8a-Creation Index
<http://www.cin.org/users/jgallegos/contents.htm> The Bible states in1 Timothy 3:15, "The church is the pillar and foundation of truth."
Cardinal Henery Neuman was a convert from Calvinism to the Anglican Church and finally to the Catholic Church. He stated “to be deep in the study of the History of the church is to cease to be Protestant”. Its Collary is also true, “to be deep in the study of the History of the church is to become Catholic”.
Rules for interpreting Scripture: Established by Pope Leo XIII in Providentissimus Deus (1893) seconded and confirmed by Pope Benedict XV in Spiritus Paraclitus (1920) and by Pope Pius XII in Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) Pope Pius XII declared in Divino... that Leo’s encyclical Providentisisimus for interpreting the bible to "the supreme guide in Biblical studies"
Four rules for interpreting the Bible for the Catholic Church 1. Always pay attention to the Magisterium the authority of the Church 2. Beguided by what the early fathershad to say about a particular passage.
3. Always to be guided by what the Bible has to say as a whole (not key phrases here and there for defining ones theology and ignoring passages which do not fit one’s theology, see opening quote) 4. Always take the Bible Literally unless it is reasonably unattenable
I will maintain that a anyone who follows the last three rules will well over 90% of the time arrive at the same truths as the Catholic Church!! The true church must be that church which follows the teachings of those immediate successors of the Apostles. These are the Apostolic fathers who learned the faith at the foot of the Apostles. The Catholic church teaches the same things as those taught by the Apostolic fathers. It has not veered to the left or ritght but teaches the same today. If a Church comes a long 1,500 years later and teaches something different how can they have the truth. They claim truth based on their own authority yet teach things that are in contradiction to the Apostolic fathers. While they maintain a portion of the same teachings as the Apostolic teachings professing Christ as redeemer and savior and hence have portion of the Catholic heritage never the less they only have a portion of the loaf of bread. For since the Catholic churche teaches the same as the Apostolic Fathers only they have the complete loaf of bread.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Creation. This section will deal with various aspects of God’s creation in patristic thought.Topics that Corunum will conver will include such things as: divine creation, the nature of man, and the nature of angels. Angels The Church Fathers unanimously affirmed the creation and existence of Angels.
Angels: The Church Fathers unanimously affirmed the creation and existence of Angels.
Immortal Soul: The Church Fathers with varying degrees of recognition affirmed the immortality of the soul.
Ex Nihilo(Create from Nothing): The Church Fathers with varying degrees of recognition affirmed that God created all things out of nothing.
Original Sin: The Church Fathers with varying degress of recognition affirmed Original Sin. That is, Adam lost holiness and justice on account of his transgression. He fell out of communion with God. This one sin was propagated, not through imitation, so that it dwells in all and is proper to each.
Creation In Six Literal Days
Creation
Note: The word day in Hebrew is Yom. In the Jewish language Yom can mean a literal 24 hour day or an extended period of time for Scripture tells us that a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day to our Lord. But when morning and evening is used with the word yom then it is defined as a literal 24 hour day. In Genesis the creation account is given for a day/yom as morning and evening with each and every day of the six day creation which means it is literally written as a 24 hour day.
Augustine writes: "With this reasoning some of our scholars attack the position of those who refuse to believe that there are waters above the heavens while maintaining that the star whose path is in the height of the heavens is cold. Thus they would compel the disbeliever to admit that water is there not in a vaporous state but in the form of ice. But whatever the nature of that water and whatever the manner of its being there, we must not doubt that it does exist in that place. The authority of Scripture in this matter is greater than all human ingenuity" (The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Bk 2, Ch. 5, No 9).
Aquinas said the same thing regarding the superiority of Scripture to decide such matters: "Whether, then, we understand by the firmament the starry heaven, or the cloudy region of the air, it is true to say that it divides the waters from the waters, according as we take water to denote formless matter, or any kind of transparent body, as fittingly designated under the name of waters..." (Summa Theologica, Bk. 1, Ques. 68, Art 3).
