The Fables of 2nd Timothy and 2nd Peter

Both St. Peter and St. Paul make a forceful distinction between fable or myth and the truth of sound doctrine revealed by “the power and presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 1:16)

St. Paul speaks of “a time when they will not endure sound doctrine but ... will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth ... unto fables.” (2 Tim. 4:3-4)

We are certainly living in those times. George A. Maloney, S.J., is an author very popular amongst religious who self-consciously pride themselves upon being “balanced” in this age of fundamentalist fanaticism. Here is whet Jesuit Maloney is telling his all too willing listeners:

We are in need of a new myth or story to guide us in our forward journey. We reject any literal interpretation of the story in the Book of Genesis that God created the entire universe in six days! (Mysticism and the New Age: Christic Consciousness in the New Creation. New York: Alba House, 1991, p. 42)

We are given no reason whatsoever for this summary rejection of almost two thousand years of Church teaching. Was God not capable of creating all things in six days if He so chose? We are simply told that we need a new myth. Obviously, Fr. Maloney considers the description of creation as narrated in Genesis 1-3 to be myth, which is to say fiction. But is he willing to exchange one myth for another? Yes, so long as it be a new one! The important thing for Fr. Maloney is not truth but new-ness! And so it seems to be everywhere. There is a universal obsession with and compulsion to change as such.

Fr. Maloney is an exceedingly facile writer. He glides with consummate sophistic skill over blatant self-contradictions, forced private interpretations of Holy Scripture, and layers and layers of confirmed dogmatic truth and eternally condemned error with nary a hitch. Watch this:

As we search for a new narrative to guide us into the far future, we also see the inadequacies of the modern evolutionist story associated with the work of Charles Darwin. In the Darwinian view, creation is a lengthy, slow process evolving over millions of years. Human beings appear at a later stage and with the evolution of higher primates. (p. 43)

But if Fr. Maloney finds Darwinian evolution inadequate because of the “lengthy, slow process evolving over millions of years” then one may reasonably ask why the literal interpretation of Genesis is so abhorrent that it must be rejected?

Ah, but the next sentence informs us that – contrary to what we were just led to believe – it’s  not the time element at all that is significant:

... the inadequacies of the [Darwinian] theory lie in the vehement rejection of God as the sacred Orderer moving all to an unending growth in a world community of love. (p. 43)

Well, God is surely present in Genesis. But the new myth is evolution in a more dangerous form then that of Darwin, for Darwinian evolution is pure naturalism, rankest materialism, radical empiricism. The new myth is theistic-pantheistic-Luciferian. It is not the God of the Bible Who is the Orderer and lover of this new myth that Fr. Maloney has found. The emphasis has shifted from the external crudities of life among the hominids to the Luciferian “evolution of human consciousness.” Enter the New Age synthesist openly espoused:

Teilhard de Chardin, one of many “new age” thinkers, presents us with a new creative synthesis of what has already been found in the writings of St. John, St. Paul and the early Eastern Fathers. (p. 43)

This figure-eight so convincingly and cunningly though brazenly executed, strives to cast a Teilhardian glow over Evangelist St. John, especially in his use of the term Logos for Christ, over certain passages of St. Paul, and over the “early Eastern Fathers” primarily St. Gregory of Nyssa. Such a false radiance of seductive error (Cf. 2 Cor. 11:14) is something these Saints of old never possessed and would most vigorously disavow if they could.

The interior life of our growth in grace, which belongs to the supernatural order, is made by Teilhard de Chardin to be one and the same as evolution’s mythical progression from simple to complex forms of life. Fr. Maloney continues:

He [Teilhard de Chardin] calls us to rediscover the whole inward history of creation, the evolution of human consciousness based on the principle that with greater complexity of matter there is a concomitant history of inwardness, of greater consciousness which brings about greater inter-relatedness among all beings.

Creation is reconceived by Teilhard out of God’s Revelation in the light of evolution as an unfinished process. (p. 43)

Teilhard’s universe of “all beings” apparently does not include those completely simple and non-material creatures we call the Angels; and God Himself must be excluded from Teilhard’s universe because God is absolutely simple and free from all change and shadow of alteration. He is so because He has no need to change, being infinitely perfect, infinite Actuality. Only imperfect creatures need to change.

But what strange “revelation” it could be to which Fr. Maloney refers, only he knows. It is certainly not God’s Divine Revelation, for His Word says:

So the heavens and the earth were finished and all the furniture of them. And on the seventh day God ended His work, which He had made: And He rested from all His work which He had done.  (Genesis 2:1-2)   (Emphases added)

According to the Divine Revelation always adhered to and infallibly interpreted for us by the Catholic Church, God is no longer creating anything except individual souls.

