It must be admitted that I was raised on a steady diet of Morris and Gish

It must be admitted that I was raised on a steady diet of Morris and Gish. By the time I was in junior high my room was littered with books and pamphlets by these two most eminent creation scientists, Henry Morris and Duane Gish. While other eighth graders idolized Michael Jordan, these two geeky middle-aged holders of doctoral degrees were my heroes; I followed their exploits monthly in the glossy newsletters sent from the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) in El Cajon, California. In my mind, these two men and their cadre of “believing” scientists were the last guard against the vast atheistic conspiracy known as evolution. Through reading their literature, and attending two of their conferences held at a local church, I had been informed that atheistic scientists had seized upon the absurd idea of Darwinian evolution because it helped defend and excuse their personal rebellion against God. These scientists, from nearly every scientific field imaginable, were involved in a vast cover-up to hide the real evidence that evolution is a faltering theory which contradicts mounds of scientific evidence. The whole presentation by ICR smacked of a story fit for a spy movie or possibly a John Grisham novel; and as an adolescent, convinced of the veracity of the Bible, I was ready to help the ICR in their defense of the faith from godless men in white lab coats. And so, in 1988, armed with the latest book from the ICR’s Ken Ham and other creationist literature, I went about writing a persuasive speech for my eighth grade speech class on the deluding idea of evolution. Ham’s thin green book was striking not only because of its ideas, but because of its chilling cover; a snake stares ominously from the front while the words THE LIE appear in large block letters over the serpent’s head. Beneath the snake is but one word, written in an attractive font that curves around the edges of an apple: EVOLUTION. The Lie: Evolution was the book I used as a main source for my “four-minute” persuasive speech that became a class-dominating twenty-minute tirade. The “speech that never ends” had the effect of putting my English teacher to sleep and boring my classmates out of their minds, but Ham’s book had a deep and lasting impact on me both scientifically and theologically. Ham’s book is indeed both a theological treatise and scientific defense manual, and while much has been written about the creationist’s scientific claims, little has been written about their theological claims. In this paper I hope to more closely examine one of the central theological objections which creationists raise for Christians considering the possibility of evolution. It has been this claim alone which has dominated my theological rejection of evolution as a viable theory for Christians for more than fifteen years. But first, let me provide a response to the scientific claims of the creationists.

Over the Christmas holiday I returned to the home of my parents in Oregon where I still receive ICR mailings more than a decade after my last correspondence with them. The newsletters come each month to Dr. Andrew Zirschky, an error that I’ve allowed to persist for fifteen years out of sheer pride and wishful thinking that someday the moniker will be correct. However, that the mailings from the ICR allowed me an opportunity to thrive on wishful thinking stems from more than the name on the envelope. During my time in college, and through exposure to serious researchers who were both Christians and scientists, I began to see “wishful” holes in the pervasive Creationist claim that evolution was a grand conspiracy. Further, I began to see that their scientific research came up lacking. I’ve existed in a state of limbo for several years trying to hold out hope that in the end the creationists would be justified in their scientific claims, yet involvement with the assigned readings for this class has rather decisively shown me otherwise.

