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From the Mere Orthodoxy Podcast Network: The Podcast reflecting on God's Word and our world. Thoughtful weekly conversations about theology, the culture, and the church, hosted by Derek Rishmawy and Alastair Roberts. Featuring Andrew Wilson, Brad East, James Wood, and Joseph Minich.

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Mere Fidelity

The Fall Before The Fall with Philip G. Porter

March 25, 2026 • Mere Orthodoxy • Season 3 • Episode 10

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What if death's presence in the cosmos is not native to creation but a wound running all the way down to its foundations, inflicted before Adam ever reached for the fruit? Philip Porter joins Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, and Brad East to discuss his new book, which retrieves Augustine, Aquinas, Milton, and Tolkien to argue that the angelic fall precedes and precipitates every other form of evil, and that contemporary theology has been too quick to make peace with death.

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Hosts: Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, Brad East

Guest: Philip Porter, assistant professor of theology at Saint Louis University (Madrid) and author of Unnatural Death: Creation, Sin, and the Angelic Fall. He completed his doctoral work under Paul Griffiths at Duke Divinity School.

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Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
3:50 - Porter's thesis: why death as enemy matters and what contemporary theology gets wrong
8:40 - Augustine's rationes seminales: the seed-like reasons at the heart of creation
10:15 - Angels as administrators of creation and how their fall wounds the cosmos
13:30 - Tolkien's Silmarillion, Melkor's discord, and the felix culpa logic
17:30 - The conditio and administratio: God's atemporal creation vs. its unfolding in time
20:00 - Three false paths: Kelsey, McCabe, and Darwin
27:00 - Does scripture naturalize death? The grain of wheat, 1 Corinthians 15, and Alastair's question
39:10 - The double fall: Romans 5, the angelic fall, and how they fit together
42:00 - Satan's envy of the hypostatic union: what Lucifer saw and why he turned
52:00 - Refracted and diffracted light: a metaphor for holy and fallen angels
1:01:40 - Deep time, hominins, and what it means for Adam to be unfallen in a devastated cosmos
1:05:05 - The Johannine thread: destroying the works of the devil and what the devil actually wants
1:12:30 - Universalism, David Bentley Hart, and the problem the angelic fall poses for it
1:20:35 - Supralapsarianism and the incarnation-anyway position

Books Mentioned

Philip Porter, Unnatural Death: Creation, Sin, and the Angelic Fall
Paul Griffiths, Decreation
David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Well
Ambrose of Milan, On the Good of Death

SPEAKER_02 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Lexim Press, who publishes books that love the word, love the faith, and love the church. Lexum Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow. Our March book of the month is Keeping Kids Christian Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship by Cameron Schaefer. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting BakerBookhouse.com backslash pages backslash Mere Fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes and get 30% off our book of the month from Lexim Press. Hello and welcome to another episode of Mir Fidelity, a podcast by Mere Orthodoxy, where we think about the Word of God and the world we live in. My name is Derek Rushmalli, and I'll be your host for today. I'm joined by regular casts and crew members Brad East and Alistair Roberts. Good to see you, fellas. Good to be here. Good to be here. And we're also joined by uh a new guest, a friend, uh the illustrious Dr. Philip Porter, author of Unnatural Death, Creation, Sin and the Angelic Fall, assistant professor at uh St. Louis University Madrid. So he is in Spain. He's recording from all the way across the ocean, but maybe even further across the ocean than Alistair, right? Spain's farther or closer. I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 1:26

Right up and down. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

Yeah, we again Americans only to which of you we're referring. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me on, though. Yeah, really glad to have you on talk about this book. It's fascinating. I will just a little word of praise on the front end. When I heard the subject, we got Angels, we got fall, we've got creation, we've got all that. Um I just knew we had to we had to think about it and talk about it together. And then I got the book, and this thing was a curveball and a fastball all at once. Um, you one of the things that I think just fascinated me was the range of material that you're covering in here, just for the just for the reader or for the listener. We've got Augustine, we've got Aquinas, we've got an insane amount of Shakespeare uh right in the middle of it, some space trilogy, right? No, some other, some other not space trilogy. Milton. You read those recently.

SPEAKER_04 2:19

Milton and Tolkien.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Same thing, right? Uh literature, uh, and and and then all sorts of other things. So uh Phil, why don't you give us why don't you give us the the really quick thesis on what you're trying to argue for and why you're arguing for it. And we're gonna unpack various threads throughout the episode.

SPEAKER_04 2:39

Okay. So I got interested in this topic, death and the theology of death when I started looking into I took a class on the deaths of the martyrs and death in the late ancient world, and started to realize that I didn't really have a great account or understanding of how death worked and functioned in the Christian imagination. And for me, the motivating push to look into this came from to two sides. One is the contemporary scientific view uh about uh a deep time, a cosmos that stretches out beyond uh our beyond easy reckoning and time and space, and uh the the processes of of death and biological evolution and and whatnot that are bound up with that in our current accounts of uh of life on this planet, and the accompanying uh a commitment from a Christian perspective that death, while in part of the experience of creation uh and our uh the human experience of life on this world is an enemy, uh, is a break, is something that indicates damage and is intimate with sin ultimately. And so I was interested in seeing what resources the Christian tradition might have to bring to bear on uh those questions and see if they could be um thought with together. So if you could think about deep time, an evolutionary timescale, a cosmos that's 14 billion years old, et cetera, and think about uh death as an evil. And part of the, when I when I started getting into this literature, one of the difficulties I found was that a lot of contemporary theology is really interested in um brushing this question aside or treating treating death and sin as obviously distinct, uh, that what we find is, well, now that we know better, it's necessary for us to disaggregate these two questions. But then I it seems like the the claims, uh the wages of sin is death, the last enemy to be destroyed is death, fall flat. What does it mean to say death is an enemy if it's part of creation at the most fundamental level? And so um the book of wisdom, uh there's a great line in the book of wisdom that God did not create death and God does not delight in the death of the living, but the generative forces of the world are good, and there's no destructive poison in them. And so that that verse really sort of launched me into this investigation, and then I used the variety of resources to hand for me, which most most is uh mostly from the Latin patristic tradition, but then also the medievals, and then into some modern theology and um as well as the uh literary depictions of this. Uh part of the reason why Shakespeare, Milton, Tolkien make an exp uh the appearances that they do is that I think they offer us a kind of um a grammar for thinking about the uh the fall of creatures. Um and so each of them in their in turn presents us with a piece of the picture. Um so I think that's those were the motivating concerns. The ultimate thesis, let's say that's what you asked me, the ultimate thesis is that uh that the fall of rational creatures, first and foremost, the angelic creatures, uh digs a deep rent or gash into the cosmos. And that goes down to the the most fundamental level of the building blocks or the seeds of creation, and that everything as a result is shot through with bro uh sin and death, and that what we find in the in the cosmos is that world, the world that's both good and beautiful and created by God and also broken, deeply wounded. And so death is an artifact that you never you the cosmos is never going to be without. You're never going to find you're never going to find a place in the cosmos uh that's uh sh been uh that this is absent. And at the same time, uh it's not doesn't belong to the the cosmos in its um its most fundamental reality.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

Good. That's that's a that's a helpful overview. And when I say overview, again, the the the depth and the fine-grainedness of some of the argumentation throughout is pretty fun. Um so you've got that pressure from contemporary theology, you're drawing on, you're doing a lot of retrieval from patristic theology. Uh that's really helpful. Uh let's just start pulling apart some of the threads, if that's okay with you. Um seeds of creation. What what are you talking about? What's what's what's a what's a what's a what's a seed of creation? Give me the Latin term maybe for that. I don't know if that's fun for you, but Sure.

