Sin, Death and Original Conditions

This past week there were two very interesting posts around the blogosphere that are related, even if not obviously so. The first was a post over at Jason Clark's by Stephen Webb. This was the third post in a three-post series on creation care and animal rights. The second was a post at Scot McKnight's on Augustine (or really, St. Paul) and the doctrine of original sin. Both posts raise important and interesting questions or puzzles about evolutionary creation and the biblical narrative . (The phrase evolutionary creation is one I am very fond of and picked up from my friend Steve Matheson, whose blog is always worth a visit or two or sometimes three. EC is a more apt locution than theistic evolution in that the latter might suggest such things as theistic chemistry, theistic embryology or theistic whiffle-ball. But there's really just chemistry, embryology and whiffle-ball. Likewise, there is really just evolution. Some, like me, think that's how God created the natural world; but, adding theistic to evolution is as strange, I think, as adding it to whilffle-ball.)

Let me start with Scot's post. Scot's provocative question was simply this: is there a gospel without original sin? Now to my ears, that's not a difficult question to answer at all. The answer is, no! There is no good news without the bad news of things having gone terribly awry, without there having been a cataclysmic fracturing of creation and ensuing misery. In any event, the puzzles and questions are just beneath the surface of Scot's question (and my answer), especially for those who accept evolutionary creation (as opposed to what the ID defenders are pedaling and what old-school creationists hawk) .

The puzzles are these. According to St. Paul, sin and death are related as cause and effect. The sin of the old man, the dirt-man--Adam--resulted in death and destruction. Death, on this view, is an intrusion into God’s good creation. It is the new man--Jesus from Nazareth--who undoes, atones for, puts to rights, and otherwise deals with sin and, according to St. Paul, it is the incarnation, life, death and especially the resurrection of Jesus that gains victory over both sin and death. See Romans 5.12, for example.

The problem or puzzle is how to reconcile the biblical story with an evolutionary account of our origins, especially the idea that death is an intruder into a previously deathless, earthly paradise. (There is also the problem of reconciling the idea of a historical, single Adam. Though, I myself find that issue less troublesome than the issue of death, and sin.) If you believe that God reveals himself in both books, that of nature and the bible, then you’ve got some explaining to do, as the two witnesses seem to give conflicting accounts.

Do you think the two can ultimately be reconciled? If so, how?

Now, over at Jason Clark’s blog, Stephen Webb suggests that animals were originally domesticated and that, apparently, either those ferocious fangs of the saber tooth tiger did not, pre-fall, exist at all or, if they did, they were not used for ripping to pieces its prey. In fact, to hear Stephen tell it, the predator/prey structure of the non-human animal kingdom is not original to creation.

Obviously, Webb’s view is also incompatible with an evolutionary account of our origins, with the very idea of common descent. One way to handle this problem is simply to dismiss the notion of evolution/common descent and embrace one of its rivals, ID or Young Earth Creationism. To do so, however, comes at a significant cost, namely, the cost of discounting the overwhelming evidence of common descent as a piece of Divine Deception. In other words, it may look for all the world like all living things are related by common ancestry, but they’re not really.

With respect to the first issue—death and evolution—I have some thoughts. But I’m really interested in how you folks think about these matters.