Jesus Is the Human
Romans 5:12-21
In what is arguably one of the
strongest thoughts in Paul’s thinking—at least in terms of its organizing or
gravitational power relative to other thoughts— Paul sets Jesus Christ in
typological relation to Adam, the first human. “Sin came into the world through
one ἄνθρωπος and thus death to all humans because all sinned” (v. 12). Though
all sinned, Adam was unique in that he was the fountainhead of the human
problem and was thus “a τύπος of the one to come” (vv. 13–14). Paul then
compares Adam and Jesus, the two ἄνθρωποι that reach all humans, in order to
show the dramatically lopsided nature of the sin/grace and death/life relation:
sin and death are defeated by the greater abundance of grace and life. “Thus,
just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all humans, so also one
man’s righteous act led to the acquittal of life for all humans” (v. 18). At
first glance, it may seem that the only comparison here is that of “headship”:
Adam stands at the head of a period of history, as does Jesus, only more so
(into eternity). But the point of the typology actually runs much deeper. What
it is to be ἄνθρωπος, Paul suggests, is signified in Adam. And what it is to
have the ἄνθρωπος remade is signified in Jesus Christ. We all stand in Christ
Jesus. The Human and the Human Remade—or, to put it only slightly differently,
the damaged human made all over again into the human it was intended to be, the
reestablishing of God’s image in the midst of time. Human beings are thus,
according to the thought of Rom 5, Adams remade and given life in Jesus Christ.
To see an Adam is to see one who stands in Jesus Christ. (C. Kavin Rowe, “Christianity’s
Surprise: New Testament Foundations of the Human,” in A Scribe Trained for
the Kingdom of Heaven: Essays on Christology and Ethics in Honor of Richard B.
Hays, ed. David M. Moffitt and Isaac Augustine Morales [Lanham, Md.: Lexington
Books, 2021], 177, emphasis in bold added)
The uptake of this standing in
the life of Adam is the living out of “new creation” (2 Cor 5:17). The defeat
of death part is, as Paul puts it in his argument about the resurrection in 1
Cor 15, this: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made
alive” (v. 22). (Ibid., 191 n. 7)
