"Adam was not an individual, the fall was collective" - Evil or Just Wrong? · What About "The Jimmy Akin Solution?" · 1909 vs § 390
I am sorry, I did not "read his paper" but heard him on a video, so I took the last view he presented, and he spent a bit more time on it than on others, as I recall the subjective feel, as that opinion being his own. |
First a qualifier. To Jimmy Akin, this is not dogma, it's a possible solution to a thorny problem or a few of them, a bit like identifying Babel with Göbekli Tepe is to me. Yes, I know the city of Nebuchadnezzar is also termed Babel in Hebrew, I do not deny they are the same ideological community, just saying they are different locations. So, Jimmy Akin should not be held as positively teaching this as the truth.
Nevertheless, it's a position he has mentioned with some favour.
So, let's deal with it.
To Mr. Akin, human origins basically evolved on the lines suggested by modern anthropology. At some point, men were sufficiently evolved to become God's image, and God made them His image. Probably at this point, perhaps later, I'm less than sure since he has so far not given chronological even hypotheses that I have seen, a couple, Adam and Eve, as individual people, were "federative heads of mankind - under God" - God's grace flowed through them to the rest of the men, and if they had continued to do so, would have continued to do so.
It's not totally inconceivable for us Catholics that God's grace can flow through even created human persons (and not just directly from the One Mediator, the divine person who became man, Jesus), so, the how is not a real problem.
However, the problem is, perhaps even the Incarnation, certainly the way it played out, with Crucifixion, only became necessary by the fall of Adam. St. Thomas opined, without the Fall, God the Son would not have been incarnate. Saint Bonaventure on the other hand opined, even without the fall, God the Son would have been incarnate to ennoble the human race.
Now, all sides, prior to modernity, agree, without the fall, we would have all been born with original grace and original righteousness, as in fact only Mary and Jesus were.
This means, tradition agrees that people other than Adam and Eve would have had grace from them, but would have had that as having grace from their immediate parents (and these either being them or having grace from them). Grace and nature would have coincided.
That we are born without grace (apart from St. Jeremias, St. John the Baptist, the Blessed Virgin and Our Lord) is a consequence of sin, of Adam's sin.
So, before Adam sinned, there is no sense in which one could conceivably imagine that men already created in God's image before Adam and Eve could have come to depend on them as mediators to have grace from God, since they could not have them as parents.
So, what if they would have had the image of God quality from Adam and Eve? Well, that would have meant that prior to Adam and Eve, despite possibly human anatomy, they were beasts. But beasts cannot speak. If you can as much as say "this morning I ate yoghurt" which right now has no practical importance, you have thereby proven you are made in God's image. You can abstract from the immediate and use that to express yourself about the past. And it is very obvious that people dated by conventional science as more than 100 000 years ago actually did have this ability, which is godlike and not bestial.
If you pretend Adam and Eve lived 500 000 years ago, Genesis 3 is not history, and the Proto-Gospel in Genesis 3:15 is simply a myth. A fiction. But if you admit Adam and Eve are as far back as the Biblical timeline suggests (yes there is one, even if it is not all contained in one chapter, the part from Adam to Abraham being in Genesis 5 and 11, which is elastic due to text versions, but not infinitely so), then you either admit Biblical chronology fully, or you say people who lived prior to 7000 years ago (after Göbekli Tepe!) were not yet people but beasts, or you come back to, they were already God's image before Adam and Eve existed, which means, they could not have to depend on Adam and Eve to be God's image, and therefore also not on grace.
I think this should adequately dispose of the Jimmy Akin solution if so I may call it. If Adam and Eve had not fallen, men would have inherited grace, directly with the image of God in their nature, from them, as from parents. This excludes the idea of pre-Adamites.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Lydia of Philippi
3.VIII.2023
Philippis, in Macedonia, sanctae Lydiae purpurariae, quae, praedicante ibidem sancto Paulo Apostolo, ut beatus Lucas in Actibus Apostolicis refert, omnium prima credidit Evangelio.
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RépondreSupprimer1909 vs § 390