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18 comments:
In Totus Christus, we are His body. But liturgically, the bridegroom can only be imaged by men.
There are prophetesses and queens and judgesses in the Bible. There are no priestesses. Yes, we are one family, but within families there are different roles to fulfill. God gave The Law to Adam.
(Hope that's what you were referring to.)
When did Adam receive The Law?
Genesis 2:16-17. The first 'ascension.'
Sure, that's a commandment, but I'm not sure you could call that the Torah (although the account does form part of the Torah).
Moses ascended the mountain of God and received the law but Israel (greater Eve) worshipped a beast. Same deal in the garden.
Same deal in Revelation. Christ ascended and opened the New Covenant Law on the mountain of God. Then Israel worshipped the beast.
All cases ended in a bloody atonement, a separation of the sheep from the goats by a "cup of testing" under the eyes of God.
Greater Eve? When is Israel described as the greater Eve?
If anything, the Old Testament plays on the idea of Israel as a type of Adam (or a second Adam if you will) because they are the true humanity.
Yes but within Israel you had Moses as head and Israel as body. The pattern is repeated again with Elijah and Elisha (see http://www.bullartistry.com.au/posts/index.php?blog=1&title=elisha_s_short_fuse&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1.)
Also, read Ezekiel 16.
However, you are right at a great level in typology. Israel was Adam, and the head has ascended. The Christian church is Greater Eve. Hence also the change from circumcision to baptism.
So where does the New Testament talk about the church as Eve?
The typology runs Adam - Israel - Christ (and because Christ is corporate, that's where the church is. what's true of Jesus is now also true of us).
Matt
Not really able to proof text this one, aside from the obvious references to the church as the bride and the city - Eve was 'built' ; )
I get my books delivered from the printer tomorrow and will send you one. That will make it more than plain.
"...readers are in a position to understand other things Wright argues in Climax of the Covenant. Early on in the book, Wright argues for the centrality of “Adam-Christology” in the Apostle Paul, and for it’s direct relationship to his “Israel-Christology.” While I cannot do adequate justice to his beginning essay “Adam, Israel, and the Messiah” (pp. 18-40; and cannot recommend too highly that people read it for themselves!) it might help to summarize some points made therein about Pauline theology:
1. Adam is the central figure in Paul’s theology who explains why the world is sinful and cursed. To undo Adam’s sin requires a new Adam.
2. Abraham is called to be a new Adam and all Israel is collectively given that vocation–to be God’s new humanity and bring salvation to the world where Adam brought death and destruction
3. Jesus’ identity as new Adam is precisely identical to his identity as the true and faithful Israel.
4. Finally, and this brings us into Wright’s next essay, “Xpistos as ‘Messiah’ in Paul: Philemon 6″ (pp. 41-55), Jesus gets to be the legitimate representative for Israel precisely because he is Christ–Israel’s anointed king.
This last point is defended as a specifically Pauline belief in his essay on Philemon. His argument is quite compelling but I’m more concerned to set out what N. T. Wright believes, rather than why. Wright argues that for Paul (and, no doubt, for Wright as well), Xpistos bears an “incorporative” meaning: “Paul regularly uses the word to connote, and sometimes even denote, the whole people of whom the Messiah is the representative”.
But why should “Messiah” bear such an incorporative sense? Clearly, because it is enemic in the understanding of kingship, in many societies and certainly in ancient Israel, that the king and the people are bound together in such a way that what is true of the one is true in principle of the other.