Augustine and Thomas both affirm that what Genesis recorded literally occurred, whether or not they understood then, or whether we understand today, how it could have occurred as stated. The Fathers tell us that Moses received his knowledge about the creation directly from God.
St. Ambrose writes: "Moses ’spoke to God the Most High, not in a vision or in dreams, but mouth to mouth" (Hexaemeron 1, 2).
St. Basil add: "This man [Moses], who is made equal to the angels, being considered worthy of the sight of God face to face, reports to us those things which he heard from God (Hexaemeron 1, 1). END
370 AD Basil The Great "`And there was evening and morning, one day.’ Why did he say `one’ and not `first’? . . . He said `one’ because he was defining the measure of day and night . . . since twenty-four hours fill up the interval of one day" ().
Basil (329-379):
"Thus were created the evening and the morning. Scripture means the space of a day and a night...If it therefore says ‘one day,’ it is from a wish to determine the measure of day and night, and to combine the time that they contain. Now twenty-four hours fills up the space of one day - we mean of a day and of a night" (Hexameron 2, 8). As Catholic doctrine teaches, no man can do anything good without God’s grace (cf., Leviticus 26:36; Deuteronomy 28:28; Deuteronomy 28:65 f; 1 Samuel 16:14; 1 Samuel 26:12; Job 12:24; Proverbs 21:1; Isaiah 6:9-10; Isaiah 29:10; Isaiah 29:14; Isaiah 44:18; Jeremiah 6:21; Ezekiel 7:26; Ezekiel 14:9; Zechariah 12:4; Matthew 11:25; Romans 1:24-28; 2 Thessalonians 2:11).
Psalms 139:1-24 (138 in some versions) says: "Thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb" (v. 13), and similar expressions are used elsewhere, including in Isaiah and Job.
Council of Cologne condemned the idea of human evolution in very straightforward words:"Our first parents were formed immediately by God. Therefore we declare that...those who...assert...man...emerged from spontaneous continuous change of imperfect nature to the more perfect, is clearly opposed to Sacred Scripture and to the Faith."
Ten years later, Vatican Council I in 1870"If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing, let him be anathema." { ex nihilo creation.}
Pope Leo XIII, in his 1880 encyclical Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae, stated this about Creation:"We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on thesixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, andbreathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep."
170-215 AD Mark Felix "Some men deny the existence of any Divine power. Others inquire daily as to whether or not one exists. Still others would construct the whole fabric of the universe by chance accidents and by random collision, fashioning it by the movement of atoms of different shapes." (M. Felix Octavius chap. 30 [Notice the term "atom" isn’t a twentieth century invention, but a term coined by Greek philosophers.])
234 AD Origen "The text said that `there was evening and there was morning’; it did not say `the first day,’ but said `one day.’ It is because there was not yet time before the world existed. But time begins to exist with the following days" (Homilies on Genesis).
234 AD Origen "And since he [the pagan Celsus] makes the statements about the `days of creation’ ground of accusation--as if he understood them clearly and correctly, some of which elapsed before the creation of light and heaven, the sun and moon and stars, and some of them after the creation of these we shall only make this observation, that Moses must have forgotten that he had said a little before `that in six days the creation of the world had been finished’ and that in consequence of this act of forgetfulness he subjoins to these words the following: `This is the book of the creation of man in the day when God made the heaven and the earth [Genesis 2:4]’" (Against Celsus 6:51).
234 AD Origen "And with regard to the creation of the light upon the first day . . . and of the [great] lights and stars upon the fourth . . . we have treated to the best of our ability in our notes upon Genesis, as well as in the foregoing pages, when we found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world" (ibid., 6:60).
The Fathers who wrote about Creation taught that God made the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing, in six literal days,.
