Re: Ramming time down the throats of trusting deities
David Mc Intire [in an article appearing on TALK.RELIGION.MISC] wrote:

>Kevin W Davidson <soft-logik@cup.portal.com> wrote:
>>David Mc Intire [in an article appearing on TALK.RELIGION.MISC] wrote:

The fact
>>>remains that the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic
>>>Church is that there was a first couple. If you can't
>>>believe the Pope, who can you believe? What is the
>>>sense in having organized religion if it is all a
>>>matter of opinion and history is bunk?
>>
>>This is not true. I can't grab the reference, but I read a book by
>>a Catholic Theologian who said that since 19xx (seems like 1953)
>>Catholics were permitted to believe that Adam and Eve weren't
>>historical people.
 
I was able to locate the reference I mentioned. I will type it in.
The text is by Fr. Raymond E. Brown who was appointed by Pope Paul VI
to the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission. The book is _Responses
to 101 Questions on the Bible_, Paulist Press, 1990, and bears the
Nihil Obstat of Rev. Myles M. Bourke, S.S.L.,S.T.D. and Imprimatur
of Rev. Msgr. Patrick J. Sheridan, Vicar-General, Archdiocese of New
York.

  Q. 24. But how far do we go in not taking biblical stories
  literally? I don't have much problem about the world not
  being created in six days and life developing by evolution,
  but what about Adam and Eve? I heard my pastor state that
  we have to believe that those are real people.

  [Answer]

  While sometimes I would like to give pastors equal time by
  offering them the chance to clarify what they stated, it may
  well be that your pastor did state exactly that. Certainly
  when I was in seminary, I was taught a very literal approach
  to the existence of Adam and Eve. In part that was because
  of a response of the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission
  at the beginning of the century specifying that certain parts
  of the Genesis story should be taken literally, including the
  appearance of the devil in the form of a serpent. We were told
  that we had to accept as factual that the first woman was
  formed from the first man and there was a unity to the human
  race in the sense that all human beings were descended from
  that first set of parents. If your pastor was trained before
  1955, that is probably what he would have been taught. But in
  1955 the secretary of the Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission
  announced that Catholics now had "complete freedom" with regard
  to those earlier responses of the commission except where they
  touched faith and morals. Therefore, there was increasing
  freedom as to the literalness of the Genesis account.

  The situation of Adam and Eve, however, was further complicated
  by the encyclical _Humani Generis_ issued by Pope Pius XII in
  1950. He mentioned the theory of polygenism, namely that there
  was more than one set of parents responsible for human beings
  now existing on the face of the earth; and he said "it is in
  no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled" with
  what has been taught on original sin. Some have interpreted
  that to mean that he comdemned polygenism, but that is not
  what he stated. Many theologians did think that a plural set
  of parents could be reconciled with original sin and, indeed,
  even with Paul's description of sin coming into the world through
  one man in Romans 5. 

  Perhaps the following could be said. The issue of whether there
  was one or many sets of parents is partly a scientific issue,
  and therefore when speaking religiously we should be wary of
  aligning ourselves too firmly with one or the other scientific
  position since neither is proved. The genuine religious concern
  in the Adam and Eve story is that, whether there was one set of
  parents or more, they were all created by God in the sense that
  God breathed into them a living soul. Forthermore, they were
  created good, and not evil, even as we are created good and
  not evil. Nevertheless, there is in human beings a basic sinful
  tendency which goes beyond personal sins we may commit; and this
  basic tendency toward evil is part of the corruption that human
  beings have introduced into the world, not an endowment by God.
  Thus we could preserve the core of the concept of "original sin"
  (even if that terminology is not technically biblical but reflects
  more of the articulations of St. Augustine and other early Church
  Fathers). We could also recognize how well the ingenious biblical
  story of Adam and Eve conveyed the idea of sin and its origins and
  not think that we will find a bettern modern substitute for
  telling that story. There is a middle position between what *you
  heard* your pastor to say by way of insisting on the literal
  historicity of the Adam and Eve story and a destructive and
  inaccurate statement, "There were no Adam and Eve."

The views cited are those of Fr. Brown and not necessarily my own.

Kevin (soft-logik@cup.portal.com)
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