April 2009 - Vol. 29

A Corporate Effect 
The position of the first Adam reveals some important truths about that of the new Adam. The texts comparing the two indicate that the chief reason to see Christ as the new Adam lies in the way Christ passes on the results of his actions and his own life to his spiritual descendants. Just as by eating the forbidden fruit, Adam performed an action that changed the human race, so by giving himself on the cross, Christ performed an action that also changed the race. Just as Adam’s action affected the way all his descendants lived because as their father he passed on his life to them, so Christ’s action affected all his spiritual descendants, because he too passed on his life.

Behind the effect of Adam’s and Christ’s actions is what could be called the family principle, which explains why the action of ancestors can have moral effects on their descendants. The modern mentality makes it more difficult for us to recognize the family principle than it seems to have been for earlier people, including the recipients of Paul’s letters. Our individualistic orientation often leads us to overlook corporate effects, especially corporate moral effects. 

In Adam we see the family principle magnified. As the first father, he simply was the human race at one point. What happened to Adam happened to the whole race. Subsequently, the same was true of Adam and Eve together. As we have seen, none of the various views of “original sin” among orthodox Christians completely eliminates the corporate aspect of the result of the first sin. Since the fall, the human race as a whole has been in a state of “separation” from God (Isaiah 59:2). Corporately, it has failed to comply with the commandments of its sovereign. As a result, it has suffered the bad consequences of its condition, including the loss of that full life that God intended for it. According to the beginning of Genesis, this condition is the result of the family principle and of the actions of the first two parents of the whole human race.

The family principle is similarly magnified in Christ and allows him to merit (deserve, earn, pay for) redemption for us. As the head of the new human race, Christ functions like Adam. He shares his relationship to God, his Father, with his spiritual descendants. He also passes on his life to that new human race and determines much of what the life of its members is like. 

Christ is, however, the new Adam. “New” indicates that there are some important respects in which Christ’s effect on Christians is unlike Adam’s effect on the human race as a whole. It is not only unlike Adam’s in the fact that the effects of his actions reverse that of Adam’s. It is also unlike Adam’s in the fact that the operation of the family principle or principle of corporate solidarity is itself strengthened in Christ, not lessened. 

This increase in the effect due to the family principle is indicated by the section of First Corinthians 15 that talks about Christ as the new Adam. Paul is explaining how a corruptible human nature can be raised from the dead after decaying in the tomb:

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 which is first but the physical, 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 are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so 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. I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable (1 Cointhians 15:45–50).  
      
In this passage, Paul tells us that the new Adam is a heavenly man, not just an earthly man. He is, in other words, a human being, but a special one. He also tells us that this heavenly human being is not just a living being like other human beings, but a life–giving spirit. In both ways Paul is possibly referring to what we would describe as Christ’s incarnate nature. More probably he is talking about the transfigured, glorified humanity that resulted from the resurrection. Either way, the human Jesus of Nazareth has a heavenly aspect, a “spiritualized” humanity. That humanity is the source of a new human life, one that changes us so that we look more like God and can live eternally.

The heavenly human being, who is Christ, imparts the new life to us directly. We receive spiritual life from the “life-giving spirit”. We are given the heavenly image from the “man of heaven”. We are not, in other words, connected to Christ the way we are connected to Adam. We are only connected to Adam through generations of intermediaries. We are connected to Christ directly. We become Christians through a personal union with him. We can even be said to be one spirit with Christ and corporately one flesh with him (1 Corinthians 6:16–17). We are his body, members of him (1 Corinthians 12:27). 

To describe Christ as the new Adam indicates the importance of what Christ is doing. He is not just improving the human race. He is not just creating a grouping of human beings that will do better than others. He is creating the grouping that can fulfill the purpose for which God created the human race in the first place, because they know his will and have been delivered from the bondage of sin. They are the new human race not in the sense that there are no other human beings, but in the sense that they are part of the human race as it is becoming what God made it to be.

[This article is excerpted from the book Redeemer: Understanding the Meaning of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, copyright © 1992 by Stephen B. Clark, published by Servant Books.]