You raise some interesting points which are important. I’ll try to answer them and we’ll go on to other considerations.

You say that surely God could have avoided much of the suffering of creation by eliminating death as a possibility for humans. Why not make them immortal from the beginning and avoid all this mess that characterizes creation? You see no point to this futile exercise that we call history. The important point is that God indeed has the goal of granting eternal life to man and creation but it is not some magical procedure – it is a little bit more complicated as we shall see.

Let me assure you that you are not the first one to raise these questions. The brief explanation given is along the following lines.

The only eternal being is God. Everything else is created and has had a beginning. But this creation comes from nothing – creatio ex nihilo. It is this beginning from nothing for humanity that hangs over it like a big shadow which is actualized in death when in fact we return to the nothing from which we came. For God to have created us immortal would have been illogical because then God would be creating another “god” and this simply cannot be.

A lot of misunderstanding arises from certain views on the Book of Genesis. And a lot of opposition to Christianity comes from this skewed view. A popular view popularized by Augustine is that death came into the world as a punishment for disobedient humanity through the actions of a pair of humans. The implications of this are far-reaching and damaging even into today. It implies that it was God who introduced this terrible scourge of death which was non-existent before the fall. It also implies that there was no death at all before the fall. Many have abandoned Christianity because of the inherent unfairness of the fact that a pair – Adam and Eve – through their actions, have afflicted all of humanity, and creation with the pain of death. Even Athanasius, one of the Fathers of the Church, points out that Adam rued what he had done but this did not stop the progress of what he had initiated. Why didn’t God forgive Adam and things would have been immediately corrected? Yes, God could have easily forgiven Adam, but this would not have altered anything and creation would have still been mired in mortality. The dealing with death has to go through another stage and this is the content of what we refer to as Salvation History.

Thus in the popular view, death is seen as a punishment sent by God for Adam’s transgression and in order to save the situation, God sends His Son to a horrible death to somehow extricate creation from the fall. It seems that God is incompetent and needs last minute corrections to rectify the mess that man has brought about. This popular view, also, runs counter to what we have learned through the Theory of Evolution and people of today’s day and age simply cannot make sense of this Augustinian view. They know from what science teaches that death preceded Adam and Eve and they can’t make sense of what some within the Church teach. Death did not come in with Adam – it was already there.

Another view is called for and it is available, although not as well known or as popularized, at least in the West, as the Augustinian interpretation of the fall. The main and earliest proponent of this view was Irenaeus but this was also a view upheld by a very important theologian, Maximus the Confessor. What this view states is that creation was not in an initial state of perfection which Adam ruined. Mortality was an inherent condition of creation from the very beginning because of its ex nihilo character, it had come from nothing and was going to return to that nothing. It was, in fact, through man that this mortality was to be nullified and transformed into eternal life. You see man was not really the problem – he was going to be the solution. Thus, the Fall did not bring about death as something alien to creation, but it created an obstacle – through man’s failure – to overcoming death. God had intended all along to abolish death but it had to be done in such a manner that man’s createdness and freedom, his personhood, would still be respected. God’s plan to address this question of the mortality of creation is what we refer to as redemption.

What Adam failed in doing was to go along with God’s plan for redemption which was to have creation in “union” with God and thereby acquire eternal life. This union was to occur through worship and the offering of creation back to God for His blessing. Adam, referring creation back to man for his own possessive and selfish goals, diverted creation from attaining its worth through God. That was Adam’s sin. He looked at creation as something merely to be used for survival and through this, Adam puts a roadblock into God’s plans for the whole of creation. Adam exchanged eternal life for survival and the rest of man’s sorry history is a description of this disastrous choice. In fact, we see this striving for survival mirrored in all of nature for the theory of evolution posits that the main driving force in the biosphere is survival.

In Irenaeus’ view, Adam was not created perfect – he began at the level of a child, so to speak, in spiritual matters – and he was to grow into spiritual maturity by bringing creation into a relationship of unity with God and through this, enable creation to overcome the curse of mortality.

Adam having failed, God has to revert to an alternate plan and chooses Israel to take on the role of being the mediator of creation with God. It is through Israel that the knowledge of God was to spread. There was also a reference to a mysterious character in this play of redemption – the Messiah who was to come. But even here, there was a need to grow in understanding as to what the Messiah was to accomplish, what the office of Messiah encompassed. For most Jews he was seen as a national liberator who was going to enable Israel to once and for all come out of exile and be freed from oppression by other nations ruling over Israel. Israel was to finally have its revenge on the Gentiles who oppressed it. What is lost in this is the realization that redemption does not center only, or exclusively, on Israel but involves all of the nations, and even all of creation. This message starts to come through more clearly in the writings of the prophets.

It was especially with Isaiah that the all-inclusive character of salvation starts to become very relevant, although other prophets also declare God’s care for all of His creatures. Isaiah says: “You alone are the God of all the kingdoms of the world.” (Is 37:16) And this realization comes to be actualized in the first century AD when Gentiles were accepted into the new family of God. But there was something else that the prophets brought to the consciousness of mankind and that was the almost unbearable depth and extent of God’s love for man and for all of creation. It is this love, in all its incomprehensibility, that is the driving force behind redemptive history. “I shall not forget you,” says the Lord. “Behold I painted you …on My hands, and you are continually before Me.” (Is 49:15,16) This love of God towards man and expressed in the prophets is unique in the annals of all religions and answers one of the deepest question in man’s soul: what is God like?

By you could object that the prophets were mistaken and were wishfully writing about a God whom they had imagined. The answer to this is very simple. If you were to look at the lives of the prophets you would see that they suffered at the hands of those around them. Looking at their lives you do not sense any deception from the prophets who were persecuted and even killed. The harsh reality of objection to their message testifies to the truthfulness of what they were saying – it was not make-believe but truth that cost the prophets much in their lives and endangered their well-being.

What is happening here in the writings of the prophets is that they see that the Old Creation is starting to give way to the New Creation which is completing God’s plan for not just man, but for the whole cosmos. The New Creation is not being formed ex nihilo but is a transformation of the Old Creation, a transformation that we see in Christ’s transformed resurrected body. Moreover, in Christ we have the union of the divine and the created and this now enables man to acquire immortality and that is why we sing that Christ vanquished death through death. The nothingness over which the fallen creation was suspended in the past is no longer there – the basis of this New Creation is not nothing but God Himself and in this way it is assured of a continued existence. As Isaiah writes speaking the words of God: “I made man forever.” (Is 44:7) A whole new chapter in the creation story has begun, one that will give life eternal and which impacts the whole cosmos.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas