Sermon for the 2nd Sunday before Lent – 12th February 2023: (Genesis 1, 1-2, 3; Roman 8, 18-25; Matthew 6, 25-end)
Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
In the Old Testament reading we have rehearsed the divine narrative of the creation, as presented to us in the Book of Genesis.
For millennia this narrative was received literally as the sole description of how all things, including humans, came into being. The narrative describes a creator God, a God who outpours all of his creative love into things seen and unseen as we say in the Creed.
For the last few hundred years of human existence the literal acceptance of the narrative in Genesis has been replaced by the findings of the scientific enlightenment, in particular since the theory of evolution was proposed by Charles Darwin.
The Church, feeling under enormous threat from a credible alternative to the Holy Scriptures, of course reacted badly, rather than having a rational debate about this new theory of evolution. In one debate, the Bishop of Oxford, who at the time was Samuel Wilberforce, of the same family as William Wilberforce the great social reformer who took on the evils of slavery. It was a rather undignified event in which the bishop enquired of Darwin whether he (Darwin) was descended from an ape through his father’s side of the family, or his mother’s. Hardly an adult way of approaching things!
Darwin’s Theorem of Evolution has now been widely accepted – even though there may be a clue for us in the word ‘theorem’ or theory. It has become the new orthodoxy for explaining the way things are and the ‘how’ it has all developed, and yet it was proposed as a theory.
