Creation vs. Evolution : CMI Back to Good Articles Today! · Great Bishop of Geneva! : Got Questions? "what are the differences", and a Catholic answer
Here, have a nice Don Batten:
Dogs breeding dogs? That’s not evolution!
by Don Batten | This article is from
Creation 18(2):20–23, March 1996
https://creation.com/dogs-breeding-dogs
Sure, it's a few decades since first publication, but it is still a good one.
Now, yesterday, by contrast ... imagine you had a friend or relative, usually a sober and intelligent person. But once or twice every half year or three months, that person will have a binge of two bottles same evening, and not beer or cider and not halfbottles either.
That's a bit how I feel about some words by Derek Moore-Crispin:
Rest, Revival, and Creation, Genesis negates evolutionary compromise
by Derek Moore-Crispin, Published: 28 July 2020 (GMT+10)
https://creation.com/rest-revival-and-creation
Five hundred years ago Martin Luther brought the Gospel of justification by faith back to the Church. Why did he need to do that? Because the Roman church had transmuted the simple Gospel of faith in Jesus and his finished work on the cross into a works-based religion, with the power of absolution from sin vested in the hands of the priesthood. Martin Luther lived one and a half millennia after Jesus Christ. So where did he get his message from? From the Bible! Why did he attribute greater authority to the Bible than to a thousand years and more of Church tradition? Because the Bible is God’s definitive and final word, written down. But why had the Church departed from the truth in the first place?
Yes, let's look at the last question again:
But why had the Church departed from the truth in the first place?
This is in fact clearly anti-Biblical. Matthew 28:20 says:
Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.
So, the order to keep all truth is accompanied by a promise spanning all days. This promise is given to the highest clergy Christ had chosen:
And the eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto the mountain where Jesus had appointed them.
And, since Derek Moore-Crispin considers it an aberration of the Church to have "the power of absolution from sin vested in the hands of the priesthood" - let's check what the Bible says about the first Catholic bishops (except Judas the traitor, and on this occasion also Thomas who was absent), from John 20:
[19] Now when it was late that same day, the first of the week, and the doors were shut, where the disciples were gathered together, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them: Peace be to you. [20] And when he had said this, he shewed them his hands and his side. The disciples therefore were glad, when they saw the Lord. [21] He said therefore to them again: Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent me, I also send you. [22] When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. [23] Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained. [24] Now Thomas, one of the twelve, who is called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.
Did only the ten get this power of forgiving sins or retaining sins? Or did Thomas get it too?
Could he get it from them or only directly from Jesus?
Could Matthias (Acts 1) get it from them, now that Jesus was not around in the Holy Land, but already up in Heaven?
Tradition says, Matthias could and did and so did the 72. But even from the Bible, the verse I cited first should make it clear : the power of forgiving or retaining sins did not belong to all faithful indiscriminately, and is around "all days" together with the command of teaching all truth and justice which Christ commanded them.
Was the "Gospel of faith in Jesus and his finished work on the cross" simple? Not really, you need to walk a "Romans road" with one in the Protestant tradition to get it, you also need to ignore the injunction to walk in good works, Ephesians 2:
[8] For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, for it is the gift of God; [9] Not of works, that no man may glory. [10] For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus in good works, which God hath prepared that we should walk in them.
Anything Catholics do which Derek would consider "a works-based religion" really boils down to the requirement that now that we are created in Christ Jesus, we also do walk in good works. No, Martin Luther did not get his message from the Bible, he got it from a misreading of the Bible, as erroneous as - claiming the Flood never happened.
You also need to ignore James 2:
17 So faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself.
Here is Romans 3:28, Douay Rheims:
For we account a man to be justified by faith, without the works of the law.
Here is the same verse (if you can call it that) in the Lutherbible of 1545:
So halten wir nun dafür, daß der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben.
Spot the intruder, if you know German!
Here is an English translation of a relevant paragraph from his Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen:
I know very well that in Romans 3 the word solum is not in the Greek or Latin text — the papists did not have to teach me that. It is fact that the letters s-o-l-a are not there. And these blockheads stare at them like cows at a new gate, while at the same time they do not recognize that it conveys the sense of the text -- if the translation is to be clear and vigorous [klar und gewaltiglich], it belongs there. I wanted to speak German, not Latin or Greek, since it was German I had set about to speak in the translation. But it is the nature of our language that in speaking about two things, one which is affirmed, the other denied, we use the word allein [only] along with the word nicht [not] or kein [no]. For example, we say "the farmer brings allein grain and kein money"; or "No, I really have nicht money, but allein grain"; I have allein eaten and nicht yet drunk"; "Did you write it allein and nicht read it over?" There are countless cases like this in daily usage.
Farmer's grain will do. Let's compare the "works of the law" - old law - as like to the money, barren in itself.
Luther wants to apply this to all he wants to consider as "works" in the Catholic religion, but even so keeps a lot of things others would call "works".
He misses that by doing so, as he cannot show any unbroken Church tradition polemising against Roman Catholicism like he does, same issues, not others like Photius on procession of the Holy Spirit, Caerularius on Eucharist in unleavened bread, if indeed unlike Photius and Caerularius he could not remotely even realistically pretend there was one, his Christianity cannot be the one of Matthew 28:20.
What I require is not the visibility of a building, but of a people. Protestants of a certain type here would like to obfsucate the issue and compare "organisation" to "building". No, the Cathedral of Lund and the parish Church of Wittenberg were Catholic buildings in 1500, but no longer in 1600 (like Notre Dame in 1900 but no longer in 2000), so buildings are not the point. I want the visibility of a people, and Christ did organise His people as a Church with clergy.
Now this is said, go back and read some good articles on CMI, but I'd prefer if they ditched the Reformation binges that recur from time to time.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
King St. Olaf II of Norway
29.VII.2020
PS, one more blooper by Derek:
The rediscovery at the Reformation of the God of the Bible (the true God) encouraged the view that, if God is the Supreme Mind, the Supreme Reasoner, then he must have created a rational world.
Er, he has not heard about St. Thomas Aquinas or the Scholastics, something? Or are they just incapable of imagining rational science without Heliocentrism, which like Evolution was first promoted widely by Protestants?/HGL