By far the most precise and damming summary of the evidence against creationist science is found in Kenneth R. Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God. Miller writes from the unique position of being a devout Catholic, the author of controversial textbooks which teach Darwinian evolution, and a professor of biology at Brown University. In Finding Darwin’s God, Miller soundly—and easily— refutes the core of what creationists point to as “evidence” for their scientific theories which are predicated on a hyper-literal reading of portions of Genesis. First, Miller dismantles the ICR claim for contemporaneous ancient and modern species prior to the Genesis flood by pointing to the evidence of fossillized coprolites—literally fossilized feces. “These remains present a stunning opportunity to validate their ideas. All they would have to do is pick through these objects and find evidence of a single contemporary organism. . . If they could just find a couple of tuna bones in the stomachs of those plesiosaurs, they’d stand the geological world on its head by demonstrating that creatures of the ‘ancient’ and the modern worlds existed side by side before the flood, as they have always maintained.”[1] Second, Miller undertakes a response to both Creationists and some in the Intelligent Design camp who hold that the fossil record is actually incompatible with an evolutionary account of life. He takes on criticisms offered in light of Punctuated Equilibrium, a theory that points to a sudden explosion of life forms instead of the graduated emergence one would expect from evolution. Miller shows that—even if the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium is correct—it in no way rules out evolution and actually confirms it in many ways.[2] Further, Miller points to the recent discovery of transitional tetrapods sharing fish and amphibian characteristics as further proof that the fossil record is confirmational of the evolutionary account.[3] Third, Miller undertakes an easy rebuttal to creationist claims that the world is less than 10,000 years old—a claim he says arises among creationists from a literal reading of Genesis and the need to invalidate the age-old appearance of the fossil record.[4] Miller invalidates the claim of Henry Morris that the decay of the earth’s magnetic field points to a figure of 10,000 years for the age of the earth by showing that paleomagnetism proves that the “earth’s magnetic field has gone through innumerable reversals and fluctuations over time.”[5] And Miller debunks the common creationist claim that radioactive carbon dating is a flawed method for dating the world; he speaks to four different radioactive methods which independently confirm one another.[6] During my ICR days I read numerous creationists briefs on the inaccuracy of radioactive dating methods, yet one of the dating methods Miller points to is the potassium-argon method which he says is commonly used by geologists because any errors provide “an underestimate of the rock’s true age, never an overestimate.”[7] Combined with evidence gained from the radioactive nuclides present in our corner of the universe, Miller shows that all tests confirm the earth to be more than 4 billion years old and the universe itself more than 80 billion years old.[8] Relentless in his pursuit of creationist claims, Miller goes on to tackle the common creationist claims that the universe only “looks” this old due to the fact that the Creator made it look this old.[9] Miller concludes that to conclude such, “we must simultaneously conclude that science can tell us nothing about nature, and that the Creator to whom many of us pray is inherently deceitful. Such so-called creation science, thoroughly analyzed, corrupts both science and religion, and it deserves a place in the intellectual wastebasket.”[10]

Undoubtedly, those in the creationist camp can find ways to circumscribe Miller’s criticism, yet in my mind Miller presents a damaging case to the Creationist position by speaking to the sheer volume of the evidence against a Creationist model, and at the same time shooting gaping holes in important Creationist beliefs. Theologian David Fergusson sums up the case against Creationism in this way: “Physics, geology, paleontology, and biology tend to confirm each other, and together provide a coherent view of the origin of the universe, and the history of the planet. Creationism is thus driven to contest the findings of mainstream science on a vast range of issues. It presents the consensus findings of modern science as a gigantic fallacy, unrivalled by any intellectual error in the history of culture. This is an impossible position to adopt, and in any case it is religiously unnecessary.”[11]

Indeed, Fergusson suggests that the Creationist movement is mostly a modern American phenomenon precipitated by a “folk epistemology” which exalts common sense (and he says evolution doesn’t appeal to common sense) to the forefront while holding to a strict theory of inspiration that assumes Scriptural infallibility “on all matters on which it speaks: history, science, morals and religion.”[12] Thus, these two assumptions have led to the creationist attempt to defend scientifically that which they already hold theologically. Further, the creationists claim that anyone who believes in the words of Scripture will agree with their conclusions—in regard to both science and theology. Ham writes an entire appendix to Evolution: The Lie entitled, “Twenty Reasons Why Genesis and Evolution Do Not Mix,” and he says elsewhere, “The many Christians who accept the belief of evolution and add God to it destroy the very foundation of the Gospel message they profess to believe.”[13] Morris reserves even harsher judgement for those who would attempt to hold to Christianity and evolution: “One can be a Christian and an evolutionist just as one can be a Christian thief, or a Christian adulterer, or a Christian liar. It is absolutely impossible for those who profess to believe the Bible and to follow Christ to embrace evolutionism.”[14]

I’d suggest that the creationists are guilty of an intense fideism which has led them to ultimately worship their theological and scientific theories instead of God; call it creationist idolatry. Their assertion that the Bible must be read in a way that excludes any evolutionary belief is troubling. Despite creationist assertions Fergusson points out that this struggle—between a high view of Scripture and evolution—has not always existed. The cases of two eminent Princeton theologians of the past are good examples of the fact that the Creationists may be making a claim that is not only unwarranted, but also untrue.

