Harmonizing Genesis Creation account(s) with Plato

            The issue about how long creation took is the question I would like to address in this post.  To be blunt, it would be unsettling if God took six days to create everything.  How is God all powerful and yet creating this globe and the creatures herein took six days of work?  Indeed, it was this very problem that led some in the early church to posit that God created the world in one day following the statement in Genesis 2:4 "on the day."  If the act of creating the world took God six days, and then afterwards he rested, it gives the appearance that God is not exactly omnipotent. 

            To solve the riddle of two creation narratives and uphold the omnipotence of God, some in early church found an answer in Plato.  Plato understood that there were the “forms” which do not exist in physicality.  These forms are tiered, with the highest form being the form of “the good”.  Everything that exists corresponds in some way to its form which is the ultimate reality of that thing.  For example look at a chair.  What makes a chair a chair?  Plato would answer that a chair is a chair in so far as it physically expresses the form “chair.” 

            This brief and painfully simplified excursus on Plato is necessary because some Fathers found the conception of forms to make sense of the creation accounts and so harmonize them.  In Genesis 1:1-2:3 God created the forms and then in Genesis 2:4 he spoke the forms into physical existence.  This also got them around the problem of a six day creation followed by a rest which at face value is unworthy of the omnipotent creator who created and sustains the world through his Word.  This was one way of dealing with the variant creation narratives.