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The view that the death and resurrection of Christ purchased back for us the innocence (and innocent world) of Genesis 1 seems extremely childish to me now. How did we miss the fact that the Old Testament is filled to overflow with deaths and resurrections, personal, familial, national and imperial? There was no death before sin, but the scenario deliberately set up by God in Genesis was to bring Adam to a point of making a wise judgment. He was to crush the head of the serpent. In a sense, he was to kill death. His obedience would guarantee future life, but his obedience itself was a form of death. Obeying God is a daily dying, but as Paul understood, it was a dying so that there might be rejoicing on the other side. Obedience is a death that makes a judgment call to purchase, nay, miraculously create, new life. The original creation was set up, wound up, to go somewhere better, to be something greater.

Peter Leithart gave some lectures on the writings of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in 2008:

In Rosenstock-Huessy’s view, the once-for-all event of all once-for-all events is the death and resurrection of Jesus.

“The crucifixion and the last judgment would not be known today as everyday occurrences in our lives if they had not occurred one-for-all with terrific majesty.” The whole experience of death and resurrection is something that Jesus plants into human history, and then reproduces in countless ways.

“In the crucifixion, with the accompanying darkness, the rending of the curtain in the temple, etc, that which is to happen finally has happened once already. For the faithful, the second coming of Christ as judge really began with His first coming. The crucifixion judges us all because we know that we would have behaved like Pilate or Gamaliel or Peter or Judas or the soldiers. The last judgment will make known publicly what those who have died with their first Brother already experience daily: that our Maker remains our Judge.”

Because of what Jesus’ death and resurrection bring into human history, this is the beginning of what Rosenstock-Huessy calls “the Christian era.” It is a new epoch of human history. It is an irreversible epoch of human history. Once the Christian era begins, you can try to leave it, but you are still borrowing what it provided for you. You still remain, he says, “a man of Jesus.” You can either resent the fact that Jesus is your Master, as Nietzsche did, or you can submit to it and be content with being “Jesus’ man.” Those are the only two options in the Christian era.

But it is the once-for-all event of the cross which has made possible the experience of repeated deaths-and-resurrections in life. Rosenstock-Huessy is not just talking about the resurrection of our bodies from the dead. He does believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus and of humanity at the last day. But he says that the death and resurrection of Jesus, planted into humanity, makes death and resurrection a daily occurrence for men, and a civilisational occurrence in the history of the world.

How is death and resurrection a daily occurrence? One premise that is found all the way through Rosenstock-Huessy’s work is that life means vulnerability, life means suffering. To live means to experience shock, to experience failure. Human beings are always being torn in pieces. We are always being torn apart. We always have conflicting demands placed on us. People place conflicting demands on us. Our own conscience places conflicting demands on us. And many of these conflicting demands are equally valid and yet we have to make a choice. So we are constantly faced with these kinds of existential crises.

What Jesus provides in His death and resurrection is not just the idea that these experiences lead to life, but the reality that these experiences of being torn, of suffering, and dying and putting away the old are gateways to new life. The cross becomes the gateway to renewal. That is the reality that Jesus planted in human history.

In 1946, in “The Christian Future,” Rosenstock-Huessy describes a time in his own life some twenty years earlier when he felt like he was experiencing the cross. He writes, “I felt that I was undergoing a real crucifixion. I was deprived of all my powers, virtually paralysed, yet I came back to life again a changed man. What saved me was that I could look back to the supreme events of Jesus’ life and recognise my own small eclipse in His great suffering. That enabled me to wait in complete faith for resurrection to follow crucifixion in my experience. Ever since then it seemed foolish to doubt the historical reality of the original crucifixion and resurrection.” That is an interesting existential argument for the resurrection: “I am convinced of the truth of Jesus’ death and resurrection because I know what it’s like to die and rise again.”

This is the possibility opened for us by Jesus’ death and resurrection. Death ceases to be something to be avoided, something to be bypassed, something to be ignored. Instead, death becomes something to be anticipated and accepted as something that has a positive value for life. The death that he is talking about is a death to anything that has gripped us, any form of life that we have been living (such as an earlier occupation, or an earlier stage of life such as singleness, divorce, or death of a spouse). All these can be embraced as pathways to new life instead of as things that bring an end to your life.

One of the ways in which Rosentock-Huessy expresses this is in Christianity’s capacity to slough off old gods through Jesus’ revelation of the living God in His death and resurrection. The living God is not the God who is timeless but the God who endures through death — through every death, every epoch of history — into new life.

By “gods,” he means any power that dominates us, any power that poses to us a question of life and death. But Jesus shows us that we can die to these gods and still have new life. He says, “By learning to anticipate the inevitable end which the pagan fights off, man has robbed death of its paralysing gloom. Anticipating the worst, he can bury his dead in time. A pagan was ready enough to die physically for his family, temple, guild, nation or race, but these he held to be immortal and therefore without flaw. He could not admit the necessity of letting them die when the time had come, hence all went down together.” What Christianity reveals is the possibility of giving up even these deepest loyalties, these temporary “gods,” and still hoping for something new.

You might devote yourself for a considerable period of your life to the pursuit of money. It dominates you. You do what your pursuit demands you to do. What happens when there is a financial crisis? Can you find a new life on the other side of that. Rosenstock-Huessy says, Christianity says, “Yes, you can! There is life on the other side, beyond the death of the old god, the life of the living God who endures all crises, all death-and-resurrection experiences.”

Anticipating death is one of the particular virtues of Christian civiliation. The civilisation is not set up to keep death at bay, but rather its pattern of life is set up to anticipate death and to embrace deaths of various sorts in recognition that those deaths are going to lead to resurrections.

“Christianity is not a decadent worship of death for its own sake, (as someone like Nietzsche would say) but the discovery that including death in life is the secret of the fullness of life.” Monks and hermits, for example, die before their deaths. They die to their families, they die to any pursuits they might have had outside of the monastery, but their existence proves that death is an essential element of living. In fact, death is its sharpest ingredient. Any father, manager or teacher has to practice resignation and let the young learn by doing things he could do better himself. That’s a kind of death, for he knows that one day he must die and they must take his place. That is anticipating death. Christianity gives us the assurance that this is possible. If people don’t anticipate death, then the various tearings in life make us vulnerable to all kinds of evils. [1]

Some more thoughts:

This is the essence of Covenant succession, and this generational succession was built into the Creation. The genealogies matter. Adam, as father, manager and teacher, was to anticipate death, not ignore it or avoid it. He was to pass sentence, avenge his “church” and execute judgment upon sin for the sake of his future offspring — embodied in the Mother of all Living.

The sentence was death. Adam was to administer the curse delegated to him by God upon the serpent. Adam himself was to bring both death and life into the world through this wise judgment. But Adam failed. The Bible gives us a Messianic line from Adam to Jesus. The same test is played out over and over, in persons, families, nations and empires — and even Covenants. All bodies, all Tabernacles, wax old and pass away, and so do the old gods, the old satans.

But the living God is always doing something new. He implants Himself into the history. Israel sins and God gets torn up over it. Yahweh makes Himself vulnerable, a Tabernacle, a house designed to die. Yahweh tears Israel up and then brings her out of the grave, but, unlike Adam, He understands that this can only be accomplished if He goes through it with her.

As a new Adam, Jesus brought death and life into the world — death for the serpent, and life for us. But we are not sky-watching, heaven-pining pietistic gnostics. The ascended Jesus is still, by His Spirit, Emmanuel: God here with us.

This new commission is also a succession, a new history, a new conquest. Jesus has a lot to teach us along the way as He makes us as wise concerning good and evil as He is. And He is building an entire worldful of such people, a civilisation of self-sacrifice, passing sentence upon death, with death, until death is destroyed. As Christians become more and more “epistemologically self-aware,” obedience-as-Covenant-tool becomes the foundation of civilisation, the process of resurrecting the nations, until the Church itself is the Mother of All the Living. This is the postmillennial hope. [2]

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[1] Biblical Horizons conference lectures are available from www.wordmp3.com
[2] On the Roman church’s failure to understand this process, see Prisoners of the Future.

or Commanded, Not Controlled

“Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned thirty-one years in Jerusalem… And he did what was right in the sight of the LORD, and walked in all the ways of his father David; he did not turn aside to the right hand or to the left.” 2 King 22: 1-2

As a very young Christian, I remember being disappointed that the Spirit of God didn’t immediately make obedience to God’s Law easier, well actually, totally easy. Getting into Jordan et al opens up to you the biblical theme of maturity, of God’s desire for us to become wise judges, turning neither to the right nor the left. This takes practice (Hebrews 5:14).

