But there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed.

2 Peter 2:1,2 NKJV

Introduction

Theistic evolution (TE) is a concept that may be almost perfectly immune to refutation. On the one hand, it is not scientific, although it subsumes itself to the materialistic theory of evolution. Darwinian evolution is mistaken by many TE advocates of as “good science” rather than a metaphysical/religious program. On the other hand, TE is unbiblical. So, being both unscientific and unbiblical, TE is irrefutable using either the tools of science or the authority of Scripture.

The very best one could hope for from any materialistic theory, such as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, would be ambivalence about any gloss of theism splashed over it. But TE is not the same thing as materialistic Darwinism, it is a different religion and, while Darwinism might in some ways be workable as a scientific theory, TE isn’t. Proponents claim TE resolves tension between science and faith, but what data could refute it? If wonders occur in mothers’ wombs and perfectly formed babies are created, a rational person might recognize the miracle and thank the Creator for showering the world with such blessings. But not to a theistic evolutionist. Within its constraining bounds, evidence of divine action must be explained away to preserve all appearances of a purely naturalistic universe.

At best, God is relegated to the laws of nature—His secondary causes. Where direct divine action might occur, it must be undetectable to the minds He created. Babies, as they grow, must have their natural ability to reason from cause to effect and effect to cause educated out of them to maintain God’s remote perfection and goodness. This insulates God from the dangerous business of direct interaction with the fallen world He created; a world where His goodness or His reality may be tested and questioned. The god of TE is not the biblical God who invites His created being to “try me now in this” (Malachi 3:10 NKJV) or “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8 NKJV).

The irrefutability of TE is summed up by Francis Collins in this way:

I find theistic evolution, or BioLogos, to be by far the most scientifically consistent and spiritually satisfying of the alternatives. This position will not go out of style or be disproven by future scientific discoveries. It is intellectually rigorous, it provides answers to many otherwise puzzling questions, and it allows science and faith to fortify each other like two unshakable pillars, holding up a building called Truth.¹

As an eminent scientist, Collins can confidently prophesy that TE will not be scientifically disproven precisely because he knows that this particular theory of origins is independent of the empirical data that serves, at least ideally, as the authority in science. In addition, at least one school of philosophy, championed by Karl Popper, puts such irrefutable conjectures outside the demarcation line of science:

A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it.²

But could the tragedy of a broken and deformed child refute TE? No, that child becomes an example of the cruel mechanism of struggle and death through which man and everything else was formed. Is the idea that the child is broken even valid? The child is a failed experiment, but an essential part of the process that brought man to his current exalted place in nature. A child can only be broken if she was not meant to be that way—if she was created perfect, in God’s image, but through some monstrous intervention failed to realize the plan the Creator had for her. For TE, that comes far too close to the record of history permeating the Word of God from Genesis to Revelation—the record that reveals God’s fiat creation of all things and man’s rebellion against his Creator, the sin that brought death and suffering and the grace of the biblical God who suffered to save every broken child of Christ.

The biblical record makes sense of this world’s strange mixture of beauty—newborn babies, towering oaks, the cool evening breeze—and horror—from mass murder to the blood-soaked death of a Thompson’s gazelle, torn apart on the Serengeti Plane by an equally beautiful cheetah. It affirms what we already know in our hearts; this is not the way things are supposed to be. The whole creation groans (Romans 8:22), and anyone with a heart groans with it; but not the theistic evolutionist. Instead, TE embraces the suffering as the plan. The struggle for survival is the way the god of TE achieves his ends.

Definitions

By being immune to both scientific and biblical evidence, TE might already appear to be beyond critique, but there is one more way in which it may appear invulnerable to serious examination. Anyone who seeks to genuinely engage with TE can quickly find themselves sucked into a quagmire of constantly shifting definitions and tortured obfuscations of once perfectly clear terms, all wrapped up in a swirling grey mist of uncertainty about everything except, of course, that TE is the only position available to thinking Christians. In a fog of poignant appeals to the emotional struggles of those who lack every answer to every possible question about the biblical creation and dire warnings about the loss of our children because of overwhelming evidence and “good science,” logical evidence-based reason never quite cuts through the emotional miasma. Theistic evolution is a hazy apparition that can never be quite nailed down, a vapor so delicate it would vanish in the clarity of dawn’s first light. It thus relies on advocates exercising a special kind of genius or ignorance, but how would anyone really know?

