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Early Christian Readings of Genesis One: Patristic Exegesis and Literal Interpretation is unavailable, but you can change that!

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...

But we must ask, even if Basil was a literalist,28 would this show that the entire early church was also? It is a misrepresentation of the Fathers to claim that because one was a literalist, all others were as well. Anyone with even a scant knowledge of Origen of Alexandria would offer him as a glaring exception, but he is not the only one. In fact, the conclusion that this anonymous writer is trying to disprove is much closer to the truth than what he is trying to prove. There is a problem with
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