Speculations: 1000 Ways Not to Die

Preamble: A Defense of Speculation

Why explore hypothetical questions the Bible does not really address? What profit is there? Is this to “go beyond what is written”?

It is certainly possible to speculate in useless or even harmful ways. As much regard as I have for Thomas Aquinas, for example, even I get tired of 15 questions composed of 72 articles about the nature of angels, most of which seem of little importance except as an exercise in working out what must be true about creatures of pure intellect.

But hypothetical questions receive their utility by what they reveal about what is or what was true in the real world. For example, if a child asks what would happen if they put their hand on a hot burner, the situation they described will hopefully not happen, but your answer will tell them an important truth about how reality works. This applies as well to the past. Asking a question such as, “What would have happened if my parents’ had never met?” also offers the child a window into, if nothing else, how real life reproduction works.

Speculating about the world before and apart from the Fall, then, is a diagnostic question that helps us shed new light on the non-hypothetical questions such as “How did God create man?”, “Why is man mortal?”, “What is the difference between nature, grace, and glory?”, or “What is the difference between problems caused by sin and the natural limits of being creatures?” Such questions are valuable both as doctrine and as practical parts of prudence in ethics or even politics.^[1]

Now, with my self-justification out of the way…

Ever since I was a kid I wondered quite a bit about how “not dying” would have worked if man had not fallen. There were simple, more boring questions: what would happen if you didn’t eat? There were more extreme examples: what if you were in an explosion? What if you jumped off a cliff? Would it be impossible to cut a person’s head off with a sharp enough object? How would the skin keep the blade from piercing?

As an adult, I realized this question runs into several possible distinctions. What’s the difference between immortality and indestructibility? What’s the difference between glorified immortality, as we will have in the resurrection, and the freedom from death that preceded the Fall? In what sense are these things “natural” or not? Was Adam originally free from death by nature, by supernatural grace, or extrinsically by Providence? God gave man food, but he was not subject to death: did man’s bodies need food to run, and if so in what way?

I never did go about any thorough study of these questions in themselves. Some of them have nonetheless appeared along the way, and I’ve given them plenty of thought over the years. On some points I have found there was great controversy at various times, e.g. the Reformed lambasting the Socinians for teaching man was naturally mortal.

The traditional Reformed position, to the best that I understand it, holds that man was created immortal in a limited sense. Specifically, before the Fall:^[2]

1. Man had the ability not to die.

2. He had no necessity to die.

3. His body was made of parts that in themselves could come apart, leading to death.

4. The perfection of the soul would have preserved man from internal bodily breakdown.^[3]

5. Because man was righteous, God would not allow him to die from external damage.

Now, for what it’s worth, I’m not interested in proving or defending any of these at the moment. I do think they all have adequate warrant. But the mechanics of the third and fifth points are what interest me most.

It seems obvious that man’s body has some physical capacity for being destroyed, and that no plausible changes before the Fall would be likely to wholly eliminate this. As long as a man is flesh rather than diamond, for example, it should be possible for axes and machine guns to rip it to shreds. As long as gravity works pretty normally and men’s bones were not made of titanium, falling from an adequate height should be able to break his spine. This aligns with point (3) above: the parts of man’s body are, in their own right, capable of being separated, which kills you.

Now, as it happens, in the Garden of Eden, it seems plausible Adam and Eve were pretty well protected. It seems like it was a fairly idyllic. God had hand-planted it, the animals there seemed to submit to Adam while he named them, and its borders were such that a couple cherubim with a sword could permanently keep anyone from getting it. That it was a garden rather than a forest, a plain, an island, or some other more natural environment suggests a level of curation and enclosure, as though God specifically made a “playground” or even a “nursery” for early man. So we can probably safely imagine that setting this environment up at all would be one of the methods God had to prevent unfallen man from death by external causes.

This, however, does not account for everything. There are two important qualifications right off the bat. First, as many have argued,^[4] the geographical details surrounding Eden suggest a high elevation, perhaps even a mountain. This almost has to be case if a river flowed out from it and divided into four down the line. At high elevation, then, we can expect the possibility of altitude accidents. Opportunities to fall to great injury or death would seem likely to present themselves, especially as Adam and Eve would have begun to have children, and I am assuming sinless toddlers would still be accident-prone. Besides this, elevation often means extra rocks, so more dangerous objects.