Both Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield are figures who play prominently into the history of Princeton Theological Seminary, and both suggest that it is possible to rectify the claims of evolution and a belief in the truth of Scripture. While Hodge held that Darwinism in its totality amounted to atheism, he also concluded that evolution was by no means incompatible with Christian teaching.[15] Warfield’s conclusion that he would “raise no question as to the compatibility of the Darwinian form of the hypothesis of evolution with Christianity”[16] is even more startling considering his belief in plenary inspiration and complete inerrancy of the Bible.[17] Warfield reasoned that evolution could be considered a “method of divine providence.”[18]

The history of Hodge and Warfield suggest that it is the creationist’s fideistic adherence to certain ways of reading Scripture, and not the Scripture itself that prevents us from rectifying evolution and Christian theology. And while the creationists want to anathematize all attempts to assimilate evolution into Christian theology, Fergusson points out that this is actually a much-needed venture. “Moreover, the need to demonstrate the ability of theology to accommodate the best insights of other disciplines is an apologetic task necessitated by its realist truth claims.”[19] Thus in light of the findings of a variety of the branches of modern science, the ultimate problem with creationism is that it walks the dangerous ground of rejecting so much of what other disciplines show to be real that it forces Christian theology to a place of abdicating its role as a realist discipline; and it forces its adherents to live this same divided life between what Scripture says is “true” and what science says is “real.” It is on this dangerous ground that I’ve spent most of my life. I grew up attempting to cover my ears during sections of my science classes; whenever anything dealing with evolution was raised, I quickly tuned out in order to avoid listening to those “corrupting claims.”

While naturalists like Richard Dawkins have wanted to exclude the claims of theology from the realm of knowledge and to exalt scientific inquiry as the only vehicle through which we can apprehend real knowledge about the world, I see the creationists making the opposite move and instead exalting the Bible as the only source of realist knowledge. This is what the creationists do in their denial of evolutionary evidence. Instead of holding science and Scripture in balance (as the examples of Hodge and Warfield suggest we can do) and then re-examining their particular reading of Scripture for error, they exalt their reading of Scripture above the claims of science. This move is scripturally unwarranted and is ultimately detrimental to the spread of Christianity because it forces people to choose between the “realist truth” which Scripture claims, and the “realist truth” which science espouses. Lesslie Newbigin decries this situation that forces us to exclude either theology or science from the realm of human knowledge: “Even as late as the end of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton was as much involved in theology as in astronomy and physics. How has this line come to be drawn?”[20]

I am in no way saying that theology should be at the mercy of other disciplines, but if we find our theology so disconnected from the rest of the real world that the two don’t overlap, we have at least three choices: First, to claim that every other discipline is wrong in its claims about the world; second, to decide that Scripture is simply irrelevant to the real world, or is simply in error; or, third, to re-evaluate our reading of Scripture and determine if we have falsely abstracted Scripture from its context and meaning.

The creationists have tried the first option, but I contend it puts the believability and authority of Scripture in serious jeopardy. If we go this route it ultimately involves making the claim that human measurement and reason is incapable of knowing the world as it is since it contends that the best of human exploration is fundamentally in error in regard to modern discoveries in a variety of fields. Thus, to adhere to this position we must doubt a large swathe of the knowledge and findings of the natural sciences. This was my tact for the years where I subscribed to a creationist model, but increasingly, I have found this situation to be untenable, and as the collective knowledge in the sciences increases, I believe this position will become more and more untenable. Christians will increasingly be faced with living in ignorance and denial, or be prodded to abandon their faith for lack of its correspondence to what they find in the world they inhabit.

This leads us to the second option, which is where much of liberalism ultimately led us early on in the twentieth century. The extreme scrutiny forced upon Scripture in regard to every claim from the Garden of Eden to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, was a direct result of subjecting Scripture to conform to the standards of scientific knowledge and the Enlightenment outlook. It deconstructed Scripture to the point of making it untenable to find any meaning or revelation in such a book of errors.

