reggieM, have you ever studied in a seminary? Have you taught in a university? Have you ever participated in a major theological conference?
If you had done the above, you would realize that the world of theological scholarship is not akin to a static museum. As our understanding of the world changes, so the Church’s interpretation of scripture and her articulation of theology changes along with it. St. Thomas constructed his theology in light of the Aristotelian Ptolemaic world view. John Donne – who lived at the cusp of the “new philosophy” – was not yet convinced of heliocentric cosmology, but his eschatology reflects the growing doubts about the medieval view of the astronomical empyrean serving as the literal abode of God.
The accelerating pace of scientific discoveries – in geological strata, in Cuvier’s fossils from the Paris basin that suggested past extinctions, in biology and biogeography, and in the literary history of the Bible – all these contributed to major revisions in world perspective.
For theology to remain nailed to a static, predynamical and an-historical world view would have been fatal, leaving Catholicism in an increasingly irrelevant pre-scientific ghetto. Thank goodness we have theologians courageous and insightful enough to help guide us into the future!
StAnastasia
“guide us into the future!” A faith statement. Too many suffer from the calendar myth. The idea that living in “modern” times confers upon them some special power or ability. This is a delusion. Did anyone become smarter or better or wiser because the calendar changed from the 20th to the 21st Century? The answer is no.
Then there is the false placement of the Church into a modernist framework. On the one hand, the Church is only about faith and morals, on the other, it needs to embrace science.
What do modernists want it to embrace exactly?
Evolutionary Psychology, which offers the idea that your genes, not you, are in control. The human person is in his present state solely due to random mutations and natural selection. An ambulatory bag of chemicals whose primary purpose is to reproduce. And whose genes alone will bring him to greater and greater stages of consciousness.
The Bible was just man’s primitve attempts to articulate this.
Those who believe this are much closer to atheist Christopher Hitchens who gives religion’s only advantage as having come before science. Who tells us: If we knew then what we now know, would we ever have become religious?
The uncovering of new information about the interdependent complexities of the cell raises new questions that, by secular faith alone, they believe science will answer.
And what of God. The lonely bystander who got the ball rolling and allowed nature to do what “it” wanted? Where does he fit into all this? At present, the answer is nowhere. Science, confident that under layers and layers of “primitive” thoughts, it will peel away the veil of the Bible and reveal that a bunch of primitive people wrote a book. God, if it exists, is truly unknowable, but that, to them is not the important, and more importantly, exciting part. No, they get to witness the uncovering of the true “truth” of the Bible.
So while adrenaline flows through their veins and they admire their own cleverness, the living God lives on. He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Living Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. But for them, this, if it’s believed at all, is far off. Yet the Bible tells us, fool, tonight your soul will be required of you.
At one time, science offered news and information but today it is corrupt. There is money to be made in scientifically convincing people to live unGodly lives. Those who want to spread immorality are looking to science to provide them justification or any excuse.
To my brothers and sisters in Christ -
Science is not the new circumcision. It is not required to enter God’s house or to know His Son. Read your Catechism to know what is required of you.
Peace,
Ed
