Replies

...and fulfill his created purpose which is to be like God.

This is a comment that has come up a number of times and I'm puzzled by this. Do you believe man's created purpose is to become like God the Son or like God the Father?

BTW-Animals are distinctly different than man. While there may be a case for them "lying down with each other" in a perfect world, they do not possess a soul.

There is a slight bit of evidence that while Adam and Eve were living, the plants and animals around them were subject to death. After all, Adam was told that in the day that he would eat of the fruit he would die. So he must have had an understanding about dead. Likewise, we find this passage in Ecclesiates:

Ecc 3:19-20 For that which happens to the sons of men also happens to beasts, even one thing happens to them. As this one dies, so that one dies; yea, they all have one breath; so that a man has no advantage over a beast; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are of the dust, and all return to dust again.

Please note this was the sentence carried out on Adam, to return to the dust. While this is very scant evidence, it does suggest that animals died and returned to dust all the while Adam and Eve was living. Man was uniquely different from animals before the fall. It is difficult to say what animals were like prior to the fall.

“This is a comment that has come up a number of times and I’m puzzled by this. Do you believe man’s created purpose is to become like God the Son or like God the Father?”

The Fathers say that “God became man so that men might become God (or gods or like god)”. The only place I know where a distinction as to which Person of the Trinity is being talked about is made is in comments like that of +Gregory Palamas likening theosis to becoming a living icon of Christ, or +Symeon the New Theologian speaking of a Christian after death being examined “for some similitude to Christ” and about us having been raised by Christ’s grace to the status of sons of God which Christ is by nature. Virtually all of the other comments about theosis and “divinization” either say or point to Christians being what God is by grace and not by assimilation. To that extent I think what the Fathers are referring to is the Trinity, our Triune God.

“While there may be a case for them “lying down with each other” in a perfect world, they do not possess a soul.”

I certainly didn’t mean to imply that they do. Neither, for that matter, does “creation”, but it is taught that creation itself is and has been distorted by man’s sin. Romans 8:22, for example.

I am surprised you mentioned animals not having souls. Do you think the soul is immortal, HD?