catholicism 101 -- part 15

Catholicism 101

(The outline of this
series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)

Church of the Holy
Cross

June 8, 2008

Part 15

Christian Duty:  Christian Belief: The Three Great
Creeds: Concerning God:  The
Creator of Heaven and Earth:  The
Creation of Man

=---      We have discussed the hierarchy of the creation narrative before:  how the narrative moves upward along the chain of being:

o   “The hierarchy of creatures is expressed by the order of ‘six days,’ from the less perfect to the more perfect.  God loves all his creatures and takes  care of each one, even the sparrow.  Nevertheless, Jesus said:  ‘You are of more value than many sparrows,’ or again:  ‘Of how much more value is a man than a sheep!’” 
(CCC 342)

o   The crown jewel of the creation, on the sixth day, the very last thing God creates
is man:

§  “Man is the summit of the Creator’s work, as the inspired account expresses by clearly distinguishing the creation of man from that of the other
creatures.”  (CCC 343)

§ Genesis 1.26f:

·      Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

§  Man (male and female) is made in the image and likeness of God:

·     “Of all the visible creatures only man is ‘able to know and love his creator.’  He is ‘the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake,’ and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life.  It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity:” (CCC 356)

o   ‘What made you establish man in so great a dignity?  Certainly the incalculable love by which you have looked on your creature in yourself!  You are taken with love for her; for by love indeed you created her, by love you have given her a being capable of tasting your eternal Good’ (St. Catherine of Siena – 14^th century –  Dialogue 4, 13).

·      The image of God can be (and is) marred by sin, but it can never be fully effaced.

·      Being in the image of God means that the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, “who is not just something, but someone.  He is capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons.” 
(CCC 357)

o   Man is free, and he is free to love.  When we freely love, we actualize the image of God in which we are made, we inhabit it.  We are living in accord with our telos, with what we were made to be.

§  When we do this, when we love and serve God, when we willingly say “yes” to God, we are in a “state of grace” – there is a kind of harmonious and free interpenetration, or mutual giving, of God and man.

o   The Fall

§  At the very outset, mankind blew it.  He listened to that “seductive voice” (cf. last time), which out of envy and malice, deceived mankind.

·      This is the voice of “the serpent” or “the dragon” in Genesis, which says:

·      “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

·      The great irony is that we were “like God” from the beginning, because God made us that way.  When we try to go off and self-actualize apart from God, we get into trouble.  Because there’s no self to actualize apart from God.  He made us from nothing, and he made us to be in a free communion of love, a “state of grace”.

§  But the fall is the occasion for redemption.  Redemption, and not just redemption in the abstract, but a personal redeemer, is promised immediately, because God’s love for us is sovereign:

·     God makes a promise for the future, another woman, and another man, who will undo what was done in the fall, when the serpents head will be crushed definitively:

o   (The curse of the Serpent:) “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head…” (Gen. 3.15).

o   This is on the surface what is called a scriptural “etiology” – i.e. an explanation of where the scariness and venomness of serpents comes from, and why it is that people (and particularly women) are afraid of them.

o   The deeper reading of this text, though, is a prophecy of the redemption.  There will be a woman in the future at enmity with the ancient serpent, who will undo what Eve did; and there will be a man who will crush the head of the ancient serpent forever.

o   That woman will be Mary, who will willingly say “yes” to God, and who will therefore be called “full of grace” (and whom Jesus otherwise puzzlingly calls “woman” [or “Eve” in Hebrew] – cf. Jn. 2.4, and Jn. 19.26), and from her womb will come the Deliverer, who will “bruise the head” of the serpent, and restore the communion of God and man.  Thus we will see later that creation is not really completed until Jesus, the theanthropos, the God-man, who is raised from the dead and glorified on the eighth day, as a sign of the completion of God’s creative work in him.