Adam soteriology

Christ is an antitype of Adam — "the last Adam", according to St. Paul:

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. … Thus it is written, "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. (1Co. 15:22,45)¹

Theologians commonly speak of Adam christology. But I want to propose that this construct (Christ as a second Adam) should be regarded as an alternative atonement theory. Hence the title of the post, Adam soteriology.²

There are three classical theories of atonement. None of them is free of difficulties, although evangelical Christians tend to subscribe to third theory, penal substitution.

Here's the way I look at it. Each atonement theory begins by identifying a specific problem, then proposes that Christ's death is the solution to that problem.

theory	assumed problem	solution
Ransom:3 (Origen, Augustine, Gregory the Great; dominant theory in the 2nd-10th centuries)	Reflects a culture that was familiar with the institution of slavery. Proposes that we are Satan's property (his slaves, or perhaps his captives) because of our sins.	Christ's death is God's payment to Satan to purchase our freedom. (Ultimately Satan is tricked because death cannot hold Christ, who rises from the dead.)
Satisfaction: (Anselm; dominant theory in the 11th-15th centuries)	Reflects the honour/shame culture of feudal society. God is our Lord; by sinning, we insult God's honour; the insult must be requited or God would be shamed.	Christ's death requites the insult of our sin, upholding God's honour.
Penal Substitution: (Luther, Calvin; dominant from the 16th century onwards)	The model is judicial, reflecting a culture where legal justice is the preeminent value. As a just judge, God cannot allow sin to go unpunished.	Christ dies as our substitute to pay the lawful penalty (death) owed by us.

I am proposing the addition of a fourth model:

theory	assumed problem	solution
Adam soteriology:	The problem is not a matter of our slavery, or of God's honour or his justice. It is a matter of history. Adam's historical act of disobedience corrupted the entire human race and, indeed, the whole of creation.	Jesus recapitulated Adam’s history; except, where Adam was disobedient (resulting in death — not for Adam alone), Jesus was obedient (resulting in life — not for Jesus alone).

This theory proposes that humankind's problem is historical in nature:  and the solution is correspondingly historical.

How did Jesus' death set things right again? By reversing the history of Adam’s fall from grace. Jesus' obedience (unto death, even death on a cross) set creation on a new historical foundation. Adam blazed a trail to death; Jesus blazed a new trail through death to life.

I realize that this answer is only partially satisfactory. But one might just as well ask, How did Adam's sin result in the corruption of the whole of creation? If Adam's historic sin could have such far-reaching consequences, then Christ's historic act of ultimate obedience could, too.

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned — for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.

(Ro. 5:12-19)

None of these insights are original to me. It's just that the construct is usually described as a christological doctrine; whereas I think it makes equally good sense as soteriology.

The proposed theory appeals to me because it emphasizes historical deeds, and the notion of salvation history is common to both Judaism and Christianity.

The theory also appeals to me because penal substitution, the dominant model among evangelicals, has significant drawbacks:

• The old theological term, propitiation, tends to represent God as savage or bloodthirsty; his wrath can only be turned aside by means of a blood sacrifice.
  
• The traditional emphasis on legal justice tends to imply that God is subordinate to the law; that God is under an obligation to satisfy the requirements of the law.
  
• The notion of God punishing Jesus tends to cast God in the role of the abusive father; the more graphically we depict Christ's suffering, the worse this problem becomes.
  
• One must also ask whether the substitution of an innocent victim for the guilty party can be characterized as a "just" resolution of the problem:  is it not rather a miscarriage of justice when the innocent one suffers while the guilty one goes free?

This is not to deny that the New Testament teaches penal substitution, because I am persuaded that it does. However, particularly in our interactions with non-Christians (for the purposes of evangelism or apologetics), I think we would do better to emphasize Adam soteriology rather than the traditional alternatives.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.
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¹Unless otherwise indicated, scripture is quoted from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version.

²James Dunn occasionally uses the phrase "Adam soteriology" in Christology In the Making: An Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, 2nd ed., 1989. For example, he expounds one element of Paul's theology as follows:

Salvation consists in the believer being transformed into the image of God (2Co. 3:18), consists in a progressive renewal in knowledge according to the image of the Creator (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24). So there is something of an Adam soteriology here — salvation as a restoration of man to that image in which Adam had been created. (p. 105)

³The ransom theory (or at least, a modified form of it) is sometimes referred to as Christus Victor.

