Recapitulation Through Suffering
Foundational Background: a Revelation of Jesus
My journey into understanding something of the scope of Jesus person and work started with an unexpected call in 1994 at the end of a week of prayer (7 days, 6am-6 pm). On the final day as things all seemed to be going wrong, but the Lord put this scripture in to my head, t was Peter’s preaching about Jesus.
“And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. 18 But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. 19 Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, 20 that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, 21 whom heaven must receive until the time of restoration of all things, which God spoke · by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago.” (Acts 3:17-21)
[“He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.” (Eph 4:10)]
Then quite suddenly I found it very difficult to pray. It was like some terrible weight was pressing on me and to stay in prayer I was lying face down on the floor gripping the carpet with both hands. Nothing quite like this had ever happened to me before, I was in deep inner torment trying to hold in there with God.
Then I received an indelible visual impression, I hesitate to call it a vision, but it was “visionary”. Jesus was in heaven (clearly ascended) far above the earth and he was putting everything on earth into its proper order and place as he ruled over it as Lord. I could sense all these spheres becoming subject to Christ; education, health, marriage, business, art, media, politics, law etc. All of life and culture was being brought into submission to his Lordship. My thinking about Jesus could never be the same again. I could see how over the centuries the Church has tried to take hold of Jesus and make him our captive. Training for “ministry” has become training for serving in the church, the time of many committed believers is taken up with church meetings, most of the money given to the church goes to maintenance not mission and so on. The risen Lord had commanded us to, “make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:18-20) but instead of discipling people groups we had made much of discipleship about one’s own private personal disciplines. I started to get a perspective on scripture that I hadn’t had before.
Introduction
Since that prophetic call I have increasingly reflected that the fundamental problem with contemporary Western Christianity (in whatever form) is our severely reduced Christology. We have made religion into something measured by the minuscule span of our personal individual experience, whereas it has always been about Jesus’ relationship with the Father. The gospel is NOT about sin, judgement, repentance, faith, regeneration, discipleship, etc. about God’s action in Christ to reconcile the world to himself “in Christ” (2 Cor 5:19). Salvation is sharing in Jesus’ relationship with the Father through the Holy Spirit. I love this quote, ‘What role does God play in our lives? It is an inevitable but wrong question. We shall be freed from it only by captivation to the right question: what role do we play in God’s life? The story is not our story with a role for Christ. The story is Christ’s story with roles for us. [To state the most audacious of (Karl) Barth's propositions straightaway: the God-man Jesus Christ, as an historical event, is the ontological foundation in God of all reality other than God'] (R. Jenson).)
How will, or more accurately, how is Jesus restoring order to all things. Whilst there are many possible ways of answering this question, one of the favourites of the Early Church Fathers is transformation as recapitulation.
What is Recapitulation?
Whilst the word for “recapitulate” occurs only twice in the New Testament, the idea is all encompassing. This is because the two usages touch on the height of Christology, and the depth of how to live as a Christian.
The first use is in Ephesians 1, and I will come back to it later, “in all wisdom and insight 9 making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” (Eph 1:9-10)
The second use appears in Romans 13, in what is normally nominated as the ethical teaching of Paul:
“For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Rom 13:9)
Love is necessarily a summary of the Law as a whole (Matt 22:37-40 cf. the testimony https://www.jubilee-centre.org/founder-dr-michael-schluter), since in Jesus “love binds everything together in perfect harmony. (τελειότητος)” (Col 3:14) .
(Eph 1: 10, ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι sum up, combine, unite, Rom 13:9 ἀνακεφαλαιοῦται.)
In an age of mindlessness and perpetual trivialisation in the world, we need a revelation that the history of a purposeful creation reaches its final/eschatological goal in Christ in which all the lines of the universe come together, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” (Col 1:15-16).
When I received the invite from Terence/Terry to speak tonight I necessarily fell to prayer, and came up with a topic that I believe, if properly handled, will be genuinely ecumenical. I first encountered the concept of recapitulation in teaching on Models of the Atonement, particularly with respect to the theology of St Irenaeus (c. 130-c.202). In his classic Against Heresies Book 5, we read “He has therefore, in his work of recapitulation, summed up all things,….as our species went down to death through a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life again through a victorious one; and as through a man death received the palm of victory against us, so again by a man we may receive the palm against death.” Perhaps with even greater clarity Melito of Sardis (On Pascha c. 150 A.D.) says, “He is the one who in many folk bore many things. He is the one who was murdered in the person of Abel, bound in the person of Isaac, exiled in the person of Jacob, sold in the person of Joseph, exposed in the person of Moses. This is the one who was made flesh in a virgin, hanged upon the wood, entombed in the earth, raised from the dead, lifted up to the heights of heaven. He is the speechless lamb.” Christ unites himself to us all in the Incarnation so that we may become what he is. This he does by the Spirit.
