The Beginning and the End

I was asked two questions today, and then asked how my answers related. It has been a long time since these questions were juxtaposed like this to me, so I stumbled. Here, I hope to make my answer clear.

First, I was asked what I believed about the creation of humanity. For those of you who follow this, you already know that I take an allegorical approach to Genesis, and as such I would say that whole generations of humanity lived and died before the Fall. Then I was asked about the nature of final salvation and the resurrection, which I generally understand as being a physical event. Here is where things get complicated: does the resurrection include those who died before the Fall. Perhaps more important than the question itself is the subsumed question of if God had planned the resurrection before the Fall. While I stumbled around on this answer, I do have one, though I can't guarantee that many will find it as satisfying as I do.

What did Adam and Eve do before the Fall? All the Bible tells us is that they came into being, were told not to do something, and then they did it. Even if one takes the story literally, there is no precise timeline given. In a similar way, what will life be like after the resurrection? We have some nice metaphors and general concepts, but I can't make any definitive claims. Both of these conditions suffer from the same problem: the paradigm in which we exist cannot comprehend a sinless reality, a condition of pure justification. We are born sinners into a sinful world, and any conception of humanity before that or after that is both irrelevant and incomprehensible.

Think back to what it was like before being born. Does anyone remember knowing no other reality that our mothers' wombs? I certainly don't, though I know that babies have functional senses before being born. Does anyone remember learning to walk, or uttering one's first words? These are things with real, recognizable and recent historical specificity, and yet none of us can conceive of life in this state. Knowing this, we still somehow think we can understand humanity before it sinned, or after judgment. Neither end of the spectrum makes sense, and thus, I cannot with any serious certainty make claims about it. I know this much: before the fall we had no meaningful separation from God, and after the resurrection and the remaking of the world, we will once again know what that means. Any more than that is pure conjecture.

Ultimately, the Bible is an existential book. It's stories are not about providing a historical record so much as they are about helping us to understand who we are, where we come from, what we should do, and how we should do it. While there certainly is esoteric information in the Bible, and esoteric consideration should not be abandon on the whole, it's point is not ultimately esoteric. The point is to show us who God is, and who God meant for us to be.

I have been accused of avoiding the question because it pokes a hole in my systematic theology. One could look at it that way. I have plenty of non-answers. However, all I can say is that there is nothing we can know, and nothing worth knowing. I'm not avoiding the question, I simply don't know what shape the color yellow is.