Early Christian Readings of Genesis One

Patristic Exegesis and Literal Interpretation

Craig D. Allert

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780830887835
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Crítica e interpretación bíblicas

Do the writings of the church fathers support a literalist interpretation of Genesis 1? Young earth creationists have maintained that they do. And it is sensible to look to the Fathers as a check against our modern biases. But before enlisting the Fathers as ammunition in our contemporary Christian debates over creation and evolution, some cautions are in order. Are we correctly representing the Fathers and their concerns? Was Basil, for instance, advocating a literal interpretation in the modern sense? How can we avoid flattening the Fathers' thinking into an indexed source book in our quest for establishing their significance for contemporary Christianity? Craig Allert notes the abuses of patristic texts and introduces the Fathers within their ancient context, since the patristic writings require careful interpretation in their own setting. What can we learn from a Basil or Theophilus, an Ephrem or Augustine, as they meditate and expound on themes in Genesis 1? How were they speaking to their own culture and the questions of their day? Might they actually have something to teach us about listening carefully to Scripture as we wrestle with the great axial questions of our own day? Allert's study prods us to consider whether contemporary evangelicals, laudably seeking to be faithful to Scripture, may in fact be more bound to modernity in our reading of Genesis 1 than we realize. Here is a book that resets our understanding of early Christian interpretation and the contemporary conversation about Genesis 1.BioLogos Books on Science and Christianity invite us to see the harmony between the sciences and biblical faith on issues including cosmology, biology, paleontology, evolution, human origins, the environment, and more.

1

WHO ARE the
CHURCH FATHERS,
and WHY
SHOULD I CARE?

Several years ago I was invited to give a presentation to an adult Sunday school class at a Mennonite church in my community. I called the presentation “Back to the Sources: An Introduction to the Great Thinkers of the Early Church” and was excited to share my passion for the church fathers with this audience. Unfortunately, my hearers did not share my excitement. At best they could not understand why we would need anything other than what we have in our Bibles. At worst, they could not understand why a good conservative Christian would recommend these figures from a church and an age that was, in their opinion, far from the purity of New Testament Christianity.

Granted, my experience above may be unique, but I doubt it. An argument could be made that the necessity of an introductory chapter in this book about the importance of the church fathers is a symptom of a greater problem within our churches that my experience illustrates. For reasons beyond the scope of this book, our own Christian heritage, which includes the church fathers, has been deemed, at best, marginally helpful for the twenty-first-century Christian. At worst, the history between the apostles and the Reformers has been judged as an era best left in the past because of its perceived distance from “true” Christianity. For many Christians the idea that we should appeal to the church fathers, who belong to that era, as part of our own Christian heritage is foreign, suspect, or even impious. The Christianity of that age has been seen as transitory, naive, and even problematic, and therefore an unnecessary resource for Christian faithfulness today. After all, wasn’t it this kind of Christianity that the Protestant Reformers opposed?1

One important reason why some Protestants fail to recognize the connection we have with the unfolding story of the people of God in the early church is because of what D. H. Williams calls a “fall paradigm.”2 In this understanding, at some point after the apostolic age the church “fell” from its pure existence, and from this fallen condition the Roman Catholic Church emerged. This understanding renders the leaders, creeds and councils, and holy days of the ancient church suspect because they were either complicit in or products of this fall. It was not until the Reformation in the sixteenth century that true (New Testament) Christianity was rediscovered and “restored and set on its originally intended course.”3

To many Protestants this is not merely a paradigm, but reality.4 Yet for most it is implicitly assumed rather than explicitly affirmed. In Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism, Williams argues persuasively that this way of interpreting history has its own history determined by certain motivations that gave rise to it in the first place. There may be better ways of looking at Christianity’s history that can have corrective value for the fall paradigm. The fall paradigm automatically creates a barrier between the church today and our heritage because it assumes that we developed independently of, and even in spite of, the early post-apostolic church.

There are many reasons why the fall paradigm fails to convince some people of its viability.5 First, it is an overly simplistic way of reading history. History tends to be messy, and a reading that simply categorizes into good and bad runs the risk of oversimplification and overgeneralization. Second, it does not accurately represent what many of the sixteenth-century Reformers believed about the ancient church and the Fathers. Many from within Protestantism itself are seeking to remind its adherents that the Reformers actually relied extensively on the sources of early Christianity because they saw themselves in continuity with the church fathers and the historic teaching of the church.6 Reformation scholar David Steinmetz argues that the Reformers were very concerned that their teachings should match those of the Fathers. Steinmetz notes that they “turned to the Fathers because they found them important sources of insight into the text of Scripture.”7 The third, and perhaps most significant, problem with the fall paradigm is that it robs present-day Christians of their own heritage.

Calls for a recovery of the church fathers for the life of the church today have been underway within evangelicalism for many years now. Doctrine that we call orthodox, as well as the Bible to which we appeal for this essential doctrine, has deep roots in the mediating work of Christians after the apostles. Much of our understanding of what the Bible teaches has come to us through the church fathers. I would like to unpack this as I make an apologetic for why we should at least consider the church fathers’ interpretation of the six days of creation in Genesis.

