Does scripture naturalize death?

What if death's presence in the cosmos is not native to creation but a wound running all the way down to its foundations, inflicted before Adam ever reached for the fruit? Philip Porter joins Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, and Brad East to discuss his new book, which retrieves Augustine, Aquinas, Milton, and Tolkien to argue that the angelic fall precedes and precipitates every other form of evil, and that contemporary theology has been too quick to make peace with death.

——

Hosts: Derek Rishmawy, Alastair Roberts, Brad East

Guest: Philip Porter, assistant professor of theology at Saint Louis University (Madrid) and author of Unnatural Death: Creation, Sin, and the Angelic Fall. He completed his doctoral work under Paul Griffiths at Duke Divinity School.

——

Get the free ebook Spiritual Formation for the Family at http://mereorthodoxy.com/family.

Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.

Get 30% of the Baker Book of the Month, Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering A Biblical Vision For Lifelong Discipleship, by going to: http://bakerbookhouse.com/pages/mere-fidelity

Apply for Beeson Divinity School's Ph.D program by April 1 for Fall 2026 admission here: https://bit.ly/BeesonPhD

——

Timestamps

• 0:00 - Intro
• 3:50 - Porter's thesis: why death as enemy matters and what contemporary theology gets wrong
• 8:40 - Augustine's rationes seminales: the seed-like reasons at the heart of creation
• 10:15 - Angels as administrators of creation and how their fall wounds the cosmos
• 13:30 - Tolkien's Silmarillion, Melkor's discord, and the felix culpa logic
• 17:30 - The conditio and administratio: God's atemporal creation vs. its unfolding in time
• 20:00 - Three false paths: Kelsey, McCabe, and Darwin
• 27:00 - Does scripture naturalize death? The grain of wheat, 1 Corinthians 15, and Alastair's question
• 39:10 - The double fall: Romans 5, the angelic fall, and how they fit together
• 42:00 - Satan's envy of the hypostatic union: what Lucifer saw and why he turned
• 52:00 - Refracted and diffracted light: a metaphor for holy and fallen angels
• 1:01:40 - Deep time, hominins, and what it means for Adam to be unfallen in a devastated cosmos
• 1:05:05 - The Johannine thread: destroying the works of the devil and what the devil actually wants
• 1:12:30 - Universalism, David Bentley Hart, and the problem the angelic fall poses for it
• 1:20:35 - Supralapsarianism and the incarnation-anyway position

Books Mentioned

• Philip Porter, Unnatural Death: Creation, Sin, and the Angelic Fall
• Paul Griffiths, Decreation
• David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
• David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Well
• Ambrose of Milan, On the Good of Death