The point of departure in this chapter is with the term “new creation,” which occurs twice in Paul’s letters (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15), where both instances seem clearly intended to echo the beginning of the Genesis narrative (chaps. 1–3). That is followed by a closer look at the three explicit mentions of Adam in Paul’s letters, including an examination of the crucial word eikōn, or “image,” with reference to Christ, which is likely a reference to Adam as the term is borrowed from the Genesis narrative as it would have appeared in Paul’s Greek Bible, the Septuagint.
The New Creation
On three occasions, in letters spanning nearly a decade and in situations aimed toward behavioral change, Paul bases his argument on the fact that with the coming of Christ Jesus, especially as the result of his death and resurrection, God had inaugurated the “new creation” promised toward the end of Isaiah (65:17–25). This usage is in keeping with the “already, but not yet” eschatological framework that characterizes Paul’s theology as a whole, which he held in common with the rest of the early church. These early believers had come to understand that Christ, through his death and resurrection, had inaugurated the beginning of the end (the “already”), while they still awaited its consummation (the “not yet”). Two passages in Paul’s letters make this point explicitly, while a third provides more detail without using the actual language itself. Here we consider each passage in turn, beginning with the earliest.
2 CORINTHIANS 5:14–17
For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
In our first passage, Paul deliberately confronts those in Corinth who have been calling into question both the Apostle’s gospel of a crucified Messiah and his own cruciform apostleship. The new creation brought about by Christ’s death and resurrection, Paul argues, nullifies the point of view of the old age. The phrase Paul uses here could be translated literally as “according to the flesh,” which most likely began as a play on words regarding the circumcision of the male child’s sexual organ, but since such a wordplay is no longer readily accessible to readers, especially in English, the NIV translators have rightly rendered it “from a worldly point of view” (2 Cor. 5:16).
From the Apostle’s perspective, Christ’s death means that the whole human race has come under the sentence of death so that those who have been raised to life (in God’s new order) now live for the one “who died for them and was raised again” (2 Cor. 5:15). The result, Paul explains, is that from henceforth to view either Christ or anyone (or anything) from a perspective that is “according to the flesh” is no longer valid. Why? Because being in Christ means that one has become a part of “the new creation,” since in Christ “the old has gone, the new is here” (v. 17). This radical new point of view—life marked by the cross and awaiting the resurrection—lies at the heart of, and serves as the basis for, almost everything Paul thinks and does.
May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord, Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation. Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule—to the Israel of God.
In his letter to the believers in Galatia, the most singularly passionate letter in the preserved Pauline collection, the Apostle concludes by asserting that the old order that distinguished people on the basis of the rite of circumcision has yielded to the new order. Earlier in this letter (Gal. 3:26–29), Paul stated plainly that participation in Christ’s death and resurrection by faith and through baptism had radicalized everything. In the new order neither religious ethnicity (Jew/gentile), nor social status (slave/free), nor gender identity (male/female) counts for anything in terms of one’s relationship with God. As his parting words to these believers with whom he was somewhat at odds, he asserts once more that value and privilege based on status had been brought to nothing with the inauguration of the new creation.
Paul’s point throughout his letter has been that in the new order of things the ground—at the foot of the cross, as it were—is equal. In the present passage, his point is that gentile believers must not be coerced to become circumcised, as some were arguing, since in the new order established by Christ’s death and resurrection the former identity markers no longer persist. Life in the Spirit has eliminated the need to keep the old order of life under the law.
As a final apposition, Paul offers the most astounding affirmation of all: that those who are part of this new creation are now in fact the “Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16). God has not abandoned his ancient people; rather, both Jew and gentile together are now, in Christ, being re-created into the divine image. Paul’s concern is that those who belong to God as children are thus to bear the divine image in their relationships with others. This is why Paul stresses that behavior (not “works”) that corresponds to that of God and Christ—love for one’s enemies, caring for the poor, breaking down ethnic and cultural boundaries (Jew and gentile as one people of God)—is so important in the new creation begun through Christ’s death and resurrection.
But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.
