“Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel makes him just a gardener.”

George Herbert

Already-Not Yet?

We’ve let the explosive heart of the good news of our union with Christ radiate out in many different directions over the last couple months looking at faith, scripture, ethics, personality, and Israel.

There is one last line of questioning that I want us to tackle: If we are so deeply united with Christ in this way, why do we still sin? Why do we still suffer? Why do we still die?

One of the most popular answers given to this question is something New Testament scholars and theologians have called the “Already-Not Yet.”

This is based on a reading of the Old Testament and on a popular view among many Jews in the first century. The view has been called the “two ages” view: 1) there is the present evil age and 2) the age to come. We live now in an age of evil marked by sin, suffering, and death, but what God has promised through the prophets is a new age marked by shalom.

So how did first century Jews who started following Jesus, like Paul, think about these two ages? Many New Testament scholars have said something like this: in Jesus’ death and resurrection the “age to come” has already been inaugurated right here in the midst of the present evil age. The old age is creation “in Adam” while the new age is new creation “in Christ.” So, right now believers occupy the tension between the two ages. They live simultaneously in two ages. Hence, the overlap; or the “Already-Not Yet” as seen below:

In Christ, the age to come has arrived ahead of time in the middle of time and to be in him is to already participate in the new age, while still being here in the present evil age. I think there’s a lot to be said for this—not least that it is so pastorally helpful for understanding our current predicament.

Either/Or vs. Both/And

Now to complicate the picture. New Testament Scholar Ann Jervis has recently argued against the “Already-Not Yet” schema in her book Paul and Time. Jervis contends that Paul does not see believers as living in an overlap of the ages. Rather, for Paul the present evil age and being in Christ are mutually exclusive categories. It is an either/or not a both/and. 

I think her argument is—at the very least—worth attending to in part because the “Already-Not Yet” schema can suggest that believers are only partially united to Christ due to the unresolved tension of the “Not Yet.” Put another way, the victory Christ has won is not partial but whole.

If we take a text like Romans 5:12–21 we can see her point pretty easily. There is no hint of being both “in Adam” and “in Christ.” It’s—as Kierkegaard would have it—a stark either/or.

“Dying Is Not Fatal”

Adam and Christ are mutually exclusive categories. But how does one move from being “in Adam” to being “in Christ”? Through dying—by being baptized into Christ’s death.

Death no longer rules over those “in Christ” because Christ has trampled down death by death. Christ submits himself to the death of Adam in order to open up new creation for all those that are in union with him. Believers, then, move from being in one category (Adam) to another (Christ). But there is no overlap; the truth of our reality is not split or in tension. We do not occupy both Adam and Christ simultaneously. To be “in Christ” means that we’ve been set free from being “in Adam.”

To be freed from the power of death, though, cannot mean that believers do not physically die. Physical death remains a reality for both those “in Adam” and those “in Christ.” But because those “in Christ” have already been set free from the power of death through our baptism “death is no longer fatal.” Or as Chris Green has so memorably put it: “God saves us from death but not from dying.”

In Christ, life has swallowed up death. Christ’s life envelops, encloses, and surrounds Adam’s life. The way out of Adam and into Christ is precisely by dying (i.e. baptism).

Thus, in Christ, dying has a completely different meaning from what it previously had in the evil age. In the present evil age, our dying is caused by the powers of Sin and Death and leads to decay and destruction. But now, in Christ, dying is a transformative event. 

As Maximus the Confessor has it: Christ has transformed the use of death. It no longer leads to decay but to life. This is why—for the believer—dying just isn’t a problem for Paul’s way of thinking. A believer’s physical death is now a transformation from mortality to immortality which, Jervis explains, is not a change in their reality, but rather a publishing of what was already their reality in Christ.

Put another way, when our bodies will be raised it is not because we will be moving from being partially “in Adam” to being more fully “in Christ,” but that the resurrection of our bodies will be the revelation of the already accomplished truth of who we have been made to be.

Suffering “In Christ”

Paul understands union with Christ to involve suffering. Given what he learns on the Road to Damascus how could he think otherwise?

Paul talks about believers sharing in Christ’s ongoing suffering (Rom. 8:17). Believers do continue to suffer with Christ, but suffering is now the proof that we are in full union with him. Christ continues to suffer with us and in us!

St. Maximus the Confessor puts it in an astonishing way:

[God is] always suffering…in proportion to each person’s suffering.

Or Origen of Alexandria has it like this:

Christ confesses that whenever one of the saints is in weakness he is likewise in weakness, and that he is likewise in prison, and is imprisoned, and is naked, a stranger, and that he hungers and thirsts (Mt. 25:35–36). For who, of those acquainted with the Gospel, does not know that Christ, by taking on himself whatever should befall believers, reckons these to be his own sufferings?

Suffering no longer leads to death and decay as it did “in Adam,” because God in Christ has suffered and is suffering for you and with you, he has transformed the use of suffering to be a means of conformity to himself.

Sinning “In Christ”?

Paul writes in Romans 6:1–2, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin;how can we live in it any longer?”

Paul does see Sin as a power that rules humanity “in Adam” (Rom. 5:21). But to be united with Christ is to be freed from the power of Sin. This doesn’t remove our capacity to sin, but it also does not mean that we are still under Sin’s pernicious rule.

To sin as someone who is “in Christ” is to refuse to act out of the freedom that you’ve been given. What it does not mean is that believers are partially “in Adam” and partially “in Christ,” partially ruled by Sin and partially ruled by Grace. Instead, as Karl Barth memorably put it, sin is the “impossible possibility” for believers. Sin is absurdity.

Jesus > Adam

Paul’s logic in both Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 is that all are in Adam. We have no problem talking about the universality of humanity being “in Adam.” Why, then, do we so quickly back-off his claim that all are also in Christ?

Clearly Paul sees that what God has done in Christ is so far superior to what he has done in Adam, that they can hardly be compared with one another (Rom. 5:12—21). Every human God has created is now “in Adam,” but “in Christ” he has reconciled all things to himself (2 Cor. 5:18—19).

Both creation and redemption are works of God. But as Paul so clearly says, the second work is vastly superior to the first (“How much more…!”).

This should give us great hope. Even, and especially, for those people who seem completely lost to us; those who have died and appear to us to have never seen the truth.

In the end, God is God and we cannot counsel him in any of his ways. But we are called by every page of Scripture to trust in this God’s unfathomable goodness.

As Ray Anderson once put it, we cannot put anyone into heaven, that is not our job. But it is our job to proclaim that Christ has gone down into the grave. And we can rest assured that anyone who is in the grave is not there alone.

This is our great hope: in Christ God has died in order to be dead with the dead.

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