It can be remarkable, the lengths that some theologians will go to avoid a theological impasse.
Here's a good one: when God foretold that sin would lead to death, he was talking, not about a literal death (because in this theologian's view, death had always been a part of the world), or even a 'spirital' death, but a 'theological' death.
That takes the cake! It is the last refuge of the theological scoundrel.
We don't know what a theological death is...unless its not getting published, of course...but to retreat to this distance from the real world, you are not making a study of God, but a study of make-believe.
But even to think that the impact of death could be restricted as 'spiritual' death, to save theistic evolutionary ideas, it fails to deal with the depth of death in the Bible.
The Bible understands death as being completely other than good: the 'last enemy'
And this is the clue to the irrationality of claiming that 'a bit of death is OK' but 'more is not'. That is, God would make a very good creation with 'a bit of death' just sufficient to enable evolution to operate, it would seem; without impairing the 'very goodness' he'd declared early on.
So, on this premise, God could give headway to the last enemy in his very good creation.
Irrational, to say the least, and a misunderstanding of death itself. Death is the end of relationship. It is anti-love and a dis-representation of God. To include it in a creation in harmony with God is to fracture God, at best; in fact it makes the Bible, and not just the creation account, incoherent. Death an integral part of life? No; death, by any definition, is not a part of life; but its end and its undoing. Nor is it part of God. Death represents the very antithesis of God. To think that it could exist in a non-fallen world is to think in 'crazy talk'.
