Welcome to Episode 13 of Foundations Restored, a Catholic Perspective on Origins.
I'm your host, Keith Jones.
In this episode, we will expand the discussion of the Cartesian-Darwinian narrative begun
in Episode 4.
You will see that after rationalism was introduced in 1637, the enemy of truth did not sit idly
by, allowing the domain of theology to be unaffected until the rise of Lyell and Darwin
in the 1800s.
Instead, Cartesian rationalism immediately impacted biblical scholarship, and like two
regiments flanking a common enemy, the rationalist theologians and philosophers battled orthodox
theology for the next two centuries.
The rationalists eerily anticipated the day when natural science would open up a third
front in the assault on truth, and they rejoiced when they perceived that Darwin had provided
the heavy artillery needed to forever rid biblical scholarship of the supernatural.
Understanding this history is important because the false harmony of rationalism and natural
science, theology, and philosophy continues to destroy the faith of millions.
And as Pope Pius XII stated, diseases are not properly treated unless they are rightly
diagnosed.
The material in Episode 13 is so important that we have divided it into two parts.
In Part 1, we will trace the impact of Cartesian rationalism in the domain of theology from
the mid-1600s to 1873 when one of the leading rationalist theologians of the period boldly
proclaimed Darwinism as the decisive argument for Descartes' proposition first suggested
in Le Monde that nature alone brings order out of chaos and God does not intervene in
the world.
In Part 2, we will see that the penetration of the Cartesian-Darwinian narrative into
theological circles was so harmful that in the most important papal encyclicals combating
the rise of modernism, evolutionism and rationalism were clearly identified as the foundation
of the heresy.
And so today there really is no need to debate whether evolution matters or why Neo-Modernism
has arisen.
The current plague of Neo-Modernism has arisen because the Cartesian-Darwinian narrative
was not adequately addressed in scientific or theological circles.
And so as long as the false science and false philosophy behind the narrative fails to be
adequately addressed, the decline in massive exodus from the Catholic faith will continue.
It is also likely that the clergy sexual abuse scandals will continue because as will be
explained these unspeakable acts of abuse are clearly linked to Neo-Modernism and the
departure from the traditional Catholic teachings due to the Cartesian-Darwinian narrative.
Recall from Episode 2 that when Descartes released his Discourse on Method in 1637,
it immediately intruded upon the domain of theology by claiming,
It is certain that the action by which God now preserves the world is just the same as
that by which He at first created it.
By this means alone all things which are purely material might in course of time have become
such as we observe them to be at present.
And their nature is much easier to understand when we see them coming to pass little by
little in this manner than were we to consider them as all complete to begin with.
Recall also that in Les Mondes, Descartes declared that miracles are not allowed.
Following the trail of Descartes, other philosophers quickly applied rationalism to sacred scripture
through higher criticism, which involves the study of the date, place, authorship, and
literary style of a composition.
While this approach need not be destructive, negative higher criticism involves rationalistic presuppositions.
As stated in the Handbook of Biblical Criticism, the presuppositions include the view that
Reality is uniform and universal.
It is accessible to human reason.
All events historical and natural occurring within it are in principle comparable by analogy.
And man's contemporary experience of reality can provide the objective criteria by which
what could or could not have happened in the past is to be determined.
When such presuppositions are strictly applied to sacred scripture, the miraculous and prophetic
are rejected as unhistorical at the outset.
Benedict Spinoza was a contemporary of Descartes and a rationalist philosopher.
Friedrich Nietzsche called him the purest sage and my precursor because Spinoza also
denied free will, the moral order, and evil.
While Georg Hegel said that to be a philosopher, one must first be a Spinozist.
Spinoza led the rationalist attack on sacred scripture, which is why he is sometimes called
the first of the negative higher critics.
In his Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza determined to examine the Bible afresh in
a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit through the use of reason.
He declared,
We may be absolutely certain that every event which is truly described in scripture necessarily
happened, like everything else, according to natural laws, and if anything is there
set down which can be proved in set terms to contravene the order of nature, we must
believe it to have been foisted into the sacred writings by irreligious hands.
For whatsoever is contrary to nature is also contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary
to reason is absurd and ipso facto to be rejected.
Spinoza dismissed the prophets as endowed with unusually vivid imaginations and not
with unusually perfect minds.
