…and…

“Adam was the first liberal theologian. If Adam had been instead a conservative theologian, he would have faithfully refused to eat from the Tree of Judicial Knowledge, but not figured out what to do with the serpent. ‘What do you mean I was supposed to crush the serpent’s head? You didn’t state that explicitly in the text!’ It required some intuition, some anticipation of the Father’s intentions for him based upon His earlier promises.”

Amen. This has opened my eyes more and more. Seeing, for example, Jesus as the Last Adam, shows what Adam should’ve been. It shows that God gave Adam some things to do and a goal to reach. It shows that Paradise (the Garden of Eden) was not the goal but merely the starting point. It shows that Adam, being a mortal man, was supposed to read between the lines, take the resources of Eden outward to the rest of the planet and make order out of the chaos just like God had done in Creation. It shows that Adam was supposed to attain to immortality (where Jesus the Man ended up). But Adam failed right out of the starting block. This, if you will, put another obstacle (besides just obedience) in the way of Adam (mankind) attatining to the state of rest where Jesus the Man ended up. The goal was made unreachable through mankind at that point. But then along comes the Last Adam.

The Last Adam shows what the First Adam should’ve been. To see this requires MUCH reading between the lines. It requires looking at the OT and seeing all the stories moving (or rather, recapitulating) toward a greater and greater expression of what God intended the First Adam be. But all those recapitulations ended in failure… until Jesus.

And now that the Last Adam has been successful in showing us how the First Adam should’ve acted, we can now become partakers and participators in making order out of the chaos of earth. Once again, we’ve been given an Eden from which we can say, “as in heaven, so on earth” and marry the two again, bringing God’s full expression into view and ultimately ending up with an actual new heaven and earth filled with “Last Adams.”

Again, I can’t express enough thanks for opening this analytical, “boring as hell” conservative engineer’s head to the asthetic beauty of reading between the lines of scripture and seeing the Father’s intention in Jesus Christ and thus, humankind.