Or third, we do what Fergusson and Michael Welker suggest we do—re-examine our reading of Scripture in light of the best learning in other disciplines, and to take a fundamental look at our underlying philosophical constructs, and see if we have somehow falsely abstracted our reading of Scripture.[21] Welker says, “you cannot think without abstractions”—ways of thinking which “limit our experiences and actions.”[22] And he suggests that these “guiding abstractions” instilled in us through cultural and educational transmission form the ways that we make judgments about anything. When we bring these judgements to bear on the biblical text, they result in “false abstractions” that are “misleading” and “distorting.”[23] This seems to me to be the most faithful route. It avoids the liberal abandonment of Scripture truth as well as the unquestioning fideism of the creationists. Further, this has been the method of theological progress throughout Christian history. Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was afforded by the knowledge of Neo-Platonism which allowed him to read the Scripture in new ways and thus answer Manichean arguments about the source of evil. Christian reading of Scripture was also fundamentally changed by confrontation of the knowledge of the solar system provided by Galileo and Copernicus. Due to the (eventual) recognition that the universe is not geocentric, we read and understand Scripture differently; we now see the geocentric view of the solar system to be the result of a “false abstraction” of Scripture. There are a myriad of examples how human learning in other disciplines has progressed our ability to read and understand the revelation of Scripture. This is nothing less than the pursuit of Thomas Aquinas’s edict of “faith seeking to understand.” And I believe it is how we must answer the theological and Scriptural questions posed by the creationists.

Since the scientific objections raised by the creationists have been sufficiently answered, I will turn to their primary theological objection to evolution and ask the question whether or not this theological objection has merit. I will then proceed to propose alternative ways of answering the creationist question. At this point, it might be asked why I would want to respond to the creationists at all if I have rejected their methods as destructive. The answer is purely personal; because creationism played a large role in my early theological development I have lingering questions in my own head that I need to answer. Some people are prevented from acceptance of evolution because of a deep need to see humankind in a special, central place in the order of the universe (this was the need of much of Catholicism during the heliocentric/geocentric debate). Yet, I’m prevented from accepting evolution because of my lingering creationist background. The creationist insistence that evolution destroys human culpability for sin and death, and thus destroys the need for the atonement and the necessity of Jesus’ death, is the central reason for my resistance to evolution. I’ve lived for sometime with the intellectual tension, created by creationism, between believing the facts of science and the facts of salvation. Thus the exploration presented from this point forward is a deeply personal exploration.

The creationist theological objections to evolution may stem from a hyper-literal reading of the Genesis account, but they culminate in the insistence that the evolutionary position of death existent before the fall is irreconcilable with the Christian gospel. Dusting off the cover and opening my old eighth-grade resource, The Lie: Evolution, I quickly found Ham’s reasoning of why a logically consistent Christian can’t possibly believe in evolution: “This history of evolution is a history of death. Death has been ‘from the beginning.’ The Bible clearly teaches that death, particularly the physical and spiritual death of man, entered the world only after the first man Adam sinned.”[24] In another place Ham says, “Romans 5:12 tells us that as a result of man’s actions came sin, and as a result of sin came death; but not just spiritual death, as some theologians claim. To confirm this, one needs only read 1 Corinthians 15:20 (NIV) where Paul talks about the physical death of the first Adam and the physical death of Christ, the last Adam.”[25]

Going even further than Ham’s claim, Terry Mortenson insists that death before sin undermines the Christian need for a savior: “This present world of death, disease, violence and suffering is not the way the world was before Adam and Eve sinned. The theory of evolution over millions of years completely contradicts the Bible’s teaching on death. Consequently it undermines the gospel. If the fall of man in sin and God’s curse on the creation (as recorded in Genesis 3) is not literal history, then Jesus died for a mythological problem caused by a mythological couple and He is therefore a mythological savior.”[26]

