A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [74]
We’ve watched Paul’s rhetorical instincts (guided by the Holy Spirit) take him back in history before the Law to Abraham, and now Paul goes back even farther in the most brilliant move possible: he goes back to Adam. Our diverse religious systems, he implies, have many points of departure that separate us, but if we follow any path back to its source, to the genesis of our common humanity, we come to the creation story of Adam, where we are united. After unifying us in the story of our common ancestor Adam, Paul presents Jesus as a new Adam, a second Adam, the last Adam. His analogy appears a bit stretched in places as we watch him develop it “on his feet,” so to speak, but the point is clear. Adam brought death and condemnation to all humanity; Jesus now brings life and justification to all humanity. So we’re all part of the story of the original Adam, and now, of the new Adam, Jesus. That story is dramatized by baptism, in which we die with Christ (as we are buried under water) and are raised with Christ (as we emerge from water). Baptism as death and resurrection provides Paul’s second illustration of the common life we share.
Interestingly, Paul uses language in this illustration that evokes the narratives of both liberation and the peaceable kingdom, suggesting that the members of our bodies—our arms, hands, legs, and so on—can be slaves to sin (evoking slavery under Pharaoh) and rebels against God’s reign (evoking the dream of God’s benevolent society). Or they can be liberated from slavery to sin and surrendered to God, so they become instruments of God’s reign. In baptism, Paul says, we die to the old life of slavery to sin and rebellion against God, and we rise to live free as agents of God’s reign, as agents of God’s restorative justice.
Paul’s third and fourth illustrations make the same point, employing slavery and marriage metaphors. We all—again, Jew and Gentile are implied even when not explicitly stated—have been enslaved by a cruel taskmaster, married to a stern (and impotent) husband. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, we die to those old relationships, and we rise to a new kind of slavery and a new love affair. Like redeemed slaves, we are bound to our new master in service and fruitfulness; like a former widow newly wed, we are impregnated with our divine lover’s goodness, bearing more and more good into the world.
Fourth Move: Unite all in a common struggle and a common victory, illustrated by two stories: the Story of Me and the Story of We (Rom. 7:7–8:39). Paul now tries to anticipate and counter possible misunderstandings or misapplications of his previous point.2 As he backs off from any suggestion that the Law (the impotent first husband in our previous metaphor of marriage) is evil, he launches his next move. He begins by abruptly switching from the plural “we” of the previous section into the singular “I” and “me,” leaving interpreters ever since scratching their heads about how to read this section.3 Interestingly, he will return to “we” in the following section. In our “Jews and Gentiles united in God’s kingdom” reading, Paul’s strategy seems abundantly clear. Through the “Story of Me” he shows how Jew and Gentile share a common experience of struggle as human beings (“in Adam,” as he has explained it previously, 7:7–25), and through the “Story of We” he shows how Jew and Gentile can share a common experience of victory in the kingdom of God (“in Christ,” as he celebrates in 7:25–8:39).4
In the Story of Me, Paul moves from the previous section’s external imagery of Adam, baptism, slavery, and marriage to the internal landscape of the human soul. This landscape