Mr
Bryan Fischer made quite a conjecture on Focal Point (4 & 5 Sept.
2019): His contention is that the lack
of the death penalty is the thread running through the entirety of Genesis 4-9,
that this is the key to understanding all the events that take place in those
chapters, from the murder of Abel to the Flood.
In short, he holds that God did not allow Cain to be executed for the
murder of his brother, but gave him a lesser sentence, that mankind might know
by experience that a society without the death penalty leads to all kinds of
chaos and turmoil.
This
is wrong on a number of levels.
First,
the punishment God gave Cain was worse than the curse laid upon Adam and
Eve: ‘Thou art cursed from the earth’
rather than ‘Cursed is the earth in thy labors’ (St John Chrysostom, quoted in
Fr Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, 2nd edn.,
2011, p. 301). But Mr Fischer,
apparently knowing better than the Holy Fathers and God Himself, dares to
pronounce this curse as a trifling matter.
What dangerous pridefulness!
Mr
Fischer goes on to say that the wickedness mentioned in Gen. 6 is the result of
a society unrestrained by capital punishment.
But the Holy Fathers say nothing of this theory of his. What they do mention as the root of this
corruption is sexual lust (Fr Seraphim, pgs. 319, 324), not the lack of an
execution of Cain or anyone else for murder.
The
Holy Fathers liken the after-Flood world given by God to Noah and his kinfolk to
that to which God gave Adam and Eve in the beginning: God tells both families to increase and
multiply. He gives both food to
eat. And He gives both one commandment
to follow: For Adam, it was abstaining
from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; for Noah it was not to eat
blood - it was to be drained out of the animal.
The blood, symbolizing life, is God’s; the meat is man’s. The Fathers do at this point (Gen. 9) say
that allowing capital punishment is meant to curb men from murdering one
another, but they tie this in with the new conditions of the world after the
Flood (Fr Seraphim, pgs. 349-50), and not as Mr Fischer would have it, as the
concluding statement for some kind of sick, divinely sanctioned, social
engineering experiment God was conducting upon mankind to prove an hypothesis
(i.e., that the death penalty is a powerful remedy for societal troubles). If all this were supposed to show the
efficacy of the death penalty in curbing man’s sinfulness, then it failed pretty
miserably, for not too long in the future, mankind was once again rebelling
mightily against God at the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11) despite the death penalty
being part of the laws.
Added
to this, Mr Fischer is also of the opinion that the 120 years mentioned near
the beginning of Gen. 6 is a reduced lifespan God allotted to man at this time. But again he is at odds with the Holy
Fathers, who say that the 120 years refers to the amount of time mankind was
given to repent before the Flood came (Fr Seraphim, p. 319).
We
are not trying to be ugly and nit-pick.
We are only concerned that Mr Fischer, departing from the sure path of
salvation laid out by the Holy Fathers and inclining to his own understanding,
is going to fall into a pit and harm himself, and cause a large number of
others who follow him to do the same.
After all, Arius, Nestorius, Eutyches, and all the other heretics no
doubt felt a strong sense of ‘inner assurance’ that their teachings, based on
their private understanding of the Holy Scriptures, about the Holy Trinity, the
Lord Jesus, His Most Pure Mother, and other matters of doctrine were correct, when
they had actually wandered far from the Truth.
We are all very good at deceiving ourselves that the darkness we see is
light. It is imperative for us to check
our opinions against the teachings of the Fathers that we may live in the Light
of God and not the darkness of the devil.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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