Whenever one reads statements such as “the Bible is not concerned with…” one should, I think, be immediately suspicious of a perhaps not very hidden agenda (see also my previous blog on this).
So, while the Bible may not have an interest in the death of dinosaurs, specifically (although some people seem to see the link!), does it have an interest in animal death, per se? To think that the Bible has no comment to make on animal death, or that animal death is not relevant to the Bible’s picture of the world as fallen, is, I think, inaccurate; moreover, it is an inaccuracy that hobbles a proper understanding of the Bible’s message. Taken to its full extent, it seems to suggest that there is an independent 'nature' separate to the world of the Bible and one that has different rules, different frames of reference, if not a whole different coordinate system from that described in the Bible. So two worlds, one derived from God, as per the creation, the other from who knows where, that is separated in reality from our God??
But perhaps the author is not interested in the question because to admit it would unseat this artificial division the author needs between salvation history and creation history to avoid challenging the prevailing world concept that has as its starting point that there is no God; and like all pagan world concepts needs huge spans of time (during which animals must have died, obviously, and before Adam brought death: 1 Cor 15:21 )
to permit the indulgence that what is not credibly possible in a short period becomes possible (likely, even) given long periods; where objective events are lost in the mists of time and where human imagination and myth-making can exercise their options independently of God.
Now, the implication of deferring to myth over historical objectivity (i.e. what actually occurred) is that the myth-makers’ and users’ preoccupations shift to mankind and away from God, pretending a breach in the chain of cause and effect that joins us and God (thereby asserting humanities’ forlorn desire for independence of its creator). Taking the story of our past and the setting it gives our human exchanges and relationships from our imagination dislocates the historical stream which in the Bible resolutely makes our connection with God objective, real and traceable in the terms that make sense in the setting which we share with God: he as creator, we as creature.
Myth lets imagination take our focus and erects a setting that denies God and his real involvement with the creation as a totality. If we deny that the Bible is other than myth, then we run the risk of presenting God as being a result of human invention, and his ‘creation’ being a comforting story that transfers our origin from this world to another world that has escaped from the objective flow of history. So there must be multiple worlds for myth to be entertained as having any substantial connection with anything, most of which must be fictional and without points of reference in this world that would permit it to be objectively and independently communicated to unify word and reality (thus ‘myth’, of course)
And this leads to my next point: creation is a totality.
Separating animal death from human death must, I think, deny the ontological unity of creation. Creation then ceases to have a single mode of connection with God, but multiple modes and therefore must have multiple ontological coordinates (to borrow from physics) that only connect in God. But the creation account does not read as though this is or could even be the case; nor is it a possibility theologically, I think, given the obvious relationship between humanity and creation and humanity and God with mankind as the steward of the creation on God’s behalf ( Genesis 1:26 .;)
The unity is indicated by the dependent sequence in the six days (each successive day relying in a physical manner on the acts of the preceding days, man being set over the creation, and in relationship with God, and God making living creatures, a translation of nephesh chayah, also used of man!
To think that God, in who is life, also has in him, at the same time, death, which is the absence of life, and by extension, absence of God, is simply impossible. To think that anti-life can occur for some living creatures (animals) but not others (man), when all come from the will of the one who is love and only provides for the best within the scope of relationship of dependence (which was rejected by A&E), and who is life ( John 1:4 is plainly nonsensical.
One of the grand under-themes of Genesis 1 is its anti-idealism (as though God predicted the without-hope-ness of western philosophy from Plato to Hegel), thus its realism: that what is real is circumscribed by the scope of creation: the entities and relationships they are in as defined by God. The great breakdown is brought in divorce from God through sin, so the antithesis of God enters as he is rejected. Life is pushed out and its reverse, death, that which is not in Christ, enters. But only through one man!
Splitting the scope of death between different living creatures excludes part of creation from the Bible’s message. But it is a critical element of the Bible’s message that it has in view the whole of creation and none of it is outside of the Bible’s historical flow, and no part of it has a reference outside the creation account. The chief theme of the Bible is the cause culmination and conclusion of salvation; salvation history, but it is all set in the realist structure that is given by, totally, the creation, the physical cosmos and our place in it. The fall we are clearly told devastated the whole of creation, and not just our relationship with God, but all relationships. Indeed, we can go no further than what is told to us of the new creation to see it as a complete undoing of sin and death, the final enemy (if an enemy, how a part of the creation pre-fall, from the one who is life?)
To think that we can separate one type of death from another is a duplicitous theological evasion of the confrontation of the word of God with the rejection of God. It accepts a definition of the world that does not derive from the revelation of God, but, as part of paganism’s long history of mythical origins that remove God from man, springs from the modern deism of Hutton who thought that we needed long ages for the earth to take its present form. This denies what we are told of the flood, as Peter warned us (2 Pt 2:5). Peter clearly saw the need for theological connection between the creation and the saviour!