Given the vagaries inherent in TE, finding a clear workable definition with which those who wish to carefully examine the idea can seriously engage is challenging. BioLogos is a leading online presence advocating TE, which it sometimes rebrands as “Evolutionary Creation.” This group of scholars defines the position they promote this way:

We fully affirm that the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God. We also accept the science of evolution as the best description for how God brought about the diversity of life on earth.³

While the first sentence would sound to most reasonable people like a firm commitment to a literal understanding of the Bible, in fact it is ambiguous due to the tortured way in which theistic evolutionists use the English language. By “authoritative,” for example, “literally true” is not meant. In fact, while designed to sound pious and clear, this definition leaves many open questions including:

1. How exactly does the Bible inform our understanding of God’s role in origins?

2. Is God directly involved in evolving organisms at all? Or is He really the remote god of Deism?

3. Did God do many small undetectable creation events to move organisms to their current state?

4. Was it God who caused species to go extinct in the past to make room for new species?

5. Is divine action evident in the creation? Or undetectable to human wisdom?

Other definitions of TE may address some of these ambiguities, while at the same time creating others. At another level, the way in which language is used by advocates of TE undermines its utility and, while it may be rhetorically useful to advance an agenda, hampers genuine analysis and engagement. If this is true, then how can a Bible-believer in the real sense⁴—rather than the non-sense way in which some who embrace TE might use the term—engage with TE in any meaningful way? The problem appears almost impossible, especially given the immunity of TE to science or biblical evidence.

There is one possibility of engagement with TE that does allow some scrutiny of the idea. In TE evolution is the means by which God achieves His ends. A central component of the idea of biological evolution is the necessity of death. As organisms change, some original types must go extinct and death is the necessary mechanism by which this is achieved.

Death is more than a small point of engagement between TE, reality, biblical Christianity and theology. In fact, death offers a vast expanse of intellectual space for evaluation of TE, particularly from a biblical perspective. The issue of death makes TE more than just an unbiblical theology about origins, it impacts our understanding of the nature of humanity, soteriology and ultimately eschatology.

Before delving too deeply into those areas, it is worth mentioning that crediting God with death-driven process of evolution, irrespective of whether it is the Darwinian brand of evolution, is theologically troubling. What kind of god uses struggle, suffering and death to create something that he or she ultimately declares to be “very good” (Genesis 1:31)? The Bible, to most sane and rational readers, goes to some pains to stress that God created using a very different mechanism: “He spoke and it was done” (Psalm 33:9 NKJV). God Himself is consistently depicted as the source of life: “I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts” (Revelation 21:6 NKJV).⁵ On the other hand, “The last enemy that will be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26 NKJV).

Invoking death-driven evolution as the means by which God created the World, life and humanity redefines the God of the Bible and denies the veracity of Scripture as an account of reality. If the biblical account of creation is not literal and the biblical description of God is not true, then there is no reason to believe biblical eschatology.

Possibly worse, by distancing God from the process of creation by stipulating that He must work through secondary causes—such as the neo-Darwinian unguided mutation and natural selection mechanism—TE also distances the Creator from all that is wonderful in the world. In other words, by distancing God from all that is wrong in the creation, TE also logically distances God from all that is right with it. While advocates of TE may write with the tongues of angels, claiming that it somehow makes God greater, this does not alter the fact that evolution leaves their god with blood on his hands and only a broken world to show for it.

In the minds of some, this distancing of God from His creation may excuse Him in some way from responsibility for the pain and suffering we see today, but at what cost? The god who only works through secondary causes may be less inclined to cast the damned into hell fire, but how can he save the righteous from it? What is salvation? What was Jesus doing on the cross? How can any coherent soteriology be built around such an idea?