The second important qualification is that, of course, man never could have stayed confined to the Garden of Eden. Besides the valid observations of people like James Jordan that God surely intended Adam and/or his descendants to go out beyond the Garden to work, expanding his exercise of dominion and using natural resources from elsewhere to the glory of God, there is simply population to consider. Without the Fall, and thus without human death and presumably also without fertility issues, the population would have to rapidly expand until one garden of any size would be too small, and people would need to migrate elsewhere. So whatever protections the Garden may have offered, people would also be operating in other, less protected environments over time.

If, then, bodily dangers would still exist without the Fall, some perhaps in the Garden and probably far more without, how might God have kept men alive in keeping with man’s righteousness and God’s law? I can think, with the limited biblical evidence we have, of three main factors, ordered here from most to least certain:

Simply enough, God takes care of people by the things He decrees will befall them. If He ordains whatsoever cometh to pass, then He can simply use that providential governance of His over nature and will to prevent people from ending up in deadly situations. This I have no doubt He would have done to some extent or another, just as He does it now, orchestrating events so that I don’t accidentally get myself killed on the interstate. But with providential preservation, God’s methods of saving people’s lives would thus be rather remote and indirect. So what about more direct methods?

This is my first step of real speculation, but I don’t think it’s a baseless one. The idea is simple: until man was fully able to fend for himself, developing adequate protections against harm and methods of recovery, angels would watch over. I mean this in exactly as toddler-parenting a way as it sounds. To return to an earlier example, if someone were taking a nice stroll in Eden, came upon a cliff, and walked right over the edge, I think it’s quiet likely an angel would have leapt up and caught him.

This is not pure guesswork, mind you. Rather, the Bible already indicates that man began in some sense under the care of the angels. We know they are ministering spirits meant to serve us (Heb. 1:14), who are God’s heirs and children. This sets us the relationship as like unto a household servant to a king’s son, who might take a great deal of charge or care over the child while younger. That relationship is further supported by their relationship to the Torah. The Torah is portrayed precisely as a childhood tutor until maturity (Gal. 3:24-25), and likewise the Torah was given and administered through the angels (Acts 7:53, Gal. 3:19, Heb. 2:2).

All this is, of course, to neglect a more overt point of connection that attentive readers might also have noticed: I did not select the example of walking off a cliff by accident. As it happens, we have in the Scriptures only one example of a sinless man lasting for more than 5 minutes, namely Jesus. It seems plausible to think that, if we can glimpse anything about how God might have treated men apart from the Fall, some of it would appear in the life of Christ.^[5] In the life of Jesus, we see agents actively aiding Him at certain points, including immediately following His temptation in the wilderness and during His distress in Gethsemane.

But looking at the temptation itself is also instructive. There Satan tempts Jesus precisely to jump off a cliff (well, technically the top of the Temple), and his argument is from Psalm 91:

For He shall give His angels charge over you,
To keep you in all your ways.
In their hands they shall bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone. — Psalm 91:11–12

It’s important to note here that Jesus does not claim Satan is incorrect. His rebuke is not that God would not send angels to save Him, but only that He ought not put God to the test. The angels coming to minister to Him immediately after the temptation further corroborates this point. Psalm 91 describes God’s perfect and comprehensive protection of the righteous against all evils, and while for those of us sinful and fallen we do not see protection of quite such a literally thorough nature (I have certainly done worse than dash my foot against a stone before), it seems plausible that, apart from the Fall, this may be exactly how God would have treated us.

So, while this is still speculation, I think it is fairly well-supported. Had man not fallen, I expect that God would have protected him from external dangers to life and limb through the ministry of the angels, who might pick up people who fell, shoo dangerous animals,^[6] halt falling tree branches, and otherwise keep up from getting killed until the time of our full maturity. (Along similar lines, I also think the angels would have served as our practical teachers for art and technology, so that we eventually could to manage and master the world on our own. According to traditional angelology, which is a real word, angels directly perceive the inner workings and natures of things, so in all probability under their tutelage we might have advanced incredibly rapidly.)

