Gardenborn

Sex, reproduction, and eternity

We are going to get speculative today. I don't propose to have answers on these questions, but I want to bring together two fields of theological thinking and show how they create a conundrum that I find difficult to resolve.

Exhibit A: The New Creation

Here's a few propositions I believe are well-grounded in Scripture:

1. At the end of history as we know it, God will renew and recreate the world. The New Creation will be a place that is physical (and spiritual), it will be free from sin, evil, and suffering, and it will be inhabited by human beings renewed and perfected who will dwell in perfect communion with God and perfect fellowship with each other, for eternity.

2. Human marriages in this world terminate at death (or Jesus' return).

3. Marriage is not a feature of the New Creation (Mt 22.30)

I do not know whether sexual intercourse or procreation will be features of the New Creation, nor do I think Scripture is clear on this point. I am inclined to say that procreation is not, in part because this would create two classes of human beings - those who were born and lived in this world, and those who were born and only ever lived in the New Creation.

Exhibit B: The First Creation.

So, generally there is a strong tendency to read the account of Genesis 1-2 as setting up a picture of the world both as it was before the Fall, and a picture of its intended trajectory if there were no Fall. I think that is right, but I also think it needs caveats. Here are some general (non-exhaustive) propositions:

4. God created humanity in his own image.

5. God created humanity as male and female.

6. God created humanity so as to

   1. reproduce,

   2. fill the earth with his image,

   3. extend the Garden to the ends of the earth, as the expression of his ordered and blessed rule

7. God created humanity to live in relationship to him and to other human beings

8. Sexual and biological binarism is innate to human beings.

Genesis 2, though, contains hints that refer to post-Fall realities. E.g. 2.24 understands the complementary nature of male and female to be a basis for marriage, but marriage and procreation do not happen pre-Fall.

Here's where I think things get tricky. What sort of reality are we supposed to imagine if the Fall didn't take place? Adam and Eve don't eat the fruit, have children, those children grow to maturity, also have children, and so on. But in a world without death, marriage and child-bearing seem to be unlimited.

Photo by Julia Caesar on Unsplash

This is where it's time to take a detour. Tolkien's elves, if I understand him correctly, are his thought-experiment (more or less) of a race of creatures in a world affected by sin, but not themselves affected by (original) sin. Elves are unfallen beings. They can individually commit sin, but they are not as a whole people affected by it; meanwhile their bodily existence is affected by the world's long waning. This idea works itself out in the genre of fantasy fiction in a whole range of ways, because most fantasy fiction is derivative. So elves or their equivalents are almost always very long-lived, if not conditionally immortal; they bear few children, and are a race almost always 'in long decline'. Some writers do better at this than others. My question is, how are we to imagine unfallen human beings in terms of sex, gender, marriage, and reproduction? Because I think this raises peculiar problems when you combine exhibit A and B.

If marriage is temporal and temporary (until death), is it a feature of the Fall, so that in an unfallen world there wouldn't have been marriage per se? Or are we to imagine there would have been eternal marriages? Why then are there not eternal marriages in the New Creation? If procreation were to be a feature of an unfallen world, would it be limitless? Would we expand to the stars and have an infinite number of offspring over an infinite lifespan? Or is 'filling the earth' a natural limit? If there is no procreation in the New Creation, what's the point of sexual differentiation? What does it mean to be male and female in a world without procreation, where at least several functions of sexual anatomy seem to no longer have a purpose?

My next point doesn't really solve any of these conundrums, but it does (I think) cast additional light. It's this - God created the world as depicted in Genesis 1-2 with the foreknowledge of the Fall, and so built into his design are features that accommodate that Fall, and in fact even the "hypothetical trajectory" of the unfallen world that is being portrayed is a hypothetical conditioned by the Fall. If God were to create a world in which the Fall were not to occur, I speculate that he would have done it differently.

When we put it like that, I think we can tentatively say that biological sexual differentiation, sexual reproduction, and marriage that ends at death, are woven into the fabric of the pre-Fall creation precisely to be features of the post-Fall creation. And however things are in the New Creation, we simply don't inhabit a world in which things are otherwise. It's not possible for us not to be what we are (in the particulars) without ceasing to be what we are.

Well, I think I have answered precisely zero questions today, and probably generated a few. Let me know your thoughts if you have any.