Just wanted to let you know I haven't forgotten, nor abandoned, our budding discussion on your website about sin, death, evolution, and the Biblical implications for these issues. (Or maybe I have forgotten.) I've just been very busy, and very tired when not busy. Mostly I have relegated myself to short, pithy, posts here and there, such as this one. Have patience.

I've written at length on this topic, as its near and dear to my heart. But I know its tedious in any discussion to constantly refer to other reading, so I'll try to be brief.

The whole of the Bible is a story beginning with the creation of the world by God - brining light, land, and life out of the chaos symbolized in Genesis 1 by the tumultuous sea. In the opening chapters, right after the poetic description of creation itself, is the story of the fall of man, and with him the creation itself is marred. The rest of the story is God's efforts in putting the world back right, of brining creation to its true potential, and his redemption of mankind - his signature on creation.

So Revelation 21 specifically is the picture of that ultimate fulfillment. We see a new cosmos - different from what we now know in that the chaos of the sea is completely swallowed up in the beauty and order of completed creation. We see a city coming out of heaven (God's dimension of existance) to the new Earth, where God now lives with mankind. The nations are now judged with justice and equity, every tear is wiped from man's eyes, radical evil is expelled once and for all, and things are finally as they were meant to be.

So to interpret all this as a mere "spiritual" escape from the "physical" world is to do violence to the arc of the entire story. The story of creation and redemption, of promised land conquered, lost, and regained, of man fallen into death and redeemed by death to life - is a ultimately the story of a grand artist and a huge creative project. To act like the physical world is just God's playpen - something he'll tinker with for a while before throwing it out completely and doing something else - is to embrace an anti-creational dualism antithetical to historic Judaism and Christianity.

And it has serious consequences. Why care about global warming, or the destruction of the environment, if all of this physical stuff doesn't really matter? Why spend your life doing science if God's just going to discard all this physical stuff anyway? This is why the resurrection of Christ is so important to Christians - it's not that Jesus died so that you can go to heaven. It's that he rose from the dead - his old body becoming new, and better than new - physicality as it was meant to be. He rose so that in him humanity has hope to rise again from death to the renewed and restored creation.

As the Sri Lankan Christian Vinoth Ramachandra put it:

The cross speaks of a god who is entangled with our world, who immerses himself in our tragic history, who embraces our humanity in all its vulnerability, pain and confusion, including our evil and our death. Here is a god who comes to us, not as a master, but as a servant who stoops to wash the feet of his disciples, to suffer brutalization and dehumanization at the hands of his creatures. And in identifying with us in our humanity, he draws the human into his own divine life.

So what this means is that the closer we get to God, the more human we become, not less. Our created physical bodies have a future. In raising Jesus from death, the creator was affirming our humanity, that this historical, embodied existence does have a future.

So you see, our salvation lies not in an escape from this world, but in the transformation of this world. Everything that is good, and true, and beautiful in human history is not lost forever, but will be restored and directed to the worship of the true God. And all our human activities in the arts, in the sciences, in the worlds of economics and politics, and even the non-human creation, will be brought to share in the liberating rule of God.

This is historic Christianity, and it is a vision that dignifies and exalts our scientific efforts in this marvelous though imperfect physical world we live in.

Revelation ends, not with Gods people going up to heaven, but with the holy city descending from heaven to a renewed earth.

Thats not how I read Revelation 21:1. Of course, I don't know what it says in the original Greek; do you have any information on interpreting it?

I can track with that to some extent - the notion of cause and effect not necessarily being chronological is in fact something I mentioned. However, I think Christianity, in order to be faithful to its Jewish roots (and scripture) needs to rather firmly reject dualism. The spiritual and the physical are not separate planes of reality. Revelation ends, not with Gods people going up to heaven, but with the holy city descending from heaven to a renewed earth.

In other words, though I am no six-day creationist, I do very much see the narrative as speaking deeply of the creation of our world, not some heavenly netherworld that we will someday escape to.

I read your link, and found it interesting. Another approach to the problem of death is to recognize that God's actions aren't as limited as those of us who are trapped within four dimensional space-time. When the cause is supernatural, it doesn't have to chronologically precede the effect. I think its entirely possible that the Garden of Eden where there is no death is in a different plane of reality than this universe; in fact it is God's Paradise where Revelation 2:7 tells us the Tree of Life that the saved will eat from currently exists. That being the case, when God exiled Adam and Eve from Paradise, he could send them to anywhen in this universe he wanted to, even though the cause of this universe separated from God by death was Adam's sin. Thus there would be no contradiction between christianity and evolutionary theory.

In your list of featured books on the sidebar, you've misspelled a couple of names. "Del Ratzsch" is misspelled as "Del Ratzch", and "Donald Brownlee" is misspelled as "Donald Browlee."

Here is the coolest video I saw this week on how man evolves wings to fly via intelligent design.

Jet Man: The Inredible Flying Man

Sal

I found the whole discussion fascinating, and it leaves a lot of open questions. I remember once MikeGene said that the real trouble between evolution and Christianity centers on the issue of death, and I certainly agree.

This is an important question even for non-religious types, because it centers in the stance taken by Francis Collins and the like. If the question of death before any historical human action is ultimately corrosive to Christianity, then Christians will ultimately cede the scientific enterprise to the Dawkins crowd.