What does being ‘In Christ’ mean?

“How Jesus saves us” (the doctrine of the atonement, in theology-speak) never made sense to me. As a young Christian, no one I asked seemed to understand it either. But good evangelicals never acknowledged such questions: you were just expected to ‘have faith’ and not question things. To ‘not let your head get in the way of your heart,’ and other such drivel (drivel in the light of Matt 22:37: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”). Instinctively, I felt that studying theology academically (rather than relying on the popular-level but often intellectually-incoherent folk theology I was accustomed to hearing) was the route to answering this and many other questions. I reckoned that questions did not faze God—I suspected he rather liked them—and that good answers were out there to most of them; I just had to find them.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I was able to do just that. Concerning that first question of how Jesus saves us, it became the subject of my Masters’ dissertation (a version of which was published in Evangelical Quarterly, a theology journal) and later my PhD thesis (published by Wipf & Stock as Atonement and the New Perspective).    

Just recently, I was asked to do a short series of talks at the lovely Riverside Church Whitstable, addressing that same question: “Jesus Saves, But How?”—there are links to the talks at the end of this article. In brief (the two points I’m about to make could fill half a theology library with books about them), the New Testament answers that question in a multiplicity of ways: “It’s like this, and it’s like that.” We are allowed to draw from these and more in sharing the good news of Jesus with others. We are allowed to understand it in different ways for ourselves: whatever makes most sense and enables us to ‘get it’—drawing people into a relationship with God through Jesus. That’s point one. Point two, however, is a counterpoint. For Calvinists and other conservative evangelicals influenced by Calvinism (most are, even if they don’t know it), there is a ‘but’ (as there often is). And that ‘but’ pertains to one of those ways, the one we call ‘penal substitution’—that, at the cross, Jesus the Son was taking the punishment due to us from God the Father, in our place, to enable God to forgive us for our sins. For those conservatives, penal substitution ‘must be’ the non-negotiable best/right/central way to understand the cross (largely because it was the Reformers’ preferred understanding). “Yes,” they would say, “it’s true that the Bible speaks about the atonement using other pictures as well, but penal substitution must always be head-and-shoulders #1.” To question its status as #1 is to question the very foundation of Christianity—or at least, of evangelicalism, which, for conservative evangelicals, often seems to be tantamount to the same thing, in practice even if not on paper.

To know more about all that, I recommend my deliberately short (and cheap) little book, Telling The Old, Old Story (https://tinyurl.com/4eup86r3).

One of the ways in which the question has been answered is by what’s known as ‘interchange,’ or ‘recapitulation.’ With names like that, no wonder it doesn’t get much airtime. I suspect that almost everyone reading this has never heard of it. That’s mainly because it’s one of the hardest ways of explaining the atonement; it begins with the idea of Adam and Jesus being ‘representatives’ of humanity as a whole (affecting us all for ‘bad’ in the first instance and for ‘good’ in the second)—a way of thinking that’s alien to our modern individualistic mindset.

‘Recapitulation’ means saying something again in a ‘summing up’ sense—like when we talk about ‘recapping’ a conversation. It also has a musical meaning—re-playing a section of a piece of music, typically as its pinnacle—and a biological meaning, of an embryo going through the same development stages as its antecedents before it. This is the first aspect—technically known as ‘Adam Christology’—in which Jesus reprises Adam.  

‘Interchange’ does not so much mean an exchange as a merging, such as when two people meet up to share and meld ideas together. So rather than Jesus’ work being a ‘substitution,’ as it’s often referred to when we talk about atonement, interchange explains it in terms of a ‘participation.’ By entering our humanity as one of us and fully participating in our human experience, Jesus transformed what it means to be human ‘from within’ for everyone who—in Paul’s language—is ‘in Christ’ (or ‘in Him’), rather than being only ‘in Adam’ (as all humanity is). A scriptural basis for this is reflected in “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” 2 Corinthians 5.21.

