Book reviewed by Doru Costache, November 2025
Recruiting the Ancients for the Creation Debate
by Andrew J. Brown
Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2023; xviii + 348 pages
ISBN 9780802874597, first edition, hardcover
AU$49

Years ago, I had the pleasure of reviewing Andrew Brown’s 2012 book, The Days of Creation: A History of Christian Interpretation of Genesis 1:1–2:3 (Deo Publishing). This was the work of a Protestant scholar who specialised in the history of interpretation of Genesis 1, a scriptural narrative I have been reading through patristic lenses since 2009 (counting only my publications in English). What took me by surprise is that several chapters of that book explored patristic exegetes. I found many points of agreement between his approach and my own, which intensified my sense of pleasant surprise—a different reaction from the glazed eyes of Brown’s own recent audiences (p. 2), regardless of his vernacular experiments (see pp. 19–20).

In this new book, Brown, a Lecturer of Old Testament and Hebrew at the Melbourne School of Theology and an ISCAST fellow, shows his ongoing interest in the use of the Genesis narrative within Christian theology through the centuries. While his works largely cover the same ground, the recent book does not merely amplify the argument of the previous one (p. ix). Admittedly, Recruiting the Ancients contributes to the history of reception of Genesis 1 as much as the 2014 work does (pp. 11–14). Here, however, Brown focuses primarily on the way recent scholars engaged the narrative’s earlier interpreters (pp. 1–2)—from the dawn of the Christian era (Chapters 1–6) and the Western Middle Ages (Chapter 7) to the Reformers and John Wesley (Chapters 8–10). He calls this engagement “recruitment,” which is not a praise of the “recruiters” (pp. 4–6, 8–11), that is, scholars from various sides of the creation debate who refer to the “ancients” to substantiate their own views.

Indeed, Brown suspects many scholars of bias in their references to the earlier interpreters of the narrative. Anachronistically, he points out, the “recruiters” pick and choose passages from the “ancients”—”superficially, selectively, or carelessly” (p. 5)—recasting them within the framework of more recent concerns about figurative and literal approaches to Genesis 1 and what Brown calls throughout “creation week.” Examples of “recruitment” can be found in many places (pp. 47–48, 63, 122–124, 130–131 etc.). It is this realisation that determined him to “revisit the ancients” (pp. 280–286) to set the record straight and to stymie the misrepresentation of traditional interpreters as siding with issues of our times. As such, Brown’s book is a necessary vademecum, especially for academics and enthusiasts whose background is not in early Christian and medieval studies—and who will undoubtedly get upset at having their proof-texting strategies dismantled by him.

Nevertheless, Recruiting the Ancients is significant for more reasons than its goals of drawing attention to the modern hijacking of the “ancients” and relearning how to read them. I shall return to this shortly. Here, I must acknowledge at least the thrust that undergirds the book’s argument. That is, its implicit message that, after several centuries of polemics over creation and the nature of the Genesis narrative of creation, the time has come to learn wisdom. And, Brown appears to suggest, as I gather, wisdom is not found in the biblicism of the last few centuries; we discover it within the complex tradition of interpreting Genesis 1, spanning two millennia (pp. 14–18). If my interpretation holds, this is a subtle counterpoint to the modern arrogant claim that the “ancients” were precritical and dumb. And I believe that Brown’s treatise proves me correct, no matter his point that “the evangelical rediscovery of the early church” does not mean “simply to go back to a patristic faith” (p. 286). Which is fine anyway.

But this is where several issues present themselves to the patristics scholar; and this is my only kind of objection to Brown’s approach: that he did not grasp the field of patristics in its dynamic. While his book is the outcome of a daring project in biblical studies and the history of faith and science, Brown overall relies on old patristic scholarship. True, his nod at the recent disallowing of the modern myth of Alexandria vs Antioch (pp. 104–106) shows that this is not always the case. Nevertheless, consistently, he attempts to identify—by the dogmas of old scholarship—who among the “ancients” read the “creation week” literally and who did not. It is this concern, which bespeaks a historicist drive (reading the “ancients” only within their own context), that determined Brown’s opposition to “recruitment,” against the new scholarship that boldly converses with the “ancients” in contemporary terms (see, for instance, Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ, 2022; unreferenced). His approach to patristics corresponds to what modern scholarship does to Scripture, considering it historically and literarily.

As Charles Kannengiesser showed in Handbook of Patristic Exegesis (2004; unreferenced), the “ancients” operated with a “rich” concept of scriptural “letter” but this does not bother Brown. But this “rich letter” renders inapplicable to patristic interpreters the modern reductionist scheme of either literal or figurative reading. The fact that the “creation week” is a projection of modern concerns does not obfuscate his own search either. Nor does the fact that Augustine does not mark the end of the patristic tradition. In a way, Brown “recruits” the ancients, too, for the authors he treats in this book had much more to say than whether Genesis 1 was about literal days or ages, or merely the parable of an instantaneous creation. In my Humankind and the Cosmos (2021; unreferenced), I discussed Clement of Alexandria’s use of the Genesis narrative as a framework for tackling broader matters of the theology of creation, as well as both Clement’s and Origen’s keen interest in the natural world, not only in the invisible, contrary to Brown’s assertions—assertions that, to be credible, would have required more textual engagement than what the author afforded (see Chapter 1). Also there, I showed that Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron is not the literal take on Genesis 1 most modern scholars believe it to be—and Brown agrees with them (see Chapter 5). And so on.

That said, Brown surprised me again by deftly addressing the difference between the patristic topics of the world’s ages as mirroring the “creation week” and the Genesis “days” as ages of the “world week” (pp. 53–102). It is always exciting to find out something new, and I am grateful to him for this cogent discussion. It is for this and for its many other virtues that I recommend Recruiting the Ancients to scholars of reception history of Genesis 1 and to historians of science and religion. Wholehearted congratulations to the author.