Apologetics · Creation — an argument that begins at the last page instead of the first
Almost every conversation about theistic evolution happens in the first three chapters of the Bible. Days or ages. Dust or descent. A real Adam or a representative one. Two believers dig in on Genesis and neither moves.
Let me try the other end of the book.
Because whatever else Christianity is, it does not end with a soul floating free of its body. It ends with graves opening. And that ending asks a question of any account of where the body came from.
State the Position Honestly First
Theistic evolution — evolutionary creation, as many who hold it prefer — is not atheism with a chaplain. The people who hold it are, in the main, confessing Christians. They affirm that God is the Creator, that the universe is His and contingent on Him, that Scripture is His word, and that Jesus Christ rose bodily from the dead on the third day.
What they add is a claim about mechanism: that the means God used to bring about the diversity of life, including the human body, was the long process of common descent, variation, and natural selection. Genesis 1 and 2, on this reading, tell us who and why with the literary conventions of the ancient Near East, and were never intended to tell us how in the way a laboratory would.
That is a serious position held by serious men, and it deserves a serious objection rather than a cartoon. So here is one, and it is not about fossils.
Christianity Ends With a Body
Paul’s longest sustained argument about the future is not about heaven as a destination. It is about a body.
So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. (1 Corinthians 15:42-44, KJV)
Sown and raised. The same thing goes down and comes up — changed, glorified, incorruptible, but continuous. Christianity has never taught that God discards the body and keeps the soul. That is Plato, and the early church fought it.
Paul says it again in Romans, and there the whole creation is waiting on it.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. (Romans 8:22-23, KJV)
The redemption of our body. Not from it. The body is not the prison in this story. It is the property being recovered.
And It Ends by Killing Death
Now put beside that the specific way Paul characterizes death in the same chapter.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. (1 Corinthians 15:26, KJV)
Enemy. Not a servant. Not a stage. Not a difficult but necessary instrument. An enemy, and the last one standing, and the resurrection is God destroying it.
Here is the tension, stated as plainly as I can.
On an evolutionary account of the body’s origin, bodily death is not an intruder into the world. It is the sculptor. Differential survival is the mechanism, which means death is not merely present in the process — it is the process. Every excellence of the human frame, on that account, is downstream of an unimaginable number of deaths that were doing the making. The eye, the hand, the brain that reads this sentence: all of it arrives by way of the thing Paul calls the last enemy.
So the question is not is the science persuasive. The question is whether the tool and the enemy can be the same thing, and whether the final act of redemption can be the destruction of God’s own chosen method of creation.
The Best Answer From the Other Side
There is a real reply here, and it should be put at full strength.
Many evolutionary creationists distinguish biological death from the death Scripture says entered through Adam. The death of a trilobite, they argue, is simply what organic life does; the death that came by sin is spiritual — alienation from God — along with human mortality as its consequence. On that reading Romans 5 is speaking of human death under judgment, not of the mortality of every creature. And Romans 8, they note, describes creation’s present bondage to vanity rather than making a claim about pre-Adamic biology.
That is a coherent move, and anyone who waves it off has not understood it.
But 1 Corinthians 15 will not stay spiritual, and that is where it strains. Read what Paul says is actually undone at the end. Corruption. Dishonour. Weakness. Mortality.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. (1 Corinthians 15:53-54, KJV)
Corruptible is not a word about alienation from God. It is a word about a body that decays. This mortal — Paul is pointing at flesh. The thing swallowed up in victory at the end is the thing that puts bodies in the ground.
Which means the enemy destroyed at the end of the story is bodily death specifically. And if bodily death was never an enemy in the first place — if it was the good and ordinary machinery by which God made the very body He is now raising — then the last act of redemption is God abolishing His own instrument.
That is not an unanswerable objection. It is a bill that has to be paid, and it is rarely itemized.
What the Empty Tomb Settles
There is a second thing the resurrection establishes, and it runs the same direction.
The tomb was empty. That detail is not decoration. Christ did not receive a newly issued body while the old one stayed on the slab; the body that was laid in the rock is the body that walked out of it, bearing wounds He invited a doubting man to touch. Continuity is the point. The Christian hope is not that God will make something better than you. It is that He will raise you.
Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself. (Philippians 3:21, KJV)
Vile there is the old word for lowly or humiliated, not filthy — Paul is describing a body brought low by death, not a body that is evil. And the promise is not replacement. It is refashioning: changed, and still yours.
A body that God intends to raise, name, and glorify is a body whose origin cannot be a matter of indifference. How something came to be and what it is owed are not unrelated questions.
Where Everyone at This Table Agrees
It is worth saying clearly what is not in dispute among believing people, because the internet version of this argument pretends everything is.
- God alone is Creator, and nothing exists that He did not make. Every party to this affirms John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16-17 without flinching.
- Man bears the image of God, and that is a status conferred by God, not a trait that accumulated.
- Sin is real, Adam matters to Paul’s argument, and the gospel is a rescue rather than an upgrade.
- Christ rose bodily and historically, and the resurrection of believers will be bodily too.
Those agreements are not small, and a man who holds them is a brother whatever he concludes about mechanism. But the fourth one is doing more work than most of us have noticed, and it presses back on the first.
The Question to Take Home
So ask it of whatever view you hold, including mine.
Can your account of where the body came from carry the weight of what Scripture says the body is headed for? If death made you, what exactly is being destroyed at the end? And if death is the enemy at the end, on what ground was it ever a friend at the beginning?
Answer that honestly and you will find you are not arguing about geology. You are arguing about whether death belongs here.
Scripture’s answer is that it does not, that it came in as an intruder, that it is going out as a defeated enemy, and that the body it currently holds a claim on has already been bought back.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:55-57, KJV)
The tired, failing, unimpressive body you are reading this in is not a draft to be discarded. It is the thing He means to raise.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist