery of the field before this ordinary solar day. And part of what may be motivating Augustine here to give so much attention to Genesis 2, 4, to 6 is he might be worrying that he's drawing too much from Syrac 181. The book of Syrac also called Ecclesiasticus is one of the Deuteroconical books. And in the old Latin version says references, he who remains for eternity creating all things at once. And Augustine appeals to that passage a lot. But now he's saying,

look, we've got an even, you don't have to go to some other book to know how to read Genesis 1. You've got right here, right after, you've got confirmation. Quote, now we get evidence in support not from another book of Holy Scripture that God created all things simultaneously, but from the next door neighbor's testimony on the page following this whole matter, which gives us a hint with the words, when the day was made, God made heaven and earth and all the greenery of the field. That's Genesis 2.4. The third reason for Augustine's non-literal reading is God's rest on the seventh day. And this is a whole theme in Augustine, the idea of Sabbath rest. But that's why in that famous quote, you know, no rest until we find

our rest in you. The idea of rest is a good motif in Augustine for heaven. But he devotes the bulk of book four of his literal commentary to this topic. And he basically says, you cannot interpret this literally. God does not get tired. Quote, God did not delight in some kind of temporal period of rest after hard toil. So why does it say that God rested if God doesn't get tired? And he says, you have to take this analogically. And he associates God's rest with his happiness. And a key point here is that the seventh day has no morning and evening. Okay? This is going to tie into his interpretation of those as part of angelic knowledge. Ultimately, Augustine says the seventh day is not a period of time that God creates, since God made everything in one instantaneous moment.

Quote, the seventh day is not a creature on its own, but the same one coming round seven times, the one which was fashioned when God called the light day and the darkness night. And then Augustine reasons that if that's the case, these first six days cannot be sequential. This means that the first six days of creation unfolded in a manner quite beyond what we are used to, in our experience, with the original fashioning of things. And you can read that whole quote on the screen. I've got to wrap this video up because my family is leaving in a few minutes to go somewhere. So sum it up like this. For Augustine, the presentation of divine rest is another confirmation of what you've already got from the light before luminaries and the discronology present in Genesis

to four to six. This, these are not ordinary days. Augustine has other reasons as well. He thinks way too much happens on day five to squeeze into one 24-hour period. Okay, I'll put up this passage on the screen, and you can read through that if you want to see that. It's kind of interesting. But there's other reasons, but those are the main three reasons. So summing up with Chapter 7, what emerges? Because you know, if you know church history at all, Augustine has such a huge influence. So what emerges from all this? Well, after Augustine, what will often come about in the later patristic era is a synthesis of the emphasis of the emphasis of the emphasis of, you know, upon instantaneous creation, you get from Augustine and others, with the emphasis upon sequence.

So you can maybe think of these two different tendencies, and there's a lot of people trying to hold them together. So Gregory the Great, for example, combines the idea of instantaneous creation with a more straightforward reading of the creation days by distinguishing creation according to substance with creation according to forms. So creation according to substance is simultaneous creation, but then the forms unfold in time. In Isidore of Seville, important late patristic figure, he is going to sum up a lot of the patristic exegesis and transmit it into the medieval era. He's going to transmit allegory, instantaneous creation, the day of Genesis 2-4, the World Week hypothesis, all of that is going to get extended into the medieval era through people like Isidore and

others, and the notion of instantaneous creation continues to be very common. I remember reading through if you know Anselm in the 11th century medieval theologian, I did my dissertation on him. He has this, in his book on Atonement, he'll just reference. He's talking about angels and human beings and whether they were created at the same time. And he'll just reference as a prevailing opinion. In his own day, the idea that the entire creation was made all at once and the days by which Moses seems to indicate that the world was not made all at once must be understood as something other than the days that we experience in our own lives. So he doesn't take an opinion on that, but he just references that. That's one of the medieval views floating around, and one of the

big issues that then is getting worked out in the medieval era is where do angels fit in to creation? And in my book, I talk a lot about Lombard and Peter Lombard and others working through that. So that's what ultimately kind of works itself out in the tradition. All right, much more to say about all this, but hopefully that gives you a flavor. And maybe it can raise some things where you might be interested to do a little deeper dive yourself. What do we do with all this? There is so much, and I say a lot more in my book, let me just leave you with two basic

consequences that are extremely simple, but I think they are important and worth saying. Number one, humility and number two, lack of anxiety. If there's anything we should take from the early church on the days of creation, it's first, humility. There's a lot of different views. there's not just one, and there's also great complexity. And that means we need humility in, before we start deploying the church fathers to address contemporary positions, you can't just easily pluck someone up out of the fourth century,

say, and then plug them in to the contemporary view and just say, well, they're on this team, over and again, it's that team. By the way, this point that I'm making right now was so relevant to all our other conversations, Protestant versus other views, all this kind of stuff. it's very tricky to appeal to church history and just immediately deploy it for polemics because of these differences of context. The literalism we find in the early church is very different from modern-day young earth creationism. But also, you don't have, you know, the day-age view, you don't have, you don't have old

creation, you don't have anybody thinking the earth is really old. Of course, they have no reason to think that, so that's not all that surprising. But basically, we need to be careful. the views of the early church don't neatly correspond to contemporary views, and so great caution is needed before we go back too quickly to pluck them out and use them for our, to support our own views today. Second, lack of anxiety. The great Eastern Orthodox scholar Andrew Luth, describing the church father's interpretation of Genesis, said, quote, there is none of the anxiety one finds in fundamentalist readings of Scripture today.

And what he meant by this is that the fathers were not threatened by the scientific thought of the day, what they would have called natural philosophy. They were not afraid to acknowledge the limits of biblical claims. And yet they treated the Bible reverently with an emphasis upon its authority, with an appreciation for its depth of meaning. They treated it as though, in his words, the text bears any amount of careful pondering. I love that. This is what I want to leave you with.

Put it like this. what if Genesis 1 wasn't something you have to hold up against pressures coming against it? What if it's itself the thing you can stand on? It can hold you up. Think of Genesis 1 as a vast castle in which you can live. You don't have to protect it. It's there to protect you. This is the text that is telling you the truth, but you don't have to be afraid and try to defend it. The meaning is more complicated. And you can just simply learn. And it could be the fun task of a life. flam of how do I relate this to what God is revealed through general revelation, so through which, you know, we know science, what we know from science and so forth. I think that's a much more enjoyable

attitude towards Scripture. We bow before it as the Word of God. It's fully true, but we recognize our humility as interpreters, and we are the humility needed in the task of correlating general revelation and special revelation. And therefore, you're not anxious. You're just pondering. You're just learning. It's like, okay, new information, right? So hopefully you understand what I'm saying there. I think a lot of Christians have a fear-based approach to these conversations between science and faith. We don't need that. Genesis 1 is the solid rock you can stand on. And there, just focus on what's really clear in the text, you know, the goodness of creation, the contingency of creation, the fact that God

is the creator. If you want to go further, let me recommend two. books. Reading Genesis, no one's paying me to recommend these books. Jack Collins, reading Genesis well is great. Pretty, a little academic book, but really helpful for working through the text of Genesis 1 through 11. He just really, he draws from C.S. Lewis to help you understand how to read. That's the best way to put it. It's such a great book. And Matthew Levering, who's a very wonderful theologian and wonderful person as well that I've learned so much from. I read every page of this book, and it was so good. Engaging the Doctrine of Creation, this is less about, just about Genesis and more just the theology of creation.

So I'd recommend those as well. Hope this video is useful for you. I genuinely hope it serves you. Let me know what you think in the comments. I'll read them with great interest. Thanks for watching everybody.