Several things should be said regarding these creationist theological claims. First, many of the assertions they make are inline with strands of classical Christian theology. Both Augustine and Aquinas taught that physical human death came into the world as a result of sin.[27] Yet, it should also be noted there have been numerous other theologians throughout time who have “not thought it necessary to hold with confidence to the idea that an unfallen humanity would be naturally immortal.”[28] Second, the creationist claims are also closely tied to the Penal Substitution theory of the atonement. Ham says, “He took the penalty which should rightly have been ours at the hands of a righteous Judge, and bore it in His own body on the cross.”[29] Such a theory of the atonement, maybe even more than other classical theories, depends heavily on death as punishment that someone must bear. Yet, there are numerous other theories of the atonement which do not depend upon this; Emberger notes, “Recent creationists’ insistence on understanding all death as a penalty for sin leads them to promote one interpretation of Christ’s atonement to the exclusion of the other views held by the wider Christian Church.”[30]

Finally, it should be noted that simply explaining all Scriptural references to death wrought by sin as “spiritual” death is an easy way to respond to most of the creationist claims. Yet, I think the spiritual death explanation alone is problematic. While we can certainly read Genesis in this way, it is much harder to see Paul’s references in Romans and 1 Corinthians as simple references to spiritual death. Working from the thought of other theologians, Emberger contends otherwise and argues that the death curse spoken of in Genesis, and again in Paul’s writings, is simply spiritual.[31] While I concede that Emberger and others may be right, I still find it a difficult and terse reading of Paul to explain all his references to death in Adam as spiritual; especially instances such as the phrase in Romans 5:14 that “death exercised dominion from the time of Adam to the time of Moses.” Either way, I will proceed with my argumentation from the assumption that somehow physical death is related to the Fall of man, and that Paul seems to make this kind of connection.

Using Welker’s terminology of false abstractions, I think there are two false abstractions underlying the creationist assertions which should be exposed from the outset. First, the literal interpretation of the Genesis account of the creation and the fall is not mandated, nor intended by the Genesis narrator. This has been made clear by a long line of biblical scholars, whose work Gregory Peterson sums up nicely: “While taken literally by many Christians around the world, the vast majority of biblical scholar and theologians recognize the mythical (in the positive sense) and even allegorical character of the story. Translated from the Hebrew, Adam is literally ‘man’; the name ‘Eve’ likely stems from the root ‘to live,’ and the symbolic meaning of the tree of knowledge of good and evil seems clear enough. For this reason, theologians have taken the doctrine of the fall seriously, even though they recognize that the Adam and Eve story cannot be understood historically.”[32] It is only through the lenses provided by false mental categories that conservative Christians are tempted to read the Genesis account as literal history; the test of biblical fidelity is not in reading everything literally, but in attempting to read everything as intended. The problems inherent in any attempt to read the creation and fall accounts become apparent when we consider the need to account for talking snakes, flaming swords, trees that give knowledge, the spiritual being God walking in the garden, and a myriad of other issues. Even Warfield, as the great defender of inerrancy, suggested that the days of Genesis must be understood as six long periods and not six twenty-four hour days.[33] Creationists have continually asserted that a questioning of these “days” of Genesis stems from a human questioning about God’s omnipotence; yet, Warfield was persuaded by the internal evidence of the creation account, confirmed by correspondence with scientific knowledge, that a literal reading of the six days of creation was simply erroneous.[34] The literal reading of the creation and fall accounts by creationists is simply unwarranted outside of a bias for literal reading brought to the Scripture itself.

A second false abstraction that I believe underlies creationist theology is the Platonic belief in the immortality of the soul. The creationist Platonism plays out most prominently in their idea that sin must be responsible for all human and natural imperfections in the world,[35] however, their Platonic tendencies also figure into their insistence that humanity was created for immortality. Paul Tillich says that this assertion arises, not out of the Scripture, but from the false assertions of a perverted Platonism forced upon our reading of Scripture. “Immortality as a natural quality of man is not a Christian doctrine, though it is possibly a Platonic doctrine. But even Plato has Socrates put a question mark on the very argument for the immortality of the soul which Socrates develops in the discussions prior to his death.”[36]

