Cycles of Salvation History: Genesis, the Flood and Marian Apparitions

Cycles of Salvation History

Genesis, the Flood and Marian Apparitions

by Ulrich Utiger

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Ulrich Utiger

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First edition published in 2010

Second edition in 2013

Cover picture: Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, engraving, 1504

ISBN: 978-1-301-01192-6

* * * * 

When I look at your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

and the son of man that you care for him?

(Ps 8:3-4)

 * * * *

Preface

This second edition has taken into account the latest results in natural sciences and adapted certain passages correspondingly, some only slightly, others more profoundly. The first part was partly rewritten and restructured. Other passages have gained in clarity by expanding certain topics. Furthermore, appendixes and an index were added.

The extended bibliography may help readers in their choice to deepen some theological, scientific, historical or other concepts. Another more comfortable, but at the same time also less safe method in doing so, is to read articles from en.wikipedia.org. For this purpose, some terms link to such articles (current at the time of writing).

Citations have quotation marks (unless they are separated from the normal text through indentation) and are italic in order to distinguish them from ironic or improper use, which has only quotation marks. On the other hand, italic text without quotes refers to the text itself rather than to its meaning. It is used for cross-references to chapters and sections in the book, special terms, book titles, and so on.

The Bible citations are from different translations, mostly from the English Standard and King James versions as well as the Jerusalem Bible. Sometimes the context requires a more literal translation directly from the original.

Introduction

It is well known that the first chapters of Genesis have been gradually relegated to the realm of mythology during the slow rise of modern science, which led to a mass exodus from the Churches in the past. It seems that in our days, this apparent incompatibility of science with faith has become less important. In any case, most contemporary Christians adopt seemingly without difficulty the view that Genesis is not a scientific but in the first place a theological book.

This view has almost a dogmatic faith among Catholic Christians. If one opposes it, one is doubted or, worse, regarded as a kind of young earth creationist. It is almost the inverse situation of some centuries ago: the hostility of the Church towards science during the Inquisition is now replaced by a general skepticism or indifference towards creationism.

However, science is evolving permanently such that certain questions related to whether the creation accounts are compatible with science must be reexamined continually. For instance, the creation of "the heavens and the earth" described in Genesis 1:1 is traditionally believed to refer to a firmament surrounding the immediate space around the Earth including the stars and the atmosphere. In the seventeenth century, scholars discovered that the stars are much farther away than the outer atmosphere and subsequently adopted an infinite universe, of which the empty space was supposed to exist since eternity.

Genesis 1:1 does not adopt this view because the creation of "the heavens" as space and home for all celestial bodies would be unnecessary if space is supposed to have always existed. According to general relativity however, space is something that is being continually formed since the big bang. In fact, space-time has a very complex structure, which had to be created. So according to modern cosmology, Genesis 1:1 is not outdated at all.

This does not make the reference to the atmosphere and the Earth redundant. As we are going to see, Genesis 1:1 refers to more than one natural phenomenon, which raises the question whether the whole creation account is multi-significant. To answer this, let us consider the speaking snake of the garden of Eden: the dilemma that no speaking snakes exist in nature can be solved in assuming that Genesis 1:1-19 refers to both an animal and an individual capable of speech traditionally interpreted as the Devil, a fallen angel. So two contexts, in which both the animal and the Devil independently play their role on time-shifted levels, must be distinguished. Therefore, this passage is multi-significant and the paradox (a speaking animal) created by the mixing up of different contexts is clarified by separating the various references.

Furthermore, it can be shown that the universe contains repeating patterns, to which the first chapter of Genesis refers by such multi-significance (or multi-reference). The creation story thus becomes perfectly compatible with modern cosmology and Earth history. The same happens for the biological evolution. It can be shown, among other things, that the traditional literal interpretation of Genesis 2:7, according to which God modeled man of dust from the ground and then made him alive by breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, is not exactly what we must believe from this passage because it refers to several contexts, namely to the angels, the first humans and the virginal conception of Christ. There is a revealing relation between all these contexts involving the fall of the angels, puberty, sexuality, family and the spiritual rebirth introduced by Christ (Jn 3:1-8; Gal 4:4-7).

Similar repeating patterns appear on the level of salvation history. For instance, the Jewish people were deported several times. The first deportation happened in 722 BC as consequence of the occupation of the Israelite northern kingdom by the Assyrians. A second deportation arrived with the Babylonian occupation between 597 and 587 BC. A similar judgment came upon the Jewish people through the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes between 169 and 162 BC, as well as through the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70, which led to their final Diaspora.

All these judgments unfold according to four typical phases characterized respectively by initial peace, sin (apostasy), judgment (deportations or persecutions) and a return to peace. These four phases form together a cycle and only differentiate from each other by their typical character, so not by a more or less equal duration, for the first phase is always considerably longer than the three following ones. With the return to peace, a new cycle begins.