SPEAKER_04 7:38

So for from uh I draw this this concept from St. Augustine's theology of creation. And for him, the way he he names this the raciones seminales or the the seed-like reasons or the seed-like rules at the heart of the created order. And so my one of my contentions is that drawing upon this um pre-modern theology of creation, drawing on Augustine's theology of creation, he can give us uh the conceptual resources for dealing with the problem that I outlined. And so the idea being that there are um that the deep structures of uh of things, the natures of things are created in uh the mind of God by way of exemplary causes. God has the rationes ideales or the ideal reasons in his mind, and that those touch down in creation when he brings them into being by knowledge and by will, and that that they they manifest themselves, uh they unfurl in time. And uh as time on time unfor unrolls, you have then the rationes seminales blooming. If the the image of being seeds is helpful here and that they're growing like trees or plants. And so they unfurl over time into the creation, the the world that we encounter.

SPEAKER_02 8:58

All right. And so just to draw a quick line from that, how the heck do angels come into that? I I mean, you know, we're we're we're in we're in uh we're in the territory of angels as architectonic components of creation at this point, or angels as we're talking about angels as the stars, angels as the, you know, just to fill out the picture uh a little bit for for our listeners before we start being mean and asking you critical questions, um, how uh you know, how do the angels actually connect, how does the angelic fall actually connect to those seeds uh a little bit more clearly? Great.

SPEAKER_04 9:38

So the idea, and this is not unique to me, this is uh Augustine, Thomas, uh Gregory of Nyssa, they all articulate uh a question, or they all articulate a position like this, uh, that each and every physical reality in the world has a spiritual reality that is appointed over it, or that has uh kind of charge uh is in charge of it. They have an administrative or a presidential role, is how um Augustine and Thomas talk about it. And so the idea here is that God governs his creation not just by his immediate force of will and immediate uh desires, but also governs through intermediaries. One of the items of God, uh one of the ways of thinking about God's generosity is that he and goodness is that he shares his um the shares the governance of creation with his creatures, right? We find that in the the creation account of humans, right? We're given dominion, but this is also we can extend this into the angelic realm. So the idea here is that the angelic fall doesn't just damage angels, it damages all of the things that they potentially come in contact with. So when some of the spiritual realities that govern, that administer aspects of God's creation defect from God's purposes, they are not just they don't just damage themselves, they go on to damage creation as a whole.

SPEAKER_02 11:04

So everything's entangled, everything so God gives out creative uh you know, liability, responsibility to the angels, just as he delegated to Adam in in the in the narrative, et cetera. But we're talking aeons before at the beginning of the cosmos, and then from there, uh everybody has been living in the in the field of the angel the the good angels and the bad angels uh activities, so to speak, ever since.

SPEAKER_04 11:29

Yeah, this is good. I think be bringing the the time question in is important for the overall argument of the book. It's that it's it the the fall happens outside of time or into time. That's how Augustine articulates the angelic fall as fall a fall into time or uh ontes omnes tempores uh before all times. There's an angelic fall that then has these ramifying effects on all of time. And so the idea here is that we're dealing with um the creatures that encounter time differently than we do. And so when they when they fall, the the ramifying effects uh make their way into every piece and corner of the cosmos that we know.

SPEAKER_02 12:12

The narrative that you invoke literarily is the one that I think maybe more of our readers have encountered, which is that those 30 pages at the beginning of the Silmarillion, which are the best part, the the creation narrative and account, where you've got uh the Illuvatar and what's his other name? I always forget what got it. He starts singing a song, he's got a creative song, and then and then and then you've got the secondary creatures, his the the angelic counterparts who start um singing counterpoint notes from the very beginning before anything else gets going. They start singing off notes, uh off key. And so from then on, the the the the music of creation, the music of the spheres, uh it's like you you the old the old idea of that the spheres having kind of a a music to them that that kind of keep the universe going. The spheres are off kilter, they're off balance, the music is playing uh in a slightly distorted, fuzzy way, or a severely distorted and fuzzy way, and then everybody else is in that musical wave and lens, or or or so to speak. And but that's we're talking 14 billion years deep and logically before that even. Right. Right. Because we're dealing with it. You have a lot you have a long discussion of the time eternity axis and the way that kind of shades our whole all of our language around this.

SPEAKER_04 13:31

Aaron Ross Powell That's right. Yeah, we run into uh problems with and th this is part of the why Tolkien's account is so helpful, is that he f he when he frames the interplay between the the Ainuur, right, the um the uh what the what you've got with um Eru Iluvatar teaching them to sing and then Melkor chiming in and giving um uh distorting the melody, right? Is you've got um you've got a way of thinking about how God responds to evil, right? So this is one of the the threads. Is it it can't be our imagin uh what the way we imagine God's response to evil can't be as something that came as a surprise to God or that there was a sort of plan B, like, oh darn, I guess that didn't work out, we're gonna have to change directions here. And I think one of the things that Tolkien gives us is a kind of grammar of God catching up all of the discord into a greater harmony in a way that isn't um isn't a response in the way that we think of something coming subsequently, but that's something that that pulls the entirety of creation, i including its damage, into a greater whole than could have existed apart from it. And the the language for this uh you know, you can we can think of the um the happy fault language. So in the um in the uh Easter vigil hymn that the that for example you s we sing in the Catholic uh tritter church, uh you you hear, oh happy fault that warranted so great a savior, oh Felix culpa. And that sort of oh the Felix Culpa logic, I think, is what's governing um Tolkien's thinking on the fall of the uh the fall and the uh the singing, the music of the Ainor.