2 Maccabees 7:28: "I beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them Basil (329-379):
"And there was evening and morning, one day." Why did he say "one" and not "first"? . . . He said "one" because he was defining the measure of day and night . . . , since the twenty-four hours fill up the interval of one day.(Basil, On the Hexameron, 1.1.2, The Fathers of the Church, 46:4,5. Ibid., 2.8, p. 34. )
Gregory of Nyssa (335-394):
"Before I begin, let me testify that there is nothing contradictory in what the saintly Basil wrote about the creation of the world since no further explanation is needed. They should suffice and alone take second place to the divinely inspired Testament. Let anyone who hearkens to our attempts through a leisurely reading be not dismayed if they agree with our words. We do not propose a dogma which gives occasion for calumny; rather, we wish to express only our own insights so that what we offer does not detract from the following instruction. Thus let no one demand from me questions which seem to fall in line with common opinion, either from holy Scripture or explained by our teacher. My task is not to fathom those matters before us which appear contradictory; rather, permit me to employ my own resources to understand the text’s objective. With God’s help we can fathom what the text means which follows a certain defined order regarding creation. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ [Genesis 1:1], and the rest which pertains to the cosmogenesis which the six days encompass." (Hexaemeron, PG 44:68-69, translated by Richard McCambly).
Eustathius (270-337), Bishop of Antioch, called Basil’s commentary on Genesis 1:1-31 an "overall great commentary" (PG 18, 705-707).
Ambrose (340-397):
"But Scripture established a law of twenty-four hours, including both day and night, should be given the name of day only, as if one were to say the length of one day is twenty-four hours in extent." (Hexameron 1:37, FC 42:42).
"In the beginning of time, therefore God created heaven and earth. Time proceeds from this world, not before the world. And the day is a division of time, not its beginning." (Hexameron 1:20, FC 42:19).
"But now we seem to have reached the end of our discourse, since the 6th day is completed and the sum total of the work has been concluded." (Hexameron 6:75, FC 42:282).
370 AD Ambrose of Milan "Scripture established a law that twenty-four hours, including both day and night, should be given the name of day only, as if one were to say the length of one day is twenty-four hours in extent. . . . The nights in this reckoning are considered to be component parts ofthe days that are counted. Therefore, just as there is a single revolution of time, so there is but one day. There are many who call even a week one day, because it returns to itself, just as one day does, and one might say seven times revolves back on itself. Hence, Scripture appeals at times of an age of the world" (The Six Days Work 1:1-2).
Victorinus (c 355-361):
"The Creation of the World: In the beginning God made the light, and divided it in the exact measure of twelve hours by day and by night, for this reason, doubtless, that day might bring over the night as an occasion of rest for men’s labours; that, again, day might overcome, and thus that labour might be refreshed with this alternate change of rest, and that repose again might be tempered by the exercise of day. "On the fourth day He made two lights in the heaven, the greater and the lesser, that the one might rule over the day, the other over the night... (cf. (NPNF1, vol. 7, pp. 341-343)."
Ephrem the Syrian (306-373):
"‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,’ that is, the substance of the heavens and the substance of the earth. So let no one think that there is anything allegorical in the works of the six days. No one can rightly say that the things that pertain to these days were symbolic." (Commentary on Genesis,1:1, FC 91:74)
Theophilus (c 185):
"Of this six days’ work no man can give a worthy explanation and description of all its parts...on account of the exceeding greatness and riches of the wisdom of God which there is in the six days’ work above narrated" (Autolycus 2,12).
181 AD Theophilus of Antioch "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" (To Autolycus 2:15).
181 AD Theophilus of Antioch "All the years from the creation of the world [to Theophilus’s day] amount to a total of 5,698 years and the odd months and days. . . . [I]f even a chronological error has been committed by us, for example, of 50 or 100 or even 200 years, yet [there have] not [been] the thousands and tens of thousands, as Plato and Apollonius and other mendacious authors have hitherto written. And perhaps our knowledge of the whole number of the years is not quite accurate, because the odd months and days are not set down in the sacred books" (To Autolycus, 3:28-29)
Irenaeus, (140-202):
"For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded...For the day of the Lord is as a thousand years; and in six days created things were completed: it is evident, therefore, that they will come to an end at the sixth thousand year" (Against Heresies 5, 28, 3).
Lactantius (250-317):
"God completed the world and this admirable work of nature in the space ofsix days, as is contained in the secrets of Holy Scripture, and consecrated the seventh day...For there are seven days, by the revolutions of which in order the circles of years are made up...Therefore, since all the works of God were completed in six days, the world must continue in its present state through six ages,that is, six thousand years...For the great day of God is limited by a circle of a thousand years, as the prophet shows, who says, ‘In Thy sight, O Lord, a thousand years are as one day." ...And as God labored during those six days in creating such great works, so His religion and truth must labor during these six thousand years... (Institutes 7, 14).
Methodius (c 311):
For you seem to me, O Theophila, to have discussed those words of the Scripture amply and clearly, and to have set them forth as they are without mistake. For it is a dangerous thing wholly to despise the literal meaning, as has been said, and especially of Genesis, where the unchangeable decrees of God for the constitution of the universe are set forth, in agreement with which, even until now, the world is perfectly ordered, most beautifully in accordance with a perfect rule, until the Lawgiver Himself having re-arranged it, wishing to order it anew, shall break up the first laws of nature by a fresh disposition. But, since it is not fitting to leave the demonstration of the argument unexamined - and, so to speak, half-lame - come let us, as it were completing our pair, bring forth the analogical sense, looking more deeply into the Scripture; for Paul is not to be despised when he passed over the literal meaning, and showed that the word extended to Christ and the Church. (Banquet of the Ten Virgins, Discourse III, Ch 2).
Clement of Alexandria (150-216):
"From Adam to the deluge are comprised two thousand one hundred and forty-eight years, four days" (ANF, Vol. 2, p. 332).
Epiphanius (315-403):
"Adam, who was fashioned from the earth onthe sixth dayand received breath, became a living being (for he was not, as some suppose, begun on the fifth day, and completed on the sixth; those who say have the wrong idea), and was simple and innocent, without any other name." (Panarion 1:1, translated by Phillip R. Amidon).
Cyril of Jerusalem (315-386):
"In six days God made the world...The sun, however resplendent with bright beams, yet was made to give light to man, yea, all living creatures were formed to serve us: herbs and trees were created for our enjoyment...The sun was formed by a mere command, but man by God’s hands" (Catechetical Lectures 12, 5).
"...but the earth is from the waters: and before the whole six days’ formation of the things that were made, the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water. The water was the beginning of the world..." (Catechetical Lectures, 3, 5).
Hippolytus (160-235):
"But it was right to speak not of the ‘first day,’ but of ‘one day,’ in order that by saying ‘one,’ he might show that it returns on its orbit, and, while it remains one, makes up the week....On the first day God made what He made out of nothing." (Genesis 1:5-6; ANF, vol. 5, p. 163).
"When, therefore, Moses has spoken of ‘the six days in which God made heaven and earth’...Simon, in a manner already specified, giving these and other passages of Scripture a different application from the one intended by the holy writers, deifies himself. When, therefore, the followers of Simon affirm that there are three days begotten before sun and moon, they speak enigmatically..."(Refutation of All Heresies, Book VI, Ch IX).
Hippolytus, as did some of the other Fathers who believed that the world would end in 6,000 years, He writes: "Since, then, in six days God made all things, it follows that 6,000 years must be fulfilled."
Chrysostom (344-407): "Acknowledging that God could have created the world ‘in a single day, nay in a single moment,’ he chose ‘a sort of succession and established things by parts’...so that, accurately interpreted by that blessed prophet Moses, we do not fall in with those who are guided by human reasonings" (PG, Homily 3, Colossians 35).
Athanasius (295-373):
"For as to the separate stars or the great lights, not this appeared first, and that second, but in one day and by the same command, they were all called into being. And such was the original formation of the quadrupeds, and of birds, and fishes, and cattle, and plants; thus too has the race made after God’s Image come to be, namely men; for though Adam was formed out of earth, yet in him was involved the succession of the whole race" (Discourse Against the Arians, Discourse II, 48; NPNF2, vol. 4, pp. 374-375).
"We begin the holy fast on the fifth day...and adding to it according to the number of those six holy and great days, which are the symbol of the creation of the world, let us rest and cease from fasting on the tenth day of the same...on the holy sabbath of the week" (Easter Letter, 10). END
Basil
"Some had recourse to material principles and attributed the origin of the Universe to the elements of the world. Others imagined that atoms, and indivisible bodies, molecules...by their union formed the nature of the visible world. Atoms reuniting or separating, produce births and deaths and the most durable bodies owing their consistency to the strength of their mutual adhesion...Deceived by their inherent atheism it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that all was given up to chance." (The Hexameron, Homily 3, 2).
"The philosophers of Greece have made much ado to explain nature, and not one of their systems has remained firm and unshaken, each being overturned by its successor. It is vain to refute them; they are sufficient in themselves to destroy one another" (The Hexameron, Homily 3, 2).
Clement of Rome, a Father of the first century (d. 80), writes on the theories of Creation among the Greek scientists of his day:
"For the Greek philosophers, inquiring into the beginning of the world, have gone, some in one way and some in another. In short, Pythagoras says that numbers are the elements of its beginnings; Callistratus, that qualities; Alcmaeon, that contrarieties; Anaximander, that immensity; Anaxagoras, that equalities of parts; Epicurus, that atoms; Diodorus, things in which there are no parts...Democritus, that ideas; Thales, that water; Heraclitus, that fire; Diogenes, that air; Parmenides, that earth; Zeno, Empedocles, Plato, that fire, water, air and earth. Aristotle also introduced a fifth element...by joining the four elements into one..." (Clement of Rome, Pseudo-Clementine, Ch. XV, Theories of Creation).
Hippolytus of Rome, an early Father who lived in the second century (d. 235)
"But Leucippus, an associate of Zeno...affirms things to be infinite, and always in motion, and that generation and change exist continuously....And he asserts that worlds are produced when many bodies are congregated and flow together from the surrounding space to a common point, so that by mutual contact they made substances of the same figure and similar in form come into connection; and when thus intertwined, there are transmutations into other bodies, and that created things wax and wane through necessity..." (The Refutation of All Heresies, Ch. X: Leucippus and His Atomic Theory).
Leo XIIIencyclical in 1880 titled Arcanum Divinae Sapientae in which he dealt a devastating blow to the theory of evolution by stating that:
(1) Eve was miraculously, and therefore instantaneously, formed from the side of Adam;
(2) that Adam did not come from the womb of an ape.
Lateran IV Council, the Church dogmatically states that the material universe is created out of nothing (ex nihilo).
Prior to this, the Church, in the person of Pope Pelagius I in his 561 letter to King Childebert I, stated: "For I confess that...Adam and his wife, were not born of other parents, but were created, the one from the earth, the other from the rib of man" (Denzinger 228a).
Same teaching that Leo XIII would give thirteen hundred years later in Arcanum Divinae Sapientae, stating that Adam was not born from the womb of an ape, and that Eve was miraculously created from the side of Adam.
408 AD Augustine "With the Scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the Scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation" (The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, 2:9).
408 AD Augustine "Seven days by our reckoning, after the model of the days of creation, make up a week. By the passage of such weeks time rolls on, and in these weeks one day is constituted by the course of the sun from its rising to its setting; but we must bear in mind that these days indeed recall the days of creation, but without in any way being really similar to them" (The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, 4:27).
AD Augustine "They [pagans] are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of [man as] many thousands of years, though reckoning by the sacred writings we find that not 6,000 years have yet passed" (The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, 12:10).
The following is taken from:
Robert A. Sungenis, M.A.
Catholic Apologetics International
8-1-03 He is on the advisory council of the Kolbe Center, He used to have a few more articles on the site in the past, right now I only saw one article by him there Catholic Apologetics International As for Augustine, far from rejecting a literal six-day period, he did not for a moment suggest that the days of Genesis 1:1-31 could be billions of years long, and he never, in fact, rejected that the days of Genesis were 24 hours long. Rather, in one of his interpretations, Augustine suggested that perhaps God created everything instantaneously, and that the six days were the means by which the angels could comprehend, in stages, what God had made all at once.(3) In short, Augustine offered what he thought was a viable alternative to remedy what he believed were exegetical difficulties in interpreting Genesis 1:1-31 as six literal days, not to mention the fact that Augustine also had a penchant for spiritual interpretation. The main reason Augustine had these difficulties is due to his self-imposed desire to find some place inGenesis 1:1-31for the creation of the angels. Seeing no other place to put them, Augustine suggested that the creation of light inGenesis 1:3served this purpose. This, of course, would force the other days to be representations of what the angels contemplated, but not necessarily in 24-hour segments. Since none of the other Fathers of the Church shared his concern about when the angels were created, Augustine acknowledged that his interpretation was only a possibility, and that he would gladly concede it if someone could harmonize the rest of the Genesis 1:1-31 text. In The Literal Meaning of Genesis he writes:
Whoever, then, does not accept the meaning that my limited powers have been able to discover of conjecture but seeks in the enumeration of the days of creation a different meaning, which might be understood not in a prophetical or figurative sense, but literally and more aptly, in interpreting the works of creation, let him search and find a solution with God’s help. I myself may possibly discover some other meaning more in harmony with the words of Scripture. I certainly do not advance the interpretation given above in such a way as to imply that no better one can ever be found, although I do maintain that Sacred Scripture does not tell us that God rested after feeling weariness and fatigue (Bk 4, Ch 28, No 45).
Another reason Augustine struggled withGenesis 1:1-31was due to his unique interpretation of Ecclesiasticus 18:1. The Greek of the Septuagint translates it as: “He who lives forever has created all things in common.” The word in question is “common,” which is from the Greek koine, and normally means “in common” or “without exception.” But the Latin Vulgate, from which Augustine read, translated koine with the words omnia simul,(4) which in Latin means “at one time” or “altogether.” But the Vulgate’s translation is at best questionable and at worst erroneous. Ecclesiasticus 18:1, at least in the original Greek, does not, in its primary meaning, say that the creation was made “at one time,” but of what was made, the Lord created it all, with no exceptions. The context of the passage bears this meaning out,(5) and it is certainly the way the rest of the creation passages in Scripture describe God’s work in Genesis, in addition to the fact that there is no other verse in Scripture which specifically indicates that God created everything “at one time.” If the Greek author had wanted to impart the idea of “all at once” there were plenty of words at his disposal.(6) The reason this mistake may have happened is that Augustine’s knowledge of Greek was at an elementary level when he began his commentary on Genesis in 401 AD.(7) It wasn’t until he was an old man that he had a modest reading ability of Greek. Unfortunately, Augustine was dependent on the Vulgate’s translation of Ecclesiasticus 18:1, and thus he could have easily misunderstood the meaning of the verse.(8) So let’s take the tally. Of the thirty or so Fathers who taught on the days of Genesis 1:1-31, all but two said the days were literal. Of those two, one had a known-habit of interpreting almost all of Scripture in an allegorical sense (Origen), while the other said the days could be limited to one instant of time, but only because he felt compelled to add the angels to Genesis 1:1-31, in addition to the fact that he misconstrued the Greek of Ecclesiasticus 18:1, yet even at that, admitted his interpretation might not be correct and he would gladly concede it to anyone who had a satisfactory literal interpretation. Thus, we have at least 94% of the Fathers who say the days of Genesis 1:1-31 are literal days, 3% who say they are not, and 3% who say that they may be. This text may downloaded and viewed for private reading only. This text may not be used by another Website or published, electronically or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Joseph A. Gallegos © 2002 All Rights Reserved.