Further to New York Times’ story about Bryan College prof uproar is really about the New York Times, there is a small reproduction of a painting hanging in the basement at my (Catholic) church in Ottawa, Giovanni di Paolo’s The Annunciation (c. 1445). This was before the Reformation, hence any viable form of Protestantism, and before Christian or Catholic Darwinism (for sure):
From a commentary on the painting:
Giovanni di Paolo’s Annunciation is believed to be one of five predella panels that belonged to the lower portion of a large, as yet unidentified, Sienese altarpiece. The central area of the panel shows the most important part of the painted narrative — the Archangel Gabriel announcing the impending birth of the Christ Child to the Virgin Mary. Outside her elegant Italian Gothic house, a lush garden reflects the spring season of the Annunciation. The fertile landscape also provides an appropriate setting for the secondary representation at the left — Adam and Eve’s dramatic expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Giovanni used the figure of God the Father, who occupies the celestial realm in the upper left corner, to link the Expulsion to the Annunciation. God both points out the exiled couple’s disgrace and looks ahead toward the Annunciation in anticipation of divine redemption. Finally, at the right, Joseph warms his hands at a fireplace, symbolic of Jesus’ future birth in the winter.
For nearly two millennia, Catholic Christians saw Christ as the second Adam (and his mother Mary as the new Eve) who would undo the mess the first couple had made of things.
Now, it is possible to work the faith around in such a way as to argue for a symbolic first couple and a real second one. But the traditional story begins to fade then.
And on what grounds is this done? To placate Darwin’s followers? Would anything in fact placate them?
To accord with the scientific evidence? Ah, on that just wait, it will come round again to any given position on subjects like this, some time within the next two decades, not the next two millennia.
So Bryan College and it profs need to decide whether the decades or the millennia should count more, and how and why. – O’Leary for News
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