Theistic Evolution and Catholicism

The answer to the challenges TE poses to a coherent soteriology lies in embracing other unbiblical beliefs, and this is well illustrated by the history of TE in the Catholic Church. It is important to understand that TE is not currently the official position of the Catholic Church and it has never been in the past. TE is merely one position that is open to and embraced by many Catholics. In contrast, there are a significant number of Catholics who embrace the biblical recent literal six-day creation.⁶ At this point in history, these two very different positions are considered to fall within orthodox Catholicism.

Up until the time of Charles Darwin, the most common orthodox Catholic position mirrored that of other Christians. Following Darwin, extensive arguments have been made within Catholicism that attempt to attribute TE to various church fathers and even Thomas Aquinas, but this was clearly not the position of the church fathers or Aquinas.⁷ Shortly after publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Cardinal Johannes von Geissel, Archbishop of Cologne, convened a synod within his ecclesiastical province that dealt with matters of doctrine and ecclesiastical discipline. The synod met, with consent from Pope Pius IX, in 1860 and the acts of the synod were published during 1862 in two volumes: De doctrina catholica and De disciplina ecclesiastica.⁸ These volumes were praised by Cardinal Prospero Caterini, Prefect of the Congregation of the Council and also Pope Pius IX. Participants in the synod would have been well aware of Darwin’s ideas and a German translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species was available before they met. With this in mind, the following statement has some significance:

Our first parents were created immediately by God. Therefore we declare that the opinion of those who do not fear to assert that this human being, man as regards his body, emerged finally from the spontaneous continuous change of imperfect nature to the more perfect, is clearly opposed to Sacred Scripture and to the Faith.⁹

While the acts of the synod carried considerable authority in the Catholic Church, they do not have the same authority as the ex cathedra pronouncements of the Pope. However, in this specific case, they remained the most authoritative pronouncements until Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis.

One would think that, on the basis of the clear statement regarding evolution published by the synod, the matter of evolution, or at least human evolution, would be settled. But it is worth noting the scope of the statement. It does not concern itself with the evolution or nature of anything other than human beings. The nature of human beings and their origin has been a primary focus of Catholic statements since the publication of The Origin of Species, with less attention to the rest of creation. As a Christian church with worship centered around the mass, in which transubstantiation of the bread and wine is claimed to be within the power of priests, the Catholic Church would and could never embrace a purely materialistic view of human origins. But it was the Catholic understanding of human nature that became the anvil on which proponents of TE worked to alter Catholic doctrine.

Theological opposition to Darwinism was not the only Catholic response to evolution. Catholic scientists, as was the case in other faiths, opposed Darwinism on scientific grounds. It has even been argued that the Moravian Abbot, Gregor Mendel, published his seminal research on the laws of genetics in opposition to Darwin.¹⁰ Mendel’s observed laws of genetics put a clear bound on Darwin’s extrapolation of slow gradual change. The bottom line is that much of the disagreement with Darwin was not theological, but rather scientific, as it remains to this day.

The emphasis on human nature and origin did not stop the Catholic hierarchy from occasionally referencing the broader biblical creation in documents of varying authority within the church. For example, Dei Filius, one of the two documents adopted in the First Vatican Council during 1870, notes that God:

[O]f His own goodness and almighty power, not for the increase or acquirement of His own happiness, but to manifest His perfection by the blessings which He bestows on creatures, and with absolute freedom of Counsel, created out of nothing, from the very first beginning of time, both the spiritual and the corporeal creature, to wit, the angelical and the mundane, and afterwards the human creature, as partaking, in a sense, of both, consisting of spirit and of body.¹¹

In the same document, Canon 5 offers the following warning:

If anyone does not confess that the world, and all things that are contained in it, both spiritual and material, have been, in their whole substance, produced by God out of nothing; or shall say that God created, not by His will, free from all necessity, but by a necessity equal to the necessity whereby He loves Himself; or shall deny that the world was made for the glory of God; let him be anathema.¹²

The 1880 Leo VIII encyclical Arcanum divinae sapientiae (The Secret of Divine Wisdom – dealing with marriage) quite clearly rejects evolutionary explanations when it comes to the origin of Eve:

