Humanity De-capitulated & Re-capitulated – Brad Jersak (with John Behr)

From Adam to Christ – All Humanity and Every Human:

My Inquiry to Fr. John Behr.

Hi Fr. John,

At a recent Open Table Conference you pointed out how simple everything becomes once we unlearn (scrape away) the many theological accretions that purport to mediate the significance of the work of Christ to our lives, including mechanical atonement theories that are required to make sense of what “Christ died for you” means if we’re all still going to die.

The simplicity you mention comes, in part, from seeing reality far more directly.

I want to run this by you to be sure I am hearing what you are saying (to which I would bet you’ll need to say, “It’s even simpler than that!”). Here goes:

Adam is a word for the whole human race in its growing stages, stumbling and all.

Christ is another word for the whole human race in its grown-up, completed stage.

And this journey from Adam to Christ is basically a way to describe the real experience all humanity and each human being:

We are born, we stumble, we get up, we stray, we come back, we die. All of us.

And Christianity is not something else than that.

It is a revelation of the human story made sacred by the human God.

To be Christian is (1) to voluntarily participate in that story through self-offering love and (2) anticipate what is common to all: i.e., that in the End, we experience the fullness of God’s love union with humanity and the cosmos, Who already loves us and is already One with us.

In Paul’s theology, the whole body of humanity had been ‘headed’ by Adam, whose turn away from God IS humanity’s turn away from the Light of Life toward the darkness of death and bondage to the fear of death.

But Paul’s gospel sees humanity receiving a new head, Jesus Christ, whose obedience to the Father through self-offering love re-Turns the body of humanity around, leading us back to communion with his Father via the Tree of Life, i.e., the Cross.

Ephesians is a key text describing the successful outcome of this ‘head transplant’.

9 He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him 10 with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, the reheading [ana-kephelaioo] of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth…

22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head [kephalé] over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

I see that while Christ is the head of the church, he is also called the head over everything of which the church is the fullness.

That is, Christ is the head of humanity, and the ekklesia are those who voluntarily acknowledge his headship now, and the ekklesia will ultimately include the all he draws to himself, which is to say, to “the Cross of self-offering love.

By that definition of ekklesia, not all Christians participate in the ekklesia and many who are not called Christians already do, because surrender to living-as-dying and dying-as-living is the fundamental identity marker for the ekklesia, for which Christian baptism provides the imagery.

Am I getting warmer?

Brad

Fr. John’s Comments and Essential Tweaks:

Hi Brad,

Not just warm but red hot: this is put so clearly that its simplicity really does shine through!

De-capitulated (beheaded) in Adam; re-capitulated (re-headed) in Christ.

In some ways, our use of the term ‘Christian’ hides this simplicity (it implies a ‘religion’ – believe these counterfactual ideas and behave in a certain way, and you are in the club): I would prefer to say:

We are Christ’s and christs.

One point, though: It strikes me looking again at that passage from Ephesians that you cite, that he does not in fact say that Christ is appointed the head of everything “of which the Church is the fulness,” but rather for the Church.

I suspect that behind this is the marital imagery of head and body.

All of this is also brought out in John’s Gospel:

“When I am lifted up, I will draw all to myself.”

And that the movement for all of this (Adam to Christ; beginning of the world, through stages of evolution, to its end) is the movement of each of our lives (conception-growth-death/resurrection/transformation) is what really blows my mind; something I’ve learned from working through Gregory’s text (On the Human Image of God) and Plato’s Timaeus.

Best,

Fr. John Behr

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