The New Testament, he wrote, was not written by revelation and divine command, but merely
by the natural powers and judgment of the authors.
As for miracles, Nature preserves a fixed and unchangeable order.
Miracles only appear as something new because of man's ignorance.
Nowhere does scripture assert that anything happens which contradicts, or cannot follow
from the laws of nature.
Miracles follow not from some mysterious royal power which the masses attribute to God, but
from the laws and order of nature.
Applying these unfounded premises to the scriptures, Spinoza concluded that Moses did not write
the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament.
This in turn created doubt about the reliability of the New Testament and even the words of
Jesus, who referred to Moses as the author.
The application of rationalism to theology had enormous consequences as it facilitated
the emergence of deism, the belief that God is an absentee landlord who has not intervened
since the initial creation.
He is certainly not a personal God who would send the sun to save mankind.
A leading voice of deism was John Toland, whose 1696 work, Christianity, Not Mysterious,
elevated reason and dismissed the faith handed down by the church fathers and magisterium.
Some of them say the mysteries of the gospel are to be understood only in the sense of
the ancient fathers, but they were of the same nature and make with ourselves, and we
know of no privilege above us bestowed upon them by heaven except priority of birth.
Some give a decisive voice to a general council and others to one man whom they hold to be
the head of the church, but we do not think such councils possible, nor if they were to
be more weight than the fathers.
Tragically, the impact of rationalism was not limited to the deists, and the path of
destruction through the following five centuries is easy to chronicle.
As early as 1633, Frenchman J. Marinas wrote that the Masoretic text of the Bible is full
of errors and unsuitable for use in biblical studies.
In 1658, another Frenchman, L. Capellas, claimed in Critica Sacra that the Masoretic text
was written much later than traditionally supposed and was not faithfully preserved.
In 1678, Richard Simon concluded that the Pentateuch had multiple authors and was based
on unwritten traditions.
Claims of a late date of origin and unwritten traditions remain a controversial component
of biblical criticism.
Most negative critics have an ingrained mistrust of accounts transmitted orally or recorded
well after the event, and the notion of divine inspiration involves the supernatural.
An explanation they have eliminated as a possibility.
As biblical criticism continued into the 1700s, arguments against the reliability of sacred
scripture continued.
In 1752, Conyers Middleton claimed that the different accounts among the four gospels
stemmed from inaccuracy or faulty memory of the authors.
The next year, Frenchman Jean Astruc observed that Genesis uses more than one name for God,
and he conjectured that this must mean there were two or perhaps more documents that were
combined to form the work.
This paved the way for the documentary hypothesis that would come into vogue the following century
and is still uncritically taught in most Catholic seminaries.
In the latter half of the 18th century, Germany became the hotbed of negative higher criticism.
In 1750, Johann Michaelis dismissed the traditional canon of scripture and developed his own method
for determining canonicity.
A student of Michaelis named Johann Gottfried Eichhorn brought early forms of the documentary
hypothesis into mainstream biblical scholarship.
Often called the father of Old Testament criticism, Eichhorn's work Einleitung in
das Alte Testament established criteria for identifying when divergent source materials
may have been used to compile the Pentateuch.
He concluded that the Pentateuch was formed from multiple documents that were stitched
together by editors or redactors hundreds of years after the time of Moses.
He based this conclusion on the parallel accounts of the same events and the two names in the
Pentateuch for God, Jehovah, and Elohim.
This gave rise to the division of the Pentateuch according to the supposed J-source, E-source
material.
In the early 1800s, the work of M. L. De Vetta claimed that Deuteronomy was written as late
as the 7th century BC and to the presumed J and E sources he added D to signify the
supposed editor of Deuteronomy.
Biblical criticism of the period was also heavily influenced by Christian Wolff who
insisted revelation only facilitates truths that reason can discover on its own.
Therefore, energies are best spent on establishing religious truths through philosophy.
Any text considered divine must meet certain rational criteria such as whether there is
a clear need for the revelation and whether God has sufficient grounds on which to intervene
in the world.
Another German critic named Johann Simmler who taught at the University of Halle wrote
that the Bible may contain divine truths but the words themselves are fallible and are
only a vehicle for conveying the divine message.
He also rejected the notion of a fixed canon and proclaimed that it was the job of the
critic to determine which parts of the Bible contain genuine religion and truths that were
tested by the passage of time.
