Did God intend for Adam and Eve to live forever?
Maybe immortality is about more than not being dead.
There are few more rigorous theological spaces than the kitchen table with a four-year-old. On one particular occasion we were talking about creation and the garden of Eden and the arrival of death in the Fall. “So before that, everything lived forever?” my conversation partner asked. “The trees kept growing and there were more and more and more tigers? And what did the tigers eat? What did the T. rexes eat? Would people have just kept filling up everything? Where would it all go?”
As we talked, I imagined looking around and seeing trees pressed together and humans and elephants and bears and coyotes and roaches and mice and dogs and cherry trees and azalea bushes and dandelions—all slowly pressing together and then piling on top of one another. Millions. Billions. Billions of billions of living things that never die.
“Well, it was just the humans who lived forever.” As soon as I said it, I knew I was wrong. Everything else lives and dies so that we don’t have to? When we interpret humanity’s relationship to creation, maybe our domination over creation isn’t our only misperception. Perhaps we miss the possibilities of our life when we believe human beings are intended to be exempt from death.