SPEAKER_03 15:19

Phil, in a moment I think it would be helpful for listeners to hear about the distinction that you draw between what you call the conditio, the sort of God's eye view of the atemporal act of creation and its administration in time by God through his providential activity. But I wanted to draw back just for a second to give a little bit of framing, not just for the substantive work, but actually some of the ideas here. I you could t you can correct me if you if this is not a good way to put it, but I think of this book as in effect a direct sequel to Paul Griffiths' Decreation. So I I understand that he was a teacher of yours at Duke. I I actually wrote about this years ago as for me the most exhilarating theological work I have read that was written in the 20th century 21st century. Uh I could not put it down when I read it. I constantly think of it. Uh Griffiths is for me uh a an always he's always accompanying me as an as a mental interlocutor. And so I love the way that this was a sort of Griffithsian um spec work of specul speculative theology where you whenever the Catholic Church has spoken, you submit, but wherever she has not, you are off to the races. Um so that's the that's the the first thing. And then the second thing, following Griffiths, you share um a moral judgment, you share a moral intuition, which is that the post-Darwinian move on the part of some, um not Derek's beloved PCA, but some theologians and Christian thinkers move to naturalize death is not a proper development, but a so to speak maladaptation. Like it is a it is a false adaptation because it gives away too much. Um, so in a moment, I'm gonna kind of set you up with three false paths that you reject in the book. And then I'd love for you to motivate for listeners why that's such a big deal, why that's such a bad move, but then why you feel it necessary to follow Augustine and to say, but we actually can harmonize the science with the the gospel using the very, the very resources of the tradition that already exist. I eat you you're you're you're speculating, but you're speculating with the resources already given, not creating something new. So I'm gonna give you three names that you that you offer to the reader as uh false paths, um, um dead dead end detours. One is David Kelsey, another is Herbert McCabe, and a third is Darwin himself and some folks who think in a Darwinian register. Um so Darwin uh may be a good scientist, but he's a bad theologian. He he offers us an anthropomorphic God who who who kind of can't see all 14 billion years in advance. So he's gotta let some things, some dominoes go uh without his immediate direct involvement or knowledge. Another's McCabe, whom you um respect in many ways as a as a Thomist, but that McCabe cannot allow himself the way Thomas does to imagine a material natural world lacking created things bumping up into each other with decay, violence, uh, and death. And then third, David Kelsey, actually one of my teachers, he was on my he was on my committee at Yale, in his great masterwork, eccentric existence, he uh wants he argues that he is following the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, that our finitude implies death, and therefore that is just what God made. And you say, I get the impulse, but that's where you're you're you're giving away too much that's necessary for the gospel to be good news. So that's a long runway to set you up to tell us what's m what's really the the sort of deep motivation of this work, why these theologians are wrong, and why and what your account offers that they lack.

SPEAKER_04 19:31

No, thanks. That's a really good setup and um a good way of putting it, I think. You're right that this is a Griffithsian sequel. Griffiths was my um advisor, uh my doctoral advisor at Duke. And so I too, I similarly read Decreation with uh bated breath throughout throughout the throughout the entirety of the work. And what I felt needed to be given an account, a further account after reading it was this question of how the angelic fall, how we could make sense of the arguments he wants to make about the angelic fall and about death, about death being fundamentally anti-natural. This is something that you find um David Bentley Hart is a big proponent of as well, right? The that um death is an anti-natural phenomenon. And this you're right to call this a moral intuition, and that's part of what I want to do in the work, uh, and I hope that this uh this comes through, is take very seriously the worries of the scientist, the poet, etc., who sees a world t torn apart by violence, death, carnage, and say there's something awry here, and I uh but without giving up these fundamental Christian commitments. And I think that you're right, the this the sort of three figures that you lay out. I think Kelsey uh make uh again makes it too natural, right? Fundamentally, death ends up being just part of what it is to be a creature, and it just doesn't seem to me that that uh that's uh how exactly is death a thing to be defeated in in that um that picture is beyond me. I'm not sure why it's an enemy. I'm not sure how why Christ needed to die. I'm not sure how um resurrection being uh overcoming a natural phenomena a natural phenomenon is the same sort of thing as defeating something that fundamentally has broken the the fabric of of creation. So Kelsey uh was all it was a work I read early in my um theological training and had this kind of bone to pick with him ever since on that point. McCabe's someone I continue to return to and I find ex extremely insightful. And I think the point he makes, the thing I want to say about McCabe is that I both agree and disagree with his assessment. And this this comes down to his framing uh Of the distinction between voluntary and natural evils, I think is a framework I want to adopt, except I want to adopt it downstream of uh the fall. So I want to say voluntary evils are the cause of natural evils, as opposed to thinking of natural evils as something that belong to the cosmos per se. And so uh McCabe's intuitions are right for a fallen cosmos. But as you say, uh Thomas Aquinas, right, his master as uh as well, uh McCabe's master as well, uh, has an imagination that extends beyond that. And so uh Thomas is able to imagine a material creation that's not torn apart by violence, and it seems like we could go there too. Uh Darwin, you're right, um, not a metaphysical thinker in the in the way that uh he um frames this conversation. Um and and it the part that's most difficult about it is that he knows it, right? He says he's not in in a couple of his works, he says that he's not really cut out for this sort of thinking, not really cut out for and then he proves it uh by by making the the God into uh a very powerful thing in the world, right? And so that that picture of God is ultimately unsatisfying. It it it ponds on the most important questions about um not just origins, uh, but also how God could be involved in the cosmos without being a tinkerer with the cosmos. And I think the the biggest, the best picture or the greatest picture that Darwin has, the mu the grandest vision he has is of a God who's always fiddling with things, right? He's the puppet master or he's the the toy maker. And it that just seems absurd to him and me as well. And so so in that sense, he's he's right to reject that picture. It's just not the picture of the Christian tradition uh more broadly.

SPEAKER_03 23:56

Yeah, and it's interesting, Phil, that that you know, what tell me if you would affirm this way of putting it, that um dropping the word natural uh from um from natural evils in McCabe's description, he really thinks, which is surprising given how well he knows Thomas, that they're necessary evils, that natural evils are necessary, not just in a fallen world, but a world like ours, that is to say, a material world of finite creatures. And uh I take your point, following Thomas and Augustine at all, is um they are necessary in a sense, and therefore they are natural in a sense given the angelic fault. But what you want to preserve is they are not necessary to any world like ours because they're contingent. Those evils are truly contingent, and what they are contingent upon is voluntary evil, i.e. the voluntary evils of the angelic creatures. Is that a fair way to phrase the point?

SPEAKER_04 24:55

Yeah, I think that's right. So they yes, they are they are uh suppositionally necessary, right, would be the the medieval language of this. Like given given the cosmos in which we live, yes, McCabe's right. But is that the only possible way the cosmos could be? Uh I think not. And I think the biggest problem for him, uh, as I mentioned in the book, is how to imagine um uh the bodies of things. Yeah, eschatologically. That that's where the the di the difficulty lies, is if that's true, if that belongs fundamentally to the logic of creatures, then uh it seems like we then would cease to be m creatures or material in any respect in the eschaton. And so that's where my that's where my argument with McCabe ended up going.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

There are various points in scripture where it does seem that something about death is being naturalized after the work of Christ, particularly. And even in describing the work of Christ, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it's part of the basic process of life that um presents it's a metaphor that Christ uses to describe his death, and something similar in First Corinthians fifteen, and the idea of the first and the second man, or in Second Corinthians, the idea of the earthly tent that we currently have being replaced by this far greater heavenly temple, and the um experience of our mortality being swallowed up in life. Is there a way in which we can see death under the conditions of sin and fall being a very negative thing? But death as something that is part of God's glorification of his creation as being a natural process that uh tends towards the final end of the glorification. There's not um it's not the full end that God has intended, but something good on the way to that. And the original creation um might have been open to a sort of death, the sort of um vision of the tree of life as perpetuation in mortal existence is not actually enough. There needs to be some transformation, there needs to be a heavenly man to follow the earthly one.

SPEAKER_04 27:20

Yeah, I think this is where the thinking about this in terms of the Felix Copa or the happy fault uh ends up working. But that's the argument I make towards the end of the book, is that the that death has become something that God has swept up into his greater purposes, right? And so the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ being the model for this, right? So when we look at how God uses death as an instrumentum, right, as a tool to glorify creation with the death of Christ, we can also then analogically sort of project backwards and think about how God has used death to bring about the whole vr all the variety of beautiful, wonderful things in the world uh that that presently exists. So yeah, I think what I don't want to end up end up saying is that um I do want to say that death in itself, death qua death, is an evil, but that I uh that death can be and is put to good use by God. He uh within God's providence, it's wielded like a tool to bring about great um great goods. And so I'd want to think of the grain of wheat falling uh in those terms, right? That it's um you plant the seed in order to grow the the the sheaf of wheat. Uh that's that's what it's for. And so when God uses death, he's using it to bring about uh great goods, even if death itself remains a difficulty. Now I think the other another way to think about this is a work I don't really get into in this book, but Ambrose um of Milan writes a work called On the Good of Death. And one of the things he thinks about, one of the goods of death that he talks about is putting an end stop to sin. Right. So you can only pile up so much sin in this life because God has providence. It's a mercy, right? That God has wielded death mercifully to prevent you from just sort of living perpetually in this state of uh alienation from God, alienation from self, alienation from neighbor. He's he's uh put a limit to how long that can go on. So I think in those terms you can we can think of the the goods that flow from death as well.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

Do you maybe add to that list the um deep sleep that Adam is placed in, which is often taken as an image for Christ's death, the church being formed from the side of Christ, that there would be there's a sort of Adamic death that's envisaged even before the fall. He's reconstituted in a very fundamental level and humanity as male and female. And if we think about that sort of event as death-like, maybe there's something good about death um but in some form that doesn't require sin and evil.

SPEAKER_04 30:09

No, that's good. I I haven't really thought uh too much about the question of Adamic death in that sense, except to say that the the the connection within the tradition, but also seems like the in with an experience of death and sleep being being um being deeply related uh to one another uh is is an interesting aspect here, right? That it's sleep as regenerative um and also a sort of blinking out of existence in a terrifying way. I remember when my my son, when he was four or five years old, ki uh uh was terrified of death or terrified of sleep for exactly this reason. And I was like, yeah, that's right. That makes sense. It is a sort of it is a sort of terrifying thing.

SPEAKER_02 30:54

I hate to bring it to you, but this is a correct fear. Um that's right.

SPEAKER_04 30:58

So um I think in that sense, there, yeah, there are definitely connections there, but not ones that I've I've thought I I've thought out much.

SPEAKER_03 31:06

Alistair, it's really interesting, and then I'll hand this off to Derek, uh, because Derek earlier mentioned Lewis, and I don't think the space trilogy makes an appearance here, but in the in Out of the Silent Planet, the first one, you know, Ransom meets unfallen creatures on Mars. And they they they they they they there's death is not the same there, but sort of when they reach, it's like Mary. Uh when they reach the end of their oathly earthly sojourn, they are translated into life with God. And so there is a terminus, but it's an ambiguous terminus that is not feared, it's hallowed. And uh I do think one could speculate if we're if we're in the speculative mode, we could say something like, it isn't death as we know it. It isn't the, it isn't nature read in tooth and claw, but we could imagine, especially especially if we're super lapsarian, that uh that there there that there would always have been a kind of translation uh that would have been that like a transfiguration that would move us out of quote unquote merely earthly existence via Christ into an elevated form that would mark the transition, but would not be uh an enemy, but would rather be what the martyrs welcome death as n now, which is as uh the fairy man taking me to heaven, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:30

Um I mean the great biblical analogy would be birth, that the earth will give birth to its death, to its dead in Isaiah, the womb it the tomb is the barren womb, that Christ opens up the virgin tomb as well as the virgin womb, and the parallels in Luke and elsewhere between the early scenes of his birth and the scenes of the death and resurrection are very clearly juxtaposing those, and Christ, of course, is the firstborn of the dead in Colossians one and elsewhere.

SPEAKER_04 33:05

No, that's right. I think you're I mean, I think this um this connection to the the the tradition of uh the translation or the the the missed opportunity to the to uh to make our way from life directly into a per uh the uh existence that transcends paradise, which is a you find that in Augustine, you see that in Gregory the Great, uh Irenaeus says this as well, right? That that there was a sort of preparation, preparatory period, and then the transcendence, but do we fall before that? I think that think thought of as a as an end and a change, that does make that does make sense.

SPEAKER_02 33:43

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SPEAKER_01 34:42

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SPEAKER_02 35:44

So with all this, I I had a lot of questions about the work that one of the things that's interesting about it is uh Brad said a lot of your motives in the work were moral, and you said it was a moral judgment. And it is, but it's a moral judgment based on fundamental scriptural, fundamentally scriptural uh data, right? There's actually a a a fair amount of uh exegesis scattered and clustered throughout. One of the one of the questions, and and this is why, just as a side note, for those who are uh not as concerned about deep time or you don't have uh an evolutionary account and or have questions there and it's all fuzzy. I mean, I have a historical atom and and am fairly agnostic about um certain other things and and all that. So I I don't really mind there. But for somebody who's not working with that kind of account, a whole bunch of the a whole bunch of the theological moves you're making are still translatable uh to other kind of more compressed time frames. And a lot of the con a lot of the questions you're asking are they they they they glide easily over. One of the questions that I was interested in was your response of uh thinking about death being connected to um the angelic fall. But scripture seems to connect it to uh fairly clearly in a couple places to Adam's fall. Right? We've got the discussion in Romans uh five and and other places, and so I was I was curious to hear you rehearse again a little bit of your your argument there around Scripture's judgment that death seems to enter with Adam, right? At least it enters the earthly realm. And narratively, Genesis three seems to have death entering in at that point as well. Um, but you've got it, you've got it occurring much earlier, and then you know, even if you don't go full, you know, evolution of Adam, all that sort of thing, even if you've got like an old earth potentially with a new humanic uh newly created humanity or whatever it is, you you still have questions about whether or not you've got a pre-adamic angelic fall and how you work all those things out together. So I wanted to hear you kind of talk a little bit about how you work that out and then pull that thread a little bit.