With the preceding two passages as background, the significance of Colossians 3:8–11 can be appreciated. Although this passage lacks the term “new creation,” it suggests as much when it speaks of “the new self” as “being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (v. 10). We examine Paul’s use of the word eikōn at greater length in the final section of this chapter. For now we simply note Paul’s emphasis on Christ as the absolute focal point of the new creation.
Earlier in the letter, Paul asserted that entrance into the new humanity is by way of Christ’s death and resurrection, understood to be evidenced by Colossian believers having been united with Christ in baptism (Col. 2:12). Now he reiterates the radical new order that emerges as a result—a new order in which all merely human-based distinctions predicated on ethnicity (no gentile or Jew), religion (circumcised or uncircumcised), cultural status (barbarian, Scythian), or social status (slave or free) are abolished (echoing his earlier statement in Gal. 3:28). As important as these distinctions would have been to most people in their everyday lives in the Roman Empire—and continue to be in many cultures today—Paul insists that they have no significance of any kind in terms of one’s relationship with God and thus no impact on everyday relationships within the community of faith.
In this passage Paul echoes language used in the narrative of the creation of Adam and Eve (Gen. 1:26–27; cf. 9:6) as well as phrases from the Christ-poem with which the letter began (Col. 1:15, 18). Significantly, everything in this letter as a whole, and in this passage in particular, indicates that the creator is Christ himself. Christ alone is in view in both the immediate context of the passage and the broader context (2:20–3:11). Moreover, in the opening Christ-hymn (1:15–20), Christ is both the divine image bearer and the one through whom the original creation came to be. Likewise, he is called the archē (“beginning”) of the new creation (1:18).
Thus the one who as the Son of God bears the divine image is also the one who by virtue of his death and resurrection is now re-creating a people into that same image. This passage thus reinforces the new creation motif by use of the language of the divine image. This combination of ideas and language lays the christological groundwork for understanding Paul’s discussions of Christ as the second Adam.
The Second Adam
All three of the explicit comparisons between Christ and Adam occur in contexts where Christ’s humanity is in full view as the presupposition behind Paul’s concern, even if it is not necessarily his emphasis. At issue in all three of these comparisons are the two basic realities of our humanity: sin and death, which Adam let loose in our humanity and which Christ as second Adam overcame by his death and resurrection. Two of these comparisons are found in the same chapter, 1 Corinthians 15, and the third is found in Romans 5.
1 CORINTHIANS 15:21–22
For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
Paul says nothing in 1 Corinthians—or in his two earliest letters (1 and 2 Thessalonians)—to prepare one for the sudden mention of Adam in 1 Corinthians 15. It appears near the beginning of the second phase of Paul’s threefold argument with the Corinthians over the matter of the future bodily resurrection of believers, regarding which some of the Corinthians are less than keen! Paul first presents Christ’s own resurrection as the basis of ours (1 Cor. 15:1–11), then spells out in detail the necessity of Christ’s resurrection (vv. 12–34), and finally indicates something of the nature of a body that has been raised and adapted to life in eternity (vv. 35–58). That he does this again in much the same matter-of-fact way in his later letter to the believers in Rome (Rom. 5) suggests that he had previously reflected on this analogy before it appears here for the first time in the extant letters.
In this first instance the analogy is simple and straightforward: death became a human reality because of the first anthrōpos (“human”), Adam; similarly, resurrection will become a future reality for believers because of the resurrection of the second anthrōpos, Christ Jesus. This is then repeated with emphasis on its effects for other humans: “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). Since this is in direct response to a denial by some Corinthians of a future bodily resurrection of believers, the emphasis is altogether on the fact that, just as the anthrōpos who stands at the beginning of the old creation brought death into the world, so also the anthrōpos who stands at the beginning of the new creation has, through his death (and resurrection), secured a future bodily resurrection for those who are his.
1 CORINTHIANS 15:44–49
If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”;1 the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so let us2 bear the image of the heavenly man.
