A few of us were discussing various faith-related questions recently at a weekend away at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba (just so you know where) when the discussion swung around to the implications of Adam being the ‘death-bringer’ when there must have been death before the fall.
This referred to the death of plants and animals from creation to the time of Adam’s choice to break relationship with God.
A few paths to solution were offered, but it interested me that implicit in the question was a view that history was defined by evolutionary/naturalist conceptualisations, and not biblical ones.
This seems to stem either from a view that Genesis 1 does not or cannot provide the historical frame in which the Bible sets our understanding of God’s actions with respect to his people (which actions extend to the first move he makes in creation), or that such information, if provided and not mythopoeic is not important to the extent that a view of history based on naturalism (or deism, if we think of Hutton, the dean of modern geological time) provides what we need to know about the world we are in, contrary, again, to Paul, I would suggest.
[BTW, if Genesis 1, etc. is mythopoeic, then it does not give information and cannot produce knowledge; it would thus stand contrary to the 'mission' of the scriptures, which is to give us knowledge about God's relationship to his creation.*]
It would fit here to launch a discussion of the philosophical idealism that allows such a view to have any air-time in contradistinction to the biblical historical frame (and contrary to the Bible’s own philosophical footing, of “concrete realism”; but then, if the historical and theological verity of early Genesis is denied, the source of the Bible’s realism is also denied, and one is forced to make one’s hermeneutical reference outside the Bible). Such discussion is, however, for another time.
SOLUTIONS
There were three basic offerings to resolve the problem of death before Adam.
1. Adam’s death was retroactive and explained animal death that predated Adam’s death.
2. The death Adam brought was restricted to ‘spiritual’ (because animal and plant death [must have] preceded the fall).
3. God anointed, as it were, a great ape with spirit, to become Adam, [which, being against a background of continued death, the ‘death’ as curse would have been of reduced significance: more emblematic than actual.]
Oddly, the Bible's solution, that there was no death before Adam, didn't get any discussion: the discussion seemed to prefer to stay away from the scriptures, per se, despite, for example, Romans 8:22!
Comments
I’ve not previously come across the idea of the effect of Adam’s sin being retro-operative (that is, the animals pre-fall would have suffered the curse because of something that’ll happen in future) and the person who raised it may have sought to get discussion going (which was a great line with which to do it, IMO), but it seems to not properly accommodate a number of factors related to the historical sequence that God has created**, the nature of God’s relationship with his creation, and particularly Adam, the nature of the creation as act and its being (or ‘Being’: capitalised), and the intrusion that death constitutes in the ‘very good’ creation.
I think the simplest response is: death is at root separation from God. At the fall, man turned his back on God, rejecting God’s fellowship. God in responding to man’s choice, man as being in God’s image and responsible to steward the creation, stepped back from the creation in total, but as loving, of course looked toward Christ to heal this breach, 'over' heal it, in fact, in the new creation.
Death before Adam would have God stepping back from the creation before his fellowship was rejected, which would be decidedly odd, as there would have been no basis for this, and it would be unloving, to say the least.
Death before Adam would also have put the creation into a contradiction, with the continuity of being within a unified creation being broken from the start. Noting that both Adam and the creatures had living souls (nephesh chayyah), how could some living soul be not subject to death while others were, when there was no cause for it? It would cause a breach in their joint 'living soul-ness' that is not suggested in the Bible, but has to be imported to 'save' a materialist cosmogony!
Also, the creation being ‘very good’ could not in part have a representation of the last enemy, death; particularly when the toppling of death is signified in the scriptures by peace in the animal kingdom (lions and lambs, children and asps, etc.); perhaps to indicate the fulsome extent of the new creation across its entire span. I note in this context that the Bible teaches that animals did not eat each other prior to the fall (Gen 1:30).
[BTW, this also illumines why plant ‘death’ is not biblical death: plants, and possibly insects, for example, do not have living souls: the confusion arises from taking our concept of death and reading it back into the biblical one.]
The other thought is that God created in sequence: time and its passing has real meaning in the creation and in our life experience; to topple the meaning of time in the operation of the creation would render impossible the causal certainty by which we live and think. If this had been a widespread reading of the scriptures in the past it would, I think, have frustrated the rise of modern science, rather than scriptures being read in direct realism leading to its rise.
The other solutions aren't solutions at all, but are in opposition to the biblical data. They simply deny what the Bible teaches. Restricting 'death' to the physical shies away from the materiality of the creation, and the unity of life across domains of spiritual and 'soul-ful', the other, that, in trivialising death does more to undermine the crucifiction than solve a problem of naturalism's, not the Bible's making (eg. I Cor 15:21).
*I take it that the point of the creation account is that it conjoins our experience with the creation showing our 'setting' for relationship with God being in the same domain as our experience of life: continuous with the interlocking chain from God's will to word to Adam being made in God's image (from 'dust' by God and not through intermediate steps) to us being from Adam. If this is not so, but just myth, then there are disjuncts all along the chain and God's existential claims with respect to us have no tangible foundation in the domain in which we enter relationships.
**Any theology that must set aside the sequential approach to time in the Bible, seems to partake of a paganised view of time, which seeks to set aside historical sequence to give a footing to the cyclical view of history and enable an imaginative participation in it by people who inevitably live in history. See my posts on Eliade, who touches the matter of 'time' in religious thought.
A couple of other posts following this topic:
Douglas Kelly: quote from his book Creation and Change
and
A selection from a number of commentators on the scope of death brought by the fall.