SPEAKER_04 38:03

Sure. There's this great line in Augustine's City of God where he says something about the narrative of of Scripture. He says, well, whether we're dealing with an account that's 6,000 years or 60,000 years or 600,000 years or 600 times 600,000 years until you get to a number for which we have no name, right? The the account of creation for him is fundamentally one of a relation between God and uh the world, right? So that's what what where the n the the account he's giving of the theology of creation is you we could think of it on, I think, either timeline, um, and still the the insights would apply in a certain uh respect. And uh the I think uh Brad brought this up earlier, but the the dichotomy or the uh between the two ways of looking at creation under the aspect of eternity from sort of God's point of view, which I call in the book the conditio, or um looking at it uh as it unfolds in time from a creaturely point of view, which I call the administratio. And these are terms I borrow from Augustine's writings, right? The the making of all things, the conditio in outside of time, and then the administratio, how those things unfurl in time, um is uh uh we don't necessarily have to have any particular timeline for those things to apply. As you say though, right, my I'm interested in narrating the relation between um Adam's Adam's fall and the angelic fall by placing the angelic fall prior to it, uh both in time and outside of time. And the reason I do that, I think, is a scriptural reason, right? By the time Adam's in the garden, there's already something waiting to deceive him, right? So there's there's some piece of creation that's already uh undergone damage. And so what I the the way I like to think about this is in terms of the double fall of angels and humans. And and this is this is language that's uh borrowed also from from Paul Griffith's accounts, right? That that the double fall, we have to think of them as related to one another. And the way I the way I talk about this in the the chapter on um on the angelic fall, and I think the final chapter of the work has to do with um what the angels know, right? So what do the angels know in their in the moment of being created? How do they fall? Okay, so the the account that I that I give is one that um again it has deep roots in the tradition. And you you forgot to mention one of the authors that I engage with uh directly, right, is Jonathan Edwards. So Jonathan Edwards, who's reading Francisco Suarez on the fall of the angels, um uh gives an account of the angelic fall as instigated by envy, right? And so the the question then is exactly what? What is uh what are the angels, what is Satan envious of? And I think the the best account to give here has to do with uh the hypostatic union, that what the angels see in their moment of creation outside of time is the sort of the whole of God's project for creation, which includes the incarnation and the elevation of human nature above angelic nature, um, and that this causes uh a desire for humans not to have that good. Um if that's the case, right, that and the fall of the angels is instigated by God's desire to elevate human nature above the uh angelic nature, the God's desire to be united to his to his creatures in precisely this way, then what you have is a link between the um the human fall and the angelic fall. And here's how it plays out. The devil falls because he's turned away from God's plans. He this is this is too much for for Satan to handle, this idea of the of the union, uh the bond between creatures and and the divine happening in the person of Jesus Christ. And he falls, and so he proceeds to tempt humans in the garden, right? He tempts humans in the garden, and th those creatures fall. And as a result of that fall, God becomes incarnate, right? The judgment, the judgment upon Satan in the account that I've given here is that he's brought about the very thing that he despised uh in the in the origins, in his own uh original, his own original sin, the primal sin of the angels. So I take it that they're deeply, uh, they're deeply implicated with one another. So Adam's it's true that death comes into the world for humans through Adam's fall. And it's also true that the angelic fall precipitate precedes and precipitates uh the human fall. At least that's the account that I'm trying to give. I uh there's there's a lot of a lot of pieces to that. I'm uh if you guys have particular questions of how to work that out, let me know.

SPEAKER_00 43:22

You talk about the angelic fall and the fall of Adam. Um when we're reading scripture, it seems that although Paul in Romans 5 and elsewhere very much focuses upon the event of the fall in the garden, there seems to be something more of an unfolding of fall. So begins in the garden, but then you have Cain killing his brother in a further degree of exile, and then the events just prior to the flood, and then a more radical spread of sin. And then going even further, you've got things like Babel. And so there seems to be a series of events. And also, depending on your read of things like the sons of God and the daughters of men, there seem to be stages in angelic fall as well. The initial temptation of Adam, the event events prior to the flood, however we understand those, and whether there's some sort of angelic involvement in the attempt to join heaven and earth in a rebellious form at Babel. Do you see some sort of um intertwining of fall in that way that's playing out over time between angelic and human fall? And also the other question I wondered about was the way that we are to understand some of the uh indications of first of all the nature of humanity's creation relative to the angels, and also the temptation that man faces to become like God, or is it like one of the gods? When God refers to creating man, let us make man in our image, is there a sense in which it's a reference to the Trinity, or is it a reference to the angelic council, as some have have argued? And in that sense, how would we understand the temptation that Satan presents?

SPEAKER_04 45:21

No, that's really good. I I I think that reading Genesis 1 through 11 as a continuous account of decline and fall is uh the way to go here. And so part of what we're thinking about, or what I'm thinking about when I'm uh working through the angelic the angelic fall, I think is the precursor to that story of decline. So I think that the bet yeah, the best way to read what's going on narratively in Genesis 1 through 11 is you have the fall, but that precipitates uh things just get worse from there, and they can they continue to get worse until the call of Abraham and God ski give uh laying out a new plan for the salvation of creation. But I think that the setup in Genesis 1 through 11 gives us that framework in which to think of salvation. What do we need saving from exactly, right? We have um this continual process of alienation. I'm teaching um uh Ephraim the Syrian uh tomorrow in one of my classes, and he has this beautiful picture in his hymns on paradise of paradise as the at the situated at the top of a mountain, and that the progressive generations of humans as they move away from their relationship with God is sort of moving into the foothills and the valleys and then further out until the flood just takes them farther and farther away from uh their origins in paradise. And so I think that kind of image of this progressive separation and that being the thing that needs healing is uh that's the uh the account I prefer for sure. As far as the temptation that uh is faced in the garden, I think the way I I like to think about this most is I I think the image of the Trinity that you're laying out here, what in other words, what what is the only thing that could tempt creatures that have a sort of pr uh idyllic creaturely existence already laid before them, right? The the temptation to be God uh seems to be just that, right? Like so that you could that you could become like the like the divine. Now, of course, the the trick here is that this is in fact what God desires for his creatures, right? It's just the mode by which they determine that that they seize it instead of receiving it as a gift is the the fundamental problem, the fundamental break, disobedience to the commandment and and grabbing it of their own accord as opposed to receiving it as a gift from God. And so I like, I think that this is the one of the places where you find the sort of wiliness of Lucifer, the the of Satan uh tempting humans with the only thing that could even in principle tempt them, which is to with something that is genuinely good, uh, but but taken uh latched onto in the wrong way.

SPEAKER_03 48:22

Yeah, uh listeners should understand that reading this book, uh, which is just such a wonderful book, is um like r theological Christopher Nolan. Um, you know, this is this is tenet uh in uh on on speculative theological steroids. The other movie that any good time travel movie where the one thing they wanted to avoid is the very thing they end up causing. I mean, I think of sorry to spoil a 30-year-old movie, but Twelve Monkeys with Bruce Willis, this is also uh very much in line with that, where uh the very thing, the very thing that occasions the envy of Satan is the thing that um that that that that um that leads to his fall and the and the and the demons' fall uh initiating a cosmic decay that and hit thereupon his temptation of Adam and Eve occasions the coming of the Godman, which is his own defeat, and the defeat of all the evils he brings about in the cosmos. And so it uh the metaphysics of time are are ingredient in your proposal. My favorite analogy that you offer, drawing on some of the scientific literature, is the way that you compare angels, good and bad, to light. And the way that the holy angels that remain in the presence of God, their interactions from eternity in heaven, their interactions with created space-time, this world, this fallen world, is uh are described as refracted light, whereas the demons is a diffracted light. As best you can on the spot, try to try to unpack that for listeners, because I thought it was beautiful in the way that it captured both the way, the way in which you draw on Jesus' description of uh of the angels in heaven always gazing upon the face of the Father, i.e., we we imagine them as sort of like going and coming, going and coming, but that you you you describe them as in a sense never leaving the presence of the Father, but precisely because they are incorporeal, they in the material, their light, their actions, their presence and speech in time, our time, can be refracted while remaining before God in heaven. So give give listeners a a sense of that. Great. So I like this image a lot too.

