EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLE 



poraries some events happening in the beginning in order to 

 show forth God's omnipotence over all creation and His 

 special providence over man, the complete dependence of man 

 on his Creator, and man's tragic resistance to God. The story 

 that unfolds is one of promise and salvation. Although com- 

 promised by sin, the divine plan eternally envisioned will yet 

 be brought to success. The mighty deeds wrought by God 

 for His people began with creation, and so the story of the 

 origins is set at the head of the Book. But God's activity 

 described in that Book is soteriological rather than cosmo- 

 logical. 



To understand the teaching of the first three chapters of 

 Genesis, which are among the most engrossing parts of the 

 Bible, we have to know how to distinguish the religious truths 

 that are presented from the manner in which they are proposed. 

 In other words, we must differentiate between what the author 

 teaches and the literary dress or literary forms he employs to 

 express his mind. We are here confronted with a real problem. 

 We cannot regard all the statements in these chapters as 

 literally true; on the other hand, they are not myths. Directives 

 toward a solution have been supplied in recent years by the 

 great biblical encyclical, Divino afflante Spiritu, of Pius XII. 

 "Let the interpreter use every care and take advantage of 

 every suggestion provided by recent research, in an endeavor 

 to ascertain the distinctive genius of the sacred writer, his 

 condition in life, the age in which he lived, the written or oral 

 sources to which he may have had recourse, and the literary 

 forms he employed. In this way he will be able better to 

 discover who the sacred w^riter was and what he meant by 

 what he wrote. For it is clear that the supreme rule of inter- 

 pretation is that which enables- us to discern and declare what 

 the author intended to say.'''^ 



By such directives the Holy See indicates how a grasp of 

 difficult sections of the Bible is to be sought: exegetes are to 

 undertake a more thorough analysis of its literary forms. In 

 this way we may hope to determine with greater clarity and 

 firmnes the teaching which the sacred writers meant to convey, 



* AAS 35 (1943) 314. See also the letter of the Bibhcal Commission to 

 Cardinal Suhard. AAS 40 (1948) 47. 



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