Drawn to New Life
Drawn to New Life
The Miracle of Wholeness
“Paul’s thought did not run from plight to solution, but rather from solution to plight.” -D. P. Saunders
Jewish people did not see themselves as in a dire predicament from which they needed rescue. By virtue of their place in the covenant, God’s loving care was the precondition in which they found themselves; their task was to honor the law as a pledge of their desire to maintain their blessedness. Neither did the apostle Paul “perceive himself to have a ‘plight’ from which he needed salvation.” That is a version of Christianity we have rather imposed upon the past, largely a heritage of the fourth century, when it became common to think of the human condition as one in need of rescue. D. P. Sanders challenges conventional readings of Paul by arguing that he “did not start from man’s need, but from God’s deed.” What he meant by this was that for Paul and the first Christians, the fact of the Resurrection—and the miracle of the new life that event portended for all Christians—appeared not as a solution to a problem, but as a miracle drawing us to possibilities never before anticipated.
If that is true, then it follows that a frequent Christian strategy of beginning with the message of human sinfulness in order to present Christ as the solution is a reversal of the early Christian experience of God—which began with the miracle of Christ’s resurrection and the possibility of participation in a new life, now as well as in a world to come. This is closer to what we find in the first apostolic sermons recorded in Luke’s Book of Acts. At the first Christian Pentecostal event, the catalyst calling for a radically new understanding of the human condition is the sudden eruption of a contagious xenoglossia; strangers across language and culture begin speaking without restraint, and being understood as part of a miraculously created community, a new body of believers. These manifestations of God’s spirit pointedly rupture the limits of human language, even as they reveal new powers and agencies in the universe and promise universal access to them. Peter casts these “signs and wonders” as heralds of the most stupendous miracle of all: Christ’s conquest of death. “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we are all witnesses” (2:32). His resurrection betokens his dominion, and the gifts of the spirit, so starkly shown among them, are promised to all who acknowledge his Lordship.
The next public preaching, taking place in the temple, follows a similar pattern. The sign of Christ’s Lordship, his powers over death and dissolution and capacity to bestow new life, are evident in a miraculous healing in the precincts of the Jerusalem temple. Whereas Jesus’s myriad healing acts were in his lifetime personal gestures of ministering to afflicted individuals, Peter now interprets a simple act of physical restoration as emblematic of a more general healing, vivifying power answering to a universal human need. Sanders’s divine “deed” revealing the preexistent “need” is nowhere more explicitly illustrated than in Peter’s use of this occasion to economically convey the gospel declaration: after healing a man lame from birth and being required to defend his act before a council, Peter addresses the crowd, with the newly healed man at his side. Employing this dramatic visual aid he declares, “there is soteria in none else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be sothenai.”
The key terms are generally translated as “salvation” and “saved,” but the Greek word invites a more expansive soteriological meaning. The urgent question for any historian of Christian thought is, how would that first-century crowd have understood Peter’s point—and the term he used? What was the universal solution Christ presented, which pointed men and women to a need they did not until then know they had? Sin is not—in either of these first two apostolic proclamations—the prompt for his sermon, and is in fact conspicuous by its absence from this scene. The whole of the first Christian message is not predicated on human sinfulness in need of a solution, but on Christ’s death and resurrection, and its serving as type—and as actual counterpart—to the possibility of our own death to ways of being in the world and rebirth as new kinds of creatures, more whole, more alive than we knew we could be.
Something had happened in the universe, and nothing could ever again be the same. Christ’s death on the cross was at first an unresolved finale to a life of selfless sacrifice. If he was, as the first Christians referred to him, the “Archetype,” then he was a test case for a new kind of life. Martyrdom had been known before, and dying as a victim rather than as a perpetrator is no doubt its own kind of moral victory. And living again may be an escape of sorts from the bands of death—but it is hardly itself the basis for a new vision of what life itself can be.
This is why it was not the fact of Christ’s resurrection alone, but rather plumbing the mystery of that miracle, that laid the foundations for the Christian revolution. Marilynne Robinson has written that most revelations can only be understood in hindsight, and so it likely was in this case with the first Christians confronting the miracle of the Resurrection. Love was now revealed as more than intimate friendship; love was more than suffering innocence; love went beyond meek acquiescence and non-retribution. Love is the ultimate risk. The only love that can transform individuals and entire communities is the love that asks us to die to the world’s idols as Christ did, trusting in the new life such surrender ushers in.
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