In Early Christian Readings of Genesis One, which I was able to read thanks to IVP Academic, Craig Allert explores whether or not one can use the early church fathers to support a certain literal interpretation of Genesis 1. That certain literal interpretation is the one that supports at young earth creationist reading of Genesis 1, and the short answer is no, you can’t use them that way.
Ressourcement and retrieval theology are all the rage today. Or at least in many evangelical and Reformed necks of the woods. It would make sense that as one wants to understand a book like Genesis better, seeing how the earliest Christian interpreters understood it brings one closer to the original context.
The problem is that one can often read the church fathers not in their own context, but filtered mostly through our modern (or even postmodern) context. The result is that one misunderstands what the church fathers are saying in general and what they might mean when they interpret the early chapters of Genesis in particular.
To remedy this, Allert spends the first part of the book explaining who the church fathers are and why you should care (chapter 1). He then offers a survey demonstrating how creation science (or young earth creationist) writers misread the fathers in their original context (chapter 2). This is often because of cherry picking passages out of a wider context and then importing a modern understanding of the terms being used. A key example is how a modern reader might understand “literal” and what the fathers meant by that term (chapter 3).
The second part of the book opens with a chapter on Basil, exploring in more detail his approach to interpretation. He was a kind of focal point in some of the resources that Allert referred to in chapter 2, so this in depth analysis further supports his comments there. The next two chapters survey various church fathers, but in relation to creation out of nothing (chapter 5) and the days of Genesis (chapter 6).
From here, Allert focuses more closely on Augustine, and how he understands “in the beginning” as well as other issues related to interpreting Genesis 1. The final chapter serves as a kind of conclusion, exhorting readers to be more like Moses in the way that they understand the early chapters of Genesis. By this, Allert means in order to understand what Moses wrote, one needs to be enlightened by the same Spirit that enlightened Moses. This is a way for arguing that chapters like Genesis 1 are more about spiritual than scientific realities, which is the way the early church fathers read those texts.
On the whole, I think there are a few takeaways from Allert’s work. First, young earth creationists should not use the early church fathers as support for their interpretation of Genesis 1. This does not make that interpretation necessarily wrong, but the examples Allert presents in chapter 2 are rather embarrassing examples of taking things out of context and not understanding basics of patristic exegesis. It looks suspiciously like proof texting to strengthen an argument rather than a legitimate engagement of those patristic sources to understand them in context to then understand Genesis better.
Second, whether or not Genesis 1 can give a scientific account of creation, it has not been the norm in the history of the church to read it that way. “Literal” means something like “according to the sense of the literature” not necessarily “physical/historical/scientific.” It does not rule out the latter, but doesn’t mean it by default. Historically, careful readers of Scripture have been more sensitive to reading it according to the sense of the literature, but also with a concern to see Christ in the text. The spiritual/theological meaning of text like Genesis 1 is that God created the heavens and earth and all that is in them. He alone is sovereign, and he defines the nature of everything else’s existence, including humanity. This is true regardless of how one understands the nature of the days, or whether the text is intended to be a blow by blow historical account of events.
Lastly, the goal of the church fathers was not to offer a plain sense meaning of the text and I don’t think it should be ours either. The reason is that often when someone says “plain sense” they mean the sense that makes sense to them. What is left out is an examination of the presuppositions being used and the cultural embeddedness that determines what counts as “plain.” One could very well point out that often a “plain sense” reading is reading of the text in English, which is not the same “plain sense” one would arrive in after reading it in Hebrew, or how a Greek speaking father might have read it in the early church.
Allert’s book reminds us that more care should not only be taken in trying to understand Scripture well, but in understanding earlier interpreters of Scripture well. It is not an easy task, but if the Bible is God’s word to us, it is certainly a worthwhile task for us.