Believers don’t have any trouble believing that God “made” the universe, but they do have difficulty in accepting the idea that He made it in six days. It is so extraordinarily difficult for moderns to believe the Genesis account of Creation is any more than an allegory that most people conclude it is precisely that.
Friday’s column was concerned with what a hard time many people have in believing that He has made “drinking My Blood and eating My Body” a requirement for having life within us.
Catholic Fundamentalism respectfully suggests that we can grow closer to God if we accept both the “eat My flesh and drink My blood” injunction and take the rest of Scripture as literally as possible.
Taking the Creation Account in the Book of Genesis just as literally as we are told to take the “eat My flesh and drink My blood” passages helps both Catholics and Fundamental Protestants see the common ground they share. Both groups struggle mightily to replace human vanity with faith, so are automatically closer to God, and to each other, than those with less faith.
It is, from our pride-filled, human condition, as difficult to put aside the worldly descriptions of reality that make people mock transubstantiation as it is to ignore the protestations against a six day creation. We don’t have anything better to do but to ignore the worldly and bring others along as we grow closer to Him.
Jesus did not tell us to take the Genesis account of creation literally. He did tell us to take literally those passages concerning “drink My Blood and eat My Flesh”. That tells us that salvation does not depend on taking Genesis, and the rest of the Bible, literally. We must, if we are obedient, take literally the “eat My Body and drink My Blood” passages. Taking the rest of Scripture as literally as we can won’t hurt us. On the contrary, it helps get us in the habit of taking God so seriously that we find ourselves at “the beginning of wisdom”.