SPEAKER_04 50:56

Uh it was one of my favorite parts of the book to write, I think. And it it it I hope lands um lands in a way that uh is both ill illuminating, no pun intended, but also uh uh worthwhile for the speculative account. So I think uh thinking about the way light works uh helped me to imagine this, right? So the the idea here is that the the metaphor for angelic creatures that Augustine continually uses is they are created light, and that they are not just created light, they're the created form of God's intellectual light. So God is the uncreated form, that God is uncreated light, and angels are sort of um a reflection of this as created light. And so just extending that metaphor, I thought about the ways in which light behaves. Uh, and one of the ways which light behaves, obviously, is prismatic. So if light passes through a prism, we see these different uh different um colors within the spectrum of visible light are made visible for us. But typically when you're looking at white light, they're not visible, right? When you white light is just it it's white, but it's comprise it's composed of all of these colors. So this idea that the un that the created light of the angels passes into our time without being decomposed in itself, but that it sort of touches down uh in creation with these different colors. The idea that is that so when Gabriel shows up um and is speaking to Mary, and when Gabriel shows up and is speaking to Zechariah, there's not, there aren't uh success, they aren't successive events in the life of Gabriel, that Gabriel has one life that's present in the uh participating in God's eternity, and that we encounter that life, or Zechariah and Mary encountered that life when it uh touched down in the particular colors of his uh of his interactions with creatures. But that for Ain for Gabriel, there's no decomposition, as it were. So there's no one of the terms I use in the text, again, drawing on Augustine's account of our experience of time, there's no stretching out, distension, being pulled apart in many different directions. There's just the all-at-on-ness of Gabriel's life that we encounter when he's on his missionary endeavors uh to creation. The the the image, again, once again, drawing on the way light works for how fallen angels are remain light, but remain uh but are a kind of damaged light, is to think about diffraction. So the there's this experiment that the that um is used they use to show um the the way uh the way light behaves under observation and et cetera. But one of the phenomena that you uh you can experience is it you can do this yourself, is if you you know cut two slits uh into a a board or a piece of paper and you hold up a sour a light source behind it, the light will pass through the two slits. Now, what we might expect is that you would just find that light would come out in two, there'd be two bars of light on the far side, but this isn't what happens, at least not when you're um when you're uh shining a light just directly through it. There are other conditions under which it behaves differently. But what you find is a sort of pattern of uh uh variegated darkness and light. And this is because light's behaving like a wave. Um and when light behaves with a wave, you find these interference patterns. And this has to do with the peak of one wave interacting with the trough of the other wave and canceling it out. And for um for Derek, who lives in uh Newport Beach and can just walk down to the glorious, um, the glorious surf, you can see this happen uh when uh a peak and a trough of a wave hit each other and they cancel each other out right on the beach. Um and this is this is a bad, you know, this is bad for surfing, but it's also bad for the angels. Um so what you what you what an amazing sentence. So the um the situation we're we're we encounter then is one in which uh the the angelic beings that fall end up being the cause of their own darkness. So it's not as though the there's some additional thing that's um that's causing them to be damaged. It's their own, it's their very um, they are interfering with themselves, like a wave interference pattern. So they are both um, they are both light by nature, right? But they've interspersed darkness in their um in their being, right, by virtue of their actions. And so that metaphor, hopefully, is uh a helpful one for for thinking about both the the holy angels and then also the the fallen angels.

SPEAKER_03 55:56

Okay, so uh one follow-up question on this that I had, Phil, was about I was trying to, I mean, I I find I find a book like this not only wonderful to read and engaging to read, stimulating to read, but I just maximally persuasive. Like, right? It's it's taking so much data, scientific and scriptural and traditional theological, and putting it together. That doesn't mean that every single theologumenon is the right one or the true one, right? Like you're you're kind of holding this out to theologians and folks, it's Roman Catholic, so uh and and sorry, I had to. And um and and and you want you right, you're it's not a provocation, it's it's hey, let's work this out together, right? So but the thing that I was trying to grasp, um trying to imagine, uh maybe I'm like McCabe in my limited imagination. If I remember rightly, Griffiths, when he describes Eden, he describes it as a kind of carve-out to a kind of like haven and then in the devastation. The devastation is is is so close to being all bad. You're you're almost tempted to say it to say it's not good, but Christians confess nevertheless in the first article it's good. Um but but I was trying to imagine what you would want to say, like whether whether on an evolutionary account of human origins or God uh does miraculously create um Adam from the dust of the earth or or in or in the Latin the slime, right? Uh and and Eve from his body, either way, right? These are rational creatures in a devastated cosmos after 13 billion years of decay and entropy, and at least for the last few billion, uh predation, violence, death. It's a charnel house they're born into. They're they're not born into, they're create, they're inserted into via creation. And I don't know how to imagine what it means for them to be unfought. This is where the older line that Derek, I think, was alluding to gives you a little bit better linear intelligibility that we've got, we've got like things aren't messed up yet. And then once the humans mess up, things go bad. They spiral out of control, uh uh three through 11 of Genesis. But when we have an always already infected at the source devastated cosmos, uh, it is difficult both for me to understand what it means to imagine these hominins, these Homo sapiens somewhere in East Africa or wherever, but then also to understand how they could have not fallen, what the implications are of their fall. It it did get me thinking of um my advisor, Kathy Tanner's description in Christ the Key. She's not actually meaning to parallel the angels, but your description of the angelic fall, you know, ex quo their creation, that like from the mo she describes the uh the human fault as more or less instantaneous. Uh it's not so much a temporal description as it she describes it with the image of God is handing them the gift of immortality, and it and as they go to grasp it, it falls through their hands by their own fault. It uh it's a defective reception. They never, you could say that in a sense, they never even had it because they failed to receive it from the start. And it would parallel then the angelic, almost instantaneous, um, you know, from the moment of being created. So I'm just wondering if you could give us and listeners a picture using maybe some some of Thomas' imaginative faculties. Like, what are we trying to think of here? What would it mean to have these innocent or just or upright, rational creatures that have not fallen, but in a fallen cosmos?