After Creation week, the work of “increasing and multiplying” is carried on by secondary causes, creatures themselves, though with God’s concurrence and under His Providence, in accordance with the natural laws created with and in them during Creation week. This horizontal order of things is called by St. Thomas the order of generation to distinguish it from the static, permanent, unchanging order of creation. The former order is horizontal and temporal; the latter is vertical and a-temporal. The order of creation is the basis for all moral and political stability in the temporal order. We can see today that the rejection of the order of creation results in chaos in the temporal sphere, bringing only dis-order rather than order.

Unfortunately, these principles of Catholic theology are foreign, even hostile to the new mythology of Teilhard de Chardin. And so they should be, for truth and error, light and darkness cannot be yoked together. Fr. Maloney, Teilhard’s disciple, is a charmingly sincere deceiver. For Teilhard’s evolution is as Darwinian as it can be – only with the one added blasphemous error of a God who evolves in and with his creatures. But this one error is enough to constitute a whole new religion. Teilhardianism can not by any stretch of the tolerant imagination be termed Catholic, no, not even Christian, if by Christian we refer to some form of Protestantism that still professes to believe in the historical Christ of the Gospels.

The deception is here: Teilhard’s movement from simple to complex is based squarely and solely on the “evidence” of the fossils in the geological strata. We know that the fossil record is a record of the global Flood of Noe’s time (Genesis 6-8), and there are compelling empirical evidences for this. See, for example, Catholic Gerard Keane’s recent book, Creation Rediscovered (from TAN, POB 424, Rockford IL 61105) pages 81 and following. The waters of the year-long deluge deposited creatures in the order of their ecological habitat – not, as evolutionists claim, in an order of emergence from simple to more complex. A trilobite is as complex as any other marine animal of its family still existing today. And by analogy of proportion, a trilobite is as complex as a monkey.

So, the only difference between Darwinian evolution and Teilhardian evolution – and it’s a big one – is that Darwin’s mechanism for evolving species was natural selection; the mechanism of the Neo-Darwinians is random mutations; the mechanism of the anti-Darwinian neo-catastrophists is “punctuated equilibrium” by periodic catastrophic events. But the mechanism of Teilhard de Chardin’s evolution – and that of all theistic evolutionists – is God Himself. To believe this, one must trash all of Holy Scripture and almost two thousand years of constant Church teaching on Original Sin and the inerrancy of the Bible.

Why do so few Catholics realize this apostasy from the one true Faith? Much of it is due to the clever sophistry of apostate theologians like Fr. S. L. Jaki and Fr. G. Maloney, S.J.

And so, following his New Age gurus, Fr. Maloney must change the very nature of Our Gospel-based spiritual life:

A new global spirituality must be seen as a creative spirituality ­that moves toward cooperative participation in the divine creative work. Now holiness means the activating of our human creative energies in the service of evolving the universe into greater consciousness. (p. 43)

Here we have the immanence and evolutionism of the New Age synthesis in the full false light of its usurpation of truth. This is not the Catholic religion. It is a new paganism.

Finally, I will quote one more passage from Fr. Maloney in which he assures his awe-struck readers that he is still in the realm of Christianity. He must be doubting it himself. Nevertheless, with the boldness of heretical self-confidence wrapped in a charming duplicity, he admits that

Redemption still is a vital part of bringing about a new creation in a synergism with the divine energies, since we cannot heal ourselves of our own selfish resistances without God’s graces. (p. 43)

I can assure every reader of this paper, that I know, from personal experience, the “selfish resistances” referred to here by Fr. Maloney mean an unwillingness to change one’s Catholic Faith, a refusal to accept the New Age synthesis of immanence and evolutionism, and an abhorrence of this subtle fraud.

Fr. Maloney’s book runs to 193 pages including the notes. But I have given here a fair sample of its message and its manner of conveying it.

The message is false, the new myth is a totally bad myth, and the style of the book is full of sophistries “cunningly devised” to entrap the simply ignorant (2 Peter 1:16).

This New Age synthesis of error pervades the institutions of Holy Mother Church. We need to watch, and to pray much.

Notes:

If you consult a Latin-Greek New Testament for the passages referred to in Second Peter and Second Timothy, you will see that the Latin Vulgate translates as fabula the Greek mythos, from which two words come our English fable and myth.

The first Catholic priest-theologian to make a serious attempt to reconcile evolution with Catholic Tradition in the doctrine of the Fathers of the Church was Fr. Ernest C. Messenger, in his book Evolution and Theology: The Problem of Man’s Origin. London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1931.

Fr. Messenger’s book does carry an Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat. In l950 Pope Pius XII published his encyclical Humani Generis dealing with both existentialism and evolution. But it was too little too late. The tide had turned in favor of evolution by then. The history of this modern acceptance of evolutionism by most Catholic theologians is a story that remains to be written.