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111 chapter six The Church and the Eucharist in Evolution As the previous chapters have examined, acknowledging the findings of evolutionary science can highlight and clarify the evolutionary achievement that Jesus brought about for the human race through his leading it through death to a richer life with an altruistic God. It can also enable us to dispense with the traditional beliefs in original sin, the Fall, and redemptive atonement, or propitiatory sacrifice, along with the inherent historical and intellectual difficulties that have been raised by these beliefs. Is it possible that such an exploration of Christian belief in reference to evolution, as this chapter is titled, can expand to throw light on other traditional doctrines, including the extent of salvation and the nature of the church and of the Eucharist? That is the purpose of this chapter. ho shall be saved? A preliminary question that arises in exploring the impact of Christ’s evolutionary work for the human species must ask how members of the species will benefit from this achievement; or, in terms of the traditional doctrine, who will be saved, and who condemned, within an evolutionary context.To begin with the latter, the possibility of being consigned to eternal suffering by a just God is not a tenet—or a prospect—that all Christian believers have found it easy to live with (Darwin thought everlasting punishment for nonbelievers“a damnable doctrine”).1 Yet we appear to have the incontrovertible teaching of Jesus on the subject in Matthew 25:41–46 that when the Son of Man returns in judgment, the good and the bad will separately be consigned to what Kelly calls “their eternal destinies.”2 Origen, and under his influence other Greek authorities, were disposed to question the eternity of the divine condemnatory sentence, arguing that 112 The Church and the Eucharist in Evolution God’s power would finally triumph, although the sixth-century Synod of Constantinople anathematized such a view (DS 411), while among the Latins, Ambrosiaster, Jerome, and Ambrose were disposed to mitigate the sentence for some of the condemned.3 Augustine, however, considered at length and adamantly rejected what he considered“the error, promoted by tenderness of heart and human compassion, that the miseries of the condemned would come to an end.” Would this, he asked rhetorically, even indignantly, extend as far as the evil angels and the Devil himself?!4 (Origen thought this not impossible.)5 Even though some people might argue for eventual divine clemency from Paul’s assertion in Romans 11:32 that “God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all,” in point of fact, Augustine retorted, “they are pleading their own cause, promising themselves a delusive impunity for their own disreputable lives by supposing an all-embracing mercy of God towards the human race.”6 It has always been generally understood by Christians that no human individual is considered as definitively sent to hell, but it was considered a very distinct and alarming possibility, as many graphic church murals and windows that depict the final judgment and damnation relished portraying in the Middle Ages, even up to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, where popes are elected.7 The Council of Florence in 1442 was in no doubt as to what classes of people merited eternal damnation, being firmly of the view that “no one outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans but also Jews, heretics and schismatics, can become sharers in eternal life, but are headed for the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels [Mt 25:41] unless they join the church before they die” (DS 1351). And not just the dead, but also the eternally damned, would be in the great majority, for, as Matthew recorded,“few are chosen” (Mt 22:14). As A. T. Hanson observed,“Whether we turn to Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin, we can scarcely avoid the conclusion that in their view only some are predestined to eternal life, and that the rest are predestined to eternal loss.”8 Both Catholics and Reformers followed Augustine in this gloomy prediction , but with the beginning of the questioning of the verbal inspiration of scripture, Hastings noted, Protestant theologians began to divide ranks on the eternity of hell, although it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that Catholics too began to question the biblical and church teaching that those condemned to hell would suffer for eternity.9 The opposing theological view, universalism, holds...

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