Karl Barth wrote: “What took place on the cross of Golgotha is the last word of an old history and the first word of a new.”[1] Keeping in theme with this apocalyptic motif, Samuel Adams writes the following, with reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer progresses from the disciple’s conformation to the crucified one to the disciple’s conformation to the risen one:
To be conformed to the risen one—that means to be a new human being before God. We live in the midst of death; we are righteous in the midst of sin; we are new in the midst of the old. Our mystery remains hidden from the world. We live because Christ lives, and in Christ alone. “Christ is my life.” As long as the glory of Christ is hidden, so the glory of the new life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:2).[2]
The Apostle Paul writes: “always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you” (II Cor. 4:10-12). And Martin Luther’s famous adage: simul justus et peccator (‘simultaneously justified and sinner’). These themes are all of apiece, whether we are thinking from Paul, Luther, Barth, Bonhoeffer, or whomever focuses on the New Testament’s teaching in regard to the Christian’s new life in Christ. The old has indeed passed away into the oblivion of Christ’s death for us; and the new has come in the resurrection, ascension, and High Priestly session of Christ’s life for us as the Mediator.
This theme is fundamental to the Christian’s daily life. We already live in an actualized and concrete mode of the Kingdom of Heaven, it’s just that it requires the faith of Christ in order for the Christian to see it. But it is this dialectic of living in-between, as the new has already surpassed and supplanted the old, that the Christian needs to live from. As we live in this apocalyptic dialectic, we will be able to better interpret the trials and tribulations of our daily, and seemingly mundane lives. We will come to see the ‘death of Christ’ as a living fragrance, as the frame of our tribulations, just as the ‘resurrection life of Christ’ is the operative power that gives us this vision in the first place. As we recognize that our daily travail has already first been an instance of God’s love for us in His enfleshed life for us in the eternal Son, it is here where we will gain the proper perspective for living lives in and from the power of the resurrection; and as such, the world will see the works of the Father in us, rather than the works of the flesh that only lead to destruction.
The Christian existence is one that comes to find meaning in the meaning of creation itself, ‘in Christ.’ If we seek for meaning a part from this meaning, then we are of all people to be pitied. We have the hope, the power, and the life of the resurrection as the ground of our lives. And it is because of this that we can experience the ‘death of Christ,’ in the death of our own apparent travail, as that is given vision through the ascended heights of our new life in the resurrection life of the Son of Man for us. This is the wisdom of God: that is, that He comes to where we are, in our squalor that is embedded in these dusty frames, and in this, at that location, He falls as a seed, dies, and then blossoms anew afresh for us, bringing light out of the darkness, through raising these mortal bodies unto the immortal body of His own resurrected life—‘first comes the mortal, first comes the earthy, then comes the immortal, then comes the heavenly.’ It is from this heavenly body, the glorified body of Jesus Christ that in this in-between we live and move and have our being, including tasting the remnants of death that Christ has already put to death in His death for us.
[1] Cited by Samuel Adams.
[2] Samuel V. Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N. T. Wright (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015), loc. 3296, 3302.