Evolution is true; and Adam is historical

Scripture and science may well differ in the boundaries they would draw round early humanity.

So writes Derek Kidner in his pithy little commentary, Genesis (vol. 1 in the "Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries" series), p. 28. The observation is key to Kidner's speculation about human beginnings.

Kidner accepts the scientific evidence in support of evolution. On the other hand, he is a thoroughly evangelical scholar; accordingly, he maintains that Adam was a real, historical human being.

Palaeontology … depicts a species fashioned over perhaps a million years or more into the present human form, showing the outward characteristics of modern man upwards of twenty thousand years ago, not only in his bodily structure but in his practice of making tools, using fire, burying his dead, and, not least, creating works of art comparable with those of any period. Even at this remote time the apparent forerunners of our chief racial groups seem to be distinguishable, and the species had already spread widely over the world, displacing another type of hominid, "Neanderthal Man", whose own relics, rough as they are, indicate that tools, fire and burial had been in use for long ages before this. On the other hand, the first known signs of pastoral and agricultural life and, later, of metal working (e.g. by hammering copper or meteoric iron [Gen. 4:19-24]) are much more recent, appearing in the Near East, on present evidence, somewhere between the eighth and fifth millennia BC at earliest.

How the two pictures, biblical and scientific, are related to each other is not immediately clear. … The latter may need the whole range of literary genres to do it justice, and it is therefore important not to prejudge the method and intention of these chapters.

Other scriptures, however offer certain fixed points to the interpreter. For example, the human race is of a single stock ("from one", Acts 17:26); again, the offence of one man made sinners of the many, and subjected them to death (Rom. 5:12-19): and this man was as distinct an individual as were Moses and Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:14). Others too are counted as individuals in the New Testament: e.g., Cain, Abel, Enoch, Noah. These guidelines exclude the idea of myth … and assure us that we are reading of actual, pivotal events. (pp. 26-27)

As asserted in the title of this post, evolution is true and Adam is historical — those are Kidner's twin convictions.

Kidner points out that the vast age of the earth is only one of the difficulties we must tackle if we intend to reconcile Genesis with science. He emphasizes that we must also explain how the first farmer follows so soon (130 years is the upper limit) after the first man in Genesis.

To the present author [i.e., Kidner] various converging lines point to an Adam much nearer our own times than the early tool-makers and artists, let alone their remote forbears. On the face of it, the ways of life described in Genesis 4 are those of the neolithic and first metal-working cultures alluded to above, i.e., of perhaps eight or ten thousand years ago, less or more. The memory of names and genealogical details also suggests a fairly compact period between Adam and Noah rather than a span of tens or hundreds of millennia, an almost unimaginable stretch of time to chronicle. Yet this seems to widen the gap still further between Genesis and current chronologies.

The answer may lie in our definition of man.

Man in Scripture is much more than homo faber, the maker of tools: he is constituted man by God's image and breath, nothing less. It follows that Scripture and science may well differ in the boundaries they would draw round early humanity: the intelligent beings of a remote past, whose bodily and cultural remains give them the clear status of "modern man" to the anthropologist, may yet have been decisively below the plane of life which was established in the creation of Adam. If, as the text of Genesis would by no means disallow, God initially shaped man by a process of evolution, it would follow that a considerable stock of near-humans preceded the first true man, and it would be arbitrary to picture these as mindless brutes. Nothing requires that the creature into which God breathed human life should not have been of a species prepared in every way for humanity, with already a long history of practical intelligence, artistic sensibility and the capacity for awe and reflection.

On this view, Adam, the first true man, will have had as contemporaries many creatures of comparable intelligence, widely distributed over the world. One might conjecture that these were destined to die out, like the Neanderthalers (if indeed these did), or to perish in the Flood, leaving Adam's lineal descendants, through Noah, in sole possession. Against this, however, there must be borne in mind the apparent continuity between the main races of the present and those of the distant past, already mentioned, which seems to suggest either a stupendous antiquity for Adam … or the continued existence of "pre-Adamites" alongside "Adamites". …

It is at least conceivable that after the special creation of Eve, which established the first human pair as God's viceregents (Gn. 1:27,28) and clinched the fact that there is no natural bridge from animal to man, God may have now conferred His image on Adam's collaterals, to bring them into the same realm of being. Adam's "federal" headship of humanity extended, if that was the case, outwards to his contemporaries as well as onwards to his offspring, and his disobedience disinherited both alike.

