So Great a Salvation #1: The Cross and the New Humanity

I wrote this week’s ‘Word for the Week’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ! Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

Romans 5:17-19

As he does elsewhere, Paul places the account of salvation on a huge stage – nothing less than the story stretching from the first Adam to the second Adam.

He puts it even more succinctly in 1 Corinthians 15:22: ‘For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive.’ It’s by virtue of our union with Adam that we die, and by virtue of our union with Christ that we’re made alive.

And at the heart of this story is the cross.

We need it to be so. Though formed in the image of God to represent his good rule in the world, our reflection of that image is distorted. To be sure, threads of beauty, compassion, and industriousness are woven through the fabric of our lives; but so are threads of darkness, disease, and disorder. In our more honest moments, we need go no further than ourselves to be confronted with the twists and turns of the human heart. We walk tall, but fall short, and are unable to make good on our failings.

But there is another who does through his life what we cannot do in ours. There is another who, in his death, takes on the consequences of disobedience that rightly belong to us. Christ Jesus as the second Adam succeeds where the first Adam failed and undoes what the first Adam did – and what we have done since.

In doing so, wonderfully, the cross not only brings about the removal of guilt and the forgiveness of sins, but also creates a new humanity in Christ, people who now ‘put on the new self, which is being renewed in the image of its Creator’ (Colossians 3:10).

Crucially, Jesus does his work as second Adam in human flesh, and the salvation he brings about doesn’t remove us from our own body or our existence in the world. On the contrary, it makes us more truly human, more what we were designed to be. Precisely because of the one who has fulfilled the destiny for which we were made, whatever realm the Lord has placed us in – whatever family, job, school, church, or hobby – we can bear fruit in it, as men and women made and then remade in God’s image to represent and reflect the glory of his grace in all the earth.

Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 5, 2 (2018)

The latest issue of the Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology is now available, the second of two fascicles on the historical Adam. This one carrying the below essays (alas, the summaries in Gerald Hiestand’s editorial relate to the previous issue rather than this one), and several book reviews which ‘likewise focus both on both contemporary and classic works relating to the Historical Adam, original sin, and theological anthropology’.

The issue is available from here via a painless sign-up link.

J. Ryan Davidson

All the Generations from Adam to this Day: The Place of Adam in the Apostolic Fathers

Jonathan Huggins

N.T. Wright on the Historical Adam

Michael LeFebvre

Adam Reigns in Eden: Genesis and the Origin of Kingship

Benjamin Petroelje

The Plight and Solution of the Primitive Person

Joshua Philpot

See the True and Better Adam: Typology and Human Origins

Book Reviews

Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 5, 1 (2018)

The latest issue of the Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology is now available, carrying the below essays on the historical Adam, and several book reviews which ‘likewise focus both on both contemporary and classic works relating ‎to the Historical Adam, original sin, and theological anthropology’.

The issue is available from here via a painless sign-up link.

Joel Willitts

Adam and Eve ‘Above and Beyond’ Darwin: Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a Model for a Faithful Theological Interpretation of the ‘First Human Beings’

Edward W. Klink III

Genesis Revealed: Second Adam Christology in the Fourth Gospel

John W. Yates III

The Image of Adam: Death in Paul and Genesis 1–5

Gerald Hiestand

A More Modest Adam: An Exploration of Irenaeus’ Anthropology in Light of the Darwinian Account of Pre-Fall Death

Matt Ward

Liturgical Adam: What Every Pastor Needs to Know

Book Reviews

Various on the Historicity of Adam and Eve

There seems to be a fair bit of stuff floating around at the moment on the historicity, or otherwise, of Adam and Eve.

1. A new book by C. John Collins – Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? – published by Crossway in the United States (with an excerpt here) and by IVP in the UK. Collins writes:

‘My goal in this study is to show why I believe we should retain a version of the traditional view, in spite of any pressures to abandon it. I intend to argue that the traditional position on Adam and Eve, or some variation of it, does the best job of accounting not only for the Biblical materials but also for our everyday experience as human beings – an experience that includes sin as something that must be forgiven (by God and our fellow human beings) and that must be struggled against as defiling and disrupting a good human life’ (13).

2. An article by Tim Keller on the Gospel Coalition website – ‘Sinned in a Literal Adam, Raised in a Literal Christ’:

‘When Paul speaks of being “in” someone he means to be covenantally linked to them so their historical actions are credited to you. It is impossible to be “in” someone who doesn’t historically exist. If Adam doesn’t exist, Paul’s whole argument – that both sin and grace work “covenantally” – falls apart. You can’t say that Paul was a man of his time but accept his basic teaching about Adam. If you don’t believe what he believes about Adam, you are denying the core of Paul’s teaching.

3. In part picking up on the Collins book and the Keller article, Christianity Today has carried a few pieces on the topic, notably ‘The Search for the Historical Adam’ by Richard N. Ostling.

4. The latest issue of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology – 15, 1 (Spring 2011) – is devoted to the topic. In the editorial, Stephen J. Wellum writes:

‘We are seeking to stake a claim that to deny an historic Adam and fall and go the way of recent evangelicals is not only unnecessary, it is unbiblical in the strongest of terms. In the end, it will lead to a denial of other parts of Scripture, and ultimately it will undercut the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is why our wide-ranging essays and forum pieces are seeking, in some small way, to demonstrate that from Scripture, theology, science, and more, debating an historic Adam matters’ (3).