One of the great ironies of Christianity is that most of us get introduced to a creation theology as the opening gambit of an evangelistic talk. This is because the Church’s popular gospel message relies upon sharing how serious sin is.
And to do that, most evangelists tell us God created the world perfect despite there being absolutely no biblical basis for doing so (see Death and suffering before the fall).
But what else can they say when holding on to a material origin story? It forces their hand. I say this because a material perspective causes us to see everything as either existing or not existing.
There or not there.
Sin fits nicely into this two category worldview. It didn’t exist and then, after human rebellion, it did. Therefore, when evangelising, we naturally want to communicate how the world was like that before sin and now it's like this after our fall.
And that’s the issue: how did our physical world change after sin entered?
The only option available to us is to say that death and suffering enter the world at the same point as sin does.
And by default, our world becomes perfect in the beginning, with the fall of humankind becoming responsible for all suffering, animal predation, and death in the universe. This puts us on a direct collision course with science and cues a ton of apologetic writing.
But that's all a material story problem. Over the course of our Creation series, we've been exploring how God creates in Genesis 1 and 2 by bringing order to creation. I've called this a functional origin story because God's creative activity focuses on how our world operates or functions rather than what material it's made of.
One of the many benefits of a functional narrative is that it isn't stuck with the material duopoly of existence and nonexistence. This means we're able to talk in clear terms about how sin changes our world while affirming how death and suffering are part of the natural order.
We can do this because a functional story offers us three categories by which to understand our world: non-order, order, and disorder.
