I suppose for the reader without fundamentalist Christian experience, I have to explain the whole question. You see, we were taught that, before Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the garden, there was no death. All the animals were herbivores (including the humans), nothing died, everything perpetually lived. It wasn't until Adam sinned that death entered the world and people and plants and organisms began to die. Now, if you don't have a fundamentalist background, you're thinking what I do now--what about the multiplication rates of micro-organisms that would have multiplied and covered the Earth, leaving no room for humans, within the week? Well, I suppose we were thinking so theologically, that the science didn't really matter.
But I say the theology matters far more in the case of this story than science (something that we should point out as often as possible to anyone who wants to use Genesis as a science textbook for God's sake). It is a sacred story not a literal history. But even then, there is something significant about how the Bible tells the story of death entering the world. And it informs, I think, how we need to approach the process of dying during this Lenten season, and while we live as Easter people in a Lenten world.In the context of this story, was there death in the garden? Yes, I think so. If not, were insects multiplying daily without ever dying? What of grass and trees etc? We could infer miraculous sort of existence--an okay hermeneutic as well, as long as you don't see the story as scientific history, of course. But I don't think that's the way this ancient story went. I believe that death existed before the fall. There was a cycle of life and death as there is now. The difference is that death was in its place before the fall...like winter that gives way to spring. Only, it was the kind of death that gives way to new life. It was perfect union with God. The way Christ experienced it in His death.
After the fall, death then reigned. Death meant separation. Perpetual winter, with no hope of new life. In Adam, all fell. But in Christ, the second Adam, all are raised. Death is put back in its place. Eden is restored internally (and, ultimately, externally) so that, yes...we still die, but that death is always the necessary step to life. "Oh death, where is thy victory?" So now, in Christ, we die to live instead of living to die. We die to self and are raised to new life, in what Fr. Richard Rohr calls "true self." (What Paul would call "Spirit" rather than "Flesh"). We die physically at the end of this life, only to have mortality put on immortality. We die to self daily, only to find room for the Divine where once God was crowded out.
Death before the fall? Yes, but nothing like we really know or understand it today. Death the way death was supposed to exist...in its place as part of life. Winter that gives way to Spring, seeds that are thrown to the ground, cracked and burst open only to grow life far greater than just a seed. After all, if we die with Christ this Lent, will we not also live with him? The ellipsis is everywhere in scripture, and like my story and yours, the story of Eden is not yet finished...