Wright elaborates:
In Romans 6.11, the result of being baptized “into Christ”… is that one is now “in Christ,” so that what is true of him is true of the one baptized–here, death and resurrection. This occurs within the overall context of the Adam-Christ argument of chapter 5, with its two family solidarities; the Christian has now left the old solidarity (Romans 6.6) and entered the new one. 6.23 may be read by analogy with 6.11; whose who are “in Christ” receive the gift of the life of the new age, which is already Christ’s in virtue of his resurrection–that is, which belongs to Israel’s representative, the Messiah in virtue of his having drawn Israel’s climactic destiny on to himself. Similarly, in Romans 8.1, 2 the point of the expression “in Christ” is that what is true of Christ is true of his people: Christ has come through the judgment of death and out into the new life which death can no longer touch (8.3-4; 8.10-11), and that is now predicated of those who are “in him.” In Galatians 3.26 the ex-pagan Christians are told that they are all sons of God (a regular term for Israel…) in Christ, through faith. It is because of who the Messiah is–the true seed of Abraham, and so on–that Christians are this too, since they are “in” him. Thus in v. 27, explaining this point, Paul speaks of being baptized “into” Christ and so “putting on Christ,” with the result that (3.28) [translating Wright’s reproduction of Paul’s Greek here:] you are all one in Christ Jesus. It is this firm conclusion, with all its overtones of membership in the true people of God, the real people of Abraham, that is then expressed concisely in 3.29 with the genitive [again translating]: and if you are of Christ… When we consider Galatians 3 as a whole, with its essentially historical argument from Abraham through Moses to the fulfillment of God’s promises in the coming of Christ, a strong presupposition is surely created in faovor both of reading Xpistos as “Messaiah,” Israel’s representative, and of understanding the incorporative phrases at the end of the chapter as gaining their meaning from this sens. Because Jesus is the Messiah, he sums up his people in himself, os that what is true of him is true of them (pp. 47-48).
As is evident from this quote, and is elaborated many other places in Wright’s work, Paul argues that all who believe the Gospel are now the true Israel so that Jesus’ role as Israel’s “representative” means that he is the representative not of unbelieving Israel (if they remain in unbelief) but of believers whether Jew or Gentile (so that even “the ex-pagan Christians are told that they are all sons of God”).
From here.
Matt
I'm not disputing any of that. But the Bible's typology works on more than one level, as I demonstrated. We gotta stop reading it like Geeks, er, Greeks.
The pattern of head and body begins in Genesis 1 - light and lights. The same heptamerous structure runs through the fall, the ascension offerings, the feasts, and typologically through the various histories. So the relationship of Adam to Eve as head and body, one flesh, corresponds perfectly with what you posted. But the head is not the body, and the body is not the head.
Wright's comments apply at the top level - whole Bible - certainly. But within that there are smaller patterns of the same thing.
"We gotta stop reading it like Geeks, er, Greeks."
But I like trying to read it like a first century Israeli Christian.
Perhaps dissecting it like an engineer would be a better analogy. Hebrew thought ain't like at. It's relational. Symbols do no describe the things. A thing is given symbols that illustrate its relationships to other things. Hence Israel could be both the mother and the bride, the Adam (in relation to the New Covenant) and the Eve (in relation to the Old Covenant).
Well, good thing I'm a relational loving art student and not an engineer.
But can't just interpret symbols on the basis of the interpretation sounding nice. The Adam/Eve interpretation might sound nice, but I don't see it anywhere in hebrew thought.
Paul can talk about Israel (with the rest of humanity) being stuck in Adam, because that's where they were in the Old Covenant. They had The Law, which promised life, but could only condemn because it couldn't take Israel out of Adam. We who are under the new covenant now have life because we are longer in Adam, but in Christ.
Matt
I don't dispute what you are saying at all. It's just not the whole story.
The Bible's symbols are repeated many times. This pattern is repeated throughout the Bible from Genesis 1.
Greater Eve is the reason Israel could be charged with adultery with the 'beasts' and 'burned with fire' as a priestly daughter. T'ain't warm and fuzzy in any way. It's often brutal.
Time to take the Torah out of the anti-typological clingwrap of modernistic, minimalistic thinking.
Good thing I'm neither a modernist or a minimalist (well, as much I try as much as I can).
Generally, I won't disagree with you, but you'll need to convince me further about the whole idea of 'greater eve'.
Matt
A while ago you asked if it was okay to correlate the 3000 saved on Pentecost with the 3000 slain after the golden calf. The Bible is a 3D movie and we've been watching it with one eye.
Proof will come in my book.
Nice talkin' to ya
Nice talking to you too :) (and I mean that).
Admittedly the 3000 correlation is a little more obvious than the Eve typology. But I'm an evangelical, so if you can show it to me in scripture, than I'll believe it.
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