Thursday, October 11, 2007
The Hahn Effect
A parishioner today shared with me some insights she had received from reading Scott Hahn. I had never really paid attention to him before; I knew the name and that he was a convert but that was about it. Well, after the discussion with "Doris" (the names have been changed to protect the innocent) I did a little google search and perused some of what Mr. Hahn had written about the Fall. I got the impression that he was treating the opening chapters of Genesis as though they were an historical account rather than a theological construct. Such literalism is most definitely not indicative of a Catholic approach to Sacred Scripture. I have to wonder if all the high profile evangelicals who have converted to the Catholic Church have truly shed their fundamentalist approach to the Bible. What do others think? Perhaps I am reading more into this. Perhaps I misread Hahn.
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Perhaps Father "there is a middle way" as they say in mahayana buddhism. We don't need the far left on hermeneutics either with Fr. Raymond Brown guessing (is the only word for it) that Mary never said the Magnificat (see pages 346-352 Birth of the Messiah)but that Luke stuck it in there to make his gospel look like the OT when women there got a mission and then sang a canticle. Paul VI and John Paul II nevertheless appointed Brown (whom I love on John where he did specialize and did a minimum of demythologizing)to the Pontifical Biblical Commission....so we could use a few Hahns for balance if we are not going to have any moderates in hermeneutics. The real center is gone somehow. That being the case, we are going to have to have quotas....50% ala Jerome Biblical Commentary people who don't believe hardly anything in the Bible is inspired (that includes John Paul in section 40 of Evangelium Vitae wherein he felt the violence of the OT death penalties did not reach the refinement of the sermon on the mount...guess he never read of God killing Herod Agrippa in Acts 12 and leaving his body for the worms...refinement?...and the incident postdates the sermon on the mount)....and 50% Hahns.
That is what happens when the middle gives way....you have to have quotas for the far ends....one habenero pepper and one sweet red pepper since you don't want or can't find any simply pepper peppers.
"Oh happy fault, oh necessary sin of Adam that has brought us so great a redeemer."
One man, one woman, one common sin to cause the Fall. One Man, one woman to, by perfect obedience, undo it and allow salvation to the heirs of Original Sin.
Genesis contains ten stories written as both historical AND theological constructs. The last nine are not generally contested, why should the first one? Last time that I checked, the literal sense of Scripture must be considered first (per the Catechism), then the other senses; I lose nothing by believing that God's Word is true as written.
What are the other 9 stories that are not generally contested?
gcc
But the literal sense is to be held unless holding it is non rational. And the second day of creation contains non rational elements based on primitive concepts that there was water above the sky and that the sky was a dome shape.
Here are the apposite verses:
Genesis 1:6
Then God said, "Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters, to separate one body of water from the other." And so it happened:
7
God made the dome, and it separated the water above the dome from the water below it.
8
God called the dome "the sky." Evening came, and morning followed--the second day.
There is no dome of a sky and there is no water above it that needs separating. The Church could be careless of these questions as long as her main missionary target was pre literate people for centuries. But we are very small in some very intelligent countries who will not accept the non rational and should not accept it. Hence we are about 1% in China and 1% in Japan....who currently supply the US with some of their brightest students in our schools.
Where Genesis is a form of literature and not history, we should say so. We are running out of primitives to convert and one day God will expect us to send missionaries into Harvard and Yale.
We are far from ready because we have extremists on both sides of these questions.
Amen to GCC! The extremists on both sides ruin it for everyone. I don't think that Jesus' idea was that we would spend all out time and energy at each others' throats. There is a world out there to convert after all! Satan must be quite amused by all the quality time we waste with petty arguments among ourselves instead of proclaiming the Good News.
The previous Amen! was for Bill, not for GCC.
bill,
Aside from the very basic explanations in Genesis 1-2, there is no communication of 'how' God created. What matters is that God created out of nothing: Light, water, firmament, light-bearers (sun and moon), fish, birds, cattle/beasts/creeping things, and man.
Literal interpretation, not literalist. All other senses of scripture are based on the literal (Cf. CCC 116). Catholics may not be 'literalists'
The issue I took with Fr. Charles's statement is as concerns the Creation of Man and the Fall. If the story of the Fall is merely a 'theological construct,' Christian theology falls flat on its face. Fortunately for us, nobody of significance until the Modernists actually questioned the historical veracity of the basic facts of the Creation and Fall of Man. One man, one woman, one sin.
Even though the passage in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, it affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
Fr. Charles,
The 10 sections, called Toledoths, each start with the phrase "These are the generations of...":
2:4: "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth".
5:1: "This is the book of the generations of Adam".
6:9: "These are the generations of Noah".
10:1: "These are the generations of the sons of Noah".
11:10: "These are the generations of Shem".
11:27: "These are the generations of Terah".
25:12: "These are the generations of Ishmael".
25:19: "These are the generations of Isaac".
36:1: "These are the generations of Esau".
36:9: "These are the generations of Esau".
37:2: "These are the generations of Jacob".
N.B.: The KJV and Douay-Rheims translations have them all this way; newer translations like the NAB and Confraternity do not, which makes them less obvious.
GCC Catholic: Yes, undoubtedly there was a primordial "turning away" from God. I would never deny that. As you so wonderfully quoted from the Exsultet the Fall is necessary in order to have a Redeemer. If there is no fall then there is no redemption. Pure and simple.
I would only take argument with the necessity of reading the story of Adam and Eve as a blow-by-blow account of how the Fall actually took place. We don't need to know how; we just need to know that we were fallen and needed redemption.
And thanks for the info on the Toledoths. I always like to learn something! (Although that might be one of those details from a scripture class that I just don;t remember like I wish I could.)
Fr. Charles,
I would only take argument with the necessity of reading the story of Adam and Eve as a blow-by-blow account of how the Fall actually took place. We don't need to know how; we just need to know that we were fallen and needed redemption.
Fair enough; it wasn't clear to me initially what you were saying. Too often, the denial of the historicity of the story of Adam and Eve leads to a denial that we had a single pair of first parents that sinned. I'm glad that's not what you were suggesting.
I had misunderstood the Toledoths; that list is a list of closing lines (called colophons), not opening ones. I found a good article that explains them here at CAI. Sungenis is rather far right (sometimes uncomfortably so even for me... and I won't deny being rightward leaning), but the article (not written by Sungenis) explains the Toledoths better than I could elaborate here. That's where I copied the list from that I put in my last post.
As you mentioned, my problem was one of having remembered it slightly from a Scripture class, then forgetting the exact details.
Thank you and God Bless!
Fr. Charles Ledderer, The Dakotas, USA you are impersonating a Catholic priest. Your identity is fictitious. There are people on here that are believing you. I am asking you not to trick people anymore.
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