The apostles’ use of the words “obedience” and “disobedience” when it comes the gospel is mysterious to many evangelicals. Is this not works?

“Therefore, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision…” Acts 26:19

“Then the word of God spread, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests were obedient to the faith…” Acts 6:7

“But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed our report?’” Romans 10:16

We use passive words like “receive” and “accept.” I have heard God’s work in us described as a hand in a glove. That’s exactly what I was looking for — an overridden will. But that short circuits God’s work of maturity. Yes, He works in us, but as A. W. Tozer observed somewhere, He never works in us against our wills.

The only instant change of this nature is at death, and as Jim Carey’s Riddler wisely observed, when given the opportunity to kill an unconscious Bruce Wayne: “Don’t kill him. If you kill him, he won’t learn nothin’.”

The New Testament uses the words obey, obedient and obedience a lot. The New Testament history is a replay of Genesis 6 and its consequences. Jesus and Paul align the Jewish leaders with the sons of God and the Gentile believers with Noah’s animals who willingly submit.

At the bottom of this confusion concerning grace and obedience is ignorance of the structure of Biblical Covenants. This has transformed much of evangelicalism into something new entirely, and tainted the church’s witness and credibility. Phillip Carey, in his new book Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do, calls this distorted thinking “the new evangelical theology.”

The Obedience of Faithful Servants

It’s a good thing to be given good work to do, and the new evangelical theology tries to deprive us of that. It tries — and fails, because it is fighting against God. But what it’s trying to do nonetheless does real harm. It causes us to forget the dignity we have as creatures made in God’s image, and the authority he has given us over the world he has created (Gen. 1:26). Our authority is meant for the good of other creatures, and we will be held responsible for how we use it. Yet it is a good gift, leading not just to our honor, but to the honor and glory of God. And it is a gift which the new evangelical theology would refuse. This rejection is disobedience and it is bad for us.

The problem, it seems, is that we hardly understand obedience anymore. We talk as if it means letting someone else do things (“let go and let God”), or we replace it with unbiblical words like “yielding,” where the idea is you yield up” your heart and will to God. The word “yield” came into the new evangelical theology from the King James Version of the Bible, where one way of describing obedience was to “yield your members” — which means the members of your body — to God, as in Romans 6:13. In more recent translation the passage is rendered, somewhat more accurately, as “present your members” — it’s actually the same word used a little later when Paul tells us to “present your bodies a living sacrifice,” in Romans 12:1.

This unbiblical talk of yielding your heart or will makes no sense of the fact that we irrevocably have hearts and wills of our own: we can’t simply bypass or get rid of them. Obedience does not mean surrendering or yielding up these parts of ourselves, which lie at the core of who we are, but rather using them. We are to use them to do what our Lord commands, like a servant eager to use his mind to learn how to invest his talents well.

Obedience does not mean letting the master do your work for you — it means doing the work he’s given you. It does not mean yielding up your will, but willingly doing what he’s commanded, like a faithful servant or a loving son. Obedience is for responsible adults, such as the son who goes to work in his father’s vineyard (Matt. 21:29) or the servants in the parable of the talents. These servants are slaves, owned by the lord (the original Greek of the parable makes this unmistakably clear) and yet they have dignity and authority, being given control over their master’s property. For a slave to be a slave in the ancient world did not mean you had to be miserable and unimportant, as if you weren’t human. The slaves in the parable of the talents are powerful people, and their obedience is the loyalty of people in a position of high authority, ruling over other servants in the household.

This is the very heart of dominion by Covenant. Obedience is not a drag. It is a privilege, an opportunity to reflect the glory of the obedient Son in Whom the Father delights. And it is a challenge, the flaming sword handed to us as a tool that will continue to fill the world that was spiritually “without form and empty” until the incarnation.

The good news is that those in whom the Spirit of God dwells will persevere. I’ve seen many godly people fall away over the years. I don’t know what went on inside them. What I do know is what goes on inside me. My understanding of the grace of God, and my own “scumhood,” grows daily. Often it all seems too hard to keep fighting, but there is something in me that won’t let me quit. I am constrained, held in orbit, by the love of Christ.

God will complete the work begun in you. It is all of grace because — and I personally testify to this — He gives us a miraculous desire to please Him. It is personal. The obedience-to-death of His Son for us constantly disarms us, and the church multiplies that obedience, responding as a bride to a bridegroom. A response is not passive but active.