Thanks for the well considered thoughts!!
What you said here was very clearly presented and I follow you. I see exactly what you mean in everything you say multiplication is not. To me, though, multiplication still looks more like a subcategory of life in Christ and not so much like the whole shebang. These are the gaps my mind still fails to get over:
Are you sure that our new covenant calling is actually strictly speaking a continuation of the commission to fill and subdue the earth? (I know that's what McNabb does contend.) I'd grant it has analogous properties, maybe a lot. What about the differences? Mainly, the earlier instruction (while still applicable) is doomed to end, it's temporary. This world will someday be undone no matter how many of us there are or how tight our dominion over it is. We won't be given in marriage in the age to come, so that's presumably a serious disruption of our horizontal multiplication. It kinda seems like eventually there are enough people. Secondly, the focus of each commission is at a different level: the earlier is about matter and time and biology, and the second calls to relationship and indwelling Spirit. Obviously I grant that the second acts through the first, but the first was incomplete, surely, even before the fall. Now we're given to know that one doesn't strictly need anything but God himself to have abundant life, right?
Also, do you think that a personal deepening of the knowledge of God is best categorized under the type of multiplication that McNabb is discussing, the type that was promised to Abraham?