The emphasis in Paul’s second use of the Adam-Christ analogy in 1 Corinthians 15 is once again on the fact that Christ is the last anthrōpos, but in this case the analogy becomes a bit more complex because the issue has changed considerably. In the first two sections of this long argument (1 Cor. 15:1–11 and 12–34), the focus had been on the reality of the future resurrection of believers, which is predicated on Christ’s own resurrection. The focus in the third phase of the argument (vv. 35–49) is on the bodily nature of that future resurrection. And if from our later perspective Paul goes at this in a somewhat prolix way, it is almost surely because he is intent on emphasizing that the risen Christ continues to have a body that is related to his life as a human. Paul does this by way of the adjectives psychikos and pneumatikos, which in this case mean something like “natural” and “supernatural,” respectively—usage that is probably intended to be somewhat ironic since the Corinthians apparently disdained psychikos human bodies. So by way of these two adjectives, Paul argues that the body that Christ Jesus bore in his incarnation was very much the same as the one we all bear, thus fully and completely adapted to earthly life. But the body that he has come to bear by way of resurrection has been refitted for the final life of the Spirit. Thus it is the same body, yet it is not quite the same. The various complexities of this part of Paul’s argument are all related to this phenomenon.
The result is that the first anthrōpos, Adam, had a body that was of the earth and made of earthly stuff (“the dust of the earth,” 1 Cor. 15:47). The second anthrōpos, while once having borne this earthly body, now has the same body as it is fitted for heaven (“of heaven,” v. 47). The reason for this somewhat complex way of saying it turns out to be a matter of exhortation. Paul wants the Corinthians to live in such a way that they will be among those who at the resurrection will also bear the “image” of the second Adam since they do indeed already bear the “image” of the first Adam (v. 49).
Even though most English versions render the verb in 1 Corinthians 15:49 as a future indicative (“so we shall”; Gk. short “o”), the superior manuscript evidence makes it quite clear that Paul himself wrote to the Corinthians in the imperative (“so let us”; Gk. long “o”), meaning that they should do so now in the present age. Paul’s point is plain, especially in light of all that has preceded till now: if we bear Christ’s name in the present, we must also bear his likeness in our relationships with one another and with the world.
To be sure, the direction of the argument in this case has changed a bit; nonetheless, Paul’s emphasis on Christ’s having been “truly human” continues from before. The difference is that Christ is now spoken of as the progenitor of the new humanity, just as Adam has been of the first. Thus in both instances of this analogy where Paul is challenging the Corinthians’ tacit denial of a future bodily resurrection, his concern is singular: Christ in his humanity, through death and resurrection, has not simply identified with us as humans but has set a future resurrection in motion—as a new creation with its eventual realization of a new body, fully adapted to the life of the future. And the basis for all of this is the historical reality that in his incarnation Christ bore a body that was truly in keeping with that of Adam.
ROMANS 5:12–21
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man [anthrōpos], and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people [anthrōpoi] . . . how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man [anthrōpos], Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! . . . For just as through the disobedience of the one man [anthrōpos] the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man [anthrōpos] the many will be made righteous.
The concern in both instances of the Adam-Christ contrast in 1 Corinthians 15 had to do with death and life as such. When Paul returns to this analogy at the beginning of the second step in his presentation of the gospel to the believers in Rome (Rom. 5:12–8:29), his central concern is still on death and life. The issue now, however, is not death itself but the cause of death, sin. Despite the focus on sin and righteousness that leads to his use of the Adam-Christ analogy—a focus that is repeated throughout and follows from it—Paul continues with this analogy to emphasize death and life. What Adam let loose in the world was sin, which led to death; what Christ brought into the world was righteousness, which leads to life. And, as with 1 Corinthians 15, throughout Paul’s argument in Romans 5 he repeatedly uses anthrōpos for both Adam and Christ.
All three explicit mentions of Adam and Christ in the extant Pauline corpus are narrowly focused; in each case the analogy has specifically to do with the one being responsible for bringing death into the world, through his sin, and the other being responsible for bringing life into the world through his death and resurrection. But nothing more is made of the analogy. Hence one can understand why many take a minimalist position on this matter. Paul’s point in using the analogy seems plain, especially in light of all that has preceded up to this point. And if one stays only with what these few affirmations say specifically, there is hardly ground for such a thing as an “Adam Christology.” But something more does need to be said of these three affirmations, because in each case there is considerable emphasis on Adam and Christ as standing at the beginning of something. For Paul they are the progenitors of the two creations, a fallen one that has issued in sin and death and a new one that has been issued in by crucifixion and resurrection. But if an Adam Christology is only implicit in the analogy in the passages we have just considered, it is made explicit in Paul’s several discussions of the divine image, to which we now turn.
