A minor

Take a look at Londoner Steve Hayhow's post, "Protestant Fiction?" He quotes at length from Peter Leithart, who "locates the problem in the triumph of Zwingli's abandonment of the union of symbol and reality through his sacramental theology: memorialism."

This reminds me of something I just read about one of my favorite Flannery O'Connor stories: "In...'Parker's Back,' Miss O'Connor seems to have succeeded where the great Flaubert failed: in the dramatization of that particular heresy which denies Our Lord corporeal substance. We do not naturally like anything that is unfamiliar." (Caroline Gordon, quoted by Robert Giroux in his introduction to Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories [Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971], p. xv.)

Update (10/3/2007): Here's another article very similar to Leithart's.

Ethan changed the subject and asked why God made The Flood. We were driving around the mall while Hollie took care of some business, and all the other kids were asleep, so it was just Ethan and me. We were talking about geography, and I told him that all states have counties except Louisiana, which has parishes because of our French heritage and the Napoleonic code, which led to rabbit trails on Napoleon, war, the justice of war, etc. I told him I thought Napoleon was a bad guy, but I couldn't really remember, and Ethan asked how he could've been good if he killed a lot of people. I mention the context because I think Ethan's underlying question, which he later came out and asked, was: "Does God mean to kill good people in floods today?" Makes me wonder if he's had underlying questions all along about the justice of The Flood and of current natural disasters.

Anyway, I reminded him that God sent The Flood because the sons of God were marrying the daughters of men and that all the people (except Noah & his family) had become so wicked that the thoughts of their hearts were only evil continually, so much so that God wished he had never made people. I told him that the sons of God marrying the daughters of men probably means God's people were marrying pagans, but that some people believe it means the angels were marrying human women. I told him this interpretation seems less likely because of the way the Bible uses "sons of God" elsewhere, and because the Bible later says "in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven."

To be fair, though, I told him that this interpretation does help explain classical mythology and comic books and that it's the official interpretation of the Catholic Church, I think. I also told him that I didn't know whether angels have always been unable to marry, or if at one time they might've been able to marry each other and/or humans, but that God had since then made them unable to marry.

So here's my question for those of you who hold the comic book position or are Catholic (or both): When God judged the earth with The Flood, did he also sterilize the angels? Is this part of the tradition?