"'Way back before space travel, the Church decided Jesus had come only to Earth, to man. If other intelligent races need salvation - and obviously a lot of them do! - God will have made His suitable arrangements for them. Sure.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Problem of Pain" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December 2009), pp. 103-134 AT 110.
Yet the Jerusalem Catholic Church later converts and ordains a Wodenite, Axor.
On Aeneas, Ivar Frederiksen refers to:
"...any Bible-and-blaster yeoman."
-The Day of Their Return, 13, p. 174.
These are two completely different versions of Christianity:
(i) Christians are members of an institution that adopts an official position on various issues.
(ii) Christians are individuals who accept personal salvation as proclaimed in the New Testament. They have no official position on whether extra-terrestrials can be saved or possibly regard them as outside salvation.
I once formulated the differences as follows -
Catholicism: the Word of God is the teaching of the Church;
Protestantism: the Word of God is a Book;
Christianity: the Word of God is a Person.
If God's self-expression is neither a set of doctrines to be accepted by believers nor a collection of texts to be regarded as authoritative by believers but a person directly encountered by believers, then religion is a matter not of words but of experience. In my experience, life and meditation are not an encounter with a person although practice continues.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I have to disagree with you here. Catholics belong to a Church which believes in both of your numbered points. The rage and fury which so many have with the Church on issues like abortion being one notorious example.
Other issues are still open questions on which the Church has not thought it yet necessary to make an authoritative decision. Such as whether or not non-human intelligent beings exist on other worlds exist, have Fallen, and can become Christians. I touched on some of these issues in my "God and Alien..." article.
My impression, possibly wrong, has been that Catholic theologians who took and interest in these matters lean to the view explicated in THE GAME OF EMPIRE--non-humans who wish to do so can be accepted as converts, be baptized, with some going on to be ordained to holy orders.
I think Peter Berg belonged to a non-Catholic Christian denomination which took the opposite view: Christianity is for mankind alone and God will provide for the salvation of non human races which are Fallen. We are never told which kinds of Christians live on Aeneas. And that bit about "Bible and blaster yeomen" has a Protestant ring!
Ad astra! Sean
Ad astra! Sean
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