It can be shown that all the history of salvation as transmitted by the Bible unfolds according to this cyclic recurrence in such a typical and coherent manner as if its over seventy books had been written by a single author. Salvation history starts with the angels, who were the first to turn away from God, thus involving the need for their return to God, that is, for their salvation. For similar reasons, salvation also became necessary for humanity. This is why all the past, present and future of salvation history is unfolding according to repeating cycles.

A recurring salvation history offers important solutions. For instance, the flood account gets an entirely new shape. There is not only one flood anymore but several. Similarly, there is more than one Adam and Noah. From this can be inferred that the long patriarchs’ ages have several meanings, which allows to calculate dates for our ancestors that accord with the fossil record, that is, 500’000 years ago for the first Neanderthals and 200’000 years ago for the first modern humans.

Other mysteries related to Genesis, Daniel, Revelation and numerous other topics can be explained through a recurring salvation history. In particular, Marian apparitions can be understood as events making part of a special phase of the recurring cycles.

Part I: The Creation of the Universe

Figure 1: Hildegard of Bingen: God’s work (twelfth century). This picture represents the medieval belief in a spherical Earth with different seasons at the same time.

The first chapters of Genesis contain many theological elements that are important for Christian faith. For instance, the fall of the first humans, on which is based original sin, and prophetic elements announcing Christ through Adam. This faith is undermined if the two creation accounts turn out to be incompatible with modern science. Declaring them meaningless as scientific accounts does not solve the problem, because there are clear statements regarding the creation of the universe, the Earth and its inhabitants that cannot attributed to a theological realm alone. This is why these statements are analyzed first in this book. Assuming that their sense is multiple, the first and second account of creation turn out to be perfectly compatible with cosmology, geology and Darwin’s concept of evolution, with one exception however: natural selection, which is a materialistic and atheistic concept that is incompatible not only with creation but also with science.

The First Account of Creation

Origins

The creation of the angels

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1).

This well-known first verse of the Bible seems to refer exclusively to the creation of the planet Earth and its blue sky. Yet, as we know from modern astronomy, the Earth is not alone in the universe. There are an impressive number of other celestial objects much older than the Earth, which was formed only 4.6 billion years ago. This is rather late compared with the 13.7-billion-years-old universe. So if one claims that the term earth refers to our planet, we would have a first contradiction of Scriptures by modern science because the Earth was not created "in the beginning" but only billions of years later.

In order to understand this apparent inconsistency, we need to analyze in more detail the original Hebrew text: the word shamayim (heavens) is used many times in the Old Testament and has several meanings. In Deuteronomy 4:19 and 1 Kings 8:30, for instance, it is used to design the invisible world inhabited by God. The same word is used to describe the place of the angels (Gen 21:17; 22:11, 15) or the host of the Sun, the Moon and the stars (Dt 4:10; Isa 13:10). It also designs the place where the birds fly, that is, the atmosphere (Gen 1:20, 26). The word erets (earth) must be understood correspondingly. In fact, it has several meanings as well. It means the whole world (Psa 72:19) as counterpart to heaven (Job 28:24; 37:3) or as the place of all nations (Isa 14:26) as well as a limited region, for instance the land of Canaan in Genesis 11:31; 12:5. The real meaning must be determined from the context and specific rules, as we shall see.

Since shamayim may also mean the world of the angels, the Bible hints to their existence. According to Colossians 1:16-17, the angels did not exist from all eternity but have been created:

For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things have been created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

According to Job 38:4-7, the sons of God shouted for joy when God laid the foundations of the earth. It is commonly assumed that the sons of God are angels. So this means that they have been created before the Earth. This is also the point of view of St. Augustine who states that shamayim refers in the first place to the invisible world of the angels, and erets to the totality of the terrestrial universe, the visible world.[1] Shamayim is mentioned before erets, which means that the angels were created "in the beginning" and the physical universe thereafter. Interpreting Genesis 1:1 in this manner solves the aforementioned inconsistency, since earth in this context does not refer to our planet but to the totality of the matter of the entire universe, which was created at the big bang.

However, a small part of that matter will later form our Solar System and the Earth. This is why Genesis 1:1 also refers to the Earth. In fact, shamayim and erets are placeholders for different heavens and earths. This can be concluded because these terms are repeated several times in the account, which points to the creation of new heavens and earths. Genesis 1:6-8, for instance, mentions the creation of an expanse again called shamayim. Since Genesis 1:1 has already mentioned the creation of shamayim, this must be a new heaven. Therefore, there must be several heavens, big and small ones with different properties.[2] The same happens with erets (in the singular) in Genesis 1:9-10, where it is applied to the continent after Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 already used the same word to introduce different earths. Consequently, several earths must exist as well, big and small ones, which correspond to the big and small heavens to form together several heaven / earth dualities. This results in restrictions indicating that big structures are prefigured by small structures, or vice versa.