There may be a biblical hint of such a situation in the surprising impression of an already populous earth given by the words and deeds of Cain in 4:14,17. Even Augustine had to devote a chapter [of The City of God] to answering those who "find this a difficulty". … It may be significant that, with one possible exception [Gen. 3:20], the unity of mankind "in Adam" and our common status as sinners through his offence are expressed in Scripture not in terms of heredity but simply of solidarity. We nowhere find applied to us any argument from physical descent such as that of Hebrews 7:9,10 (where Levi shares in Abraham's act through being "still in the loins of his ancestor"). Rather, Adam's sin is shown to have implicated all men because he was the federal head of humanity, somewhat as in Christ's death "one died for all, therefore all died" (2 Cor. 5:14). Paternity plays no part in making Adam "the figure of him that was to come" (Rom. 5:14). (pp. 28-30)

I am not committed to Kidner's reconstruction of human beginnings. In fact, Kidner himself describes it as an exploratory suggestion and invites correction and a better synthesis (p. 30).

I have gone to the trouble of typing it out because I wish Kidner's proposal was in wider circulation. By daring to offer a bold and original interpretation, I think he shows up most evangelical interpreters, who demonstrate a lamentable paucity of imagination. Kidner shows that it may be possible to read the early chapters of Genesis as history without repudiating the theory of evolution, which has the weight of scientific evidence in support of it.

It seems to me that death was in the world long before Adam's sin. But consider:

1. that human beings may not have had the moral capacity to sin until after God had breathed into Adam's lungs and reconstituted him in the image and likeness of God; and
   
   
2. that the earlier deaths may have been physical only:  whereas spiritual death (estrangement from God) appeared for the first time as a consequence of Adam's act of disobedience.

In the end, I prefer a more mythological interpretation of Genesis 1-11 than the interpretation Kidner commends to us. I don't suppose that the events of creation necessarily occurred in the same order as in Genesis 1; or that Eve was formed literally of a rib from Adam's side; or that there was a literal tree with fruit that would impart eternal life; nor do I feel compelled to reconcile the variant accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.

Nonetheless, Kidner provides a reconstruction that is thoughtful, scholarly, and evangelical. It merits our consideration, if only to show us how blinkered our perspective on scripture usually is.

Adam christology in Paul's letters

And now for something completely different …!

In general, Emerging From Babel consciously focuses on exegesis of the Old Testament. But since I'm a Christian, interacting with other bibliobloggers, I continue to get drawn into dialogue on New Testament issues as well. Thus I've gotten sidetracked (it happens all the time) by a recent post on Chris Tilling's blog.

Chris has been surveying the content of a recent publication by Gordon D. Fee:  Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson, 2007). Part 7 of Chris's survey touches on the question of Adam christology:

While there is an Adam Christology in Paul, "in terms of actual language and echoes from Gen 1-2, it is limited to two kinds of passages:  first, explicit contrasts between Christ and Adam … and, second, where the incarnate Christ is seen as the true bearer of the divine image".

I'd like to explore this topic here (having already posted several long comments on Chris's blog).

In this post, we'll deal with the topic of Adam christology in general. In the follow-up post, we'll take a look at the great hymn contained in Philippians 2.

1. Allusions to Adam:

Adam plays a larger role in Paul's theology than is usually realized. … Adam is a key figure in Paul's attempt to express his understanding both of Christ and of man.

(James Dunn, Christology In the Making: An Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, 2nd ed., 1989, p. 101.)

Dunn argues that there are numerous allusions to Adam where Adam is not explicitly mentioned. I would summarize the texts by saying that they deal with the whole notion of the "fall of man":  a fall from grace into depravity, separation from God, hardship, suffering, and ultimately death.

Those themes are of course sounded in the story of Adam's creation and disobedience, recounted in Genesis 1-3 —

• created in God's image / likeness;
  
• bore God's glory;
  
• tempted by the promise that he could be like God;
  
• disobeyed God's command;
  
• forfeited God's glory and perhaps also God's image / likeness;
  
• became a slave to sin and death;
  
• the creation likewise was subject to bondage and decay.

