Hi, Christine —

Thanks for your question.

You are speaking of the Gap Theory espoused by a guy named Dakes. Dakes was a fundamentalist of the worst kind, known as a Dispensationalist. Most of what he wrote is pure heresy. Aside from faith in Christ and the Trinity, he has little else in common with Catholic Teaching.

Genesis, Chapter one, is not meant as a historical record. The whole point of the chapter is to tell us God created the universe out of nothing. Out of chaos He brought order. He made man in His image and likeness as the crowning jewel of His creation.

The reason Genesis records this happening in seven days is because the Hebrew word seven is the same word for oath. Oaths are the essential elements of a covenant; a covenant being an exchange of persons. Therefore the Hebrew reader would have seen that six days of creation and the Seventh Day as the sign of the Covenant God made with His creation. God first makes the creation and then gives Himself to it.

That's the point of Genesis chapter 1. It is not a play by play description of creation.

I take the Bible literally more often than most modern Catholic scholars. I'm no liberal in these matters but there is really no tradition in the Catholic Church to understand Genesis 1 as text of history and science.

It is a literary construct, meant to convey a deep theological truth.

John

Hi, Christine —

There were no pre-Adam people. By definition and Revelation, Adam is the first human.

There may have been various ages between Adam and Abraham, and these have indications in the Scriptural text.

As for pre-existing spirits, the only spirits who exist in pure form are the angels. No human spirits pre-existed the body. As with Adam, they are breathed into matter at the time of the first existence of the individual. We are not spirits who inhabit a body that we dispense with. We are persons who are both spiritual and physical; we are ensouled flesh, enfleshed soul.

Death, the separation, is not a shedding of a lower form, but is the unnatural, and un-planned by God, dissolution of the unity He created, a dissolution caused by sin. Fortunately, since we were made to exist forever, our souls continue to exist while our bodies decay, only to be reformed so that we can be whole again at the Resurrection.

Mary Ann

Hi, Christine —

My colleague John said:
the Hebrew word seven is the same word for oath.

The word sacrament has a similar origin. It means to seven oneself. If you look up the definition of the word sacrament and its etymology you will see the word origin comes from:

sacramentum meaning: obligation, oath.

In every sacrament of the Church, God is swearing an oath to fulfill what that sacrament does for the faithful. This is a great consolation for the faithful.

Hope this helps,

Mike