The Fall Before The Fall with Philip G. Porter

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 - Intro3:50 - Porter's thesis: why death as enemy matters and what contemporary theology gets wrong8:40 - Augustine's rationes seminales: the seed-like reasons at the heart of creation10:15 - Angels as administrators of creation and how their fall wounds the cosmos13:30 - Tolkien's Silmarillion, Melkor's discord, and the felix culpa logic17:30 - The conditio and administratio: God's atemporal creation vs. its unfolding in time20:00 - Three false paths: Kelsey, McCabe, and Darwin27:00 - Does scripture naturalize death? The grain of wheat, 1 Corinthians 15, and Alastair's question39:10 - The double fall: Romans 5, the angelic fall, and how they fit together42:00 - Satan's envy of the hypostatic union: what Lucifer saw and why he turned52:00 - Refracted and diffracted light: a metaphor for holy and fallen angels1:01:40 - Deep time, hominins, and what it means for Adam to be unfallen in a devastated cosmos1:05:05 - The Johannine thread: destroying the works of the devil and what the devil actually wants1:12:30 - Universalism, David Bentley Hart, and the problem the angelic fall poses for it1:20:35 - Supralapsarianism and the incarnation-anyway position Books Mentioned Philip Porter, Unnatural Death: Creation, Sin, and the Angelic FallPaul Griffiths, DecreationDavid Kelsey, Eccentric ExistenceJ.R.R. Tolkien, The SilmarillionDavid Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be WellAmbrose of Milan, On the Good of Death