No dead give away. The interpretation of individual words do not change the literal interpretation of Genesis. This does not detract from the beliefs of the church fathers concerning a literal Genesis.
It may be a Creationist site, but the references concerning the Church Fathers is accurate, and yes the view of the Church Fathers is decidedly a literal Genesis. The authors of the gospels(?), likely edited and compiled, by the earliest Church Fathers believed in a literal Genesis. here is more:
Origen, Clement of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo
Usually liberal Christians refer to these three church leaders to support their ideas. However, we must understand that these three scholars never even thought about interpreting the days of Genesis in a way that today’s liberals understand. To try and do this is a violation of their teaching.
Firstly, even these three leaders who interpreted Scripture in a more symbolic way than the others, never once tried to mix the long ages of the pagan philosophers like Plato with their teaching. Every single person among the Christian leaders who spoke about Creation said it had happened much less than 10,000 years ago. Augustine (AD 354 – 430) could write:
“fewer than 6,000 years have passed since man’s first origin,”
and he referred to the pagans’
“fairy-tales about reputed antiquity, which our opponents may decide to produce in attempts to controvert the authority of our sacred books....”9
Liberals are keen to get Augustine on their side because apparently he believed that the days of Creation were symbolic, and not literal. He tells us in his City of God what he understood about the Creation days:
“The world was in fact made with time, if at the time of its creation change and motion came into existence. This is clearly the situation in the order of the first six or seven days, in which morning and evening are named, until God’s creation was finished on the sixth day, and on the seventh day God’s rest is emphasized as something conveying a mystic meaning. What kind of days these are is difficult or even impossible for us to imagine, to say nothing of describing them.
In our experience, of course, the days with which we are familiar only have an evening because the sun sets, and a morning because the sun rises; whereas those first three days passed without the sun, which was made, we are told, on the fourth day. The narrative does indeed tell that light was created by God…. But what kind of light that was, and with what alternating movement the distinction was made, and what was the nature of this evening and this morning; these are questions beyond the scope of our sensible experience. We cannot understand what happened as it is presented to us; and yet we must believe it without hesitation.”10
From this we realise that Augustine held to a literal interpretation of the Creation days, although he admitted he had to take it by faith, rather than by reason. In his earlier book (AD 397 – 398), Confessions, he does spiritualize the Genesis account of Creation to communicate with a different audience, but his City of God was completed only four years before his death, and, as shown above, this later book shows a literal understanding of the days of Genesis.
He did teach an idea known as the “seminal principle,” which some liberals have jumped on with glee, stating that Augustine was a theistic evolutionist. This is, however, reading too much into his work from a post-Darwin mindset. He simply believed that all living things contained within them seeds, which grew to form the complete species, but that all kinds of living things had fixed boundaries. These seeds, he believed, grew rapidly into fully mature living forms during the creation process – there was no thought about millions of years in between each stage of the days of Genesis.11
Origen (AD 185 – 230/254) was one of the most prolific Christian writers in the Early Church, and was used by God to lead many into the Christian faith. He was recognised as one of the greatest scholars of the church at that time. He led a Bible school in Alexandria, and in order to become a better missionary to the pagan philosophers, he attended the lectures of Ammonius Saccas, who had founded the school of Neo-Platonism in Alexandria. Sadly, it was the influence of pagan philosophy that led Origen astray in some of his Scriptural interpretations.
Origen started preaching that human souls had already existed and that they were waiting to be put into bodies. This heresy was known as the “Pre-existence of the Soul”, and it was totally rejected by the church. He also taught that the stars possessed their own souls. This belief he adopted from the pagan scientists of the day. He began to explain away Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden as figurative, and he also bought into a pagan understanding of the Creation days. He believed that “the world is not yet ten thousand years old, but very much under that”,12 but saw the six days of Creation as figurative.
The reason why he struggled with a literal understanding of the six days is because he could not understand how light could exist, and the earth rotate in a 24-hour cycle before the sun had been created. He appealed to Genesis 2:4 in order to give a figurative meaning to the six days of Creation and wrote:
“We found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world, and quoted the words: 'These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.'”13
Of course today we know that the sun is one among many stars, and that light radiation existed before they were created. The problem of a 24-hour earth cycle before the sun was made is not a difficulty for God; it is just that we do not yet understand it. When Origen quoted Genesis 2:4 to give a figurative foundation for the days of Creation, he did not realise that traditional rabbinical understanding of this verse was that the “generations” meant “the account of” and “the day” meant “at the time when”.14 Thus he is guilty of twisting Scripture.
Clement of Alexandria (AD 153 – 217), was famous as a Bible teacher, and he taught Origen. Although some evangelicals think he held to a liberal view on Creation, he actually had a mixed approach. He has an historical date for Creation of 5592 BC (Stromata, or Miscellanies 1:21) and he said about the Creation days:
“For the creation of the world was concluded in six days ...Wherefore also man is said to have been made on the sixth day ... Some such thing also is indicated by the sixth hour in the scheme of salvation, in which man was made perfect.”15
Although the context of the above passage is indeed figurative, it is clear that Clement was referring to a literal six-day Creation with man being “made perfect” in the sixth hour of the sixth day. Clement was influenced by the rabbinical teaching of the six hours in which God completed man, an idea which goes beyond the bounds of Scripture, but yet demonstrates a literalist view.16
In conclusion, my investigation clearly demonstrated to me that the Church Fathers were almost unanimous on the twin beliefs of a literal six-day Creation and a “young earth”. Origen, who was influenced by pagan views and held to some heretical ideas, was the main exception to the rule. Although the Church Fathers were literalists, it is true that they also used Genesis in a figurative way to point prophetically to the return of Christ, and to draw out spiritual messages for their audiences, as do literal creationists today.
