Augustine vs. Luther

My third research paper of five is now complete. This one was for Lutheran Dogmatics I. For this class, we got to choose one topic of systematic theology to analyze and write 3,000 words on. I chose to write on two different views of the word "day" in the Genesis 1 creation account: St. Augustine's position and Martin Luther's.
St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was an incredibly influential church father. He was particularly influential to sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther. In fact, Luther was a monk of the Augustinian order before the Reformation. And the two theologians concurred on most matters of the faith, which makes it all the more curious and intriguing when one finds a stark disagreement.
Augustine believed that God created all things in a single instant instead of in six days. He was convinced that since God doesn't need time in order to create, therefore he didn't use it. To explain why Genesis 1 speaks of creation over six orderly and sequential periods of time, Augustine asserts that God used this story instead of plainly describing creation like it was, in order to accommodate human terms to our feeble intellects. Without this allegory, Augustine says, humans would not be able to comprehend or appreciate God's creation.
1,100 years later, Martin Luther studied this position of his highly-revered church father and declared that he smelled a rat. In his lecture on Genesis 1, he sought to discredit Augustine on this matter. Luther claims that, given this straightforward historical account, Augustine resorted to "extraordinary trifling in his treatment of the six days." Since Dr. Luther can explain his view of what "six days" actually meant much better than I can, I will give you the primary source: "Although these subjects are debated with keen reasoning, the result is no real contribution. For what need is there of setting up a twofold knowledge? Nor does it serve any useful purpose to make Moses at the outset so mystical and allegorical. His purpose is to teach us, not about allegorical creatures and an allegorical world but about real creatures and a visible world apprehended by the senses. Therefore, as the proverb has it, [Moses] calls 'a spade a spade,' i.e., he employs the terms 'day' and 'evening' without allegory, just as we customarily do... Therefore so far as this opinion of Augustine is concerned, we assert that Moses spoke in the literal sense, not allegorically or figurative, i.e., that the world, with all its creatures, was created within six days, as the words read."
Given these very different views from two highly respected theologians, I concluded that, with regard to this matter, Luther had the more biblical view of God as Creator. After all, if we applied Augustine's logic that God didn't use time because he didn't need to, then that leads us into very dangerous territory.
Throughout Scripture, we see God using earthly means to accomplish his work for us. He uses water in order to baptize us into his name. He uses his spoken Word to create faith in us; and Jesus makes bread his body, and wine his blood to forgive our sins and strengthen our faith. If Augustine’s logic of necessity is carried over into these realms, it would lead to one of two conclusions: either God needs these means in order to accomplish his work for us, or he does not really use these means, but only illustrates his grace to us in these means in order to describe the salvific work he actually does in a way our feeble intellects can grasp. Neither of these conclusions is biblical in how they view God as Redeemer and Sanctifier, so why would we ascribe the same line of thinking to our view of God as Creator?
Martin Luther, defended by Martin Chemnitz in Loci Theologici, realizes that we do not have a tricky God. Our Creator is one who desires to teach us about himself, what he has done, and what that means for us. To take the first chapter of God’s Word as an allegory would be to imply that our Creator is tricky, making up myths in order to hide from our inferior minds what he really did. If we are to take the historical account of creation as an allegory, who is to say that we shouldn’t take other historical accounts in Scripture mystically? This can lead into unsafe territory, especially once we get to the incarnation of Jesus.
Our Creator does things in certain ways for us. He does not do things in ways that suit him and then describe the events to us in earthly terms so we can understand. He actually uses earthly means in order to carry out his divine work for us. What a Creator we have!