With this potential false abstraction exposed, it leads us to consider whether the connection Christian theology has made between the Fall and the origination of physical death have been false abstractions as well. Classical Christian theology has generally assumed the connection between the existence of physical death and human sin, thus affirming that humanity was created to be both spiritually and physically immortal.[37] Yet several biblical commentators agree with Tillich that the biblical account doesn’t state nor presuppose that humanity was originally created for immortality. The most natural reading of Genesis 3:19 is that humankind has not been created for immortality but will naturally at some point, return to the ground from which humans come: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” As well, the most natural reading of the following verse, Genesis 3:20, suggests that humanity was not created for immortality.

Yet, at the same time is it clear that Scripture links sin and death. A reading of Romans 5:12, that “sin entered the world through one man and death through sin” is confirmation of this idea. But the issue we must consider is: does it link physical death to human sin, or just spiritual death and separation from God? The Genesis account may be read either way (scholars disagree) but keeping in mind that it is clearly poetic and allegorical, and even assuming that this allegorical story links physical death and the sin of the human couple within the bounds of its literary structure, we shouldn’t then necessarily conclude that the allegorical story is attempting to make a realist truth claim about the nature of physical death in the real world. In other words, if Genesis isn’t attempting to make scientific claims about talking snakes, or trees from which we pluck the knowledge of good and evil, there may not be the necessity to see that Genesis is making any kind of realist claim about the reason we experience death in this realist world.

On the other hand, Paul seems to take the Genesis narrative seriously on the account that physical death in the real world is a result of human sin.[38] If we are to avoid writing Paul off as simply incorrect—as my theologically conservative tendencies wish to do—then we cannot assert that the Genesis account is completely allegorical but that it does make a realist claim about the reason for death as we experience it. Every allegory has a point that corresponds with reality, and this seems to be one of those points.

On another front, it has been pointed out by many people that God’s threat in Genesis 2:7, that “in this day you will surely die” doesn’t seem to be incurred upon the first man—at least physically, or at least immediately. For the story to hold together as a literary unit, we must explain this apparent disparity between God’s promised curse and what appears to happen.

Skinner’s response is that God simply threatened but didn’t fulfill his terrible curse.[39] I find this problematic from a theological standpoint, however, because it confers upon the serpent a curious role of truth teller (“you will surely not die”) and portrays God as a capricious divine parent who flippantly warns that the consequences of an action are far worse than they really are. I do this with my two-year old and feel guilty for lying to him afterward (“You touch that and your fingers are going to fall off!”) Theologically, I’d hope God, the author of truth, doesn’t do the same sort of thing.

Gordon Wenham says that the story hints that natural death preceded Adam’s sin, and that the death suffered by Adam in his fall is indeed a type of spiritual death, namely estrangement from the Garden of Eden—the locus from which life flows.[40] As we will see in a moment, this is much akin to Paul Tillich’s idea of death as spiritual estrangement.

Dillmann’s answer is that God’s threat, and the curse that Adam receives is both spiritual and physical; but Dillmann’s answer is most curious in the sense that he sees physical death as both the natural consequence of humanity’s mortality and also a punishment: “It is presumed that death is a natural consequence of one’s origin from the earth. Likewise it is a punishment.”[41] Dillmann’s suggestion is interesting because it parallels what we see God clearly doing later in Genesis with the rainbow, a naturally occurring phenomenon of light refracting through water. God takes an already existent phenomenon but attaches to it a new significance—following the flood it serves as the sign of God’s promise to all mankind. Likewise, if we do not bring assumptions about immortality to the table, it is possible to see death—a natural and normal occurrence—given a new and terrible meaning in the fall of humankind.

This line of thought may actually help us understand the redemption of death accomplished by Christ. In his resurrection he removes the curse, or the “sting” of death which was a result of Adam’s fall. We all still die a physical death, but the curse of physical death is removed, and we can truly say with the apostle Paul, “Where, O death is your victory? Where, O death is your sting?”[42] We already do this in some ways in the celebration of the Eucharist where death—the death of Christ—is not seen as a curse but a source of life and redemption.