This is why the invisible and visible world form together such a duality heaven / earth. Inside the visible world is found a smaller duality of this kind, that is, the space-time / matter duality, because not only matter but also space-time is an entity that must have been created, as we are going to see. This gives us a rule for further understanding of Genesis: the duality heaven / earth of Genesis 1:1 is a structure that goes throughout the whole account. Like the different meanings of the words themselves, this duality successively refers to even more restricted universes that are contained in the previous ones. The invisible and visible world is the first of this series of dualities followed by the restricted spaces of our physical universe, our galaxy, the Milky Way, our Solar System as well as our planet. So Genesis 1:1 finally also refers to atmosphere / Earth and even ocean / continents, although other passages more explicitly relate to these dualities, as we shall see.

The big bang

If space was nothing, the question would rise why God created it? In fact, before the advent of modern physics, space has never been considered a real entity. In mathematics, space can be formulated in different manners. The oldest and simplest model is Euclidean space. In two dimensions, this is simply a flat infinite surface. This can be extended to three or an arbitrary number of dimensions. Such spaces seemingly do not require to be created.

More sophisticated concepts came up in the 19th century with Riemannian geometry, according to which shapes like a circle line or the surface of a sphere are closed and curved spaces. Also infinite open spaces are possible like hyperbolic surfaces, for instance. Intuitively spoken, a Riemannian space is the locus of the shape alone, the place outside does not make part of it. Any physics are thought to take place exclusively inside these spaces. Therefore, inhabitants of such shapes could not go elsewhere and would perceive nothing from the outside. Living beings on a circle line, for instance, would be kind of worms that could not cross each other because there is no escape from the line.

Based on these concepts, Albert Einstein developed his general relativity in 1915, which is the basis for theories on the evolution and shape of the entire universe. Einstein initially defended a static universe with not moving galaxies by introducing a cosmological constant into his equations to counteract the attractive effect of gravity on matter, which would otherwise cause the universe to collapse. At the same time in 1927, the Catholic priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître proposed an expanding universe in order to counterbalance gravity. He was also the first to theoretically derive what later became known as Hubble’s law and made the first estimation of the Hubble constant. Lemaître was also the first to propose the big bang theory.

However, he was not very well noticed at first, until Edwin Hubble experimentally observed that all galaxies scatter at a speed proportional to the distance to our galaxy. The proportional constant of this linear law is precisely the Hubble constant. This scattering must be considered an intrinsic expansion of space. In fact, it is not matter that is spreading into preexisting space, but space itself becomes larger. This can be compared to the expansion of a balloon being inflated. Any given points on its surface get further apart from each other. In a similar way, each galaxy is withdrawing from all the others.

Because of this scattering of all galaxies, one has to conclude that they were closer to one another in the past. In a very distant past, they must have been even so close together that their matter constituted one single indiscernible mass. Numerous ulterior confirmations finally brought most cosmologists to the conclusion that all the matter of the universe was formed in an immense explosion called the big bang, a term coined by astronomer Fred Hoyle in 1949 as an attempt to discredit Lemaître’s cosmology because it provided arguments for creation.

According to a experimentally determined cosmological parameter called omega, the universe will either eternally expand or slow down through the interaction of gravitation to finally collapse like stones flung in the air coming back to the ground. This possible contraction is called big crunch. Omega also determines the shape of the universe. Three main models enter into question: if omega is equal to one, the universe is infinite and Euclidean flat. If omega is less than one, the universe is also infinite but hyperbolically curved. This case is also called open. A value of omega greater than one implies a spherically shaped universe also called closed.

Let us return to our question if space may be considered a real entity on the same level than matter. This must clearly be answered affirmatively because space has properties like curvature and expansion. Nothing cannot have any properties, it is just nothing. Other space properties are contained in the cosmological parameter omega, which is made up of divers densities like matter, radiation energy and vacuum energy density. If matter density is taken into account, then also radiation energy must be considered because of Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence, the famous formula E = mc², which means that energy can be transformed into matter and vice versa. So radiation energy density is not fundamentally different from matter density. If in our days radiation plays a minor role, this was different in the early universe when radiation dominated over matter and mainly influenced the rate at which the universe expanded.

Vacuum energy density, on the other hand, is a very strange concept. It arises from quantum mechanics, more precisely from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle with respect to energy and time. It states that the vacuum can borrow energy during a very short time and produce a particle-antiparticle pair. Within the allowed time interval, they must annihilate each other and