The critic's descent into error was aided by the writings of the period's great philosophers
who remained rationalists at heart even though the particulars of their individual philosophies
varied widely.
John Locke wrote that
"...whatever God hath revealed is certainly true, but whether it be a divine revelation
or no, reason must judge.
Nothing that is contrary to and inconsistent with the clear and self-evident dictates of
reason has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith."
David Hume maintained that
"...a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature."
And then, invoking the presupposition that no one has ever witnessed a violation of these
laws, he concluded that
"...the proof against a miracle is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly
be imagined."
Immanuel Kant wrote that concepts such as the existence of God and immortality had been
historically approached
"...as a science which is at the very outset dogmatical, without any previous investigation
of the ability or inability of reason for such an undertaking, and regarded the conclusions
as valueless results."
Metaphysical questions, said Kant,
"...have a still higher end, the answer to the question what we ought to do if the will
is free, if there is a God and a future world."
He concluded that mankind should act as if there is a God and that this would bring about
happiness.
Later philosophers would have nothing to do with such views.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote mockingly in Twilight of the Idols
"...they are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they
must cling to Christian morality.
We hold otherwise.
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality from
under one's feet."
Between 1774 and 1778 there emerged under mysterious circumstances what became known
in the world of criticism as the Remaris Fragments, so named after Hermann Remaris, a professor
of Oriental languages, who had died without publishing his Apology for Rational Worshippers
of God.
The first fragment asserted that Jesus was merely a teacher of rational practical religion
and only followers of his ethical teachings are Christians.
The fragment called for tolerance of deists and rationalists, who, it was claimed, were
nearer to true religion than their orthodox detractors, who did not understand that the
apostles invented the concept of Christ as the Messiah and tailored accounts to make
it appear that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy.
Five more fragments were published in 1777 and stated that only reason proves the truth
of the Christian faith.
That if revelation occurred, there is no way to guarantee it was not corrupted.
That Moses could not have written the Pentateuch.
That special revelation is impossible.
That it was impossible for the Israelites to pass through the Red Sea.
That the Old Testament has nothing to say about the immortality of the soul.
And that the resurrection narratives must be fabricated since they differ in some details.
The final fragment was released in 1778 and asserted that the teachings of the church
are not those of Jesus.
That Jesus never intended to teach complicated concepts such as the Trinity, his divinity,
or to institute the sacraments.
That his cry from the cross indicated that his mission failed and he died disillusioned.
That the church invented the doctrine of the resurrection and final judgment.
And that the church transformed Jesus' political mission into a spiritual mission.
The disciples stole the body from the tomb and these same conspirators conjured up the
Gospels and began Christianity.
All of these unorthodox conclusions followed from Ramirus' rationalism and his a priori
decision that any text not supporting the view of Jesus as a peasant of limited intelligence
and political ambition was a forgery.
One commentator observed about the works of Ramirus.
Seldom has there been a hate so eloquent, so lofty as scorn.
Another critic of the time explained.
The first result was a kind of amazement that spread immediately.
Many thoughtful and serious young men who had dedicated themselves to the Christian
ministry were fearfully shaken.
Many determined to choose another profession for their future labors rather than persevere
so long amid increasing uncertainty.
While it is obvious that behind the unorthodox conclusions of Ramirus was a very irrational
rationalism, his views actually revolutionized biblical scholarship.
By making a sharp distinction between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of the Bible,
Ramirus is said to have initiated the first quest to discover the real Jesus.
As negative criticism transitioned into the 1800s, there appeared dozens of works about
the life of Jesus by rationalistic critics.
In these works, the rationalistic critics went to great lengths to explain away miraculous
accounts in the New Testament.
An early example was the 1782 work of Karl Barth who theorized that the Essenes recruited
Jesus when he was a young boy to advance their political agenda.
Jesus was then introduced to Luke the physician who taught Jesus how to feign miracles through
science and deception.
Barth stated that it was
"...more reasonable to think of a thousand ways by which Jesus might have had sufficient
supplies of bread at hand than to believe in a miracle."
He speculated that the Essenes stashed large quantities of bread in a nearby cave and then
passed these to Jesus from behind as he stood by the cave entrance.
Barth also declared that rather than walking on water, Jesus stood on a small raft that
the apostles simply did not notice, and Jesus was crucified but he did not die.
Instead, Jesus was in top physical condition and by the third day, his wounds were sufficiently
healed such that he could rise and walk.