SPEAKER_04 59:49

No, that's really good. I mean, I so one of the things I do in the the the last chapter is I I sort of sketch out just briefly in I think a footnote, uh, how these two I think that there's a couple of different pictures that are compatible with the overall vision. I mean, I'm sympathetic to to the Griffithsian sort of uh carve-out uh idea that what God has done is in the creation of humans is begun a new possibility. So it hasn't gone back again, the one of the major themes I think in the work as a whole is that God is always God is doing a new thing. God doesn't go go back to sort of repair things in the in the past, but that God's reparative work uh happens in the present. And so that the creation of humans is meant to be a blessing and a reconciliation for creation as a whole. And and we fail at this task, right? So but part of the part of the m motive for thinking about Christ as the second Adam is that he's going to have dominion, properly speaking, over creation in a way that we failed to have dominion over creation, um, that he accomplishes what's left on the table. I tell you, I my my imagination sort of falls short in the deep time in this respect, in the that I want to say something like whenever the first hominins uh that uh that we're able to reflect and think, uh, should I do this, is this right, is this true, existed, that we would have a we would be dealing with um, we would be dealing with human beings. So uh now I I take it that that means that they're created with a spiritual soul, right? So God has used the on the account that I'm offering in this text, God has used the biological machinery of the cosmos to bring about uh the creation of hominins. And that that um that structure, that the actual biology of it, right, the actual um capacity to receive a spiritual soul is part of what's unfolding over time. And when when they are gifted with the spiritual soul that has this capacity for self-reflection, understanding, conceptual reasoning, moral reasoning, that you're dealing with the first humans, and that God has called them to a particular task. And almost immediately, I don't know if I'd want to go quite as quite as dramatic as Tanner, but I'm sympathetic to that idea that that we we fail to do it, right? We we know our responsibility, or the the first um hominin with a capacity for self-reflection knows what he ought to do and doesn't do it, and that that's the violation of the covenant. Um but again, I'm I uh I think the account I've offered here is meant to be maximally um maximally uh acceptable to a variety of different um protologies, right? So it's meant to engage this question, uh the question of the angelic fall and the origins of death that gives you some flexibility on thinking about monogenesis versus um you know a community of original hominins evolving over time. I think that it's docile to both of those readings, I hope.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:13

I'd be curious to hear some of your perspectives upon the um vantage point that this gives us upon the work of Christ. And here I'm thinking particularly of the um Johannine literature, which seems to have a different set of emphases from what we find in Paul, which tends to emphasize a lot more of uh human vantage point, focusing upon the issue of Adam, Christ as the second Adam, etc. Whereas in places places like 1 John chapter 3, verse 8, the reason the Son of God appeared is to destroy the works of the devil. And then in places like Revelation 12, it's the battle with the devil and his angels, the serpent of old. In John it's a series of texts that speak of a great showdown that's about to happen with the ruler of this world. And I'd be curious to hear how you pull those threads together and how your particular approach maybe enables us to capture something of the genius of a Johannine approach. Um and also along with that, what does the devil actually want? Does the devil want Christ to die? Does the devil want him to avoid the cross? At certain points we might wonder what his motivations are, um what is he trying to achieve, for instance, in the temptations and in Gethsemane? How does this all fit together and shape our perspective of Christ? Great.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:49

So I think um my my engagement with the Johanna literature primarily comes with the revel the account of Revelation and the fall of the angels in Revelation 12. And there I think that perhaps the most helpful way to read it, uh, the argument that I make there is that it's a two two-level drama. We're dealing with an account of things that are happening under these two aspects that I've articulated before, right? From the the aspect of eternity and the aspect of uh of time. And when you're when we think about what what John might mean by destroying the works of the devil, um, at least one of those works on this account would be uh death, decay, sin, destruction, damage, um, the devastation as a whole, right? Undoing that, but in uh an extraordinarily unlikely way, right? The or a way that what we wouldn't we wouldn't anticipate from the outset um that he's done it by entering, entering into death itself, right? So Christ has come to defeat the devil on his own terms, on his own turf, uh, and has done so by uh entering into death in a way that undoes it. So I think that there's that aspect. And then the second thing you asked about was uh what does the devil want? Um and this is uh this is one of the key pieces I think that I've I've I've struggled with, but I I want to give a theological account of the devil's fall as being precipitated by envy as opposed to pride. And now I know that this is a minor minority report within the tradition, right? Um pride as the source of angelic fall uh is the certainly the predominant view. But I there's there's something about envy that captures the kind of um the kind of futility of the effort that I like quite a lot. Not only that, but it captures the difficulty of uh reconciliation, right? So envy, Sean Cashin uh talks about this in his conferences. The difficulty with envy as a vice is that whenever you are good to the person, uh whenever you are kind to the person who's suffering from envy, you actually only make their envy worse, right? It's not it's not clear what you can do to aid the envious person, because everything you try to engage with, try to engage uh them with ends up driving them further into the sort of despair of wanting wanting uh the other person uh to lack something. And I and I distinguish here between jealousy and envy, insofar as uh envy is uh at least one account, the account I give in this in this book, is that envy doesn't have an object. What envy wants is a lack for another. Envy desires the someone else to not have a good that they possess. And so on this account, if if we're going back to the what does what does causes the angelic fall, where does the primal sin of Lucifer come from? When when Lucifer sees the the incarnation, when Lucifer sees the hypostatic union between human nature and divine nature, what does he want? He wants that not to be. He doesn't have to desire anything else. I think this is the this is the move that distinguishes and the angelic fall from the human fall. It's not that he's after a positive good. It's what he wants is nothing for someone else. And that's I think both the I what I want to preserve in that account is uh and what I like about this account is it makes sin absurd all the way down. Right? There's there's nothing to know about sin because sin itself is unintelligible. He doesn't want anything uh good. He wants nothing. Um and that that that continual decline um is what traps him too. So the the reason one of the ways of thinking about the uh the impossibility of the reconciliation of the devil is that um it comes in in these terms, right? What could you what could you show him that he doesn't already know? What could you give him that wouldn't drive him further into the despair of envy? And and uh what then finally does this teach us about sin?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:26

On that front, it seems to me that there's something about the cross that comes into clearer view, that the cross is on one hand as the means of over overcoming the devil, but it's the thing he wants to avoid, but at the same time, it holds out the thing that he wants more than anything else the complete dehumanization of humanity and the unguarding of God. Um, and that is for that reason a fitting bait.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:55

That's right. No, I think I like that account a lot.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:58

So this is this is uh roots around one of the questions I've had for the last, I don't know, 25, 30 minutes of other questions. Uh essentially is the the ongoing fall and the ongoing uh rejection of God. The envy account was helpful and persuasive. It you reading reading it in Irenaeus as well uh is there in a in a less, I think, worked-out form. The question it raises for me is in relation to uh, in a sense, David Bentley Hart's account of uh universalism in that all shall be saved. I don't know if you you've you've worked through that text, Phil. Yeah. So part of part of the the part of his account is is kind of assumes this locked-in universal psychology of all pursuing the uh the ultimate good. And inevitably, inevitably, you're gonna see God. Inevitably uh you're gonna see that he is the desire of all desires and the thing underneath all the things that we've been wanting, and so on and so forth. And so no rational will, you know, will hold out for all of eternity. And so all wills will be bent back on so on and so forth for him. Um and the thing that always just kind of grinded my gears about that account is the fall. Like the angelic fall is angels beholding God and turning away from him. And that's always the third that's been there. That's always the absurd component that's been there. And I I suppose, in a sense, what my question is, you know, that that um that account of envy as wanting others to not have uh what they are going to have, I'm curious if you would transfer that psychology to like in a sense to everyone else. If you've if you've locked in a choice here on earth forever, so to speak, or you've chosen not God, um if that is a logic that you would uh cross over from angels from fallen angels to humans, and as kind of thinking through some of the logic of in a sense remaining like I I have I have I have plenty of scriptures that just say, you know, you it's enough to die once in face of judgment and so on and so forth. And you know, I'm not questioning on that wrench, but uh the idea of anybody turning anybody who's like beholding the face of God and is is a derivative light of his light and then defecting already makes it seem like it's possible for you know the irrational choice to be made and then be locked in in that point. That that's that's the first question I have, and then afterwards I'm gonna piggyback and ask you a super super lapsarianism thing. But Phil, that's that's kind of where I'm I'm I'm digging. I would love to hear you more on that.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:45

