The
Catholic Weekly
Online
Sydney
21 September 2003
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Heaven
scent floral feast
Welcome
strangers’ call
Bishops:
Fight racism
Bishop
Mayne dies at 75
Senate
‘yes’ to gay bid
Benedictine
nuns gather in Sydney
Tears
of joy at Marriage Sunday Mass
Donor
club
His
Holiness, the poet
Concert
to mark Pope’s jubilee
It’s
‘weakness of faith’
Still
a need for Catholic voice: Dr Pell
Editorial:
Spectre of fear
Letters:
Christian values
Conversation:
Amanda McKenna, Catholic singer and songwriter - ‘God’s messenger’ on a journey
of faith
Opintion:
‘Good mother of all ...’
Voice
of Youth: ‘Most wonderful day’
Insights:
Biblical ancestors?
Religious:
Spirit-ualities are everywhere
North
American, Irish, Australian sisters in historic Loreto reunion
Education:
Decade a day at school
Social
Work degree course at Strathfield
Balmain
kids hit right note
Catechism:
Daytime course
New
bishops ‘help God’s light shine in darkness’
Capacity
to forgive ...
‘Heroic
witness’ to the Gospel of hope
‘Kids
worth dying for’
Inspirations:
‘Schoolies’ faith patrol
Insights: Biblical ancestors?
By Fr John Dietzen
Q You have explained in the past that Catholic teaching does not rule out the possibility of other ‘first parents’ than Adam and Eve. I can accept that. In fact, I do not know how you could understand the story of creation in Genesis any other way.
Cain, supposedly Adam’s and Eve’s first child, fears someone will kill him after he kills Abel (Gen 4:14), and then goes to the ‘land of Nod’ where he marries a wife and establishes a city (4:16-17). God must therefore have made other people than Adam and Eve to start things off.
My problem is Bible passages such as St Paul’s remark, “Through one man (Adam) sin entered the world” (Rom 5:12). How do we explain such a statement if there were other original human ancestors?
A First of all, the various literary traditions that went into the formation of the Genesis creation stories were not addressing anthropological questions such as polygenism - that is, whether there were more than one ‘first parents’.
Whether there were 20 or 200 such ancestors, or where they came from, has little to do with the theological intent of the biblical story of God’s creation, which was put together in the form we have it only a few hundred years before Christ.
That story is meant to convey some essential truths of our faith - that the world, including our human family, owes its existence to creation by the one true God; that as it came into existence, the earth was good and intended for human happiness; that whatever moral evils exist on earth result from people’s own stubbornness and sinfulness; and that even in the beginning God had a plan eventually to save us from that sinfulness.
Now to your question. Preachers and writers commonly use the device of referring to well-known characters to make a point, with no intention of declaring judgment on the actual existence of those characters. When a priest in a homily, for example, refers to the Prodigal Son or to the Lion King as in some ways a figure of Christ, he is not professing a belief that these people or animals really existed. They fit the point to be made, and that’s all their mention means.
When Jesus, for example, said that as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days, so he would be in the tomb for three days, he wasn’t declaring a belief that poor Jonah actually lived three days in a whale’s stomach. He knew the Jonah story was well-known to his audience, so he used it to illustrate his coming resurrection.
Thus Jesus did it, and so did Paul. If reference to a familiar Scripture story could help, they didn’t hesitate to use it.
In his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII referred to some doctrinal and scriptural problems with polygenism, some of which have been resolved, incidentally, in the 53 years since. At the time, he said Catholics should not hold that opinion (polygenism) as a fact since “it is not apparent” how this opinion is compatible with certain Catholic teachings.
It is commonly acknowledged, therefore, that Humani Generis labels the belief in more than one ‘Adam and Eve’ a conjectural opinion. It does not call that opinion erroneous or heretical. This concurs with current Catholic teaching concerning biblical interpretation.
Fr John Dietzen writes a regular Q&A column
for the international Catholic News Service. He is the author of Catholic Life in a New Century, which includes a 500-page Q&A section covering the bible, the Mass, marriage and divorce, ecumenism, prayer and other topics.
Published by Guildhall Publishers, Peoria, Illinois.