The New Adam

What the Early Church Can Teach Evangelicals (and Liberals) about the Atonement

Ron Highfield

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781725274327, 9781725274334
• eBook ISBN: 9781725274341
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Have you ever found yourself repeating expressions such as "Jesus saves" or "Jesus died for our sins" without really understanding them? When popular speakers "explain" how Jesus's death satisfied God's wrath so you could be forgiven, do you ever think to yourself, "I don't get it"? If so, you're not alone, you're not dumb, and the problem is not with you.Ron Highfield reframes Christian teaching about the atonement so that it comes alive with fresh meaning. Drawing on biblical and traditional sources, Highfield explains why our frustration in trying to understand how Jesus's death satisfies God's judicial wrath is inevitable... because the idea doesn't make sense and the Bible doesn't teach it! Instead of viewing the atonement as the solution to God's problem of how to forgive sins while remaining perfectly just, Highfield argues that the atonement is God's solution to our problem. In Jesus, God rewrites the human story, forgiving our sins, correcting our mistakes, and realizing our destiny. As one of us, Jesus lives a perfect life, passes through death, and enters into eternal life. As the new Adam, he invites us to join his family, share his life, and enjoy his victory.

Part One

The Human Condition

A View from Within

1

The Paradox of Human Existence

Human beings are curious animals. We look up at the stars and gaze at waterfalls. We travel half way around the earth to see an eclipse of the sun. We marvel at huge mountains, tall trees, and powerful animals. And yet, as Augustine observes, “in ourselves we are uninterested.”1 We expend great energy to find answers to our questions about nature and are curious about the affairs of others. But we do not question ourselves about ourselves. Every other thing we study is external to us. We take it apart to unlock its secrets, but find ourselves looking at external surfaces and disconnected parts only. We never experience external things from inside in their unity and wholeness. There is only one thing we can experience as a whole from inside and that is ourselves. In the words of Lucien Laberthonniere (1860–1932), “There is only one problem, the problem of ourselves, from which all others derive.”2 This “problem” is what I intend to pursue in this chapter and in Part One of this book.

Mythmakers, philosophers, poets, and theologians in all ages ask questions about the human condition: What are the different types of experience possible for us? What are the kinds of human emotions and what is the range of those emotions? What are the structures of human existence common to all human beings? What makes us different from other animals? Different thinkers describe human existence in different ways and offer different explanations for why we are constructed as we are. Yet they all notice that human beings possess a dual nature unlike any other creature. We are body and mind, finite and infinite, large and small, of heaven and of earth, one thing and all things,3 located and omnipresent, and temporal and eternal. We are not just one but both sides of these paradoxes. If we were simply finite, we could not experience existence as we do. Nor would we be human if we were simply infinite. The combination of both dimensions makes human beings capable of that unique state Augustine called “the human condition.”4

The greatness and wretchedness of humanity is a persistent theme of Western literature. Sometimes wretchedness, at other times greatness, is emphasized, but usually both are acknowledged. Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390) probes the paradox of the human condition in a way that anticipates Pascal:

What is man that thou art mindful of him? What is this new mystery concerning me? I am small and great, lowly and exalted, mortal and immortal, earthly and heavenly. I share one condition with the lower world and another with God; one with the flesh, the other with the Spirit. I must be buried with Christ, rise with Christ, be joint heir with Christ, become a son of God, a god myself.5

Such church fathers as Lactantius (ca. 250–ca. 325), Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 330–ca. 395), Nemesius of Emesa (fl ca. 390), and Augustine of Hippo (354–430) extolled the greatness of humanity, especially the gift of reason.6 But they were clear that our dignity is a divine gift that demands our grateful response. In the pre-scholastic Middle Ages, theologians in the Latin West drew on Augustine for their views of human dignity and misery. Pope Innocent III (pope from 1198–1206) before he became pope had written a treatise entitled On Contempt for the World: On the Misery of the Human Condition. Acknowledging that misery of condition does not disprove dignity of nature, Lotario dei Conti di Segni (Innocent’s birth name) promised a complementary treatise on the dignity of human nature. But Lotario was unable to keep his pledge, and his unfulfilled promise provided an excuse for the composition of many humanist essays on the dignity of humanity in the following three centuries.7

Petrarch (1304–74) wrote the first of these, The Remedies of Both Kinds of Fortune, thereby initiating the literary genre “The Dignity of Man.”8 Many such treatises followed in the next 150 years. Some retained the earlier emphasis on such theological themes as the image of God and the incarnation of the Son of God in human flesh. Others moved in a secular direction. Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) in his Dialogue on the True Good, defended the Epicurean view on the goodness of pleasure against the Stoic rejection of pleasure. Pico Mirandola (1463–94) in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), emphasized humanity’s created openness to self-realization according to its own will.

Blaise Pascal (1623–62)

Though I will draw on some of this earlier literature, I will give center stage to Blaise Pascal because he brings special notice to the paradoxical relationship between greatness and wretchedness in a way I want to emphasize in this chapter. Pascal lived at the dawn of the modern era, in the age of Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes. His thoughts on the greatness and wretchedness of humanity were found among the notes he made in preparation for an apologetic work designed to address the issues of his age in a way that could reach the nascent modern mind. These notes were collected and published as Pensées, which is French for “thoughts.” Below are some of his thoughts on the paradoxical relationship between human greatness and human misery.

Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched: a tree does not know that it is wretched. Thus it is wretched to know that one is wretched but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched.9

Man must not be allowed to believe either that he is equal to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.10

Man’s greatness is so obvious that it can even be deduced from his wretchedness, for what is nature in animals we call wretchedness in man.11

Had Pascal spoken only about human wretchedness we might consider him a gloomy pessimist. Had he spoken only about human greatness we would think him an untethered optimist. But he holds them in such careful tension that Peter Kreeft designates him a “paradoxicalist.”12 Human beings are not part wretched and part great or sometimes wretched and sometimes great. They are wretched in their greatness and great in their wretchedness. Pascal understands human wretchedness and greatness in much the same way as thinkers before him did. We exist in bodies that are mortal, fragile, and weak. We are a speck of dust in an infinite universe, a reed battered by the storm. We live at a particular place and time and are far more ignorant than knowing. We are subject to such violent passions as fear, anger, and lust. We are happy, anxious, hopeful, and despairing all in one day, depending on changes in external circumstance. And in our fear, anger, lust, and despair, we can sink lower and become more vi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: The Human Condition
• Part Two: The Human Condition
• Part Three: Christian Soteriology
• Bibliography