So yeah, I have worked through Heart's um That All Shall Be Saved. And I I have to say at the outset, I'm I'm deeply sympathetic to the universalist position, right? It's one that that's extremely attractive for a number of reasons. Um I the where it runs afoul for me is exactly on this question of um of the angelic fall. And uh the the account. So there's a couple of pieces here. One is an account of angels themselves. So what are angels? And this depends, you know, there's there's a lot of different uh accounts that we could give. I heard you guys talking in the the episode on on aliens about uh you know the whether or not uh angels are purely spiritual realities. I mean the the one of the the primary modes of talking about angelic beings is as um uh having airy bodies, right, in the uh the patristic tradition. You find Augustine talks about angels this way, Bernard of Clairvaux talks about angels this way. Um he's he's the there's um there's uh there are a variety of different accounts. And one of the the distinctions in the account of uh of angels uh that you find would be between uh their state of creation. Are they created in a kind of liminal state like humans in the in their beginnings? And this is the account that Thomas Aquinas, for example, gives, right? So Thomas thinks that angels are created in a in a comparable sort of state to humans, where they can then be super elevated, right, by virtue of persisting in their original state, at which point they're made secure in their um their perpetual everlasting happiness. Augustine's account is not as neat as that. Um like I said, he his account is of that angels are the created form of uncreated light and that they're made beholding God, as you said. If that's the case, if that's the kind of angel that you're dealing with, and they fall, I think then you that the the difficulties uh with the intellectualist position that um Hart is articulating start to start to come to the fore. If it's possible to reject the perfect good, having knowledge of it, which that's what an Augustinian angel seems to be doing. They have knowledge of the good and they refuse it, then it doesn't seem to me to be necessarily uh a problem that there, I mean, there are there are problems here, but there doesn't seem to be um a problem that uh they could continue to refuse it, right? If they've already known there's a knowing refusal of the good and they continue, persist in that knowing refusal of the good, it seems that that's uh certainly a possibility for creatures. Um as far as the logic of like human envy and turning away. I mean, my my typical view on like if if humans are um consigned to uh eternal separation from God, that it has to do finally with um our rendering ourselves not uh rendering ourselves the sorts of of creatures that don't desire union with God, right? We've like that our hearts have been bent away from the good and we've persisted it in such a way that they are they are um hardened and defective. Uh now I I prefer that account to the idea that um God is simply dealing out uh so it I I think Hart has a point, in other words, when he talks about um an infinite punishment for a finite, uh finite violation of of a commandment, of the of the law, of um of desire for God, et cetera. Um I think he's right. If it if it were just that, right, if it were a finite uh um a finite violation, that would be a problem. The problem is that it's uh we're dealing, I think, more with the trajectory of a creature, right? So when the heart's uh when the heart is hardened and desires um not God, when it doesn't desire communion with God, um, that that trajectory terminates uh exactly there, right? It doesn't it doesn't end up in communion with something it doesn't desire.

unknown 1:17:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:08

And when you said the heart was hardened against God, I thought, wow, that's a really rough take on on on his book. But um but you were talking about the heart, the H-E-A-R-T. I I mean he's fairly hardened against certain th against certain things from my perspective. But um so okay, that that's helpful. I I I kind of I I merge those. I do think part of one of the things that we see in scripture is God hands us over to our sins. And so sometimes what he's doing is he's handing you over to a hardened heart. And so there's there's the inner outer retributive dimension. Um the other question I had, and it's it's it's not entirely unrelated, but it it goes back to the what the angels saw that they envied. Um, the union element um is essentially does is your position fundamentally a superlapsarian one? Uh where because because what you've got is this causal loop, the tenet causal loop, where the devil brings about the thing that he didn't want to see happen through his actions. But the question is, you know, are are we are we in the realm of of, you know, uh oh, what's his name? Oh gosh. Classical literature. Kid his eyes out, killed his killed his dad, married his mom. What are we what are we talking about? Oedipus, yeah. You know, is this Oedipus and fate, like you, you, you, you brought it about because you tried to avoid it, or is it you brought about another version? Like the it was gonna happen. It could have happened happily or unhappily or less happily or whatever it is. You know, God and humanity would have united.

unknown 1:18:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:48

One way or the other.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:49

I so I I'm what your account is going for.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:51

No, so I mean I'm I'm so a couple of things. One would be I'd want to say, um I don't I don't have an account of possible worlds insofar as I what I have is um uh hopefully an account of the world that we've got. Um but uh I do think that there are good reasons to assume the incarnation, uh incarnation anyway position, let's say, that that there are qualities that there are features of um the incarnation that uh God would want to God would want to bring about the goods that are a result of the incarnation, um uh whether or not humans fell. So what I mean is um divine sonship, for example, right? Filial adoption, like when when God makes possible um uh the incorporation into the inner life of the Trinity, that seems like a pretty good argument for um for that seems like a pretty good argument for the incarnation anyway position. But but again, the incarnation anyway position would be uh r depends on an uh on a on a picture of a cosmos that we don't have. And so in uh I I guess in this sense, I'm sympathetic to Thomas Aquinas' kind of uh silence on this issue. Like Thomas doesn't deny this issue exactly. He just says, what we have is the revelation that we have, right? And this is the world that we're dealing with, and what we know is what God has told us. We don't know what God would have done under a different set of circumstances. So I kind of I mean, I'm I'm sympathetic to that view as well, a kind of chaste um approach to the question of the incarnation. So I guess my my answer would be I could see lots of reasons why God would become incarnate apart apart from uh apart from creaturely fall. And yet the cosmos in which we do have is a uh the cosmos that we do have is a cosmos in which creatures have fallen, and that is the precipitating cause of the incarnation.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:58

Phil, I have so many more questions. I know Alistair and Brad do as well. Unfortunately, we do not have so much more time. Um I will just say that as you can tell, as listeners, you can tell from the length of the episode and the kinds of questions we had. This is a very stimulating book. And I will say, even again, for even for those who don't share some of the kind of metaphysical scientific premises, it's the kind of thing that was it's stimulating beyond that. Like that there's a there's enough theology that's going on for everybody. So uh again, the name the name is Unnatural Death, Creation Sin and the Angelic Fall. Uh, Phil, thanks for coming on.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:34

Hey, thanks guys. This was really great. It's a it was a good time.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:37

Yeah, always a good time. Always a good time. Uh if you've listened this far uh and you thought this was a good time worth sharing with others, uh go ahead and rate us, review us on iTunes or Spotify, get the word out, that kind of thing. Uh but for now, this has been Mere Fidelity.