The final factor, and perhaps the most speculative, is the Tree of Life. The Bible does not tell us a great deal about the mechanics of the Tree of Life,^[7] but we know it could lead man to live forever. Whether this was from a single bite (like effects of the Tree of the Knowledge) or required regular consumption we do not know for sure. Whether it would be ordinary food while in our original, limited immortality or would give us our final, glorified immortality, we also do not know, although I tend to lean toward the latter. There is also the reference in Revelation to its leaves being “for the healing of the nations,” a reference which I think inspired Shawn Smucker’s portrayal of the leaves as having broad healing powers.^[8]

In any case, we do not have a ton to go on here. But since man was created with a limited form of immortality and a body that could in principle be damaged, I am inclined to believe that, even with angelic guardianship, it might have been the case that unfallen man might at times be injured. Again, accidents happen, not always because of sin. And I would be surprised if our bodies in their original state were invulnerable as opposed to simply free from the need to die.

So, for my final piece of speculation, I think it is not implausible that the Tree of Life may have been involved in healing and sustaining unfallen man. Whether this involved the fruit, or the leaves, or what-have-you, I really don’t know. But it seems at least reasonable to imagine the Tree of Life could have helped us, well, stay alive.

This was, as I said, an exercise in great speculation. But, as I said at the start, I do not think such speculation if wholly without profit. After all, such hypotheticals attempt to answer factual questions about the real world, in this case, “How did man’s original immortality work?” In the process we got to look at the doctrine of providence, the relationship God designed between men and angels, fiction recommendations for Smucker and Dekker, and all the things God decided not to tell us about the Tree of Life specifically to keep nerds like me in our place.

More importantly, I think this kind of exercise sets us up to reflect more realistically on the difference between the world as created, as fallen, as being redeemed, and as remade. It gives us another angle to consider the relationship between nature, grace, and glory, which is structurally the heart of the redemptive story. It definitely can play a curious role in debates on creation, especially in dealing with bad arguments connected to many popular versions Young Earth Creationism, a position which can be more plausibly defended by a more careful account of How Stuff Works apart from the Fall. Were one inclined, such an analysis might also be usefully employed to analyze edge case questions of ethics and political theory, something I certainly am not prepared to go into here. But, here as elsewhere, the world is a highly interconnected thing, as are the truths we know about it. I for one like testing those connections, and I don’t think I even got electrocuted doing so.

1. Yes, people who fuss about prelapsarian political speculation, e.g. in The Big Bad Wolfe Book, are missing the point.↩︎

2. This summary is drawn chiefly from Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theolgoy, vol. 1, topic 5, question 12.↩︎

3. For my part I wonder if the fruit of the Tree of Life would have also helped with this. Come to think of it, if you like speculating about the Tree of Life in perhaps more fantastic ways, you might consider checking our Shawn Smucker’s novel The Day the Angels Fell. Smucker’s writing has a very curious effect (or affect), and his story about what happened to the Tree of Life after the Fall scratches an itch I find hard to define.↩︎

4. Off the top of my head the completely uncontroversial figures of James Jordan and Michael Heiser.↩︎

5. Obviously this is still complicated by the fact that (1) Jesus came into a fallen world, despite Himself being sinless, and (2) Jesus had a very specific and special mission. Nonetheless I think we may cautiously use the example to strengthen a case that has other parts.↩︎

6. Some of you are probably thinking, “Wait, surely there were no dangerous animals before the Fall?” I do not agree. I am with Thomas, Augustine, and a host of others that harmful animals had the same exact nature before the Fall, and that man was simply protected from them by (1) the Garden, (2) other divine aids, and perhaps (3) the likelihood that even violent animals before the Fall might have obeyed the will of man, their master. But what about animals eating each other? I don’t consider animal death a consequence of the Fall but part of the goodness of creation and the nature of animals, which, lacking a rational soul, holiness, or the fruit of the Tree of Life, had nothing within them capable of preserving the parts of their body from breaking down. The ecosystems and food chains we see today are probably messier and less pleasant than before the Fall, but also probably mostly the same in their basic structures.↩︎

7. The trials God sends us…↩︎

8. Related to this would be Ted Dekker’s portrayal of an unfallen Other Earth as a place where people were commonly injured but healed quickly and easily with fruit from the blessed trees in their realm.↩︎