In Wisdom You Have Made Them All

I’ve been enjoying On Ancient Paths, the Substack of an Orthodox writer named Jeremiah Carey. (You should subscribe, if you don’t already.) His most recent post touches on a subject I’ve been wanting to write about. It’s called “The Church Fathers Were Not Literalists”.

In it, Mr. Carey lists several instances where the Church Fathers reject the literal reading of some passage from Scripture and interpret said passage symbolically. These include:

• St. Gregory of Nyssa on the “skin” used to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness

• St. Gregory on the final plague of Egypt

• St. Jerome on the measurements of Cain’s city

• St. Neilos the Ascetic on the doorkeeper of Ish-bosheth

• St. Maximos the Confessor on Uzziah’s vine-dresser

The article is very well done. And he’s right, of course: the Fathers don’t always read the Bible literally.

Still, I think it’s worth pointing out that the opposite is also true. Sometimes, the Church Fathers do read the Bible literally. For instance, we know that they took a literal reading of John 1. God the Son literally became man and dwelt among us. Likewise, Matthew 28. Jesus literally rose from the dead. And so on.

As a rule, the Church Fathers take a non-literal reading of the Scriptures when they speak about trivial matters. They take a literal reading when it pertains to matters which are essential to the Christian Faith.

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When folks argue over “literalism” in the Bible, they’re not usually asking whether Adam’s loincloth was made of real leather. Usually they’re talking about Genesis 1.

Even many “conservative” Christians find this conversation painfully embarrassing. Many are passionate defenders of Darwinism and will react strongly against anything that smells of Creationism. But why? I doubt they’re really passionate about the subject. Few have read the Origin of Species. Virtually none are up on the latest issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Most probably don’t really care one way or another.

For over a century, however, the interpretation of Genesis has served as an most important litmus test. Fail it, and your views—on any subject—will never get a hearing among Very Serious People. This is why “conservative” Christians have made a habit of ingratiating themselves to Worldlings (both within and without the Chuch) by saying things like: “Of course I believe in science. I don’t God literally made the earth in seven days! But…” They will then go on to explain why it’s not unreasonable for them believe some other miraculous event: Christ’s virgin birth, His rising from the dead, etc. One might say that we’ve sold out Creation to save the Incarnation and the Resurrection.

That kind of language strikes me as cowardly. More importantly, we should note that the majority of Church Fathers were Young Earth Creationists (to use modern parlance).

Again, merely stating this fact this can anger many people. I heard one Orthodox Christian say recently. “The Church Fathers were well-versed in philosophy, history, and the sciences. My guess is that, if they had the evidence and information we have now, they absolutely would absolutely incorporate it into their reading of Genesis.” But I’m not so sure.

St. Augustine suggests that we must accept the literal reading of Genesis 1 as an article of faith. It’s a miraculous event, which—like the Incarnation or the Resurrection—must trump any theory we have about science or history. As he says in the City of God:

[The pagans] are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6,000 years have yet passed.

Likewise, St. Theophilus of Antioch wrote:

On the fourth day the luminaries came into existence. Since God has foreknowledge, he understood the nonsense of the foolish philosophers who were going to say that the things produced on earth come from the stars, so that they might set God aside. In order therefore that the truth might be demonstrated, plants and seeds came into existence before the stars. For what comes into existence later cannot cause what is prior to it.

For Theophilus, as for Augustine, this question had nothing to do with scientific evidence. Both felt that the account given in Genesis must be accepted on the authority of Holy Scripture. For them, it concerns the very essence of the Christian Faith.

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I’m not trying to argue for YAC. I’m more concerned about this attitude we adopt towards the Fathers.

We assume that, if they were alive today—if they knew the things we know—of course they would think differently. But that’s a dangerous line of thinking.

Firstly, the “symbolic” reading of Genesis leaves us with major theological holes. For instance, how do we explain the Fall of Man without a literal Adam and Eve? How does sin and death enter the world without a deliberate act of disobedience by the first human being ever to exist?

Chrsitian Darwinists may have a plausible answer to this question. But my guess is that 99% of the Christians who claim to support evolution have never even thought about this question. And that brings us to the second problem:

These days, even traditional Christians tend to trust scientific authorities over religious ones. We will say things like, “Science and religion must complement each other.” And that’s true! Yet, whenever the two appear to contradict, we assume that the scientists must be right. Or, rather, we say that science must be right in the “literal sense,” and Scripture in the “symbolic sense.”

Yet this is the same exact logic that Modernists employ to undermine other traditional doctrines: the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, traditional gender roles, sexual morality, and so on.

I once overheard a debate between two Roman Catholics. One supported women’s ordination; the other did not. The latter quoted 1 Corinthians 14:34—“Let your women keep silence in the churches…” The former accused her opponent of insulting St. Paul’s legacy: “Of course, if he were alive today, he never would have said that.” Of course.

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Really, it’s not that science and religion complement each other. At bottom, there can be no distinction between the two.

We tend to think of miracles as those moments when God does the impossible—where He breaks something called the laws of nature. But the first law of nature should be this: “With God nothing will be impossible” (Luke 1:37).

The laws of nature are, ultimately, just patterns. They tell us how things usually work, not how they must work. Of course, for the most part, these patterns are extremely reliable. We can be quite sure that a virgin can’t bring forth a son… at least, until she does.

So, if we’re tempted to say, “Of course Augustine would believe in evolution if he were alive today,” then we’re already on dangerous ground. We’re developing a habit, not merely of disagreeing with the Fathers, but of dismissing them.

And why? Are we so confident in our understanding of the cosmos? Or is it because we’re afraid of embarrassing ourselves in the eyes of the World?

There’s an idea—a very ancient idea—that we can appease Mammon by watering down the Faith, by shelving the views which he finds most offensive. This is a trap. It’s simple, but it’s extremely effective. Because it allows the enemies of Christianity to decide what Christians ought to believe. Don’t fall for it.