So was Adam going to die if He didn't get the tree of life? Was this tree of life going to maintain him as an immortal human being? In other words, how do we know we didn't evolve and then at some point God 'woke us up' as fully sentient human beings capable of relationship with him, but full of our genetic diseases and degradation, and needing some outside influence to keep us alive? Remember what God said if we sinned? We would die. Then how did we die? We were banished. God did not strike us down with lightning, but we were excluded from the tree of life. We were sent out into the wilderness. We were returned to 'normal'. From dust to dust. This is Baddedley discussing 1 Cor 15, and early Christian thought on these matters. Enjoy.
What is important for our discussion however, is the way in which Paul here seems happy to intermingle conditions arising from sin and conditions arising from creation without any attempt to distinguish them. Adam is earthy, he is from the earth, and is living soul. Accordingly his body is natural, and so is mortal, perishable, weak, and ends in dishonour. Paul is very clear that death is the final enemy, and is the result of sin—he returns to this theme in the next verse after what I’ve just quoted above. And yet, the way he talks about Adam in contrast to Christ in these verses makes the difference seem primarily to do with creation versus new creation. After all, he is focusing on Adam’s natural body, the fact that Adam is from the earth and so is earthy, and the nature of Adam in Gen 2:7. Nothing about what he says here about Adam seems drawn from chapter three. I've shortened it....
That is, the basic picture in 1 Cor 15 seems to be both that death is a tyrant, and Christ’s final enemy and that Adam and his image-sharers (us) are by nature mortal and perishable and that we need to be fundamentally changed to be made immortal.
How is this to be understood? I’ll highlight three ways I think Christians have often sought to understand this. This isn’t an exhaustive list, and there are variations of how these views could be expressed, and they can be combined in different ways, but it’ll give some pegs for thinking:
First.... Second....
Third, Adam was mortal by nature but immortal by participation. That is, left to ourselves, death is as natural to human beings as it is for all other parts of the animate creation. There is nothing inherently immortal about flesh and blood—which is why flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God but must be put off for us to put on imperishability and immortality. What Adam and Eve were given was a source of life external to themselves that enabled them to enjoy a share in God’s own eternal life and so be kept from death. This was mediated through the Tree of Life.
On this view death is unnatural when at looked at from the point of view of God’s purpose in creating humanity. We were made to stay connected to God through trusting his word and obeying it and so stay in the realm of life by being caught up in something greater than ourselves. Yet death is natural when looked at from the point of view of humanity’s nature. Humanity was made mortal like all creatures and so once we were cut off from God, we faced death like every other animal. ....
Two, I think it is arguably the dominant position of the early church. It’s not the only position in the early church, my impression is that Tertullian, for example believes that human souls are inherently immortal. Nonetheless, the view I’ve tried to unpack briefly here is held by a number of respected and orthodox teachers in the early church. I’ll give some brief extracts from Athanasius as an example:
For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good. By nature, of course, man is mortal, since he was made from nothing, but he bears also the Likeness of Him Who is, and if he preserves that Likeness through constant contemplation, then his nature is deprived of its power and he remains incorrupt. De Incarnatione §4
Here, I hope, it should be clear that the basic schema is fairly similar to what I’ve outlined. Humanity is by nature mortal ‘of course’ (!). This is because he is a creature, and so has been made from nothing (a common link among the early church fathers in my reading—that which has a beginning naturally has an end as well). Hence, returning to non-existence is natural for humanity. But because humanity bears the Likeness of the Son, that underlying nature ‘is deprived of its power’ and humanity ‘remains incorrupt’. I’ll give one more example to show this isn’t an exception:
For God is good—or rather, of all goodness He is Fountainhead, and it is impossible for one who is good to be mean or grudging about anything. Grudging existence to none therefore, He made all things out of nothing through His own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ; and of all these His earthly creatures He reserved especial mercy for the race of men. Upon them, therefore, upon men who, as animals, were essentially impermanent, He bestowed a grace which other creatures lacked—namely, the impress of His own Image, a share in the reasonable being of the very Word Himself, so that, reflecting Him and themselves becoming reasonable and expressing the Mind of God even as He does, though in a limited degree, they might continue for ever in the blessed and only true life of the saints in paradise. De Incarnatione§3
Here Athanasius indicates that men naturally die because we are fundamentally animals: ‘men who, as animals, were essentially impermanent.’ What makes us different from all other animals is a particular grace we have that nothing else has—we are made with an impress of God’s own Image, and share in the rationality of the Word of God. This is ‘so that, reflecting Him…they might continue for ever…in paradise.’ Here Athanasius is briefly stating my key points—human beings are animals and so are mortal. Our immortality came through our link to God forged by our sharing in the nature of the Word because we had the imprint of His Image within us.
Much more good stuff on this theme here.
http://reflectionsinexile.blogspot.com.au/2007/11/problems-with-creation-science-iv.html
