A Catholic Ponders Seventh Day Adventists and the Creation

I posted yesterday on my Grandfather's funeral and the Adventist aspects of it here at Saying Goodbye for Now to My Grandfather

I am no vast expert on Seventh Adventist belief despite it having some influence in the family. It still was around me somewhat as I mentioned through my grandmother. For instance we have always received Signs of the Time Magazine , no doubt my grandmother has put the entire family on the mailing list, for as long as I can remember. The Adventist health outlook was always around. My mother was of course around it and in fact went to a Adventist college for a bit. Also there is a tad of a persecution complex that is nurtured by Adventist I became aware of.

Now there is some truth to this perhaps. I do recall stories from my Great Grandmother via my mother that Adventist were look at with some suspicion here in the deep south. Though it did not hinder my Great Grandfather( I am not sure if he fully embraced Seventh Day Adventist belief) because the family fortune was partly made off controlling the slot machine business , pool tables and juke boxes for a nice part of Mississippi and Louisiana. An irony that is pretty funny. Still I think the "persecution of Adventist" is still embraced a tad today and promoted because it fits so well with the end game(Current game in their timing) they imagine. True The Christian Church in the end will be persecuted but to Adventist this takes on particular significance to them. They after all are true keepers of the true and only Sabbath(we know this as Saturday) that was made special and Holy by God forever and Ever Amen at the beginning of creation.

When I became Catholic of course alarm bells went off with my grandmother. I got more Adventist literature than I knew what to do with. Most of my interaction with the Adventist Doctrine has to do with
(1) The Belief that the Catholic Church is the big whore of the Book of Revelation(This of course brings the Sabbath stuff into play),

(2)How the Catholic Church's role among other things is all mapped in incredible detail(once the symbolism has been explained :) ) in the book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation.

and
(3) various End of the World stuff.

However it was not until my grandfather's funeral that I remembered how central the LITERAL 24 HOUR DAY CREATION is to all Adventist Doctrine. Memories are starting to flood back of the few conversations I had with Ma Ma on this subject. I generally avoided the subject of religion with Ma Ma because to be honest what good would it do. She was concerned about me anyway and me Poping. I love her deeply so I avoided the topic. However I can now recall conversations she had with my daddy where she and Pa Pa were quite strong on the topic.

Let me put it this way. If a Adventist starts messing around with the belief in the literal six day creation then the whole system falls apart.

It is very much like if a Catholic stops believing in the Sacraments or especially the Doctrine of the Eucharist. Stop believing that the Bread and Wine Become Jesus and you might as well sign up for an subscription to the Upper Room magazine and join the local Methodist Church. The Literal Six 24 hour six day creation is a similar non negotiable to Seventh Day Adventist.

During my Grandfather's funeral as I mentioned, I thought the Pastor did a good job of getting Adventist doctrine into his sermon without being overly offensive or divisive. A tough job to do in an occasion like this where most of the the family is very much not of that faith.

I did not mention in my earlier post that he touched on this subject. The basic premise was

(1) We must believe in God Words
(2) If we don't believe in God's words and if they are LIES then Pa Pa will never rise again
(3) God said he created the world in six literal days and Evolution NEEDLESS TO SAY IS ALL FALSE

(4) To deny that is to deny a Creator God
(5) to deny a Creator God is to deny any hope for us to rise again

I personally thought it was a big leap that if one did not believe in the literal 24 hour 6 day creation that one thus denied a creator God and thus was denying my Grandfather or anyone else could not rise again to live forever.

However it struck me that again it showed the importance of this belief to the whole Adventist system of belief that this was brought up at a funeral. It is truly their Eucharist. I mean how many Funerals do you go to where the Dogma of a literal 6 day 24 hour creation is a critical part of the sermon. Again I have only been to two Adventist Funerals in my life and they are surely not all alike. Still it struck me as significant

I bring this topic up because via an Adventist that commented on my blog I found this very interesting blog. Wishing Doesn't Make It So -A lifelong Seventh-day Adventist tries to make sense .

She seems not only to be having a Adventist Faith crisis but a Christian Faith Crisis as a whole all of which she bravely shares with us on her blog.

