Orthodox Christians read Genesis as true history that also carries deeper spiritual meaning. We don’t have to choose between literal and allegorical. We hold both.
Genesis tells us what happened. God created everything in six days and rested on the seventh. He made Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib. They walked with God in Paradise, fell through disobedience, and were expelled. That’s the story, and we believe it occurred.
But Genesis isn’t a science textbook, and the Fathers never treated it as one. St. Basil the Great wrote his Hexaemeron (commentary on the six days) not to explain geology but to reveal God’s wisdom and power. When he looked at “Let there be light,” he saw God’s immediate creative word bringing forth what didn’t exist. He wasn’t worried about photosynthesis timelines or whether plants could survive three days without the sun. The text proclaims something far more important than mechanics.
What Genesis Actually Does
The ancient world was drowning in creation myths. Babylonians said the gods fought each other and made the world from a dead goddess’s corpse. Egyptians had their own bizarre stories. Canaanites worshiped the sun, moon, and stars as deities.
Genesis walks into that mess and says: No. One God made everything. The sun isn’t a god, it’s a lamp He hung in the sky on day four. The sea monsters aren’t divine powers to fear, they’re creatures He spoke into being. Even the serpent in the garden is just a beast, not a rival deity. Genesis demythologizes the pagan cosmos and establishes that the God of Israel alone creates, rules, and judges.
That’s the primary purpose. It’s theology, not biology.
How the Fathers Read It
The Church Fathers saw layers in Genesis that most modern readers miss entirely. St. John Chrysostom could preach for weeks on a single verse, unpacking its moral, spiritual, and prophetic dimensions. When Genesis says “In the beginning,” some Fathers like Origen pointed to Christ as that beginning (John 1:1 echoes Genesis 1:1 deliberately). Creation happens through the Son, by the Spirit, from the Father. The Trinity is there from verse one.
They also noticed Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image.” Not “Let me” but “Let us.” The Fathers saw Trinitarian dialogue before the foundation of the world.
And they read Genesis eschatologically. Creation points forward to the new creation in Christ. The seventh day’s rest prefigures the eternal Sabbath. Adam’s failure sets up the New Adam’s victory. The garden we lost becomes the Paradise Christ reopens to the thief on the cross.
So yes, the Fathers believed in a real garden, a real tree, a real serpent, real people. But they also knew Moses was showing them something about Christ, the Church, and the world’s ultimate destiny.
What About Science?
Orthodoxy doesn’t have an official position on the age of the earth or evolutionary biology. You’ll find Orthodox Christians across the spectrum, from young-earth creationists to those comfortable with an old earth. We’ve never had a council declare “Thou shalt believe in six 24-hour days” or “Thou shalt accept common descent.”
What we do insist on: God created everything from nothing. Humanity bears His image uniquely. Adam and Eve were real people. The Fall really happened and broke something fundamental in creation. Death entered through sin, not the other way around.
If you’re coming from a Baptist background here in Southeast Texas, you might expect us to have a statement of faith spelling out our creation position in twelve bullet points. We don’t work that way. We have the Nicene Creed, which says God made “all things visible and invisible,” and we have the Fathers, who offer us wisdom without demanding we treat Genesis as a geology paper.
The Fathers knew plenty about the natural world for their time. They weren’t ignorant. But they also knew Genesis was doing something different than Aristotle’s Physics. It’s revealing the Who and the Why, not providing a manual for the How.
Where We Differ From Others
Fundamentalist Protestants often demand Genesis be read as science, then fight culture wars over textbooks. That’s not our battle. We’re not trying to prove the earth is 6,000 years old or defend a literal global flood using geological evidence. Those debates miss the point.
Catholics sometimes lean heavily allegorical, treating the serpent as a symbol and the garden as metaphor. We’re more grounded in the text’s historical reality while still embracing its spiritual depth.
And secular materialists who dismiss Genesis as primitive mythology completely misunderstand what they’re reading. Genesis is sophisticated theology that dismantled the ancient world’s religious assumptions. It’s not primitive at all.
What This Means for You
If you’re exploring Orthodoxy and wondering whether you have to check your brain at the door, relax. We’re not asking you to reject reason or science. We’re asking you to read Genesis the way the Church always has: as true, as inspired, as revealing God’s relationship with His creation.
You don’t have to have it all figured out before you can become Orthodox. I’ve met cradle Orthodox who hold different views on these questions, and they still commune at the same chalice. What matters is confessing that God created you, that you bear His image, that you’ve fallen and need restoration, and that Christ makes that restoration possible.
Fr. Lawrence Farley at OCA has written excellent reflections on Genesis if you want to go deeper. But honestly? Start by reading Genesis itself, slowly, prayerfully, asking what it reveals about God rather than what it says about dinosaurs. You’ll be reading it the way the Fathers did.
