"Theological, Not Disinterested"

Without Excuse? · "Theological, Not Disinterested"

How Do We Interpret the Genesis Creation Accounts? w/ Fr. Jordan Schmidt, O.P. (Aquinas 101)
5th of April 2022 | The Thomistic Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2Ik1ea8yUI

Fr. Jordan Smith, OP, gives a good overview over the accounts in Genesis 2, then Genesis 1. Now, it has the flaw of presenting the account of Genesis 2 as Adam created before the world he was meant to live in. But it also has the merit of presenting a parallel to Genesis 1 in the sevenfold repetitions in Exodus 40 and Leviticus 8 to 10.

Just as each creation day involves "God said, let there be x", then "and x was" and then "and God saw that x was very good", seven parts of the ritual process are described in Exodus 40 for the building of the tabernacle, in Leviticus 8 to 10 for the beginning of the rituals of the real Old Testament (which is now past). In each case (as I get the video, before looking up), there is a description of what happened, a summary claim that all was done according to God's instruction, and a manifestation of God's presence.

Then he makes a summary on the points made stating "the accounts are avowedly theological" - which is fine - "and not intended to be disinterested descriptions of the physical processes by which the universe came to be."

I am all too reminded of a certain strain in Liberal Theology in which the Gospels are not intended to be disinterested accounts of the historic life of Jesus and perhaps even Acts are not intended to be a disinterested account of the historic development of the Church.

The problem with this approach is, while natural science is according to its ideology supposed to be pursued in a disinterested way, historic accounts on the other hand are very rarely disinterested. You make a court room reconstruction of what happened on the day of a purported crime, the reconstruction is not disinterested (except as to which of the parties is to blame or if one is to blame or not, it shouldn't be blatantly partial), but its interest - even bias - is in accounting for the factors of the events that are relevant for the applicable laws on what you can and can't do and when one is or isn't responsible for what one does.

The fact that a text is not disinterested doesn't say it isn't objectively and factually true. The fact that Liberal Theologians I had to do with before I left the Swedish state Church (a few months before my actual conversion in 1988) are now echoed by Dominicans should make people pause if they think that the Vatican II Sect is the Roman Catholic Church./HGL