Running without movement

From the earliest centuries, the church has confessed that Adam’s sin brought death into the world, but historically this was understood as applying above all to human death. Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 were consistently read as teaching that man was created for life and lost that gift through sin. Romans 8 was also taken to mean that the Fall subjected creation to futility, but this “futility” was not read as the sudden beginning of animal mortality. Instead, it meant corruption, frustration, and disorder. Augustine described thorns, toil, wild beasts, plagues, and natural disasters as marks of this futility — creation no longer served man in peaceful harmony. Aquinas made the same point: animals were mortal by nature, but after the Fall creation resisted man and afflicted him with toil and disease. In this way, the Fathers and medievals held that animals had natural mortality, while futility referred to creation’s frustration of its God-given purpose in serving man.

The Lutheran orthodox stood in this same stream. Luther, in his Lectures on Romans, explained futility as creation’s failure to achieve the good purpose for which it was made: instead of ease and harmony, the earth now produced thorns, storms, and plagues. Gerhard likewise spoke of futility as corruption and disorder, creation’s “groaning” under man’s sin, but he was explicit that animal mortality itself was not a penal effect of the Fall. Pieper carried this line forward in the twentieth century, affirming that creation is in bondage to decay because man fell, but restricting “death through sin” to humanity. For the Lutheran tradition, as for the catholic consensus before it, futility meant frustration and corruption, not the loss of beastly immortality.

A significant shift occurs in the Reformed scholastic tradition, especially with Francis Turretin in the seventeenth century. Turretin, building on covenant theology and Adam’s role as federal head of creation, argued that the curse of the Fall extended so far that even animal mortality itself was a result of Adam’s sin. This move went beyond the patristic and medieval consensus, transforming the older intuition of Romans 8 — that creation groans in futility, resisting man and failing to reach its purpose — into a tighter claim that no creature at all died before the Fall. Later Reformed voices carried this forward, giving it greater weight in their theology of the curse.

The claim reached its sharpest form in the twentieth century through modern evangelical Young Earth Creationism. Writers like Whitcomb and Morris in The Genesis Flood (1961) argued that if animals died before Adam sinned, then the gospel itself collapses. This made “no animal death before the Fall” a non-negotiable foundation. Because of this stance, YEC apologetics had to invent elaborate scientific models — Flood geology, accelerated nuclear decay, catastrophic tectonics — to account for the entire fossil record within post-Fall history.

Thus the distinction is clear. Historic Christianity has always taught that the Fall brought human death and subjected creation to futility in the sense of frustration, corruption, and disorder, while allowing that animals were mortal by nature. The new development — beginning with Reformed scholasticism and solidified in modern YEC — is the insistence that no creaturely death at all could have occurred before Adam, and that this claim is essential to the gospel.

Now, imagine if someone told you airplanes can fly, but left out the fact that air must flow across the wings. That would be nonsense. Flight without aerodynamics is no flight at all. In a similar way, some Young Earth Creationist models claim that radioactive decay, tectonic drift, and meteor bombardment all happened very quickly, but they leave out what always comes with those processes: heat. To compress billions of years’ worth of energy into just a few thousand—or even into a single year of Noah’s Flood—without accounting for the heat is like proposing flight without air. The mechanism is inseparable from the process. For another analogy, to claim that accelerated nuclear decay happened without producing overwhelming heat is like saying a man is running while standing perfectly still. Running is movement; decay is heat. You cannot have one without the other.

This is what people mean by the “heat problem.” If accelerated nuclear decay, catastrophic plate tectonics, and rapid cratering all occurred within a short span, the energy released would have been catastrophic. The oceans would have boiled, the crust would have melted, and life could not have survived. This difficulty does not disappear by rejecting uniformitarianism, the idea that the past always matched the present. Even if one allows for rapid rates, the physics of energy release remains constant: each nuclear decay event gives off a fixed amount of heat. Compressing billions of years of such events into mere centuries produces unlivable conditions.

The heat problem arises most sharply in the RATE project (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth), which proposed accelerated nuclear decay to account for isotopic signatures in rocks. The proposal compressed vast amounts of decay into the Creation week or Flood year, but at the cost of a catastrophic thermal load that no physical mechanism could disperse. Other YEC models avoid this particular problem, but raise others: either the theological problem of “apparent history” or the scientific problem of positing changes in constants without evidence.

At this point it is crucial to make a distinction. It is not YEC itself that is in question. One can lean toward affirming a young earth and a real, global Flood on the basis of Scripture alone. That is confession, and it is legitimate. What is being resisted here is not young-earth belief, but the insistence that such confession must be propped up by fragile models. Confessional Lutheran theology gives room for this distinction. It affirms that God created the world, that Adam fell, that the Flood happened. But it does not bind the conscience to theories of vapor canopies, catastrophic tectonics, or accelerated nuclear decay. Scripture says the Flood happened. That is enough. Faith rests on God’s Word, not on speculative physics.

