TIME magazine announced this summer that scientists at Colossal Biosciences in Dallas, Texas had resurrected the long extinct dire wolf through gene editing of gray wolves and modern canines. The dire wolf is a relative of modern wolves, though it’s unclear exactly what their relationship with them is, whether they were cousins, ancestors, or something else. Whatever the supposed relationship, they share enough genetic material from discovered DNA samples for scientists to modify the existing genes of gray wolf pups and bring forth a creature that is like a gray wolf but larger, tougher, and stronger.
Whatever self-searching questions Colossal scientists should be asking, Christians in particular have raised eyebrows at the practice involving no small amount of gene editing. This gene editing has been solicited for human embryos for multiple American “fertility” companies as a part of a customizable experience for parents to choose desirable physical traits and remove undesirable ones.
Luckily those companies promised more than they could deliver (for now), but the ethical questions raised by gene editing are right and proper: is this a slippery slope?
We should distinguish genetic editing of human children and genetic editing of everything else in creation. While gene editing of creatures can be done in cruel ways (causing grotesque suffering to the animals) and also done for ecologically dangerous projects (like introducing invasive or violent species into environments when natural terrain or humans could be recklessly endangered), man has a fundamental right to have dominion over all of creation in the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth from creation (Genesis 1:28). This governance is always to be done in relationship with God, and the Psalter would suggest it can only be done properly by a man who meditates on God’s law (Psalms 1 and 150).
As members of Adam, we govern over the heavens and the earth, a governance only extended by the grace of the New Adam such that we will judge both the world and the angels (1 Corinthians 6:2–3; Revelation 20:4). Paul takes up this theme of Christians seated in the heavenlies above angels and puts it at the core of his message of the gospel.
In Christ, we not only are blessed with every spiritual blessing from heaven and made his sons (Ephesians 1:3), we are actually said to ascend with Christ and to be seated with him above the angels (2:6). When his gospel is given to us, we receive something the authorities in the heavenly places (angels according to our common parlance) have not seen until it is embodied in us as baptized Christians living by faith in the church (3:10, 1 Peter 1:12).
The devil recurs as an enemy in Ephesians 4:27, 6:11, and 6:16. It is in those last two instances, in the Armor of God sequence, that Paul most clearly outlines the Christian life as warfare against spiritual forces:
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
This verse is usually preached as if to magnify the nature of the threat, that we are not wrestling against mere mortals, but spiritual forces in the heavenly places. While this rightly instills the moral lesson of bewaring lest our adversary attack us like a lion, it actually inverts the hierarchy of Christian-angel relationships in the New Testament, which is what Satan has always done (Genesis 3:1–5). In Christ, the Strong Man Satan and all his comrades have been decisively beaten (Mark 1:12–13; 3:23–27). No, instead of emphasizing the near impossibility of the challenge to mortal flesh (“let go and let God”), Paul seems to be contrasting the effectiveness of warring against a blinded and bound Satan to the futility of Satan’s fight against Christ’s kith and kin. Flesh and blood rise again; spirits don’t.
When we eat of Christ’s flesh and drink of his blood, by dwelling in him and he in us, we are given the very means of conquering the flitting spirits arrayed against him. The angels become less of an existential threat, less authoritative, as Christians move towards wisdom and knowledge and the stature of full manhood.
Once Eve encounters the serpent, man is exiled from the Edenic temple. Once serpents plague the camp of Israel, many perish but some look to the serpent and are saved. Once the Leviathan attacks Job, Job moans, suffers, but eventually survives and forgives his deceptive friends. Once Israel falls into idolatry, Josiah tramples and melts the bronze serpent temporarily saving Israel. But when the serpent strikes Paul, he casts it off into the fire without fanfare and is declared a god (Acts 28:6). The serpent’s power weakens over the course of the canon.
Hebrews paints a similar picture, contrasting over and over again the flightiness and instrumentality of angels to the permanence and comprehensiveness of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man (1:5–14). Angels and prophets (ministered to by angels) brought a message that was to come about by another, but a man declared, “The kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (1:1; 2:2; Mark 1:15).
There is only one living man of flesh and blood. Pilate could not more perfectly embody the duty of every Christian magistrate than when he declared in dismay, “Behold the Man!” to an angry crowd of un-men (John 19:5).
Dwelling in Christ, true flesh and true blood, we become coheirs with him. We can and will thus rearrange all of creation as Scripture and wisdom would have us lead, according to the taking-blessing-breaking-forming-thanksgiving order so essential to Theopolis.
So don’t lose sleep over the genetically modified wolves, the return of wooly mammoths, or even sheep cloning. If powers and principalities are to be judged by us, how much more the creatures under our feet? All things from atoms to angels are subject to man, and will answer to him on the last day, as clay before the potter.
Jackson Waters is the Executive Editor at the Theopolis Institute. He studies divinity at Trinity Anglican Seminary and received a B.A. from Union University in Anglo-American History.