WHO WERE THE CHURCH FATHERS?

The Greek and Latin terms for father are similar: in Greek it is patēr and in Latin it is pater. This is why the discipline that studies the church fathers is called patrology, or patristics, which means something like the teaching or study (logos) of the Fathers. One will often hear and read references to the patristic age. This simply means the age of the church fathers. But who were they?

The term father as a teacher, leader of a school of philosophers, or rabbi occurred in Jewish, Cynic, and Pythagorean circles.8 In Christianity, father as an honorary title represents the “confluence of a host of common, human, OT, and Greco-Roman conceptions.”9 The understanding of a father as one who has gone before us is common in day-to-day experience. Although not everyone can claim to have had an ideal father, we can surely grasp the concept of one. He is someone who guides his children with wisdom gained from life experiences.10 From here it is not a far step to the concept of a father as one who is a spiritual guide because of his experience in the faith and his responsibility and ability to hand on that faith.

In the New Testament the apostles saw themselves as fathers to the nascent church. In 1 Corinthians 4:14, Paul speaks of himself as a father to the Corinthian church.11 He addresses both Timothy and Titus as loyal children in the faith.12 John greeted his readers as “my children” and “my little children.”13 Peter even appealed to Christians of his own generation as “the fathers.”14 This kind of use extended into the patristic age. Writing in approximately 180 CE, Irenaeus claimed that “when any person has been taught from the mouth of another, he is termed the son of him who instructs him, and the latter [is called] his father.”15 Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–ca. 215) says that “words are the progeny of the soul. Hence we call those who have instructed us, fathers. . . . And every one who is instructed, is in respect of subjection the son of his instructor.”16

The term father in Christianity can therefore refer to previous generations of believers who have continued to guide their spiritual descendants in the church through history up to our own age.17 This has prompted Christopher Hall to describe a father in the faith as “someone who is familiar with the teachings concerning the life and ministry of Jesus Christ and can be trusted to hand on faithfully and correctly the tradition that he himself has already received. Trustworthiness of character and rootedness in the gospel are non-negotiables in the life of a father.”18

In this description it appears that anyone with similar qualifications could be labeled a church father. This is particularly true in the Greek Orthodox Church, of which Panagiotes Chrestou states:

The Church has never excluded the appearance of renowned teachers in her bosom, who are outstanding bearers of the divine grace of the divine spirit, and she has never restricted this appearance to any particular period of her history. Orthodox ecclesiastical consciousness, which attributes the title of father in every epoch to elect vessels of grace that lived in previous epochs, has already pushed the patristic period to the end of the Byzantine era and is pushing forward beyond it more and more.19

Even though Chrestou rightly recognizes, as we all should, the contribution of great leaders in the church throughout the ages, he “does not exclude the habit of regarding the Fathers of the first Christian centuries, when the foundations of the Christian institutions were first laid and the dogmatic teaching was specified to a large extent, as occupying a privileged position.”20 In agreement with Chrestou, the church fathers are limited to a particular age when foundational and baseline actions and beliefs were hammered out. Evangelical Christopher Hall recognizes the importance of Christian leaders in this age as those who preserve and hand on the teachings concerning Christ and his ministry (apostolic teaching), foundationally exemplified in “the conciliar decisions of key councils such as Nicaea (A.D. 325), Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon.”21

There has not been complete agreement on limiting the age or even the orthodoxy of the church fathers. In his famous four-volume work on the Fathers, Johannes Quasten states that these early leaders include both orthodox and heretical writers up to Isidore of Seville (d. 636) in the West and John Damascene (d. 749) in the East.22 Most, however, would not want to include as church fathers men who were deemed heretical. The dates assigned by Quasten are also somewhat arbitrary since most historians consider the seventh and eighth centuries as part of the early medieval age. For various reasons, I see a shift occurring with the death of Augustine (430) and the Council of Chalcedon (451). Therefore, I put the end of the patristic age around 451.

In 374 or 375, Basil of Caesarea included a list of church fathers that supported his argument in On the Holy Spirit.23 The appeal to previous leaders in the church was important because it represented the responsible safeguarding and handing on of the faith. Augustine did the same thing in his work against Pelagius. In about 434, a few years after the death of Augustine, a monk named Vincent of Lérins (d. before 450) wrote a document called Commonitory (meaning something like “an aid to memory”), a classic formulation of what has contributed to the main criteria by which we identify a church father.24 Building on Scriptures that appeal to the wisdom and guidance of past leaders in the church,25 he states that his purpose in this aid to memory is to “put down in writing the things which I have truthfully received from the holy Fathers.”26 It is Vincent’s conviction that the Fathers, along with Holy Scripture, are invaluable for Christians to distinguish truth from heresy. Thus, he counsels that

we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. . . . This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors.27

Vincent’s admiration of these “holy Fathers” has influenced a set of four criteria that has emerged, wherein a church father is thought of as one who is ancient, orthodox in doctrine, holy in life, and approved by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: UNDERSTANDING THE CONTEXT
• PART II: READING THE FATHERS
• Selected Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• The BioLogos Foundation
• Notes
• Praise for Early Christian Readings of Genesis One
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright