No. Orthodox Christians aren’t required to believe in a literal six-day creation with 24-hour days.
The Church has never made this a dogma. You won’t find it in the Creed. It wasn’t defined at an Ecumenical Council. What we must believe is that God created everything out of nothing, ex nihilo, by His will and word. That’s non-negotiable. How long it took? That’s another question entirely.
This surprises people, especially if you’re coming from a Baptist or Bible church background here in Southeast Texas where creation vs. evolution has been a major dividing line. You might’ve grown up thinking you had two choices: young-earth creationism or atheistic evolution. But Orthodoxy doesn’t fit neatly into that American culture-war framework. We’re asking different questions than “How old is the earth?” We’re asking “What does Genesis tell us about God, humanity, and our purpose?”
What Genesis Actually Teaches
Genesis isn’t a science textbook. That doesn’t mean it’s not true, it means it’s doing something different than describing physical processes in modern scientific terms. The Church Fathers read Genesis as theology, not biology or geology. They wanted to know what it revealed about the Trinity, about humanity’s calling, about Christ.
St. Basil the Great wrote about the six days and took them seriously as God’s creative work. But he wasn’t trying to calculate the earth’s age or explain photosynthesis. He saw the days as revealing the Father as source, the Son as the creative Word, and the Spirit as the one who perfects. That’s what mattered to him.
Other Fathers read it differently. Origen and Clement of Alexandria saw “In the beginning” as referring to Christ Himself, not just a point in time. They weren’t being liberal or compromising, they were reading Scripture the way the Church taught them to read it, looking for Christ in every passage.
The Freedom We Have
Fr. Thomas Hopko addressed this directly in his “Darwin and Christianity” podcast series on Ancient Faith Radio. He pointed out that the Hebrew words translated as “create,” “make,” and “form” don’t all mean the same thing. The Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament the Church has always used) describes the earth before God’s work as “unsightly and unfurnished,” not necessarily “formless and void” like some English Bibles say. These details matter because they show the text is more complex than we often assume.
The days themselves don’t have to be 24-hour periods. Before God created the sun on day four, what would a “day” even mean? The Fathers recognized this. They understood that God’s creative work was supernatural, operating outside the natural laws He was in the process of establishing. You can’t measure divine action with a stopwatch.
Some Orthodox Christians do hold to a literal six-day creation with a young earth. That’s a permissible view. Others accept an old earth and see the “days” as ages or as a literary framework. That’s also permissible. What’s not permissible is denying that God created everything, that He did so deliberately and purposefully, or that human beings are uniquely made in His image and likeness.
What We’re Really Arguing About
When people get worked up about Genesis, they’re usually worried about something deeper than the length of a day. They’re worried about whether Scripture is true. Whether God is really in charge. Whether we’re just accidents.
Orthodoxy says: Scripture is absolutely true, but it’s true in the way God intended it to be true, not necessarily in the way a 21st-century American expects a text to be true. God is absolutely in charge, so much so that He’s still creating, still sustaining every atom in existence right now. We’re not accidents. We’re made in God’s image with a purpose: union with Him.
That’s the point of Genesis. Not to give us ammunition for debates about the age of rocks, but to tell us who we are and why we’re here. We’re meant to cultivate the world, to transform it into a garden, to grow into the likeness of God. Adam and Eve were created innocent but not complete. They had a calling ahead of them. They failed. Christ succeeded, and now He’s bringing us into that success.
What This Means for You
If you’re inquiring into Orthodoxy and you’ve got strong convictions about creation, either way, you don’t have to abandon them at the door. The Church gives you room to think. What she asks is that you hold your convictions humbly, that you don’t make them tests of fellowship, and that you stay focused on what Genesis is actually revealing: the mystery of God’s love and our calling to become like Him.
I’ve known oil field workers who believe the earth is 6,000 years old and engineers who accept an old earth, and they stand next to each other at the chalice. That’s how it should be. We’re not a denomination built around a statement of faith that spells out every detail. We’re the Church, and the Church has always had space for theological reflection within the bounds of Holy Tradition.
If you want to dig deeper, Fr. Tom Hopko’s podcast series is a good place to start. So is Fr. Stephen De Young’s “Whole Counsel of God” commentary on Genesis. Both are on Ancient Faith Radio. They’ll show you how the Fathers read these texts and why the questions we’re asking might need to change before we can hear what Genesis is actually saying.