The Image of God
In light of the new creation and second Adam passages examined above, there is good reason to believe that Paul’s several references to the Son of God as bearing the divine “image” (Gk. eikōn) are intentionally contrasting Adam with Christ (as the second Adam). This seems especially so since Paul’s first use of eikōn in this way is in the immediate context of his analogy of Adam and Christ discussed above (1 Cor. 15:49).
What is less clear in the scholarly literature is where one places the emphasis on Paul’s use of the word eikōn—whether it is on Christ’s bearing the divine image or on his replacing Adam as the one true human in whom the divine image has been restored. Or perhaps Paul’s emphasis is somewhat (deliberately?) ambiguous. In an attempt to answer this question, we consider several passages that use the term eikōn. We treat them according to their likely chronological order, since we can learn something by doing so.
1 CORINTHIANS 15:49
And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so let us3 bear the image of the heavenly man.
First Corinthians 15:49 provides the earliest use of eikōn in the Pauline corpus. As we saw above, Paul’s concern in this passage is to help the Corinthians understand the future bodily resurrection of believers (1 Cor. 15:35–49), and he tries to accomplish this by returning to the analogy between Adam and Christ introduced earlier (vv. 21–22), which echoes the opening narrative of the Bible (Gen. 1). With what appears to be a kind of double entendre, Paul’s emphasis lies first on the bodily nature of the resurrection, which Christ now bears and which all who are in Christ will eventually bear. But, second, Paul cannot keep himself from urging them to live in the present with that future in view.
Thus in this moment near the end of the letter, Paul emphasizes Christ’s bearing the image of God, or imago Dei, in his human life, even if the purpose of his argument is to describe Christ’s truly human, but now transformed, body. There is no emphasis on Christ’s deity as such; rather, in his coming as the second Adam, Christ did what Adam failed to do: to bear the divine image in his humanity and thus to serve as the progenitor of all others who, by means of the Spirit, are to do the same.
2 CORINTHIANS 3:18
And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
2 CORINTHIANS 4:4–6
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,”4 made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
The most striking thing about the set of affirmations in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4 is that the first appearance of eikōn (3:18) is generated not by the passage from Genesis but by the mirror imagery that Paul uses in writing to believers in a city famous for its bronze mirrors. But if this comparison is used to catch their attention, which was very likely Paul’s intent, the main thrust of the sentence has to do with Christ bearing the unfading divine glory (in contrast to the fading glory that Moses experienced). Paul’s point for his Corinthian audience is that as they by the Spirit gaze on Christ as into a mirror, they are themselves being transformed into that same “image,” the image of God that has been borne fully and perfectly by Christ.
When in the next phase of the argument Paul returns to the twofold language of “image” and “glory” (2 Cor. 4:4), the focus is now on Christ. The emphasis in this second instance is not primarily on Christ’s humanity as such—that is assumed as inherent in the imagery itself—but is on the true image of God being borne by the one who shares the divine glory, the one who, when turned to in devotion and obedience, by his Spirit transforms believers into the image of God that humanity was created for in the first place. But even with this different emphasis, the use of this language for Christ presupposes his humanity, which is the only reason for such language being used of Christ at all.
We have seen two places in the extant Corinthian correspondence where Paul uses the language of the opening narrative of the Bible (Gen. 1) with reference to Christ. In the first instance, his central concern is with Christ’s bearing the image in his humanity (1 Cor. 15:49); in the second, the emphasis is on the same Christ sharing the divine glory with the Father (2 Cor. 4:4–6). Thus Christ is the one human who, because he is fully divine, bears the perfect image of God—the image into which believers themselves are in the process of being conformed.
ROMANS 8:29
For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.
