Mohler on Adam

A quote from Albert Mohler:

If you adhere to an old earth position you have a very difficult time explaining how the effects of the Fall--death, disease and suffering--showed up long before Adam and Eve.

[from the current Creation magazine]

The article also cites a couple of papers on the topic:

Plants and death, and

Romans 8

I've posted with reference to Mohler previously, on the Framework Hypothesis, and the age of the earth.

Dead like dust

Further to my posts on death, reading the Bible I came to Genesis 3:19. This would seem to cap off any thought that the death Adam brought was only 'spiritual'. There is clearly a conjunct between the physicalness of the creation as our physical setting, and that death intrudes physically: dust is clearly of physical, and death is clearly to have physical effects. QED.

Hostile Intruder

From a sermon by Robert Jones, St James Turramurra, 11-11-2007 (a Remembrance Day sermon, starting with mention of the Battle of the Somme)

The Bible passages used were:

Isaiah 11:1-10

1 Cor 15: 12-58

Robert towards the end of the sermon, made these remarks:

Jesus’ resurrection signals the total defeat of death…death itself will be destroyed as the hostile intruder it is in God's creation.

Picking up on the theme starting at Death at the Carrington.

Wise on death and the creation

From Kurt Wise’s talk in 2000 at Grace Reformed Baptist Church on Creationist Biology

[at about 47 mins, if you want to find it in the talk]

We under estimate the importance of sin before God, so much so that the sin of man caused a crack in the perfection of the entire universe. There is no such thing as a little sin. Sin is extraordinarily important in God’s economy and we so undervalue the significance of sin; but when you start to see the effects it has had on the biological creation I think you re struck by the incredible force of sin in God’s economy and how much against his nature that it is.

For example, the curse introduced imperfection into the creation, [and] automatically God introduces death: which it turns out has a dual function: punishment for sin, but also an indication of his mercy. Can you imagine being fallen forever, separated from God? And that goes for the creature itself, because in Romans chapter 8 it says ‘the earnest expectation of the creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God’: the entire universe is waiting for our glory because it is going to be relieved from the curse, the bondage of corruption will be lifted.

Kelly on Death

Another follow-up to the Death at the Carrington post:

From Creation and Change by Douglas Kelly, Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte.

Even more theologically significant is the clear Biblical teaching running throughout the Old and New Testaments (as in Genesis chapter three and Romans chapter five) that death and disintegration of the entire cosmos came through Adam's sin, for Adam was the covenant head and representative of the whole creation, not Lucifer. Althought Lucifer fell before Adam, his fall did not bring death into the rest of the created order, because Adam, not Lucifer, was the representative figure (or 'covenant head') of the whole creation, thus taking it down with him into judgement. (97)

Winslow on Broken Creation

Further to Death at the Carrington, I looked at a number of commentators to see how they had dealt with the ramifications of the fall for the entire (inculding animal creation:

From Octavius Winslow "No Condemnation in Christ Jesus" (1853)

Ch. 20 "A Suffering World in Sympathy with Suffering Man"

From the ruin of man, our Apostle naturally turns his consideration to the ruin in which the apostasy of man plunged the whole creation--animate and inanimate. If another link were wanting to perfect the chain of evidence demonstrating the existence of the Divine curse for man's sin, this passage (Roms 8:21) would seem to supply it.

We read of no blight resting on the material world, of no suffering in the brute creation, prior tot eh period of Adam's transgression. The present is juste the reverse of the original constitution of the world. When God made all things he pronounced them very good (Gen 1:31). We delight to look back and imagine what this world was when, like a new born planet, it burst from the Fountain of Light, all clad with beauty, radiant with holiness, and eloquent with praise...

All the materials and elements of nature were harmless, and in harmony, because all were sinless. Innocence and happiness reigned over teh irrational creation. The whole world was at rest, because man was at peace with God, at peace with his fellows, at peace with himself...

Man was in "league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field were at peace with him" (Job 5:23)

[describes the world as fallen]

Yea, every creature that we meet, and every object we behold, supplies an evidence (sic) of man's fall, and bears the frown of God's curse...thus closely is a suffering world linked with suffering man. Thus the whole creation--material and animal--sympathizes with the weight of woe that crushes our race to the earth. When man fell, God cursed the ground, and cursed the brutes of the field, for man's sake' and no the whole creation groans and travails in pain until the time of the restitution of all things.

Interestingly both Leon Morris in his Commentary on Romans (Eerdmans 1988, p. 329f) and Cranfield in his ICC commentary on this same book (v. 1 p. 413ff) consider that Paul in Romans 8:21 has in mind the 'sub-human' creation.

Calvin is at one with this view:

21. Because the creation itself, etc. He shows how the creation has in hope been made subject to vanity; that is, inasmuch as it shall some time be made free, according to what Isaiah testifies, and what Peter confirms still more clearly. It is then indeed meet for us to consider what a dreadful curse we have deserved, since all created things in themselves blameless, both on earth and in the visible heaven, undergo punishment for our sins; for it has not happened through their own fault, that they are liable to corruption. Thus the condemnation of mankind is imprinted on the heavens, and on the earth, and on all creatures. It hence also appears to what excelling glory the sons of God shall be exalted; for all creatures shall be renewed in order to amplify it, and to render it illustrious.

Then, I just had to see what Barth had to say on Roms 8:21: check his commentary in the Oxford edition (pp. 309-313). I can't figure if he's a full-blown mystic, or even a pagan, with his seeing 'evil' within God (when it is the antithesis of God-ness), his making the Fall unobservable (I take it he means this in principle, not in force of historical remove), and the trajectory from despair to hope being one of perception, not historic act!

Yet, I like these comments: "We groan as the creation does; we travail in pain together with it." (p. 312) and "Ought we then to regard this knowledge as too scanty for us? Is it not enough for us to know the groaning of the creation and our own groaning? Ought we to demand some higher or better knowledge, which takes no account of the Cross or of the tribulation of time? If so, we must, perforce, take no account of the Resurrection" (p. 313)

Finally, from an old Puritan: Matthew Poole on Roms 8:21:

...the creatures in their kind, and according to their capacity, shall be partakers of that liberty and freedom, which in the children of God is accompanied with unspeakable glory: they shall not partake with the saints in glory, but of that liberty which in the saints hath great glory attending it, and superadded to it. The creature, at the day of judgement shall be restored (as before) to that condition of liberty which it had in its first creation; as when it was made at first: it was free from all vanity, bondage and corruption, also it shall be again at the time of the general resurection (Acts 3:19,20; 2 Pt 3:13).

Sermon on Roms 8 that may interest.

Death at the Carrington

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.