Bishop Michael Curry's Problem with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Let me start out by saying that Bishop Michael Curry does not have a problem with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as he referenced him during the wedding sermon for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle recently.

"French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was arguably one of the great minds, great spirits of the 20th century. Jesuit, Roman Catholic priest, scientist, a scholar, a mystic." - Presiding Bishop Michael Curry

Well, the rest of the world has a problem with the late Jesuit. There is a papal warning on Teilhard's books, a warning that some are trying to remove. It seems that great minds like Teilhard's and Curry's are not immune to false teaching. A couple of years ago, Crisis Magazine published an article, "Challenging the Rehabilitation of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin", that documents some of the problems with Teilhard's thinking and why the Pope slapped the warning label on his work. I have selected a few quotations from that longer critique,

"The problem with Teilhard’s 'scientific theology' is not evolution per se but the definition or interpretation of such a term and its application to Christian theology. According to Smith, Teilhard artificially rules out God’s intervention and insists that God can only create through evolution. First, Teilhard limits God’s providence by following a deterministic view of physics (entailing a closed universe) without real justification. The science of quantum mechanics was already in existence during Teilhard’s productive years. A view from quantum mechanics would not support a neatly fashioned deterministic biosphere as Teilhard envisioned. Nor could a professed Christian assert that the universe is a closed system disallowing outside intervention from God. In his work, Christianity and Evolution, Teilhard implicitly asserts this",

"In the earlier conception, God could create, (1) instantaneously, (2) isolated beings, (3) as often as he pleased. We are now beginning to see that creation can have only one object: a universe; that (observed ab intra) creation can be effected only by an evolutive process (of personalizing synthesis); and that it can come into action only once: when ‘absolute’ multiple (which is produced by antithesis to trinitarian unity) is reduced, nothing is left to be united either in God or ‘outside’ God. The recognition that ‘God cannot create except evolutively’ provides a radical solution for our reason to the problem of evil (which is a direct ‘effect’ of evolution), and at the same time explains the manifest and mysterious association of matter and spirit."

"It is clear that Teilhard has an agenda to reconstruct the traditional conception of God, one in which eventually even God must bow down to the process of evolution and goes from being the evolver to part of the evolved."

"Teilhard has also a peculiar vision of Christ in lieu of his views on evolution. He sees Christ as an evolving Christ, much as his vision of God becoming part of the evolutionary process. Christ is dependent upon the cosmogenetic process, as Teilhard intimates himself a month before his own death, in a quote found in The Heart of Matter: 'It is Christ, in very truth, who saves—but should we not immediately add that, at the same time, it is Christ who is saved by Evolution?'” 

"Teilhard’s views in fact have no place for the Incarnation in the traditional Christian sense since nothing can ultimately enter up in the universe unless through a process of evolution since all is reducible to a cosmic evolution. Teilhard’s metaphysical impositions of evolution on the divine nature are completely heterodox because they overthrow the traditional conception of an eternal transcendental God. Teilhard’s heterodoxy extends beyond God’s nature. He accepts the separation of the soul from the body at death but does not allow for its origin via ex-nihilo through God’s creation but instead through gradual physical evolution."

"In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard theorizes that all matter is in the process of becoming spirit through progressive complexification that entails 'matter [giving] birth to life, consciousness and thought—in a word, gives birth to ‘spirit.’”

Lets list some of the problems we have with Teilhard,

1. God can only create through evolution.
2. It is Christ who is saved by Evolution.
3. "Spirit" is born of matter, consciousness, and thought. 

I admit that I have not done an extensive review of all of the man's works, but I do see enough here to be concerned when the leading Episcopalian Bishop claims in front of an audience of perhaps two billion that,

"Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was arguably one of the great minds, great spirits of the 20th century" 

Episcopalians fall too easily under the spell of false teaching, and since Bishop Michael Curry has clearly demonstrated that he is under the spell of his denomination's teaching on same-sex marriage, is it any wonder that he would quote from a discredited Catholic priest in an important sermon?

At least he didn't quote Bishop Spong or Bishop Gene Robinson.