Creation Rediscovered by Gerard J. Keane
Does the term "Theistic Evolution" have a legitimate place in Christian discourse, or might it designate some insight of Christian reflection, other than being a generic synonym for change or progress? Perhaps it might, but in that case it will be necessary to define the term carefully and explain why it does not entail the radical revisions of doctrine and revealed history which nigh universal convention about this word entails. It is difficult to see, however, how in practice the devilish Hegelian substitution of becoming for being thereby deifying change and directly contradicting the immutability of God and eternity of truths as taught by James 1:17 - can be exorcised without abandoning the use of this phrase.
This means, therefore, that the phrase is misleading, possesses a built-in ambiguity and is "two-faced." Theistic suggests faith in God, the Creator; Evolution suggests just the opposite. Thus, the phrase is a parte rei, apart from the good intentions of its users, misleading. It points to an understanding of the world in terms of progress, an ever upward, spiral-like unfolding of the inner potentiality of matter until it reaches man, and in the version of Teilhard de Chardin, Christ Himself. What primarily and proximately energizes this process is from within the process itself, the existential - only incidentally supported and perfected by divine "intervention," an "intervention" defined and conditioned by the process, instead of the process being defined and limited by the prior act of creation and differentiation of essences. The classic, modern formulation of this view is the Hegelian.
How different this strange view is from the traditional vision of a created Universe hierarchically structured by the Creator from without, in terms of His own eternal counsels. Each order (grade of being) of that Universe is the direct work of the Creator and by His foreordination subordinated to and recapitulated by the higher orders, each of which is a grace in respect to the lower, the highest being the Incarnate Saviour and His Mother, the immaculately conceived Virgin. Another word for this "teleological" action is mediation, and it is the only basis for a true, and so humane vision of Origins and existence.
It is no accident that so many prominent promoters of the evolutionary perspective as the basis for a total reconstruction of Christian thought and life are Marian minimalists, indisposed to a hierarchical, mediational vision of the Universe, tending always to collapse the higher orders of grace into a single, naturalistic level of existence. Nor is it a coincidence that many promoting Theistic Evolution in the Church are radically opposed to a dogmatic definition of the universal mediation of the Virgin Mother centering on her role as co-redemptrix with her Redeemer Son on Calvary and during the celebration of the Eucharist.
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