Chapter 4 of Joel Edmond Anderson is a powerful quick tour of how the early church fathers interpreted the early chapters of Genesis which was spiritually and sometimes historically but not scientifically. Anderson shows the whole history of the early church from its beginning to modern history has interpreted the book of Genesis very differently than YEC (Young Earth Creationists) who have tried to suggest that this is how every true believer has interpreted Genesis throughout church history. Anyone who will look at the history of the church will discover that YEC is a very novel and modern invention and not an ancient understanding of the biblical text.
Early exegetes like Philo, Origen, Augustine, and the Cappadocian fathers understood the early chapters in Genesis very differently than the conclusions of modern creation-science folks of today. The early Christians were not explaining biology but salvation. They even understood development, progress, and growth as God calls us to a kind of spiritual evolution of loving as God loves us. Christians through the ages have been more concerned about readers of the Bible understanding not so much that Adam was a historical person (which many of them did believe) but how the story of Adam is the story of us.
Thomas Aquinas taught that God did not create everything instantly but rather nature has the capacity to develop over time and God is continually creating new life. The problem with YEC is the Enlightenment assumptions they impose on the biblical text and then go further by imposing it on everyone else if you are a faithful believer in Christ. If evolution would have been taught in the early church's day, many of the early curch fathers would have understood it to simply be the process which further proved God's providence in the world around us. Next week I'll finish Anderson's chapter that covers the Protestant Reformation to today.
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