From 1800 to 1802, negative critic Carl Vinterini released his work Non-Supernatural History
of the Great Prophet of Nazareth in which all accounts of people raised from the dead
were said to merely involve people awakening from comas.
All events involving nature, such as the calming of the sea, were possible because of Jesus'
scientific knowledge.
In 1828, critic Heinrich Paulus reported in His Life of Jesus that recorded miracles merely
indicate that the eyewitnesses were not aware of the secondary and natural causes behind
the event.
Healings, for example, were the result of Jesus' knowledge of medicines known only
to him.
As the number of accounts from the negative critics grew, there was little pushback within
biblical scholarship due to the deep penetration of rationalism, and few acknowledged that
such writings reflected a complete rejection of the Christian faith.
Also few seemed to notice that the rationalistic dismissal of miracles had become more difficult
to accept on rational grounds than the miracles themselves.
Finally, in 1835 and 1836, a very important German critic named David F. Strauss, whose
methods the modern-day Jesus Seminar follow, issued his two-volume Life of Jesus Critically
Examined.
In this massive work, Strauss broke with the previous rationalists and stated it was
"...time to substitute a new mode of considering the life of Jesus in place of the antiquated
systems of supernaturalism and naturalism.
The new point of view which must take the place of the above is the mythical."
He explained further,
"...the exegesis of the ancient church set out from the double presupposition, first,
that the Gospels contained a history, and secondly, that this history was a supernatural
one.
Rationalism rejected the latter, but only to cling the more tenaciously to the former,
maintaining that these books present unadulterated, though only natural, history.
Science cannot rest satisfied with this half-measure.
The other presupposition that the Gospels contain history also must be relinquished."
In essence, Strauss maintained that the Gospels are comprised of mythical accounts having
no historical basis.
He divided the Gospels into several types of myths, including philosophical myths that
were written in the garb of historical narrative to convey a simple thought, a precept, or
an idea of the time.
According to Strauss, an indicator of myth was when the narration is irreconcilable with
the known and universal laws which govern the course of events.
In other words, Cartesian rationalism remained the criterion of truth.
Strauss also insisted that the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John were written by impostors
in the mid-2nd century and were built upon mythical accounts.
His view marked a further development of the debate among critics of the previous generation
as to which Gospel was written first and on which the other Gospels likely borrowed accounts.
For a time, Mark was declared to be the first Gospel written, only to be declared as the
third Gospel by Johann Grispa who first coined the term Synoptic Gospels in 1797.
This term refers to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke that, in the mind of the critic,
compete for the right to be considered a source document for the other two Gospels,
with the other two Gospels dismissed as late compositions that merely embellish the first written account.
Meanwhile, the Gospel of John is often not even discussed because of the messianic view of Jesus.
Negative critics conclude that this Johannine problem indicates very late composition that
incorporates the myths that eventually arose about Jesus.
In this manner, the multiple testimonies provided by the four Gospels is reduced to one, and
even the first Gospel is claimed to have arisen from a collection of sayings of Jesus called
Q, even though there is little evidence that Q ever existed.
Reviewing the work of the negative critics in the 18th and 19th centuries, a 1906 work
called The Quest of the Historical Jesus concluded,
The historical investigation of the life of Jesus did not take its rise from a purely historical interest.
It turned to the Jesus of history as an ally in the struggle against the tyranny of dogma.
Hate as well as love can write a life of Jesus, and the greatest of them are written with hate.
That of Remaris and that of David Friedrich Strauss.
It was not so much hate of the person of Jesus as of the supernatural nimbus with which it
was so easy to surround him.
They were eager to picture him as truly and purely human, and their hate sharpened their
historical insight.
When chronicling the tragic history of higher criticism, the average Catholic may be dismayed
and wonder how learned scholars could have failed to see that their methods were based
on the unsound foundation of rationalism, or how they could fail to see the destruction
of their theories.
But cannot the same be said of present-day Catholic instructors who blindly accept Darwinian
claims which are but the necessary outflow of rationalism and are not supported scientifically?
In both cases, those who abandon the faith of our fathers and embrace naturalism lose
the God-given ability to believe and obtain miracles, and they inevitably choose to associate
with others who have embraced the same naturalistic creed.
