Page "religion" Paragraph 64

Death reminds man of his sin, but it reminds him also of his transience.

It represents a punishment that he knows he deserves, but it also symbolizes most dramatically that he lives his life within the process of time.

These two aspects of death cannot be successfully separated, but they dare not be confused or identified.

The repeated efforts in Christian history to describe death as altogether the consequence of human sin show that these two aspects of death cannot be separated.

Such efforts almost always find themselves compelled to ask whether Adam was created capable of growing old and then older and then still older, in short, whether Adam's life was intended to be part of the process of time.

If it was, then it must have been God's intention to translate him at a certain point from time to eternity.

One night, so some of these theories run, Adam would have fallen asleep, much as he fell asleep for the creation of Eve ; ;

and thus he would have been carried over into the life eternal.

The embarrassment of these theories over the naturalness of death is an illustration of the thesis that death cannot be only a punishment, for some termination seems necessary in a life that is lived within the natural order of time and change.