This way of thinking about Jesus’ atoning work emphasizes in the first instance the significance of the incarnation (God becoming man). That is not to diminish the cross; rather, it reminds us of the significance of the entirety of Jesus’ mission and achievement, none of which should be left out or deemphasized—his incarnation, life, ministry, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension.

The atonement was first framed in this way by Irenaeus in the second century. He saw Jesus as ‘recapitulating’ human life in himself, as the ‘new Adam’ or ‘second Adam’ that Paul speaks of in Romans 5.12-19 and 1 Corinthians 15.21-23; 45-49.

What humanity lost through Adam’s disobedience was won back through Jesus’ obedience, ‘undoing’ or ‘reversing’ what went wrong in human life. The divine plan to rescue humanity from within humanity was a ‘recapitulation’—a repeating or replaying of the original creation, but with a different outcome.

In the fourth century, Athanasius put it like this: Jesus became as we are, so that we might become as he is. He pictured it as a restorative work on the damaged and tarnished Imago Dei (the Image of God in humanity)—like an expert restorer repristinating a portrait on an oil painting, restoring it to its original condition.

Also in the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus said: “What has not been assumed has not been healed; it is [only] what is united to his divinity that is saved.” In other words, Gregory was stressing the necessity, for our salvation, of Jesus the Son of God becoming fully human as we are, fully participating in our humanity (uniting divinity to humanity in himself). Hebrews 2:14–18 reflects this necessity: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death … For this reason, he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that … he might make atonement for the sins of the people.”

How might we draw from this in ways that can make sense for an audience today? It’s not easy, but let’s try.

Jesus became the first of a new kind of people of God, according to a new pattern, a new way of being human. The Apostle Paul pictures this by contrasting ‘what Adam did’ with ‘what Jesus did.’ Romans 5 says that ‘sin and death’ came into the world through ‘Adam.’ When he exercised his freewill, he changed the course of human history. But the defeat of sin and death came into the world through Jesus when he exercised his freewill and changed the course of human history.

In computer language, Jesus ‘re-booted’ human life, pressing Control-Alt-Delete to restart it with a new version of the human operating system in himself, according to a new pattern of what it means to be human, with a new and different outcome for human life. This then becomes available to all those who are ‘in Him.’ Just as the consequences of being ‘in Adam’ affect us.

We should remember that ‘Adam’ is not just a reference to an individual named Adam in the creation story (or in Paul’s writings), it’s also (depending on the context) a generic reference to the human race. When we read about ‘Adam and Eve’ we need to know that there’s some wordplay going on here that would have been ‘obvious’ to the original audience. The Hebrew word ‘āḏām is the word for ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ and Eve (ḥaûâ) means ‘life-giver’ or ‘mother of all the living.’ Hence in its early chapters, the story is not just talking about one man and woman; it’s talking about all of us. It’s not just picturing what they were like and what they did and why—it’s picturing what we’re like and what we do and why. We can see ourselves mirrored in Adam and Eve (for example, in making bad choices with life consequences), just as we can see ourselves in many other biblical characters from Genesis onwards. ‘What Adam did’ becomes relevant to us insofar as we share in a group with ‘Adam’—the human race. We are ‘in Adam.’   

The challenge in this ‘in Adam’ and ‘in Christ’ picturing is that it requires us to be conscious of the impact of sharing in a ‘group’ identity (as part of one collective human race) over and above our ‘individual’ identity. The ancient world of the Bible was group-centered, so it would have come easily; the modern/postmodern world is the opposite. It also requires us to see how Jesus as our ‘champion’ won a victory on our behalf, of which we (as part of the group) participate vicariously if we are ‘in Him’—in the same way that David won a victory over Goliath in which all Israel vicariously participated.     

To read more on this, see Morna D. Hooker, From Adam to Christ: Essays on Paul (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2008)—warning, it is a theology book!

The first of those Riverside talks is here (I will add links as they are delivered—the remaining talks in the series will be on Sunday April 6 and Sunday April 13): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYVlaK4tuCo