@MW do you know whether any earlier theologians in the history of the church dealt with that connection to the 4th commandment? Particularly whether any patristic or medieval theologians who held to a non-literal view (such as Augustine) noticed that clause and connected it to the hermeneutic of the creation account?
Is it possible one might pause and consider Augustine's non-literal view was one of a day being so much
less than 24 hours as to be
an instant.
(This is due to his lack of Hebrew knowledge leading to his insistence that "bara" includes an instantaneous act outside of time measurement, and J.H. Taylor pointed out that not everyone embraced his theory because "rega" was used in other places and would have been used in creation if that is what God intended to mean. See Taylor's introduction to Augustine's
The Literal Meaning of Genesis)
In
City of God, Augustine was responding to his contemporary evolutionists of his day as he wrote the sections on creation and origin of man
, (but his contemporary pagan evolutionists were very different from ours today.)
Those ancient evolutionists believed in cycles of catastrophies and re-births as most pagans do, so that in their anthropology, modern man was more recent than the world with previous cycles of pre-modern men buried beneath the then-current layer of crust. It differs only slightly from Darwin and, in their ancient pagan writings, all the seeds of Darwinism are there long even before the birth of our Lord.
Augustine defines it here and actually counters them with an age of the earth less than 6000 years:
... for they hold that, just as the world is reborn out of its previous matter, so a new human race would arise from the elements of nature and only thereafter would a progeny of mortals spring from parents. And the same would be true of the rest of the animals.
There are some who complain when we claim that man was created so late. They say that he must have been created countless and infinite ages ago, and not, as is recorded in Scripture, less than 6000 years ago ...
It was this controversy that led the natural philosophers to believe that the only way they could or should solve it was by a theory of periodic cycles of time according to which there has always been and will be a continual renewal and repetition in the order of nature, because the coming and passing ages revolve as on a wheel.
- City of God Books VIII - XVI, pp. 265, 267
In point of fact, Augustine taught a very young earth.
In volume XII, p. 10:
Of the Falseness of the History Which Allots Many Thousand Years to the World's Past
"Let us, then, omit any conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race ... They are deceived too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed.
Further reading on proto-Darwinism in ancient Greece:
Osborn, Henry Fairfield.
From the Greeks to Darwin New York: Scribner and Sons, 1929.
For more on the misappropriation of church fathers for "day-age" theory, (and my primary source for organizing this post):
Sarfati, Jonathan.
Refuting Compromise Powder Springs, GA: Creation Book Publishers, 2014. Foreword by Douglas Kelly.