It is bitterly ironic that even as Descartes and his disciples rejected the faith of their
fathers, wonder-working saints like Venerable Antonio Margil in Central America and Saint
Francis Jerome in Europe worked the kind of miracles performed by our Lord Jesus Christ.
The divergent paths that emerged between those who rejected the miraculous and those
true Catholics who fully accepted God's word was stark.
In 1711, for example, as rationalism was infecting Europe, the arch-skeptic David Hume was born.
Hume would have a dramatic influence on philosophy and eventually even on science as the Darwins
greatly admired his writings.
Meanwhile, God's grace overflowed where the faith was true.
In Poland, on February 1, 1711, a nine-year-old girl named Ann Gluzynski was found dead in
her bed.
Her mother and her father, who was a skeptic until cured of a life-threatening illness
through the prayers of the recently martyred Jesuit priest St. Andrew Bobula, asked this
same St. Andrew to intercede for their daughter as a Greek Catholic priest recited the words
The child is not dead, but sleeping.
It is well documented that upon these words, Ann moved her head, recovered her senses,
and began to walk.
This example was by no means exceptional or short-lived for those who believed the faith
once delivered to the saints.
A 1920 letter from the bishops of Poland to Pope Benedict XV attested to more than 350
sworn and proven through the intercession of St. Andrew, including 11 instances of people
raised from the dead and more than 15 instances of restoration of sight to the blind.
Well before Darwin, the evolution of religion was discussed by several philosophers including
Auguste Comte who viewed Christianity as the first and fictitious stage of religious
development that would eventually develop into the final scientific or positive stage.
Georg Hegel viewed history, which, as a pantheist, he saw as part of a universal spirit or mind
to involve the principle of development in which the spirit is striving to realize itself.
According to Hegel, history is in the process of working out that which it is potentially,
and in this working out, there will be struggle and change.
From this concept came the more radical interpretation of Hegelian philosophy by Marx and others
involving the notion that a thesis or idea, once opposed by an antithesis, inevitably
results in a synthesis and progress.
Among higher critics, the notion of religious development led to the self-appointed task
of tracing religious beliefs and practices from the simple and ancient to the more complex
and describing how religious concepts of multiple civilizations combined to produce
more modern conceptions of God.
In the religion of Israel, Johann Watt portrayed Christianity as the product of religious evolution
extending back to the Old Testament.
In this view, biblical writings do not record actual historical events.
They merely record the evolution of religious concepts that eventually found a synthesis
in Jesus and the early church.
The negative critics also viewed the New Testament in an evolutionary sense.
German critic F.C. Bauer, an instructor of David Strauss, viewed early Christianity and
the New Testament as a struggle between those holding a conservative Petrine theology, the
Judaizers, and those sympathetic to a liberal Pauline theology, the Anti-Judaizers.
He alleged that the sequence in which the Gospels and other books of the New Testament
were written could be determined by following the progressive development of beliefs in
those books.
Bauer assigned the origin of the Gospels to the years 130-170, a period during which,
he claimed, the Petrine and Pauline factions synthesized into the historical Christianity
of record.
This late date would mean that the Gospels were not written by the evangelists or their
companions, that the Catholic Church has covered up the true history of the New Testament,
and that sacred scripture is not only full of errors but a deception that cannot possibly
be inspired.
With this background, it becomes clear why in 1864, and after more than two centuries
of rationalist criticism, Pope Pius IX was compelled to issue his syllabus of errors.
Recall from episode 4 that the following were named to be among the principal errors of
the time.
All action of God upon man and the world is to be denied.
All the truths of religion proceed from the innate strength of human reason.
Hence, reason is the ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at the knowledge
of all truths of every kind.
The prophecies and miracles set forth and recorded in sacred scripture are the fiction
of poets, the Old and the New Testament contain mythical inventions, and Jesus Christ is himself
a myth.
Unfortunately, the naming of rationalist errors by Pope Pius IX did little to turn back the
tide of Cartesian influence among biblical scholars due to two other publications that
date to the same period.
In 1863, the century's most influential Life of Jesus book was published by the radical
critic Ernest Renan, a man who lost his faith and abandoned the priesthood at the age of
22 only to become an instructor of biblical criticism at the Collège de France.
What made Renan's Life of Jesus so important was that it was written for the common man.
This was unfortunate because, as a true rationalist, Renan's starting assumption was that none
of the gospel's miraculous events really occurred.