With the explanatory sentence in Romans 8:29, one comes to the first of the two eikōn passages (with Col. 1:15, discussed below) where Christ is explicitly referred to as the “Son” of the Father. In both instances the two-sided reality (human and divine) is a play on the language from the beginning of the whole biblical narrative (Gen. 1), and in both cases Paul also refers to the Son as God’s prōtotokos (“firstborn”), a word that is never used of Adam in any of the Jewish literature. By using this term, Paul is not speaking of temporality, as if Christ were the first in a series, but of the one who holds all the rights of primogeniture. Thus even though an Adam Christology likely lies behind the language in both instances, the emphasis seems not to lie there but to be moving toward a messianic Son of God Christology.
The appearance of this combination of eikōn and prōtotokos in the present passage comes as the climactic moment in Paul’s elaboration of what living in and by the Spirit looks like (Rom. 8:1–30). His goal is to assure the believers in Rome, both Jew and gentile together as one people of God, of the work of Christ on their behalf and of God’s gift of the Spirit—the Spirit of both the Father and the Son (8:9–10). Thus the Spirit is for them both the enabler of ethical life now and the guarantor of eternal life to come.
Thus in a sentence that begins on the double note of God’s foreknowing and predestining them, Paul interrupts his sentence to spell out the shape and the ultimate goal of that predestination. God has foreordained not that they make it to heaven, as it were, but that in the present they be “conformed to the image of his Son,” who himself is God’s “firstborn” among the many who are to become his “brothers and sisters.”
Deeply embedded in such language is a twofold emphasis: first, that the eternal Son of God perfectly bears the divine image and, second, that he does so in his identity with us in our humanity. This first emphasis is almost immediately picked up when Paul—with an echo of a crucial moment in the Abraham narrative (Gen. 22)—refers to the crucifixion by asserting that God “did not spare his own Son” but gave him up for our sakes (Rom. 8:32). The second emphasis, on Christ’s humanity, is contained within verse 29 itself, with the phrase “the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” Even though there is no direct echo of the opening chapter of Genesis in this passage (though the allusion to Abraham takes us back to the Genesis narrative), it would seem fair to conclude that where Adam failed as God’s “firstborn,” Christ has succeeded—something foreordained by God from eternity past.
COLOSSIANS 1:15
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
The remarkable word about our Savior in Colossians 1:15 is the first of two such affirmations about Christ that have a poetic, almost hymnic, ring to them. Both strophes of this Christ-poem (Col. 1:15–17 and 18–20) make sense precisely as one takes seriously that “the Son [God] loves” (v. 13) is the grammatical subject governing both the beginning of the first stanza (v. 15) and the beginning of the second stanza (v. 18). Thus Paul is here echoing what he said to the believers in Rome (Rom. 8:29, discussed above) but with considerably different concerns.
These new concerns are to identify the Son as the messianic Son of God (Col. 1:13), which seems to be confirmed in verse 15 by his addition that the Son is also the Father’s prōtotokos, thus echoing what came to be understood as a messianic passage from the Psalter (Ps. 89:26–27). Paul also affirms that “the Son” has the rights of primogeniture with regard to the whole of creation—which also came into existence through him. Thus Paul’s emphasis with his use of eikōn in this passage is on the incarnate Son of God as the divine image bearer, who in eternity past was both the agent and the goal of the created order.
That Paul is here once again (indirectly, but surely deliberately) echoing the original creation narrative (Gen. 1) is confirmed by the way he begins the second strophe of the poem by stating that the Son is the archē (“beginning”). This most unusual language is a direct echo of the first words of the Bible (Gen. 1:1), and as with the term eikōn that begins the first strophe, the term archē is immediately followed by a second use of prōtotokos. But now the referent is to Christ’s being the “firstborn” of the new creation, marked by his resurrection from the dead. Thus even though the word eikōn does not occur in the second strophe (Col. 1:18–20), it is assumed throughout, so that the emphasis on the Son’s bearing the divine image in the first strophe moves toward his identity with us in his bringing about reconciliation in the second strophe. The One in whom all the divine fullness dwells bodily has brought the reconciliation through the blood of his cross (vv. 19–20), which leads us to the sixth instance in which Paul uses eikōn with regard to Christ.
COLOSSIANS 3:10
[You] have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.
