Who is Dead and Who Lives

Christianity cannot sort out the content and the progression of how humans came to be.  Christianity's difficulty lies in an overweening desire to possess an "historical" revelation.  In such a vein, the "in the beginning" theme of "Genesis" is overworked, as though the beginning of anything in a God-tended universe could be shorn of mystery.  When humanity came to reside upon the earth, the world itself had been plucked out of a primordium of unrepresented duration--the "beginning" is the province of God, not of humans.

And even the "came to reside upon the earth" part is less definite than it seems.  There are, of course, two different and conflicting accounts in Genesis of the creation of human beings.  The literalist must contend that the second--the "Adam-and-Eve"--account is a "focusing-in" (or some such) on the particulars of a single, apparently clumsy story--the clumsiness shown not merely in the forced presaging (in the first account) of the "mastery" (creature-naming and assessing) and "male and female" developments of Adam's story, but more straightforwardly in inconsistencies of place and progression.

What is described in the first, more general, account is a humanity of latent potential--a humanity tending to assert mastery, to exhibit carnal desires, to seek to reproduce, to seek the satiation of hunger.  All of this describes humans quite fairly, and Jesus provides us later with an additional description.  Jesus says that the God of Abraham (and, in Jesus' application, all persons) is the God of the living, not the dead.  A God who knew Abraham, and will know Abraham, through all time (as we might conceive of time) is a God to whom Abraham is ever-living (as might be said of us all.)  The general Genesis account of humanity's creation need have little to do with our earth-bound notions of "life."

Indeed, Jesus toys (as it seems) with nothing more persistently than the ideas of life and death.  On learning of the demise of Lazarus, the disciples resolve to accompany Jesus to the home of Lazarus' kin, though it might mean the disciples' death.  An of course there is the recounting of Jesus' great sorrow--after he has wrung his disciples about over whether Lazarus is really dead or not.

The God who gives life and death also decides who is dead, and who lives.