In his introduction, Renan establishes ground rules, stating,
We will inquire only in what degree the data furnished by the gospels may be employed in
a history formed according to rational principles.
That the gospels are in part legendary is evident since they are full of miracles and
of the supernatural.
Observation, which has never once been falsified, teaches us that miracles never happen but
in times and countries in which they are believed and before persons disposed to believe them.
It is not then in the name of this or that philosophy, but in the name of universal experience,
that we banish miracle from history.
Since readers not trained in biblical criticism knew nothing of rationalistic methods, Renan's
Life of Jesus introduced widespread doubt across Europe as the book sold more than 60,000
copies in the first five months alone.
By the late 1800s, the book's influence was regarded by many as being on par with Darwin's
Origin of Species and Marx's Das Kapital.
From a Catholic perspective, an important figure who studied under Renan for three years
was a French priest named Fr.
Alfred Louisi, who would later praise Renan for providing him training in historical critical
methods.
We will learn more about Fr.
Alfred Louisi in Part 2.
The second publication from the period that helped fan Renan's flames of doubt was of
course Darwin's Origin of Species, which was published just four years before and was
also written on a level that had wide appeal to non-specialists.
Taken together, the writings of Darwin and Renan provided the world with a first glimpse
at the devastating effects of rationalism when simultaneously assumed in the domains
of natural science, theology, history and philosophy.
As the harmony of rationalistic error worked its way through the Western world, the faith
of millions was impacted.
One of the specific ways that Darwinism impacted theological studies was that it gave renewed
vigor to the early forms of the documentary hypothesis.
This theory reached its fullest expression with Julius Wellhausen during the late 1870s.
The basic theory holds that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, as there was likely
not even writing in his time.
Rather, the Pentateuch was woven together through four primary sources or traditions
between the 9th century and perhaps the 5th century BC, or even later.
The sources include Yahwist, or J-source, the Elohist, or E-source, the Priestly, or
P-source, and the Deuteronomic, or D-source.
Found within each of these sources were myths and embellishments, which eliminates serious
consideration of their historical validity, let alone inerrancy.
Biblical scholar Gleason Archer explains the environment in which Wellhausen's theory
was tabled.
Although Wellhausen contributed no innovations to speak of, he restated the documentary theory
with great skill and persuasiveness, sporting the JEDP sequence upon an evolutionary basis.
This was the age in which Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was capturing the allegiance
of the scholarly and scientific world.
The theory of development fitted admirably into Hegelian dialecticism and Darwin's evolutionism.
The age was ripe for the documentary theory, and Wellhausen's name became attached to
it as the classical exponent of it.
A Catholic commentary on Holy Scriptures stated that the entire hypothesis rested on questionable
presuppositions that include 1.
exclusion of the supernatural, that is, of any direct intervention of the deity in human
history 2.
the evolutionary scheme of unilinear progress in religious thought, this development following
strictly Hegelian dialectic 3.
the presumption that Hebrew historiography is not to be relied on
What is remarkable about the documentary hypothesis is that it continues to survive in Catholic
and Protestant seminaries and institutions, even though its fundamental assumptions began
to crumble almost immediately after the full hypothesis was expressed by Wellhausen.
Indeed, by the 1920s, it was clear that not only was there writing in Moses' time, but
that it had been around for several centuries.
Further, based on multiple indicators, it is highly likely that in addition to the inspiration
of the Holy Spirit, Moses had reliable written accounts in tablet form from the patriarchs
that he used to write Genesis.
In Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis, P.J.
Wiseman explains.
We now know something of the literary methods used by the ancients.
In Genesis, we find a similar literary method.
The method and indicator to which Wiseman refers involves the multiple verses in Genesis
that state, these are the generations of.
He explains that in using this phrase, Moses clearly indicates the source of the information
available to him and names the persons who originally possessed the tablets from which
he gained his knowledge.
These are not arbitrarily invented divisions.
They are stated by the author to be the framework of the book, indicating the source from which
he obtained the narratives and genealogies.
Regarding Genesis 1, Wiseman states.
The first chapter is so ancient that it does not contain mythical or legendary matter.
These elements are entirely absent.
It bears the markings of having been written before myth and legend had time to grow.
And not, as is often stated, at a later date when it had to be stripped of the mythical
and legendary elements inherent in every other account of creation.
This account is so original that it does not bear a trace of any system of philosophy.