With the remarkable assertion in Colossians 3:10, the concerns of the present chapter are brought full circle. Having earlier identified Christ as the bearer of the divine eikōn (1:15), Paul now adds that the new person is “being renewed” (= re-created) in keeping with the eikōn of him who has created the new person. Thus as creator of the first Adam, Christ now functions as the re-creator of the new humanity, the ultimate goal of which is re-creation into his own image and thus into the divine image. Thus the one who re-creates broken and fallen humanity back into the divine image is none other than the one who is himself the “image” of God—the Father’s own “firstborn,” the one who by virtue of his resurrection is the “firstborn” with regard to the new creation. The creator of the first creation, who himself bears the Father’s image, is now seen as the creator of the new creation, as he restores his own people back into the divine image and thus into his own image that he alone perfectly bears. Here the emphasis is simultaneously on Christ as the divine image-bearer and on Christ as the one who now re-creates fallen humanity into that same image.
PHILIPPIANS 2:6–8
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross.
We examined Philippians 2:6–8 in chapter 2, and we return to it here at the end of this analysis of Paul’s use of eikōn because there has been a veritable groundswell in the New Testament academy that has argued (or more often simply asserted) that Paul’s use of morphē (NIV “nature”) in the opening phrase of the Christ story (v. 6) is virtually synonymous with eikōn. But this is a piece of scholarly mythology that needs to be laid to rest! The preceding discussion of Paul’s use of the term eikōn allows us to see this, while at the same time demonstrating that the presupposition of the phrase “in the form” nevertheless reinforces Christ’s preincarnate divine existence.
There are two reasons for rejecting the view that morphē is virtually synonymous with eikōn. First, as noted earlier, Paul’s apparent reason for choosing the term morphē is that it was the only word available in the Greek language that could serve equally well to define Christ’s mode of preexistence with God and to indicate the extreme nature of the mode of his incarnation—coming into our history in the “nature,” or “form,” of a slave.5
Second, Paul’s use of eikōn elsewhere in his letters demonstrates both the folly of equating eikōn with morphē and that, whatever echo the next phrase—about Christ not using his equality with God “to his own advantage”—has with reference to Adam, it cannot include the phrase “in very nature [morphē] God” that has preceded. Paul did not intend to begin this poem by saying that Christ was in the image of God with regard to his preexistent divine nature, which would border on theological nonsense. As we have seen in the previous passages that use eikōn, Paul uses this language with regard to Christ only with reference to his being the divine image-bearer in his incarnation, not with regard to his preexistence. This is especially so since this language would make no sense as an echo of the first two chapters of Genesis. Whatever Adam-echo one might find in this grand telling of the story in Philippians 2 is altogether conceptual (in this case, invented by later readers). It lacks a single linguistic tie that could possibly clue the Philippian believers in to such a comparison, if this were Paul’s intention. And what the believers in Philippi could neither have heard nor understood can hardly be what Paul intended with this word morphē.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have seen three ways that Paul develops what might be called Adam Christology: first, in Paul’s use of “new creation” language; second, in Paul’s comparisons and contrasts between Christ and Adam, where Christ is seen as the progenitor of this new creation, who has overturned the effects of Adam’s sin that led to death; and, third, in Paul’s uses of the term eikōn, where the incarnate Christ is seen as the true bearer of the divine image who is also re-creating a people who are to bear that image with him. These, however, are not the only ways Paul refers to the earthly Jesus. In chapter 4, we turn to an examination of further evidence from Paul’s letters where he asserts, and sometimes emphasizes, Christ’s true humanity.
1. Gen. 2:7.
2. I am providing the NIV marginal reading here, which is almost certainly Paul’s original, since it appears in all but one of the early and best manuscripts.
3. Again, I am providing the NIV marginal reading here. See note 2 above.
4. Gen. 1:3.
5. Paul’s use of the word “slave” is difficult for modern English-speaking North Americans, whose terrible history of capture and enslavement of native Africans is an eternal blot on our history. But in Paul’s first-century context, this language could refer simply to one in a household who, for a variety of reasons, belongs to the owner and thus lacks many of the rights of personal choice.