For the nine bishops, the eternal Logos is not only the warrant for the created order of being, as we have noted above, but also, evidently, the warrant for the socially constructed traditional orthodox claims of Catholic theology, including natural-law theory regarding sexual morality. In other words, the eternal Logos is presumed to have sent the Holy Spirit (the conceptual construct in trinitarian theology used to refer to the supposed Third Person of the supposed divine trinity) to inspire the supposedly orthodox claims of Catholic theology. Therefore, when moral theologians such as Salzman and Lawler challenge certain aspects of traditional natural-law theory regarding sexual morality, they may appear to the nine bishops to be suggesting that the Holy Spirit and by extension, the eternal Logos got something wrong in the traditional orthodox claims. From my standpoint, I would say that we need to clear away the doctrines about the supposed divinity of Jesus and about the supposed divine trinity in order to clear the way for discussing natural-law theory about sexual morality. But what I am here suggesting is admittedly far more radical than anything that Salzman and Lawler suggest about natural-law theory regarding sexual morality.
Understanding the Human Person
Next, we should examine the statement in the above-quoted passage about "a Catholic understanding of the human person as created in the image of God" (page 11). Once again, let us note that the nine bishops are holding out for a creationist account rooted in scripture. In their antiabortion anguish, many Catholics have claimed that life begins at the moment of conception. Yes, a form of life begins at the moment of conception. But at the moment of conception, is the human person created in the image of God? I do not thinks so.
As a result, I would suggest that we think of the human person as having two distinct natures: an animal nature that begins at the moment of conception and a distinctively human nature that begins when the live fetus is born and is able to live outside the mother's womb. Until the fetus is viable outside the mother's womb, it is best understood as an infrahuman life-form, not a distinctively human person.
For centuries, Catholic theology about the supposed divinity of Jesus has claimed that he supposedly had two natures: a human nature and a divine nature so that he was totally human and totally divine. So the idea that a human person might have two natures is hardly a new idea.
The two-nature way of thinking of the human person means of course two souls: (1) an animal soul (i.e., life-form) and (2) a distinctively human soul (i.e., the life-form that is the rational soul). This way of thinking about the fetus before viability and after viability (i.e., able to live outside the mother's womb) could be referred to as hominization (i.e., the making of the human person through God's creation of the individual distinctively human soul).
In an effort to reconcile evolutionary theory with the creationist views found in both accounts of creation in the book of Genesis (the kind of reconciling that Philo of Alexandria had undertaken in his day, incidentally), Ong suggests how the process of hominization can be understood in his book IN THE HUMAN GRAIN: FURTHER EXPLORATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE (Macmillan, 1967, page 78): "It took much longer for matter to be capable of the incredibly tight organization found in the human body. Nevertheless, over a period beginning with the emergence of life some one billion or more years ago, living beings did develop progressively more and more elaborate organization, more and more "complexification' or intensity of life. At a point where living organisms approximating the present human body finally were appearing, the first human soul is created by God, infused within a body in the material universe. This is, of course, a special act of God, for the creation of the human soul is always a special act of [God], since the soul in its spirituality transcends the material."
In other words, because the specifically human soul is immaterial (a.k.a. spiritual), it transcends the material. Ong is working with the philosophic distinction of the body (material) and soul (immaterial). Because the distinctively human soul, the source of human rationality, is immaterial, God is understood as the creator of each individual distinctively human soul. As a result, God's creation is ongoing. As to the story in the book of Genesis about God resting on the seventh day of creation, some priest probably made that up as a way to argue that we should take a day of rest from our daily labors periodically, which is not a bad idea.
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