The Fall-Which-Is-Creation
Yes, we can definitely say that the general resurrection will lead to “something that hasn’t been know or seen, and which didn’t even exist, before”—that is, during the present (or any previous) age. That’s just good Christian theology: it will be “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1), not the old ones.
When it comes to the relationship, temporal and otherwise, between creation and the fall, we get into the realm of theologoumena and speculation. I call my students’ attention to the fact that St Irenaeus, among others, teaches that the created world is ipso facto imperfect, since whatever is generated is necessarily less than what is not generated. Following this line of thought, we could therefore say that the creation amounts to a “first fall”, followed sequentially—in keeping with the temporal narrative of the Scriptures—by the fall of the angels and then the fall of man.
On the other hand I see no reason to reject the meta-temporal possibility (or possibilities) you propose: that the fall of man in some way logically preceded, and perhaps thus entailed, the fall of creation—or rather that fall-which-is-creation—or again that these two “events” are so intimately interconnected that the fall of man and the creation of the universe (as we know it) are two sides of the same coin, or two ways of saying the same thing.
July 29th, 2012 at 3:33 pm
So what I’m hearing in this post is the idea that Reality is somewhere else. Oh, I know about the immanence of God in creation—the belief that all positive phenomena symbolize some quality of God and so forth. But since, in the perennialist, Platonic, Neo-Platonic view of emanation, “what is generated” necessarily falls away from Reality (God or the Absolute), it is lower—less than that Reality. So, according to this view, some degree of ascetical struggle to remain, in some sense, aloof from the world is necessary. One must not put oneself in accord with the world as it is because, well, the world is fallen. Have I got that right?
But do you know that there is another way? I can’t explain adequately in this comment. So, I shall just suggest that in Mahayana Buddhism, the teaching of Emptiness or shunyata entails no hiatus between Absolute and Relative Truth or between Reality and the World. So one is taught to put oneself in accord with the way things are—which doesn’t mean some transcendent state of affairs, but with one’s actual, direct, sensory experience. We are taught to accept ourselves and the world unconditionally—without judgment of any kind. It’s a different way based on a very different teaching about the nature of Reality.