FRANCE
http://arsnet.org
Home to the parish church where St. John Vianney once served, his incorrupt body now lies in the Basilica of Ars. Pilgrims can take tours through the saint’s home and view such items as his breviary, rosary, room and small library.
(Part 1 of this article ran yesterday. To read it, click on Brother Darwin, Pt. I in left-hand column.)
It seems to me that Catholics ought to point out to Fundamentalists the curious parallel between the view of natural history they emphatically reject and the view of supernatural history they often emphatically affirm. For one of the weirdest ironies of American Fundamentalism is that it often regards any trace of evolutionary theory with fear and loathing while simultaneously holding a view of Christian history that reads as a kind of Darwinian myth.
The myth runs something like this:
Jesus creates the little cell called “the early church” on the day of Pentecost. It is, as the cell was to Darwin, a featureless, structureless blob of protoplasmic goo which definitely has no bishops, certainly has no Petrine office and reproduces by splitting into other equally undifferentiated blobs of structureless “fellowship” with no authority and no doctrine except “the simple word of God — the Bible.”
This “Church as Algae Colony” model does not, however, last. Under pressure from the Greco-Roman environment, the primitive life form of the early Church begins to develop various structures and to mutate. Depending on who you talk to, the date may vary, but many Fundamentalists posit that the Church experienced some sort of Mass Extinction in the first, second, or third centuries. Theories vie for whether mass extinction happened shortly after the death of St. John or when Constantine legalized Christianity. But at any rate, some immense Comet of Apostasy slammed into the earth, according to this scenario, and “true Christianity” was nearly annihilated, hiding in the shrubs and underbrush of Europe like a tiny primitive mammal while, for the next 1500 years, enormous powerful brutes called “Catholics” roamed the earth like herds of tyrannosaurs, holding councils, electing Popes and having terrible earth-shaking doctrinal battles in which they imported all manner of pagan mutations like the Eucharist, Marian beliefs, bishops, statues and relics.
The roots of this apostate Catholic Church are, according to this scenario, from a totally different evolutionary line than that of True Christianity. It turns out that Catholics are actually the descendants of Babylonian Mystery Religions which swelled to immense proportions in the vacuum left by the Mass Extinction of True Christians. Sure, the Babylonian Mystery religionists repudiated paganism wholeheartedly and died for their refusal to renounce Christ. Sure, they fought fiercely to preserve Scripture from the scissors of Marcion. Sure, they defied the might of the State for the name of Jesus. Sure, they held the ecumenical councils, canonized Scripture, settled the most vexing questions concerning the nature of God and Christ, evangelized Europe, established the rule of civilization in the demon-haunted lands of barbarians, fostered the growth of science, philosophy, art, music, law and education, cared for the poor, challenged nations to be holy and preserved learning through waves of Viking, Mongol, Vandal, and Islamic invasions. But such “Christians” were an evolutionary dead end because they believed in bishops, the Eucharist and prayer to Mary. True Christians were the nameless, faceless, unknown “hidden church” that did nothing, said nothing, and accomplished nothing for 1500 years while the Catholics of the Mesozoic Era ruled the earth.
Finally, after centuries pass, God sends yet another comet, the Black Death (and a Renaissance or two), to cause another mass extinction. The Beasts of Popery reel and fall! And then, out of the chaos God again raises up one organism (Martin Luther) who receives the divine spark and evolves to a higher plane of being. But, according to the scenario, Luther is not evolved enough. He still venerates Mary, for instance, and he believes in baptismal generation. So, ever reforming, God abandons this early evolutionary theological equivalent of the Megatherium and continues the march through the ages, “raising up” Calvin, then Wesley, then Finney, then Moody, then the Asuza Street Revival, then the Latter Rain Revival, and so forth till at last, today, we have… Me and My Sect who have finally arrived at highly-evolved, truly spiritual purity. And this must go on ad infinitum. For the only thing that keeps the spiritual gene pool pure is precisely the constant battle for survival among the various sects. That is why Loraine Boettner suggests in Roman Catholicism that “the diversity of the churches, with a healthy spirit of rivalry within proper limits, is one of God's ways of keeping the stream of Christianity from becoming stagnant.” It is not love, but competition, that ensures the life of the Church. Indeed, Boettner goes on to quote Walter Montano to say that competition is essential in order for the Christian to know the freedom of the gospel at all. In Montano's words: “Organic unity is a foreign element in Protestantism. The lack of organic unity is the strength, not the weakness, of Protestantism, and assures us of our freedom before God… Unity and liberty are in opposition; as the one diminishes, the other increases. The Reformation broke down unity, it gave liberty…”
Now, for a theology that utterly repudiates “survival of the fittest” ideologies and claims faith in a supernatural God of love, this is a very curious way of looking at God's dealings with the human race. It does not look very much at all like the desire of Jesus who prayed to the Father for his Church, that “they may be one as we are one” (John 17:11). One does not see between the Father and the Son a “healthy spirit of rivalry” as a model of the unity of the Church. One seldom notices Jesus teaching the disciples to quarrel over who is “stagnant.” One does not see St. Paul issuing ultimatums to choose freedom over unity or telling the Phillipians (whom he urged to be “one in spirit and purpose”) that unity is a prison and competition is strength. Indeed, the idea of flushing weaklings out of the spiritual gene pool or throwing off the chains of love in order to survive is not something that seems to look anything like biblical teaching. But it does look a great deal like Darwinism.
Fundamentalists rightly apprehend in the Darwinian paradigm of “survival of the fittest” a naturalistic ideology which, applied to human beings, has served as the basis for some of the most brutal regimes in history. They rightly decry the view of human beings as mere “naked apes” living in the illusion of morality. They are appalled by the secularization of the human person which has reduced him from a creature made in God's image to a mere animal motivated by sex, hunger and power. They are opposed to the relativism that pits hedonism and materialism against the claims of family and children. They rightly detest the ideologies that pit class against class, race against race and man against woman. They recognize that such applications of “survival of the fittest” ideology to the socio-political sphere are anti-Christian assaults on the dignity of the human person. They recognize that a feminism which opposes the union of marriage as a “slave relationship” and declares that the freedom of woman can only be found by revolt against man is a stunningly short-sighted understanding of what marriage is all about. They argue strongly that it is a grave mistake and a sin to say that, in some ultimate sense, competition, not the love of Christ, is the great driving force behind the world.
Yet people like Boettner and Montano hold exactly this view of freedom when it comes to the unity of the Church. Cockeyed Church “histories” which prop up various anti-Catholic notions of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, the Great Apostasy, the Hidden Church and so forth owe an enormous amount not to “true Bible teaching” but to the view of life which says that competition, not the love of Christ, is the great driving force behind the Church. In so doing, their anti-Catholic zeal blinds them to what they see elsewhere with such clarity: that the great proponent of this view of life is not Jesus Christ, but Charles Darwin.
Catholics therefore have the obligation both to support and oppose the Fundamentalist in the matter of evolutionism. Insofar as the Fundamentalist grasps the insight that human beings are in fact creatures in the image of God who are made for love, he is simply right and Catholics ought to support that insight. However, insofar as Fundamentalism offers crackpot science and, in fact, contradicts itself by holding a Darwinian view of the Church, Catholics ought to make clear what is going on in the hope that the Fundamentalist will rub his eyes and see the irony of his attack on the Catholic Church. For as Paul recognized clearly, we are not only created by the one God of love, we are intended to live by him in love, not competition. That is why he says, “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit — just as you were called to one hope when you were called — one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all” (Eph 4:3-6).