Dillmann’s biblical exegesis can be more fully developed with the help of Tillich’s theology. Tillich says, “According to the Genesis account, man comes from the dust and returns to the dust. He has immortality only as long as he is allowed to eat from the tree of life, the tree which carried the divine food or the food of eternal life.”[43] We must remember that, for Tillich, the story is symbolic, not describing a real tree, nor describing real fruit that sustains a “dust-bound existence,” but instead referring to a real relationship between the divine and human. Tillich says, “The symbolism is obvious: separation from the eternal leaves man in his natural finitude.”[44] What Tillich means is that man is left to die alone, to be separated from the divine, and can look forward to nothing more than a return to the dust.

How may humankind regain access to immortality, and again find this relationship with the divine which gives me hope for something more than just a return to the dust? The Church has taught for 2,000 years that this access to divine relationship comes again through an act of partaking in the divine life of Christ; Tillich points out that the early Church Fathers thus called the Lord’s Supper the “medicine of immortality.”[45]

Tillich concludes, “Sin does not produce death but gives to death the power which is conquered only in participation in the eternal. The idea that the ‘Fall’ has physically changed the cellular or psychological structure of man (and nature?) is absurd and unbiblical.”[46] What is the power which sin gives to death, that Tillich is referring to? Precisely the power to enact estrangement between God and humanity, and secondly, to bring about the “horror of death.”[47] Tillich says: “Sin is the sting of death, not its physical cause. It transforms the anxious awareness of one’s having to die into the painful realization of a lost eternity.”[48] Tillich thus says that physical death is not an evil in and of itself, but it becomes a curse to be feared when such physical death is also connected with estrangement from God.[49]

It is in this way that we can understand Dillmann’s assertion that death is both natural and a divine punishment for sin. Death has always existed, but it has not always existed as the dreadful evil which awaits us. Karl Barth says, “Through sin came death, death as judgement, as the breaking of our life, as the occasion of apprehension, as our misery. . .”[50] Barth describes this state of dread and misery as “living without sharing in life” and says that humans in such a state are “loosed from primary existence” and “defined as mortal.” Thus Barth, echoing the words of the apostle Paul, says that we are already “dead in transgressions and sins,”[51] and that we are not alive. For Barth and Tillich both, we may be physically living and breathing, but death looms before us constantly reminding us that we will soon return to the dust and be no more—we are in fact already dead because we are separated from the Giver and Sustainer of Life.

Thus, I would argue that instead of offering fidelity to Scripture, the force of the gospel’s words have been blunted by the false abstractions of a Platonic and literalist reading of Genesis and Romans. There is a distinct difference between seeing physical death as a punishment, and seeing death as the curse that makes the punishment so terrible—the reminder and final horror of spiritual estrangement from God. When we see physical death as the punishment for sin that awaits us, we miss the apostle’s point that the punishment has already been doled out upon us, that without Christ we are “dead in transgressions and sins”—estranged from the divine life and relationship that we could have had. And it is the gift of the man Jesus that restores to us the possibility of participation and relationship.

We can now clearly hear the words of Paul in Romans 5:12 that the curse of death and estrangement from God came through sin, and that this estrangement and its corollary reminder called physical death, extends to all people because all sin. Since all humanity sins, we thus have solidarity with Adam, and the looming figure of death on the horizon of all of our lives now serves as a reminder and final enactor of our estrangement from God. Returning to the dust awaits all of us, as it has for all of humanity for all of time, but in estrangement from God this returning to the dust is all that there is—the only thing that we have to await is our perishing. Through Tillich, Barth and Dillmann we can hear the words of Paul in a different way. When Paul speaks of death coming into the world through sin, we can understand more clearly that he means not physical death as naturally created, but physical death coupled with spiritual estrangement which is what creates the horror and curse of death as we know it. This estrangement from the divine life, from the Godself is conquered by Christ who removes the curse of estrangement. Interestingly, he does not remove the natural fact of physical death; even those in Christ still die physically. According to some theories of the atonement, physical death alone serves as a punishment for sin, yet since Christ died physically for our sins and “paid the price” you’d expect that Christians wouldn’t have to suffer physical death. But, obviously this is not the case.

