As I also said, plants are not regarded as living OR dying in scripture as animals and humanity are, so you are imposing a contemporary definition on scripture.
Yes, in the Hebrew, the word life or living is 'nephesh', which differentiates human and animal life from non-human/animal life. Specifically it ties in the fact that these animals breath air using lungs and have blood circulatory systems. That is why in Genesis 1, the land animals with 'nephesh' are differentiated from other forms of life including sea creatures and plants. They did not have our modern comprehension of biology, so this is how they described life. However, they understood that plants though different lived and died, flourished and withered away. Same thing with the sea creatures.
I believe the primary reason they differentiated them is in support of the scriputure which discusses God breathing into man the breath of life. Only animals with lungs and humans had this capability and thus were 'nephesh'.
However, how does this tie into your concept that physical death did not enter any of creation until the fall of Adam? You seem to be grasping at straws and doing mental gymnastics, pulling scripture from both the OT and NT to back up this belief.
You specifically and rather emphatically interpreted that scripture as "spiritual death" which is consistent with your claim that Adam only died a spiritual death as a result of the Fall, while his physical death was normal and inevitable and unrelated to the Fall, as if God had created us all with physical death as part of our life. Although you are not keeping this as clear as it should be, sometimes leaving it vague enough for me to keep stumbling over your terminology, this as I understand it is the crux of our disagreement.
My inclination is that physical death was a by-product of the fall along with spiritual death, but I am not ruling out that the focus of the fall was primarily on spiritual death. Will do more research and get back to you on this.
but I don't agree that physical death was in any way a natural part of God's creation, but that it entered as a result of the Fall, as did spiritual death, in fact the death of the whole being, and of the whole Creation
"on the whole Creation" bit is confusing me, since you said that plants died before the Fall. Are plants not part of Creation??
For starters everyone is BORN into spiritual death because of the Fall, and only if redeemed by Christ do we begin to regain the spiritual life which Adam lost,
Original sin. I agree with, but with more of a Wesleyen interpretation.
John Wesley writes:
Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and of his own nature inclined to evil, and that continually."
However, the rest of your discussion, I for the mostpart agree with.
The wages of sin can include disease which is part of physical death.
I see this as part and parcel with physical death. Disease and death are like horse and carriage. You don't have one without the other. Scientifically speaking death through just old age and the naturally deterioration of the body is also possible but for the sake of brevity I group that in with disease.
But the problem in all this is that it is basically a straw man argument -- IF you are claiming that I've said ONLY physical death is the result of the Fall.
Ok, I am just making sure we are on the same page.
I have not denied spiritual death at all ever anywhere in this discussion, but you have denied that physical death is the result of sin and the Fall.
Not denied physical death of humans so much as focused emphasis more on spiritual death than physical death.
There is no need to convince me of the importance of spiritual death, but physical death is always the end result of this physical life for all humanity due to sin, and that is implied in all the discussions of death even where spiritual death is the focus.
Ok, no harm no foul.
If sin brings both physical and spiritual death, then the Fall brought both physical and spiritual death, as I've been saying. Since you posted this link maybe you are no longer claiming that the Fall did NOT bring physical death? Or what?
Did I actually come out and say that the Fall did not bring about physical death of humans? If I did it was not intentional. I do have questions of why there would be a tree of life in Eden though. To me this seems to imply something else as far as man's mortality before the fall. Not saying I am certain on this, just saying it leaves it open for debate.
Why else did He need to become "incarnate" which means embodied, in human form? So He could redeem our entire being both spiritual and physical which was ALL corrupted at the Fall, and die the death both physical [rather brutally in His case] and spiritual ["My God My God why have You forsaken Me?] The whole point of His physical death was to redeem our sin-corrupted BODIES, which isn't to say that was ALL He died to redeem of our human nature.
Ok, I understand the point you are making, and pretty much agree with this. However, I think the emphasis of his death is not on saving our physical mortal bodies but on saving our immortal souls in our newly transformed bodies.
Again, you seem to be imputing to me a straw man notion that says ONLY physical death was the result of the Fall and ONLY physical life the result of Christ's salvation. Not true.
Not trying to invoke a strawman, just trying to comprehend what your belief is.
But it does seem that YOUR argument is that ONLY spiritual death was the result of the Fall and ONLY spiritual life the result of Christ's salvation, with the resurrection of the body just a sort of meaningless bonus gift from God or something like that.
Not exactly the way I would have worded it. The Fall brought on a separation of our souls from God and eventually death to our physical bodies and that through salvation our immortal souls are saved, and after physical death our immortal souls in our new glorified bodies will live eternally in heaven.
Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
"In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are. - C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
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