I’ve a strange fascination with death, especially so as trying to understand it from a Christian perspective. We know of no thing that does not die, or, at least, nothing apart from “inanimate” objects. Our entire classification of what differentiates a living from a non-living organism centers on the fact that the former will, inevitably, have to face death. All evolutionary theories (and sociological theories, and psychological theories, and political theories, and culture theories, etc.) have as their underlying assumption the idea that our world longs to contradict its impending entropy, that we want to outrun death, that we want to survive. This world, with its limits and balances, sees death on all sides, and our existence as one large response to those boundaries.
Was our world created—was life created—with death in mind? Or have we just learned to adapt surprisingly well to it? Or are we even asking the right questions? Can we take the liberty of interpreting death (or facing it at the very least) in theological terms? If God foreknew that man would fall and yet still created us, is death the punishment for our ensuing sin, or is it, perhaps, the final show of His great love, a demonstration that there is a way out of this Paradise Lost, a promise that even the fall can be redeemed?
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