Instead, what Christ removes is not the natural fact of death that has always existed, but the curse of death. He releases those “held in slavery by their fear of death”[52]—death is no longer to be feared for it is not simply the return to the dust which has plagued humanity since Adam. The estrangement has been removed, thus the fear of death, and thus death as we have known it, no longer reigns.

There are undoubtedly problems in the line of reasoning I have presented. Yet, what I believe this essay has shown is that the creationist assertion that a Christian cannot believe in evolution because of necessary theological problems is false. I must agree with B.B. Warfield over the assertions of Henry Morris that a Christian can indeed be an evolutionist without denying true scriptural teaching.

While the creationists says that the Bible clearly teaches that all death stems from the fall of humanity, I assert that the Bible doesn’t clearly teach this in Genesis or elsewhere. The creationist claim that Paul links physical death and sin is refuted by un understanding that Paul links the curse of physical death as we know it— a death that has been ontologically changed by its association with final estrangement from the divine life. And finally, the creationist claim that the creation and fall accounts must be read literally is refuted by understanding that the Bible’s claim is less about the beginning point of human sin than a fundamental change in relationship.

On a personal level, I am unsure whether the scientific claims of evolution are accurate. Although the creationist defense doesn’t hold water, I still have lingering questions not fully answered by evolutionary theory. While my theological fears about accepting evolution have been largely eroded by this class and paper, I still have trepidation about incorporating a scientific theory—by necessity, a theory in flux—into my personal views of the way that the world is.

[1] Miller, Kenneth R. Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (New York: Perennial-HarperCollins, 2002), 62.

[11] Fergusson, David A. S. The Cosmos and the Creator (Arrowsmiths Ltd, Bristol, Great Britain, 1998), 55.

[13] Ham, Ken. The Lie: Evolution (El Cajon, CA: Creation-Life Publishers, 1987), 73.

[14] Morris, Henry. King of Creation (San Diego: Christian Literature Press, 1980).

[15] Livingstone, David N. Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987) 104.

[20] Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989), 28.

[21] Welker, Michael. Creation and Reality. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1999), 18.

[26] Mortenson, Terry. Evolution: The Debate. [28 September 2001]. Available from World Wide Web: (http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/01/evolution3_092801.htm)

[27] Shuster, Marguerite. The Fall and Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2004) 25.

[30] Emberger, Gary. “Theological Analysis of Selected Recent Creationist Assertions Concerning the Occurrence of Death Before Sin.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 52: 160-168.

[32] Peterson, Gregory R. “Falling Up: Evolution and Original Sin,” in Evolution and Ethics: Human Mortality in Biological and Religious Perspective, ed. Philip Clayton and Jeffrey Schloss. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 274.

[35] “Romans 8 reminds us that corruption and decay entered the world only with sin,” Ham 139. This reading stems from the originally Platonic idea that perfection demands the lack of nothing as opposed to an Aristotelian idea of teleological perfection which denotes that perfection stems from the fulfillment of purpose.

[36] Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Volume 2. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 66-67.

[37] Shuster notes that Augustine, even while affirming this connection seems uncomfortable with the idea of human physical immortality before the fall and asserts that without sin Adam would have at some point been removed to a “better place” without suffering death. (Shuster, 25).

[38] A case can easily be made that Paul read the rest of the story allegorically, as intended by the Genesis narrator. Gary A. Anderson asserts that Paul, as a Jew, would have been highly aware that Adam’s name literally meant, “mankind” and would have immediately realized the story presented the allegorical beginnings of humanity. (Anderson, Gary A. “Necessarium Adae Peccatum: The Problem of Original Sin,” in Sin, Death and the Devil, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 28.

[39] Skinner, John. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1910) 75.

[40] Wenham, Gordon J. Word Biblical Commentary: Genesis 1-15. (Waco, TX: Word Book Publishers, 1987), 83.

[41] Westermann, Claus. Genesis 1-11: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1974), 266.

[50] Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) 170.