Autor: Ormerod, Neil

Buch: Creation, Grace, and Redemption

Titel: Creation, Grace, and Redemption

Stichwort: Erbsünde - Evolution; Monogenismus

Kurzinhalt: For many Christians, belief in original sin was so tied to a premodern worldview that they could not see how the two could be separated.

Textausschnitt: 75a These two opposing positions became firmly entrenched in post-Reformation polemics. Nonetheless, some Catholic movements, such as Jansenism, adopted elements of Luther's pessimistic anthropology,1 while some of the reformers, notably the Wesley brothers, rejected Luther's pessimism to acknowledge a real transformation in the life of believers. For example, John Wesley attacked the notion of imputed righteousness as "a blow at the root of all holiness, all true religion ... for wherever this doctrine is cordially received, it leaves no place for holiness."2 These variations aside, the Council of Trent established a dogmatic foundation for a Catholic understanding of original sin well into the twentieth century. It took the major cultural upheaval of evolution to bring new questions to the fore. The difficulty with the teaching of the Council of Trent, particularly on original sin, is not so much the questions the council fathers addressed but the unquestioned assumptions from which they operated. (Fs)

75b The unquestioned assumptions drawn from a premodern worldview tended to take the opening chapters of Genesis as a literal account of human origins. The teaching of Trent simply assumed such a reading since this was not the object of contention between the Catholic Church and the reformers. There was no reason at this stage why these assumptions should have been questioned. With the emergence of Darwin's theory of evolution, however, and the geological and cosmological evidence that the time scale for the world stretched beyond the thousands of years of the biblical narrative (taken literally) to reach millions and even billions of years, a literal reading of the biblical narrative became increasingly untenable. From an evolutionary perspective it is highly unlikely that human beings all descended from an original first couple (a position referred to as monogenism), or that they enjoyed an idyllic period in a plentiful garden. Genetically, human beings share a common ancestry with primates, and the first recognizably modern humans seem to have emerged from the plains of Africa. Then there was a period of tens of thousands of years before settled agrarian communities emerged and culture became more than rock art and primitive stone tools. The question that Christian theology faces is, Where in all this history of human existence does the traditional understanding of original sin fit?

76a For many Christians, belief in original sin was so tied to a premodern worldview that they could not see how the two could be separated. They were left with a simple set of alternatives. They could reassert the premodern worldview and reject the emerging insights of science, and hence was born so-called "creation science." This position clings to a literal reading of Genesis, rejects evolution, and takes Genesis 3 as relating "historical" events.3 Alternatively, they could simply reject the doctrine of original sin altogether as an Augustinian error imposed on Christianity and distorting its true meaning. Such an approach can be found in some works on "creation spirituality," as proposed by Matthew Fox, and among some liberal Protestant theologians.4

76b A number of Christian thinkers have attempted to integrate evolutionary perspectives into their theology, notably Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner.5 Church authorities have viewed these attempts with caution, to say the least. In 1909 the Pontifical Biblical Commission reasserted the "historical" nature of the early chapters of Genesis, though the church later moved away from a literal reading of Scripture when it officially endorsed elements of modern biblical historical criticism, notably with the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943). In 1950 Pius XII issued the encyclical Humani Generis, which, among other things, attempted to defend the position of monogenism on the ground that it was a necessary element in the traditional understanding of original sin. Now there seems to be less anxiety about this question, and Pope John Paul II offered cautious acceptance of evolution as a scientific hypothesis of human origins. Indeed, various theologians have adopted non-monogenistic theories of original sin without comment by church authorities.6