There is a certain striking element that seems particular to theological argument, with its explorations into omnipotence and therefore into the idiosyncratic implications of the effulgences of omnipotence. This is the element of boundlessness. I have referred to this before, with my musings about how Jesus' disciples--imbued on their missions with the power to raise the dead--might have resurrected every person beginning with Adam so all could hear Jesus in person. This type of musing is not original with me. Luther, as I recall, asserted that Mary and all the saints--supplied with their boundless, fungible merit and attuned to the pleadings of mercy--would redeem immediately all of the debts of the purgatory-held heaven-bound souls, rendering purgatory moot.
When the unfettered quality of God and of all his doings is entertained, then questions of dimension and of proportionality are scattered away from any of our grasping. It might seem cruel, for instance, for God to allow the incubation of the sins of the Canaanites for four hundred years (foreclosing even, it would seem, any thought of missionary forays from Jacob's people during their palmier days in Egypt), but is it not equally perplexing that God's angel would grant the hours or even just the minutes for repentance to the man who was upbraided with, "You fool! This very night your life will be required of you"?
And if dimension and proportionality are in play at God's discretion, then what sense are we to make of Jesus' assertion that, had God not "shortened" the coming time of troubles, then no one would survive? "Shortened" it from what? Are we as the gospel audience to imagine we have gained admittance to God's chronological counting-house? If God wanted a remnant to survive, could he not simply have arranged for people to die less readily? Surely it is the emotive impetus imparted by talk of dimension and proportionality that matters, not the quantification at play in the verbiage.
This question of emotive impetus must be revisited continually. If we look, for example, at the four hundred years of fermenting wickedness among the Canaanites, it is undeniable that each ensuing generation was brought up by a progressively more wicked cohort of elders. What was dissolving might have been the social structure itself, while yet the villainy-versus-victimhood calculus pertaining to individuals remained relatively stable. One might be reminded of the modern complaint that "kids" are so depraved that they have no concept of right and wrong--as though that very conceptual lack were not a mitigating factor.
This understanding of dissolving social structure must be applied to the generations of Noah's time--those generations described in Genesis as being quintessentially preoccupied with evil, while yet they are described by Jesus as being indistinguishable from normal folk in the days and hours before the flood. The standard Christian conceptualization discards the emotive (and more illuminating) aspects of the story in favor of fretful moralizing.
To the denominations, Adam after the Fall is still a glorious creature, the slightly tarnished crown of creation, and the expanding Family of Man accumulates progressively more defects. (This conceptualization has the added allure to the literalists of softening objections to the inaugural incests, though unsurprisingly there do not seem to be conjectures abroad about the possible widowerhood of Adam through his many chromosomally-admirable and presumably fertile centuries.) Humanity in this paradigm becomes more and more wicked (though the precocious Cain rather spoils the neat slope), and from this paradigm springs any manner of condemnatory racial and ethnic conceptualizations.
Next we will see where this goes, and where it ought to go.
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