Daniel Eaton's Public Library

Even those who rejected literal 24 hour days still believed
in a young earth as Table 3.4 demonstrates. Origen
believed that the world was less than 10 000 years old and Clement thought it
was still younger. In my view Davis A. Young is right when he concludes that
the early church fathers “...did not believe that the creation had taken
place over six thousand years, but that the totality of human history would
occupy six thousand years, a millennium of history for each of the six days of
creation.”(17)

Table 3.3: The
Length of the Days of Creation

Writer	Date	24 hours	Figurative	Unclear	Reference
Philo	c.20 BC- c.AD 50		X		Creation 13
Josephus	AD 37/38- c.100			X	Antiquities 1.1.1 (1.27-33)
Justin Martyr	c.100 - c.165			X
Tatian	110-180			X
Theophilus of Antioch	c.180	X			Autolycus 2.11-12
Irenaeus of Lyons	c.115-202			X
Clement of Alexandria	c.150 - c.215		X		Miscellanies 6.16
Tertullian	c.160 - c.225			X
Julius Africanus	c.160-240			X
Hippolytus of Rome	170-236			X	Genesis, 1.5
Origen	185-253		X		Celsus, 6.50, 60
Methodius	d.311	X			Chastity 5.7
Lactantius	240-320	X			Institutes 7.14
Victorinus of Pettau	d. c. 304	X			Creation
Eusebius of Caesarea	263-339			X
Ephrem the Syrian	306-373	X			Commentary on Genesis 1.1
Epiphanius of Salamis	315-403	X			Panarion, 1.1.1
Basil of Caesarea	329-379	X			Hexameron, 2.8
Gregory of Nyssa	330-394			X
Gregory of Nazianxus	330-390			X
Cyril of Jerusalem	d. 387	X			Catechetical Lectures 12.5
Ambrose of Milan	339-397	X			Hexameron, 1.10.3-7
John Chrysostom	374-407			X
Jerome	347-419/420			X
Augustine of Hippo	354-430		X		Literal, 4.22.39

One of the most influential proponents of this position
was William Greenough Thayer Shedd (1820-1894). Shedd placed special emphasis
on the history of Christianity as a means of identifying and countering false
teaching.(28) For this reason his opinions on the history of
doctrine continue to carry a great deal of weight. He wrote in the first volume
of his Dogmatic Theology:

Respecting the length of the six
creative days, speaking generally, for there was some difference of views, the
patristic and mediaeval exegesis makes them to be long periods, not days of
twenty-four hours. The latter interpretation has prevailed only in the modern
church. Augustine, teaches (De Genesi ad literam, IV.xxvii.) that the length of
the six days is not determined by the length of our week-days.(29)

A far
more accurate assessment of Augustine is given by Bernard Ramm, who points out
that in his work on Genesis:

Augustine does not call them
geological days, and it has been argued that there is nothing in Augustine to
justify any belief in a period of time for these days. The point Augustine
actually makes is that the creation days are so great, so majestic, so profound
that we cannot consider them as mere sun-divided days but as God-divided days.
They are creative days, not solar days, and so he calls them natures,
growths, dies ineffabiles.(32)

Augustine believed that God created all things ex
nihilo,(36) instantaneously.(37) He
identified “in the beginning” with the beginning of time(38) which is considered one of his most valuable contributions
to the doctrine of creation.(39) By coining this theory
Augustine cut the ground from under his opponents, the Manichees, who asked
“What was God doing before he created the world?”(40) If time was created with the world then such temporal
questions become meaningless, because you cannot have a time before time
existed!(41) Augustine based his doctrine on Sirach 18:1
which reads “He who lives forever created all things together” in the
Old Latin and Vulgate.(42) The NRSV of this
verse reads: “He who lives forever created the whole universe", so his
argument is based on a mistranslation of an apocryphal book, which Augustine
apparently accepted as inspired.(43)

In his exegesis of Genesis Augustine recognised three acts
of creation. The first, the plan of everything in the mind of God,(44) in the second (Gen. 1:1 - 2:4) of the creation of
everything instantaneously in the form of seminal principles. The final
act (Gen. 2:5 onwards) describes God’s works within time which we now
experience in which the principles became this world and its
creatures.(45) The creation of man took place as part of
God’s third act,(46) as did the making of Eve from one
of Adam’s ribs.(47) However, even this formation of Eve
from a rib was part of the seminal principles created during God’s
second act.(48)

Augustine
wrote that

With regard to certain very small
forms of animal life, there is a question as to whether they were produced in
the first creatures or were a later product of the corruption of perishable
beings. For most of them came forth from the diseased parts or the excrement or
vapors of living bodies or from the corruption of corpses; some also from
decomposed trees and plants, others from rotting fruit.… it is absurd to
say that they were created when the animals were created, except in the sense
that there was present from the beginning in all living bodies a natural power,
and, I might say, there were interwoven with these bodies the seminal
principles of animals later to appear, which would spring from the decomposing
bodies, each according to its kind and with its special properties, by the
wonderful power of the immutable Creator who moves all His creatures.(51)

