I recall a theology professor once stating that “Baptist theology” is a contradiction in terms because every Baptist has his or her own theology.
A real Baptist would decide their theology by committee and then congregational vote to approve like they decide everything. It’s a Baptist distinctive that the local church is accountable directly to Jesus not to any other authority. And churches are typically congregationally led, not under elder rule like Presbyterians, or led by pastors like many non-denoms. Our church business meetings used to use parliamentary procedure. Official minutes and motions and tables and floors and seconding and carrying unanimously. It was like student council for grown-ups.
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Sounds like our Baptist church. Things are in a bit of transition in SBC Baptist circles with the kicking out of Saddleback due to having a woman pastor. So independent autonomy is not so independent in some people’s eyes. Fortunately our pastor is moderate in most things, and our association with the national organization is pretty loose.
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Love requires life and freedom.
Life and freedom require learning, growth, and development.
Learning, growth and development require pain.
Thus pain (and physical death) is a part of God’s original plan.
Without pain and physical death there is no learning, growth, or development.
Without pain and physical death there is no life.
Without life there is no freedom.
Without freedom there is no love.
Evil and sin is an attempt to avoid and circumvent this. They are self-destructive habits which avoid essential aspects of life itself. Avoiding the pain of failure can only end in a refusal to learn from ones mistakes. The refusal to learn stops growth, learning, and development. Life is replaced by a frozen, meaningless existence, and under such conditions love will die. This was the fall of man and the failure of Adam and Eve. They avoided growth and learning by playing the blame game. It is one of the greatest and most destructive human habits. Prisons are filled with people who blame their victims for what happened.
This is a lesson not only of the scientific finding of evolution, but also of how the biology of our own bodies work. The lack of pain is an illness, for example leprosy (a bacteria destroys the nerves which enable us to feel pain). The lack of death is an illness, for example cancer (cell live and reproduce beyond the normal bounds/rules of the body). Because of this, theology which imagines a state without pain and death before the fall of man is so far from reality it is indistinguishable from fantasy. It cannot be of any interest to me.
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I once infuriated a professor by arguing that since Christ is the Second Adam, and since obviously He had to be Adam before Eve, then Christ contained both male and female, so that while the head pastor should be male nevertheless the ministry couldn’t be complete without a female pastor as well.
It might help to explain…
As far as we know, the body in which God was incarnated as Jesus was male. We have no evidence to think otherwise.
But…
Christ is God. And there is nothing which God lacks. Therefore Christ as God has perfect and complete femininity as well as masculinity. Otherwise, are we to think that women have something which God lacks? Are women superior to God in this respect? I don’t think so.
But… too many Christians seem to equate their knowledge of God with the totality of God. It is a vanity which I have always found difficult to understand. How can they make God so small just to make themselves bigger? Is there any other way to explain it?
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So was Adam before Eve.
It’s a bit of a philosophical argument, and in a way it requires regarding Adam as diminished after losing that rib. I could have argued the point in a couple of other ways, but that professor was so find of “essence” and “substance” that I couldn’t resist tweaking him.
Fortunately, he wasn’t doing the grading on that one.
Oh…
Yeah your further explanation does shed more light and what you meant. Of course, I never took such aspects of the story literally so this would not even have occurred to me. No I do not believe Eve was a golem of bone made by necromancy any more than I believe Adam was a golem of dust made my necromancy. I was always reading the Bible in the context of reality as revealed by science, asking whether it could have any meaning in such a case. If not, I would simply have discarded the book as nonsense.
I mean come on… when you make it magical like that… all the scientific logic goes out the window. Why would the bone removed from Adam be female any more than it was a full grown woman. It was magically changed in that reading of the Bible. But I guess your point was more about this person’s reaction to your creative thinking.
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This is how I tend to look at it but the thorny issue that always comes up for me is heaven.
Is there no life, love or freedom in heaven? Or is there pain and physical death allowing them for in heaven
Logically can one say physical death and pain are required for love, life, and freedom while maintaining there is love, life and freedom in heaven but not physical pain or death?
Slightly different question but I asked this on a livestream from word on fire ministries two days ago as they were doing a 3 part series on the problem of pain from C.S Lewis. The author’s response was something along the lines of, we will have more of a face to face with God and an open channel so we will have no desire to sin or do evil. This we have freedom in heaven but no possibility of evil exists. I don’t know if heaven is different from the realm of angels but this is odd if angels can fall. It was not entirely satisfying to me but did open up an avenue to at least look at.
At any rate, I think heaven is the unknown. We clearly know pain and death pre-date humans and are how the world was made.
Vinnie
Physical pain? no. Physical death? no. Physical pain and death is a necessity for the development of physical life. Physical life is just the beginning of life – the limited protected womb in which life learns enough to live spiritually (with God, like God).
But there is still pain and death in spiritual life, in some sense. The possibility of spiritual death remains a necessity for the free will needed for love and spiritual life – not as a constant threat but only as possibility (of the perversity of choosing death over life) which one must choose against.
I think this is essentially correct, more or less. Heaven is the choice for goodness and life against evil and death. It is the choice to do what we must for love and life. It is not that our freedom is gone, but only that our choice is made. And after all, this choice between good and evil which seems such a big deal to us now is really only a minor side effect of free will. The much greater freedom is the freedom to choose among infinite possibilities to be found in goodness (for it is creative and thus leads to endless possibilities). It only requires that we choose against this one perverse option that goes against goodness (and freedom) to destruction and nothingness (an option empty of future possibilities).
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@Christy - just getting back to this. @Mervin_Bitikofer has it correct earlier; the physician’s name is Paul Brand, & he & Mr. Yancey wrote 2 or 3 books together. I highly recommend them. I’ve stolen, er, borrowed heavily from them to do a couple Sunday School classes at my church.
While we thankfully don’t see much leprosy here in the US, there is an analogous clinical scenario. Patients with diabetes often have what’s called a peripheral neuropathy, usually affecting their feet most severely — thus, for example, they cannot feel the relatively minor neurological signals of discomfort at the early stages of an infection involving a toenail bed, for example. Further, healing of any infection requires adequate blood flow, and this same patient population often also has an impairment there, as well; diabetes & peripheral arterial disease far too often exist as a combo platter here in susceptible patient populations. Thus, a superficial infection can quickly progress to an infection of the bones of the foot, & with impaired blood supply, those infections are extremely difficult to treat — neither white blood cells nor antibiotics get to the site of infection in adequate quantities.
Every single day in my hospital — including lots of weekends — patients have toes amputated…or worse. To completely remove the infection, occasionally most of the leg has to be amputated above the patient’s knee. And it’s often because the initial soft tissue infection wasn’t perceived earlier. The painful signals didn’t transmit.
What I was driving at with my earlier post on this thread was simply to note that there’s good reason from a biological perspective to indicate that our ability to feel & neurologically process physical pain may in fact be completely untethered to traditional Christian ways of thinking about the aftermath of Original Sin…or our own present sinful state, for that matter. I’ll freely admit that putting together a comprehensive model for how this all shakes out is above my own theological pay grade. But I also can’t say that I find the models being offered up by Mr. Piper —and, by extension, @mgruber173 — very satisfying. Sorry, but it feels a bit like claiming that previously existing neurological pathways now conjure up new psychological effects en masse for the entire human race, all to force the scientific evidence peg into one’s preferred theological hole.
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