Yet it is so profound that it is capable of correcting philosophical systems.
It is so ancient that it contains nothing that is merely nationalistic.
Neither Babylonian, Egyptian, nor Jewish modes of thought find a place in it.
For it was written before clans, nations, or philosophies originated.
Surely, we must regard it as the original, of which the other accounts are merely corrupted
copies.
Others incorporate their national philosophies in crude polytheistic and mythological form.
This is pure.
Genesis 1 is as primitive as the first human.
It is the threshold of written history.
Following many sound arguments for mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and the discrediting
of foundational assumptions of the documentary hypothesis, Wiseman concludes.
The higher critical theories were advanced before anyone was in possession of a single
secular document of the patriarchal age, and the critics were thus wholly ignorant
of the manner in which records of that age were written.
When this is understood, it is not surprising that, like men groping in the dark, advanced
scholars wove together their intermixture of short-lived theories.
It is as unscientific as it is inaccurate to speak of the assured results of modern
criticism, for these results are neither assured nor modern.
Excavation has proved the critical theories to be not only groundless, but false.
By the early 1870s, a noticeable shift of power occurred between those biblical scholars
holding an orthodox versus a rationalist view of sacred scripture.
The added weapon allowing the rationalist advance was, as we have discussed, Darwinism.
In 1873, the influential German critic and rationalist David Strauss, who declared the
New Testament to be filled with myths in his 1835 Life of Jesus, openly declared victory
over orthodoxy and all miraculous accounts of scripture.
He also predicted that the combined impact of negative criticism and Darwinism, what
we have been calling the Cartesian-Darwinian narrative, would destroy the Christian faith.
His declaration and prediction were contained in the 1873 work The Old Faith and the New.
As if proposing a toast to Darwin, the now elderly German critic David Strauss wrote
the following.
Against theological doctrine, an opposition has risen.
Natural science has long endeavored to substitute the evolutionary theory in place of the conception
of creation, but it was Charles Darwin who made the first truly scientific attempt.
The theory is unquestionably still very imperfect.
Nevertheless, we can see the direction it will take.
Thither it shall and must go, where the flags are fluttering joyfully in the breeze.
Yes, joyfully, for vainly did we philosophers and critical theologians over and over again
decree the extermination of miracles.
But our sentence died away, because we could neither dispense with miraculous agency nor
point to any natural force able to supply it where it seemed most indispensable.
Darwin has demonstrated this force, this process of nature.
He has opened the door by which a happier coming race will finally cast out miracles.
Everyone who knows what miracles imply will praise him as one of the greatest benefactors
of the human race.
He concluded,
When day by day the prospect grows brighter for our eventually demonstrating the conditions
under which life has been developed in accordance with natural laws, what then becomes of the
personal creator, who is supposed to have miraculously called into being the universe,
and what becomes of the church, whose whole system of faith is based upon a miraculous
beginning?
If we would have our yay-yay and our nay-nay, in short, if we would speak as honest, upright
men, we must acknowledge we are no longer Christian.
We shall have to conceive of the cosmos as being the sum not only of all phenomena, but
of all forces and all laws.
These chilling words were written with confidence because it was clear to Strauss that the Cartesian
Darwinian narrative had not only gained influence among biblical scholars, but the new view
of reality had penetrated the mindset of the general population.
Evolutionism and rationalism had merged.
The combined destructive force was quickly becoming the spear of the age, and it was
being applied to all areas of thought, including traditional Catholic doctrine.
As one theologian of the period wrote,
is threatened, and yet many stubbornly refuse to see the danger.
Will this licentious proliferation of errors one day give birth to some great heresy?
There are grounds to fear it.
For under all these variant forms of the spirit of novelty lies a common thought from which
the other proceed, a master concept which gives force and cohesion to the whole.
It is a system capable of extending into and infiltrating all the sciences.
It is evolutionism, an error of the future, an invasive and conquering idea, which deserves
the most serious attention.
In part two of episode thirteen, we will trace the impact of the Cartesian Darwinian narrative
on the Catholic Church in the form of the modernist heresy.
We will also see that the modernist mindset in the form of neo-modernism continues to
destroy the faith of millions.
This destruction will continue until the underlying rationalism and evolutionism are adequately
addressed.
May our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ give strength to His Church in these trying times
and help us preserve the faith handed down from the Apostles.
Amen.