Arthur C. Custance is perhaps the most famous of the modern
supporters of the Gap Theory. He argued that Origen was a gap theorist on the
basis of the following quotation. While discussing Genesis 1:1, Origen wrote:
“For it is certain that the firmament is not spoken of, nor the dry land,
but that heaven and earth from which this present heaven and earth which we now
see afterwards borrowed their names.”(80) Given the
complexity of Origen’s thought it would at the outset appear a somewhat
dubious practice to read so much into such a short quotation. As we can see in
Appendix 1, Origen believed that when Adam and Eve fell they took on physical
bodies and the physical world which as we now know it was created to house
them. So in context Origen is saying that the physical world was named after
the spiritual world from which Adam fell.

Basil of Caesarea provides one of the most detailed
expositions of the six days of creation to come down to us from the early
church. Basil was convinced that the world was created “in less than an
instant,”(88) but writing about the creation of plants
he wrote: “God did not command the earth immediately to give forth seed
and fruit, but to produce germs, to grow green, and to arrive at maturity in
the seed; so that this first command teaches nature what she has to do in the
course of ages.”

In a moment earth began by
germination to obey the laws of the Creator, completed every stage of growth,
and brought germs to perfection. The meadows were covered with deep grass, the
fertile plains quivered with harvests, and the movement of the corn was like
the waving of the sea. Every plant, every herb, the smallest shrub, the least
vegetable, arose from the earth in all its luxuriance.…

Basil’s belief in spontaneous generation led him to conclude that
the same process of creation was continuing with such creatures as frogs,
gnats, flies, grasshoppers, mice and eels.

A number of reasons have been identified for the lack of
interest in the study of Hebrew among the church fathers. The majority of Jews
living in the western empire never mastered the Hebrew language and relied
instead on Greek translations, especially the Septuagint. This explains why the
New Testament writers predominantly used this translation when quoting the Old
Testament. More importantly the Septuagint rapidly gained the status of
“inspired translation” in the church, in much the same way as the
King James Version is treated by some Christians today.(18) As such it could not be questioned and did not require any
correction from the Hebrew original. In contrast the “...Hebrew Bible was
devalued or even rejected, either because it was taken as a forgery, or because
it was the Jewish Bible.”(19)

Augustine of Hippo developed his doctrine
of original sin from the Old Latin version of Romans 5:12. This mistranslated
the Greek and implied that the sin of Adam was passed on to his descendants. In
contrast to this view, the Greek Fathers, including John Chrysostom, Theodore
of Mopsuestia, Athanasius, Methodius and Gregory of Nyssa(24)
generally held that Adam passed on merely the consequences of his sin, i.e.
death. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin still remains central to the
Roman Catholic doctrine of baptism. Differences between the Latin
Vulgate, the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew text of Genesis also caused
Augustine problems. How, for instance, can one explain how Methuselah lived 14
years after the flood (according to the Latin translation)? For him the answer
was simple - the Septuagint translation was wrong. For some pious believers
questioning the translation was beyond the pale. The text must be right
- so Methuselah must have been snatched up to be with Enoch during the flood,
and then set down again when it was over!(25)

The early Christians accepted the
Jewish Scriptures as divinely inspired, but interpreted them in a completely
different way. They did not regard the Old Testament as a prelude to
Christianity, which the new revelation in Christ augmented or displaced....
Christians generally believed that the Old Testament spoke about Jesus Christ,
not merely prophetically but in types and allegories which the Spirit revealed
to Christians.

All of the fathers used typology to provide biblical
illustrations for their preaching of Christ. Some took this method to extremes
that leave the modern reader wondering if they saw any difference between
typology and allegory, or whether the latter is just an exaggeration of the
former.

Only Lactantius explicitly rejected sphericity, although
there is some indirect evidence from later writers that Theodore of Mopseustia
(c. 350 - 430) and Diodore of Tarsus (d. 394) may also have done so.(46) The surviving works of Lactantius have played an important
part in the development of what J.B. Russell calls “the flat error” -
the false idea that the early and mediaeval church taught that the earth is
flat.(47)

Apparently following the generally accepted opinion, held
also by Pliny the Elder (AD 23 -79), Ovid (43 BC - c. AD 17) and Aelian (AD
170-235), Origen accepted that certain animals are spontaneously generated from
dead bodies:

...it is not wonderful that at the
present time a snake should be found out of a dead man, growing out of the
marrow of his back,(57) and that a bee should spring from an
ox,(58) and a wasp from a horse,(59) and a
beetle from an ass, and, generally, worms from the most of bodies.(60)

As far as we can tell, the majority of the people of the
ancient world believed in spontaneous generation, including some of the early
church fathers (to a limited degree). See Table 7.1.
However, the assumption that they were therefore evolutionists in the modern
sense is unwarranted.(62)

The Sons of God = Sons of Kings, Daughters of Men = any woman.

"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."