We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep. God thus, in His most far-reaching foresight, decreed that this husband and wife should be the natural beginning of the human race, from whom it might be propagated and preserved by an unfailing fruitfulness throughout all futurity of time.¹³

Taken together, these statements form part of a pattern that indicates clear opposition to Darwinism, and specifically the idea of human evolution, by those who spoke for the Catholic Church. Given that evolution faced formidable scientific objections, theological problems and administrative opposition, it may seem surprising that there were Catholic academics and leaders who took on the task of championing this view, but history records that they did and did so with some success. While there were various political and bureaucratic maneuvers that advanced this agenda, the issue of human nature regularly crops up at the core of arguments.

St. George Mivart

Possibly the most prominent early Catholic proponent of evolution was the English convert St. George Mivart; a friend and confidant of both Darwin and T. H. Huxley. While much of Mivart’s 1871 book, The Genesis of Species, argues against Darwin’s ideas, in the last chapter he attempts his own version of TE. Mivart’s view hinges on the reality of body-soul dualism in which the body may be a product of natural unguided processes, secondary causes, while the soul is eternal and infused from God:

Man, according to the old school definition, is “a rational animal” (animal rationale), and his animality is distinct in nature from his rationality, though inseparably joined, during life, in one common personality. This animal body must have had a different source from that of the spiritual soul which informs it, from the distinctness of the two orders to which those two existences severally belong.¹⁴

From this foundation, Mivart goes on to assert:

[M]an’s body was not created in the primary and absolute sense of the word, but was evolved from preëxisting [sic] material…His soul, on the other hand, was created in quite a different way, not by any preëxisting [sic] means, external to God Himself, but by the direct action of the Almighty, symbolized by the term “breathing:” the very form adopted by Christ, when conferring the supernatural powers and graces of the Christian dispensation, and a form still daily used in the rites and ceremonies of the Church.¹⁵

Ultimately, Mivart fell out with the Catholic Church, but not before Pope Pius IX conferred him with a PhD, possibly due to his opposition to Darwin, giving his views some legitimacy.

Raffaello Caverni

Another attempt at reconciling evolution with the Catholic faith was made by Raffaello Caverni, a priest and professor of physics. Caverni wrote that:

[T]he new doctrines of the English naturalist [Darwin], instead of being opposite to what can be read in the Book of Moses, fit into it in a more orderly way than the interpretations of the ancient exegetes do.¹⁶

The views regarding evolution expressed in his 1877 book De’ nouovi studi della filosofia were considered so heterodox that it attracted enthusiastic criticism from the Jesuit Francesco Salis Seewis, and the Congregation of the Index unanimously added it to the index of banned books. This was despite the fact that Caverni consistently appears to have separated the creation of man from the evolution of other creatures.

Dalmace Leroy

It is interesting that Caverni’s difficulties appear to have had less to do with issues surrounding the nature and creation of humans and more to do with the intrinsic materialism of Darwinism that runs counter to history recorded in Scripture. The French Dominican Dalmace Leroy embraced a kind of polyphyletic evolution that resembled that of some creationists today. However, while on the one hand claiming that human bodies are the result of direct divine intervention,¹⁷ Leroy, like Caverni, seems to equivocate at times and also attempts to reconcile Christianity with materialistic explanations:

My primary goal is to show that the emergence of life on Earth as the result of only natural laws, does not exclude divine action in the world, but on the contrary requires it, making it shine in a most authoritative and admirable way. If the direct creation of species requires an infinite intelligence directing unlimited power; do not the same effects mediated through secondary causes, by use of a few natural laws, give a more sublime and grand idea of Divine genius? The first idea is a completely human conception; the other is incomparably more divine. I do not see how materialism could profit from evolutionary theory.¹⁸

Perhaps it was the way in which Leroy discussed materialistic ideas as if they do not detract from the supernatural understanding of creation revealed in Scripture that drew the attention of critics, but it is interesting to note that his book reveals a path for resolution of a perceived conflict between traditional Catholic understanding and some nonmaterialistic form of evolution:

Even though there are not radical differences between the human body and those of the higher apes, there permanently remains, in the transcendence of the human soul, an impassable barrier separating the human kingdom from the animals; the man and the brute. Supposing that reason was born of instinct, consciousness of appetite, intelligence of matter or, to be specific, the immortal soul from purely organic life—even given the analogies and similarities between the organs of humans and animals—is this not the height of nonsense?¹⁹

The “impassable barrier” is the immortal human soul. What, other than the clear testimony of the Bible and tradition, is to prevent one from believing that the body evolved independently of the soul? While Leroy does not advocate this position, he opens the door for it. In addition, Leroy undermines the utility of Genesis with an assertion still commonly used:

The first pages of Genesis provide the oldest written sacred lessons. These pages are not written in the form of a cosmography, geology or zoology manual; the style is poetic, a primitive song, a patriarchal psalm. Therefore, it would be unreasonable to use literal exegesis on the metaphors, as we would on the prosaic content of a modern physics or natural history textbook.²⁰

Even if the claim that the first chapters of Genesis are poetry is true, something experts seem to struggle to make up their minds about, the assertion that it thus can’t be or isn’t history is demonstrably false. Perhaps as a Frenchman, Leroy can be excused for being unfamiliar with Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” or Francis Scott Key’s “Defence of Fort M'Henry,” but Victor Hugo’s ode to his dead daughter, Demain, dès l’aube, really was about visiting her literal and recent grave while L'Expiation lays out the literal horror of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and defeat at Waterloo. Poetry is not by definition a departure from reality; often enough, poems encapsulate historical reality more truthfully than is possible with prose.

As with Caverni, Leroy’s book attracted the attention first of Jesuit scholars and then the Congregation of the Index. However, in Leroy’s case there was not the same unanimity or clarity among those examining the text.²¹ In a split decision during 1895, the Congregation of the Index banned L’évolution des espèces organiques, but the decision was unpublished. Leroy publicly submitted, but subsequently made multiple attempts to rehabilitate his ideas. In addition, he published the opinion that Catholics could hold multiple views on the origin of species, thus arguing that a spectrum of beliefs on origins, including evolution, are equally Catholic.

John Augustine Zahm

The year following the decision in Leroy’s case, John Augustine Zahm published Evolution and Dogma.²² Zahm was an ordained priest and scientist who had a significant impact on the development of Notre Dame University and also serving the Catholic Church in various administrative posts. Evolution and Dogma was published when Zahm was professor of physics at Notre Dame and a year after he received his PhD from Pope Leo XIII.

In Evolution and Dogma, Zahm argued for TE as the solution to perceived tension between church doctrines and current science. In this he mirrors many theistic evolutionists today. Unlike Caverni, Zahm spends little time on the nature of man, taking the Catholic understanding of humans as a mortal body combined with an immortal soul for granted. He concentrated heavily on reconciling evolution with the teachings of Scripture and other authorities. Thus, when arguing that the writings of Thomas Aquinas are in harmony with evolution, which he carefully distinguishes from Darwinism, Zahm writes:

In the beginning, then, God created primordial matter, which was actuated by various substantial forms. With the elements thus created were associated certain seminal influences—certain physical forces, we now should say—and the various compounds which subsequently resulted from the action of these forces, on the diverse elements created, were the product of generation and not creation. There was development, Evolution, under the action of second causes, from the simple elements to the highest inorganic and organic compounds; from the lowest kinds of brute matter to the highest bodily representative of animated nature but there was nothing requiring anew [sic] creative action or extraordinary intervention, except, of course, the human soul.²³

Zahm spends much of his book arguing for evolution and against other understandings of origins, especially special creation, but is unconstrained by the specific wording of Genesis and does not concentrate on using the instantaneous act of ensoulment by God as a way of reconciling evolution with the belief that creation of man occurred in an instant. His argument concentrates on the body, not so much the soul:

We must hold not only that there was an actual creation of matter in the beginning, that there was a potential creation which rendered matter capable of Evolution, in accordance with the laws impressed by God on matter, but we must also believe that creative action and influence still persist, that they always have persisted from the dawn of creation, that they, and they alone, have been efficient in all the countless stages of evolutionary progress from atoms to monads, from monads to man.²⁴

He has no problem with apes as ancestors of the human body:

Proving that the body of the common ancestor of humanity is descended from some higher form of ape, or from some extinct anthropopithecus, would not necessarily contravene either the declarations of Genesis, or the principles regarding derivative creation which found acceptance with the greatest of the Church’s Fathers and Doctors.²⁵

Zahm regularly references both Mivart and Leroy in his arguments, and is seemingly untroubled by or unaware of the rejection of their ideas by other Catholic authorities. Despite this, Evolution and Dogma initially received favorable reviews from Catholic academics in Catholic publications, but this was not to last. There were scientific objections and then the matter got referred to the Congregation of the Index. After a complex series of investigations and meetings, the opinion that Zahm’s view of the origin of the human body ran counter to doctrine was presented to the cardinals meeting in general congregation. This was the subject of much debate, but ended with the unanimous decision that Zahm’s book would be proscribed, but not before he was given the opportunity to revoke his views.

The result was that the decree was never published and opportunity was given for political maneuvering to blunt the impact of the decision. This led to an indefinite delay in publication of the cardinal’s decision, but also allowed for various leaks of information about what was happening. Eventually, Zahm wrote to the French and Italian editors of his book asking that the book be withdrawn. This letter was then published, giving the only public indication that there was a problem with Evolution and Dogma, one that could easily leave the impression that Zahm was in some way the victim of church intrigue, while not revealing the carful arguments made by experts against his position. The effect was that Zahm’s advocacy of TE was available to the public, while the views of those who argued against his position were not, because the decree containing them was not published.

The Emerging Pattern

In the cases cited so far—Mivart, Caverni, Leroy and Zahm—the outline of a pattern can be seen emerging:

1. The initial response of Catholic authorities to TE was clear and unequivocal.

2. Over time, with each subsequent case, there was no change in doctrine.

3. What did change was the resolve of Catholic authorities to invest political capital in defending the biblical and traditional view of creation

4. Scholars who advocated TE were both protected politically and rewarded in their careers, irrespective of their heterodox views.

In short, the advance of TE in Catholicism was made possible by the persistent effort of advocates and a lack of resolve among church leaders in opposing the new idea, even though most gave the impression that that they disagreed it. This pattern continued and intensified until the pivotal 1950 encyclical of Pope Pius XII, which gives clarity on why Catholics can believe in TE, but are not compelled to:

“[T]he Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.²⁶

Thus, it is clear that the Catholic Church has shifted over the past century or more from unambiguous opposition to TE to declaring it an acceptable position. In addition, Pius XII makes clear that the reason this is possible is because of the doctrine of an immortal soul directly created by God. This doctrine is spelled out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not “produced” by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.²⁷

How does the unbiblical doctrine of an immortal soul separate from the body make TE a possibility for Catholicism? To understand, one has to consider the overarching biblical view of history; past, present and future as diagramed in Figure 1. This view is succinctly expressed several times by the Apostle Paul in Romans 5. For example:

Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous. Romans 5:18,19 NKJV

If it was “one man’s offense” that brought judgement—if “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23)—what about the necessity of death before humans according to TE? The solution lies in the definition of death allowed by the doctrine of an immortal soul that can exist separately from the body. Death, human death, is not the cessation of existence, it is separation of the immortal soul from the mortal body:

What is "rising"? In death, the separation of the soul from the body, the human body decays and the soul goes to meet God, while awaiting its reunion with its glorified body. God, in his almighty power, will definitively grant incorruptible life to our bodies by reuniting them with our souls, through the power of Jesus’ Resurrection.²⁸

If death is simply the end of conscious existence—as expressed in Seventh-day Adventist Fundamental Belief 26—and it occurred before sin, then a coherent soteriology becomes problematic. What exactly was Jesus doing on the cross? On the other hand, if death is the separation of mortal body and immortal soul, then it is something different, something that can only exist after God begins creating immortal souls and putting them into mortal bodies. Because of this, all of the death and suffering leading up to the first human, in the TE view, is not the same thing as the death of humans made up of a mortal body and immortal soul. It is death of soulless brutes. That is not the kind of death Jesus was conquering on the cross. A coherent soteriology is once again possible, but one that accommodates a different ontology and eschatology than that outlined in the Bible.

