From: gordon brown (gbrown@euclid.colorado.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 23 2003 - 16:59:40 EDT
It has always seemed a little strange to me that the idea of no death
before the Fall should have become some sort of litmus test for orthodoxy.
Back before 1961 when I was growing up, evangelicals held the notes in
Scofield's Bible (the first version) in very high esteem. (This was a
major factor in the rise of dispensationalism in evangelical circles.) It
was very widely used. Scofield was a proponent of the gap version of
creation. I don't believe in this mostly discarded theory, but I would
point out that it proposed that Satan's fall ruined the previous creation,
and that the creation in Genesis 1 was a restoration of the previous one.
Thus most of the fossils were supposed to be of creatures that perished in
Satan's fall (before the fall of man). Thus these highly revered notes
implied that there was death before the Fall, and I don't recall that any
evangelicals accused Scofield of failing a litmus test for orthodoxy.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
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