This chapter explores premodern Christianity’s two primary interpretive traditions concerning the challenge of creational violence and suffering. These approaches, known as the major and minor traditions, draw upon themes from Holy Scripture that bear witness to the divine act of creation. Both traditions adapt essential scriptural themes, such as God’s creative sovereignty and the world’s fallenness, to narrate the violent and destructive aspects of the natural world. Each tradition presents a distinctive portrait of nature’s form in view of God’s creative purpose. The major tradition, historically the most dominant, upholds a vision of creational violence as directly aligned with God’s creative will. The minor tradition, by contrast, perceives nature’s state as shaped by some fundamental disorder, both moral and cosmic. By examining exemplary representatives of each tradition—Thomas Aquinas for the major tradition and a group of second-century theologians, including Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras of Athens, and Irenaeus of Lyon for the minor tradition—we examine how these interpretive traditions engage Scripture to address nature’s violence. Despite their premodern character, these interpretive traditions remain the broadest heuristic approaches to the problem of animal suffering in the Christian tradition.