Conclusion

Seventh-day Adventists understand human beings as “an indivisible unity of body, mind, and spirit,”²⁹ —rather than a combination of mortal body and immortal soul that separate at death. Therefore, human death consists in the cessation of physiological processes in a way that is not qualitatively different than death for animals. If this kind of death occurred before humanity chose sin, and if TE requires death before sin, then TE remains impossible for Adventists to embrace because it makes a coherent soteriology logically problematic.

Accommodation of TE into Adventism would require a change in many of the fundamental beliefs of the Church, notably the biblical view of the nature of humanity (Fundamental Belief 7). There may be other unbiblical views that would serve as effectively as dualism did in Catholicism to act as a fulcrum for levering TE into a religion. These would present their own issues, but following the Catholic path requires, at a minimum, further unbiblical modification of the following Adventist Fundamental Beliefs:

1. The Holy Scriptures (Fundamental Belief 1)

2. The Son (Fundamental Belief 4)

3. Creation (Fundamental Belief 6)

4. The Great Controversy (Fundamental Belief 8)

5. The Life Death and Resurrection of Christ (Fundamental Belief 9)

6. The Sabbath (Fundamental Belief 20)

7. Marriage and Family (Fundamental Belief 23)

8. Christ’s Ministry in the Heavenly Sanctuary (Fundamental Belief 24)

9. The Second Coming of Christ (Fundamental Belief 25)

10. Death and Resurrection (Fundamental Belief 26)

Should these changes be made, the name might remain the same, but the church would clearly be very different. In addition, changes in these beliefs would require further changes in other beliefs. This may seem to present an insurmountable barrier to adoption of TE by Bible-believing Adventists who submit to the fundamental beliefs of the Church. However, it is worth noting that, historically, barriers to embracing TE were also significant for Catholics. Many Catholics were informed scientists who saw the myriad scientific issues with evolution, particularly as formulated by Charles Darwin. They and other academics understood that the Bible, Church Tradition and much of the Catholic hierarchy stood in opposition to TE. The Catholic Church made multiple official statements carrying significant authority in opposition to this evolutionary and unbiblical view. Despite this, today TE is possibly the most widely accepted view among Catholics.

Currently, Seventh-day Adventists cannot embrace TE without exhibiting extraordinary duplicity or naiveté. This does not make Adventism immune to the TE heresy. It is quite possible that this church could follow the path of others, including the Catholic Church, and depart from the biblical faith to embrace something completely different. If this path is followed, the church will assuage the concerns of those who embrace the biblical faith by issuing official statements while, at the same time, a small group of academics promotes the TE heresy from positions of privilege. Those entrusted with administering the church will allow this to occur through a combination of political expediency and incompetence. In fact, church manages will promote advocates of TE to positions of greater privilege and responsibility. This power will be used to increase the ranks of those supportive of TE or ambivalent about it, while academics who wish to address the heresy may be disadvantaged or dismissed as old fashioned, inflexible or troublemakers. Young people will be indoctrinated by charismatic TE advocates in positions of authority over them and thus lay members will become progressively more amenable to accepting this unbiblical doctrine. Those wishing to maintain the faith will find themselves swimming against a shifting tide against which they can make little progress. As with the Catholic Church, whether or not this occurs will depend to a great degree on the resolve of administrators to use their political capital and ecclesiastical authority to maintain and promote the biblical doctrine of creation.

—The END—

Figure 1

The overarching narrative of Scripture first provides the entrance of sin as the reason the once good creation is marred by suffering and death. The logical solution to the problem of death is to address the root cause, sin. Through His victory over sin, Jesus thus redeems His creation from the consequences of sin, and salvation involves a good new creation and eternal life.