She had a very interesting post a few days ago called Virginia was a sucker . I think she in her very open and candid words shows how Central this is too all Adventist belief. It is a very good post. She posted a official Adventist Church Document that said:
Creation is a foundational pillar in the entire system of Seventh-day Adventist doctrine—it bears direct relationship to many if not all other fundamental beliefs. Any alternative interpretation of the creation story needs to be examined in light of its impact on all other beliefs. Several of the Faith and Science Conferences reviewed alternative interpretations of Genesis 1, including the idea of theistic evolution. These other interpretations lack theological coherence with the whole of Scripture and reveal areas of inconsistency with the rest of Seventh-day Adventist doctrine. They are therefore unacceptable substitutes for the biblical doctrine of creation held by the church.

She then says "In other words, remove the belief in a recent literal six-day creation and the whole thing falls apart." Elsewhere in this post she says "I find myself struggling with a script someone else has written: If you don't believe in a literal six-day creation in the recent past, you can't be a Christian."

Now let me say I am not making a argument pro or con on the whole literal 6 day creation story. Catholica can and many do believe in that literal six day 24 hour creation. Catholics can of course disagree . Though they are bound to some beliefs. More on that at the end of the post.

However if one is ever doing Apologetics with an Adventist I think it is important to understand the importance of this to everything else.

For instance even among the most Fundamentalist of Churches there are many many people that combine elements of Evolution and God Creating the world into their world view. Their disagreement with the 6 day young earth belief does not shatter their view of Christianity and their living faith. As to a Adventist it perhaps is a different story and could become something far more Soul endangering if they have doubts about it.

Anyway I found her post interesting in light of my grandfathers funeral.

For what Catholics believe or I should say "Can" believe as to Creation and all these topics really deserves a huge post . I might attempt that in the next few weeks because I do hope to be of assistance perhaps to people like this lady that now feels perhaps all of Christianity is perhaps a fraud.

Two thoughts come to mind before I give a few resources.

First are the words of Pope Benedict in his now infamous Lecture in Germany that got some Muslims fired up
At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry....... opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).[10]

and then these words of St Augustine which seem to be some that Christians need to consult

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1.7]
Saint Augustine (A.D. 354-430) in his work The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim)

Go see HOW AUGUSTINE REINED IN SCIENCE for more on this quote

Again I am not making argument pro or con against the Literal 6 days or not. However here are a few Catholic resources
For a few Church Fathers that have differing viewpoints on the timespan Six Literal Days?

Also see David Armstrong's Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah as Actual Historical Figures: the Biblical Evidence and Catholic Agreement With It

Also see David's Dialogue on Materialist Evolutionary Theory and Intelligent Design -(including an examination of St. Augustine's and St. Thomas Aquinas's Views on Creation and Evolution)


No. 50 - Jan 1994
Part VI. The Creation and Formation of the Physical Universe by John F. McCarthy
No. 49 - Nov 1993
Part V. The First Four Days According to St. Thomas by John F. McCarthy
No. 48 - Sep 1993
Part IV. The Second Day of Creation by John F. McCarthy
No. 47 - Jul 1993
Part III. The Days of Creation According to St. Augustine by John F. McCarthy
No. 46 - May 1993
Part II. The Literal Sense of Genesis 1:1-5: The First Day of Creation by John F. McCarthy
No. 45 - Mar 1993
Introduction; Part I. Response to a Form-Critical Interpretation by John F. McCarthy

Benedict XVI clarified that evolution does not exclude a creator.(Zenith News Article)

Adam, Eve, and Evolution (Catholic Answers)

I find this Wilki article helpful Evolution and the Roman Catholic Church

Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis 1950 encyclical

EVOLUTION AND THE POPE (good article relating to John Paul the II)

Cardinal Ratzinger's Commentary on Genesis Excerpts from In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall. (very good)

Communion and Stewardship:Human Persons Created in the Image of God
The July 2004 Vatican Statement on Creation and Evolution

Catechism
"Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth" (Catechism of the Catholic Church 159).

"The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies that have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers" (CCC 283).

God himself created the visible world in all its richness, diversity and order. Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine "work", concluded by the "rest" of the seventh day.(CCC 337)

The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but 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" (CCC 390).

"Because of its common origin the human race forms a unity, for 'from one ancestor [God] made all nations to inhabit the whole earth'" (CCC 360, quoting St. Paul in Act. 17;26, cf. Tobit 8:6)