The Darwin Bicentenary has brought a plethora of films, lectures, articles and books dealing with the implications of evolutionary theory for modern thought and life. Within evangelicalism the anniversary has prompted an important discussion about the relationship between human death and the Fall.
Here, I would like briefly to answer the question: did Christians before the appearance of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859 separate human death from the appearance of human sin in Genesis 3?
The short answer is ‘no’. As far as I know, until around 1750, human death was regarded as a consequence of the Fall. The most noteworthy earlier exception came in the early 5th century, when Theodore (from Mopsuestia in what is today Turkey) regarded the Fall as more-or-less a mythical explanation for the fact that people had always been mortal. This was a large part of what lay behind his heretical Christology (in which he saw Christ as a divinely-inspired man who leads the human race from the age of mortality up to the age of immortality). He bequeathed that understanding of Christ to Nestorius, and both of them were condemned by the church.
