Re: [asa] a theological exercise

On Tue, 3 Jun 2008, Bethany Sollereder wrote:

> "This "Death" must be something other than physical death of anything at
> all. It boils down to a denial of reality."
>
> The problem with this is that eventually you get so far from the original
> text, that it ends up being exercises in aisegesis, rather than exegesis.
> As you pointed out, geocentricity was a clear teaching of scripture. We got
> around that by saying "they were wrong, the earth rotates around the sun"
> not by trying to reinterpret the scriptures actually be heliocentric. The
> same goes for death.
> Trying to reinterpret the death in Genesis as "spiritual" death is something
> I've tried to do before, but this clearly goes against the meaning of the
> text (as I've been rather forcefully told by Old Testament experts). It
> falls then to us to say "they were wrong, death did not begin with the
> fall".
> It is incidental worldview. Let it go.

I don't see anything in Genesis that says that there was no death of any
living thing before the Fall. YECs appeal to Rom. 5:12 and I Cor. 15:21
although the contexts in each case indicates that Paul is talking about
death of humans. I don't know the history of interpretations concerning
this topic, but when I was young, evangelicals commonly used the original
edition of the Scofield Reference Bible, and death of animals before the
Fall was part of the creation theory that its notes advocated, and that
was without any indication that it was necessary to be defensive about
believing this.

Gordon Brown (ASA member)

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Received on Tue Jun 3 21:59:59 2008