This Lutheran instinct is visible throughout the tradition. Luther, in his Lectures on Genesis, insists that Moses is teaching history, not allegory, and that we must receive the text simply as God’s Word. Yet he ridicules philosophers who demand to know the how of creation, reminding them that God spoke and it was so. For Luther, creation is miracle confessed, not process modeled. Chemnitz, in his Loci Theologici, draws the distinction between God’s ordinary providence through secondary causes and His extraordinary works, in which He suspends or surpasses those causes. Miracles, Chemnitz insists, cannot be reduced to natural law. Johann Gerhard likewise interprets Romans 5 as teaching human death as the penal result of sin, not as a claim that no beast ever perished before the Fall.

In the modern era, Franz Pieper warned against tying the doctrine of the church to the fluctuating theories of science. In Christian Dogmatics he affirmed creation and the Flood as real history but denied that theology depends on scientific mechanism. Hermann Sasse sharpened this by insisting that once the church lets scientism dictate its categories, it has already lost its freedom of confession. Robert Preus echoed the same concern, teaching that when the gospel is tied to human systems, it falls with them; but when tied to the Word, it stands unshaken.

And C. F. W. Walther, the great confessional voice of the nineteenth century, put it in simple, pastoral terms: consciences must never be bound by human inventions, only by the Word of God. Walther warned that to make human constructs into conditions of faith is to burden believers with what God has not commanded. Applied here, his principle means that the church cannot require adherence to speculative models of geology or physics as a test of faith. One may confess a young earth and the Flood because Scripture teaches them, but no one may be forced to defend those events with canopy theories or accelerated decay charts. That would be to exchange divine certainty for human speculation, and to burden consciences with what God has left free.

The danger of insisting on models is twofold. First, models collapse under scrutiny, as the heat problem shows. Second, when faith has been bound to models, faith collapses with them. By contrast, confession does not collapse. To confess a young earth on the basis of God’s Word is secure. To make that confession rest on canopy charts and tectonic diagrams is to tether faith to human constructs. Confessional Lutheranism refuses such tethering.

This does not mean evidence is denied. Geology shows rapid burial and widespread deposits; cultural traditions testify to ancient floods; fossils appear suddenly and en masse. Christians may welcome these signs as consistent with the biblical account. But evidence is not mechanism. To insist that evidence must also be wrapped in a model that “explains” the Flood in purely natural terms is to confuse categories. The Flood, like creation, is a miracle. It is confessed as history, but not reduced to physics.

Genesis 1:29–30 states that God gave seed-bearing plants to humans and “every green plant” to the animals for food. At first glance this seems to suggest a world without carnivory, a vegetarian harmony between man and beast. Many who argue for “no animal death before the Fall” take this verse as their key proof. But the interpretation of this text has not been uniform across traditions, and within confessional Lutheranism it has been handled with characteristic caution.

Luther, in his Lectures on Genesis, takes the words at face value: God did provide plants as food for both man and beast in the beginning. He sees this as testimony to God’s abundant goodness in creation. Yet Luther does not extend the verse into a doctrine that all animals were immortal or that predation was metaphysically impossible. His concern is not zoological taxonomy but theological confession: God spoke, and it was so. The order was peaceful and good, but Scripture does not say more than that, and so Luther does not press the text further. Johann Gerhard likewise acknowledges the original provision of plants. But he warns against confusing this provision with a sweeping dogma about all animal death. Gerhard is careful to distinguish between human mortality, which Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 explicitly connect to Adam’s sin, and the life cycles of brute beasts. To press Genesis 1:30 into a law that no animal could ever die before the Fall is, for Gerhard, an overreach. The text reveals God’s sufficiency and order, but it does not answer every question about animal life and death. Franz Pieper, writing in the early twentieth century, maintains this line. He cites Genesis 1:29–30 as evidence of God’s original design for man’s diet but resists the Reformed and evangelical YEC move to make “no animal death before the Fall” into a doctrinal necessity. For Pieper, Scripture does not say that beasts shared man’s penal sentence of death, and to make such a claim is to bind consciences with what God has not revealed. Pieper insists that the center is Christ’s redemption of fallen man, not speculative theories about the zoology of Eden. Together, these Lutheran voices show a consistent pattern: the text of Genesis 1:29–30 is affirmed, but it is not pressed into a system. Plants were indeed given for food, but the gospel does not rest on whether lions ever ate gazelles in paradise. The Lutheran instinct is to confess what Scripture says plainly and to refuse to bind consciences with what Scripture leaves in silence.

The Resurrection is our paradigm. Christians do not attempt to explain it in terms of medical biology. That would be to deny it as miracle. Instead, we confess it as God’s direct act in history, the very heart of faith. Creation and the Flood belong to the same order of divine acts. They are real events, received on God’s authority, with evidence that may point toward them but without compulsion to model their mechanics.

Thus the Lutheran dogmatician concludes, in continuity with Luther, Chemnitz, Gerhard, Walther, Pieper, Sasse, and Preus: miracles are confessed, not modeled. Human death is the penal result of sin; animal mortality is not central to the gospel. Doctrine centers in Christ crucified and risen, not in speculative geology. A young earth may be confessed, but it need not be defended with collapsing scientific systems. The heat problem proves the point: when miracle is forced into mechanism, the model collapses. When miracle is confessed as miracle, faith remains firm.

Therefore, to lean toward YEC is not to bind oneself to RATE projects or to catastrophic tectonics. It is to confess what Scripture says: God created, Adam fell, the Flood came. This is most certainly true. And it is true not because we have solved the physics, but because God has spoken.