Of the above items, the most interesting concerns the image / likeness / glory of God. Did humanity forfeit these things, either in Adam's sin or in our own subsequent sins (or both)?

That humanity forfeited God's image at the fall was not a traditional Jewish view:

The motif of man made in the divine image does not play a large part in Jewish thought — it seems to have been taken more or less for granted. … More striking is the fact that there is little or no thought of the divine image being effaced or obscured in Adam as a consequence of his fall (cf. Gen. 5:1-3; 9:6; James 3:9). (Dunn, p. 105)

On the other hand:

There may have been no real idea that Adam forfeited the image of God by his fall, but there was certainly a firm conviction that he had forfeited the glory of God. … Thus in [the rabbinic texts] Gen. Rab. 12:6 and Num. Rab. 13:12 glory (or lustre) is one of the six things taken from Adam which would be restored in the world to come (see also Gen. Rab. 11:2; 21:5; Deut. Rab. 11:3). (Dunn, p. 106; I added the italics on "image" and "glory")

As for Paul, at one point he states that man (meaning literally the male) is the image and glory of God. But:

The dominant motif in Paul is that man is rather the image of fallen Adam, shares his corruptibility (1Co. 15:49), and that salvation consists in the believer being transformed into the image of God (2Co. 3:18), consists in a progressive renewal in knowledge according to the image of the Creator (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24). So there is something of an Adam soteriology here [NB. even where Adam is not explicitly mentioned] — salvation as a restoration of man to that image in which Adam had been created. (Dunn, p. 105)

Accordingly, Dunn sees references to Adam where a casual reader would not notice any such thing:  e.g.,

• "for all have sinned and forfeited the glory of God" (Ro. 3:23; Dunn's translation);
  
• "I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me" (Ro. 7:9).¹

On the latter text, Dunn comments:

Romans 7:9f. can be fully explicated only by reference to Adam. Only if he was thinking of Adam could Paul properly say that he was alive once apart from the law, and that the coming of the commandment brought sin to life and resulted in death for him. For a life "apart from law", and a "coming" of law which resulted in sin and death, was true of Adam in a way that it would not be true of anyone born after or under the law. …

Finally with Rom. 7:11, "for sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, deceived (ἐξηπάτησέν) me and by it killed me", we have a fairly explicit echo of the woman's complaint in Gen. 3:13 — "The serpent deceived (ηπάτησέν) me and I ate." (p. 104)

2. Explicit references to Adam:

The divine program for man which broke down with Adam has been run through again in Jesus — this time successfully. … Christ could not become last Adam, progenitor of a new manhood beyond death, if he had not first been Adam, one with the manhood which the first Adam begot. (Dunn, pp. 110-111)

We can now turn our attention to the only two texts in which Paul explicitly develops an Adam christology. First, Romans 5:12-19 —

Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. … Adam … was a type of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. … For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. …

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.

Dunn comments:

Adam and Christ are alike (Adam the type of Christ — vs. 14) in that in both cases the action of one man had fateful consequences for those who followed. Both also died, but here the similarity ends. For where Adam's death was the consequence of his trespass, his disobedience, Christ's death was his act of righteousness, his act of obedience. …

By freely following out the consequences of Adam's disobedience (i.e. death), Jesus burst through the cul-de-sac of death into life. … [Thus] he was able to catch up man in resurrection, to make it possible for God's original intention for man to be fulfilled at the last. The point can be expressed thus:

          Adam's disobedience ———> death
               Christ's obedience to death ———> life.

(p. 111)

Second, 1Co. 15:20-49 —

Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. …

[The body of a dead person] is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

Dunn comments:

It is likely that there is an underlying connection of thought … to the effect that Christ too first bore "the image of the man of dust" before he became "the man from heaven" (vs. 49), that he too was a "living soul" before he became "life-giving Spirit" (vs. 45). For only he who died as men die could become "the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep" (vs. 20). (p. 111)

Conclusion:

These are complex ideas:  they are familiar to us and yet they stretch our capacity to understand.

In the follow-up post, we will consider the great hymn in Philippians 2 to see whether it, too, is an instance of Adam christology. Dunn thinks it is, even though Adam is not explicitly mentioned.

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¹Unless otherwise indicated, scripture is quoted from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version.