Where Adam disobeyed in relation to food, Christ conquers Satan through hunger. Adam disobeyed through a tree, Christ redeems us through a tree. He recapitulates and annuls the disobedience of Adam. Satan is now bound because humanity is now free through Christ.
Recapitulation as Re-Humanising the Cosmos in Christ
When I came to Christ I found an interest in philosophy and theology, and set about reading 2 monumental Christian works, one was Augustine’s City of God, the other was Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. [Forgetting about Calvin’s alleged focus on predestination,] the following quote* open up his insight into the breadth of the all sufficiency of Christ for our salvation.
[“This will become still clearer if we reflect, that the work to be performed by the Mediator was of no common description: being to restore us to the divine favour, so as to make us, instead of sons of men, sons of God; instead of heirs of hell, heirs of a heavenly kingdom. Who could do this unless the Son of God should also become the Son of man, and so receive what is ours as to transfer to us what is his, making that which is his by nature to become ours by grace? Relying on this earnest, we trust that we are the sons of God, because the natural Son of God assumed to himself a body of our body, flesh of our flesh, bones of our bones, that he might be one with us; he declined not to take what was peculiar to us, that he might in his turn extend to us what was peculiarly his own, and thus might be in common with us both Son of God and Son of man. Hence that holy brotherhood which he commends with his own lips, when he says, "I ascend to my Father, and your Father, to my God, and your God,"” (John 20: 17.) Calvin Inst II.]
*‘We see that our salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ (Acts 4:12). We should
therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation,
we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is ‘of him’ (1 Cor 1:30). If we seek any other
gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his
dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth…If we seek
redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in
his cross (Gal 3:13); if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood; if
reconciliation, in his descent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of
life, in his resurrection…In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us
drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.’
(Calvin, Institutes, II. 16.9)
Incarnation and Necessity
The basis of the origin, existence and meaning of all things is in the divine Word of God who became flesh (John 1:3, 10; Psalm 33:6; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 1:2). “The Holy Trinity determined upon the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension as man of one of the persons of the Trinity so that this person might recapitulate all men in himself and thus bring all into communion with God in Trinity.” (Dumitru Staniloae). The universal recapitulation in Christ is possible only “if Christ’s manhood is not the human nature of a mere man but that of a hypostasis (subsistence) independent of the limitations of created nature.” (Meyendorff) The Son of God is a kind of foundation of all other human hypostases.
Whereas one of the outstanding features of popular Christian spirituality is a downgraded estimation of the Incarnation., the biblical vista of the Word becoming flesh incorporates “every family in heaven and on earth” (Eph 3:14), the unfallen sons of God (Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7) and fallen humanity united under Christ as head of all holy rational beings in love. Jesus alone qualifies for this all-surpassing dignity of service (Col 1:17-20), he alone is “the heir of all things, through whom also he (God) created the world. 3 He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” (Heb 1:2-3). The necessity of the Incarnation is that the world under the Lamb crucified and glorified will be inestimably more glorious with order and beauty than the original Adam ever was capable of. “We are saved in Christ because in him and from him we possess the fulness of exaltation and the fulness of humiliation [2 Cor 10:1]. We experience the total warmth of communion and yet we are maintained eternally each in his own personal reality.” (Staniloae) we must never measure Christ by Adam, who was merely a “type/pattern of the one who was to come” (Rom 5:14 cf. 1 Cor 15:45-49).
Jesus is the summit of whatever may be said about God and humanity and he repeats in himself all the stages of humanity, personally and historically/typologically.
“He passed through every stage of life, restoring to all communion with God….he sanctified each stage of life by a likeness to himself…he was made an infant for infants , sanctifying infancy; a child among children, sanctifying childhood…a young man among young men…and thus he even came to death, that he might be the first -born from the dead, having the pre-eminence among all (things)” (Irenaeus)
(This is why Christ is the key to all the Scriptures, as their centre and true hermeneutic.) In the course of the stages of his life, he reverses the Fall in himself. Recapitulation is the Christological basis of a proper understanding of the history of creation from inception to consummation.
The purpose of the Incarnation is the restoration of the human form in all the beauty of God’s creation. Christ must retell the story never embraced by Adam. This involves a total narrative reversal effecting an ontological restoration (restoration of “being”) of original goodness (Gen 1:31) and beyond (Rom 5:9ff.). The Son enacts human nature dynamically in his unwavering filial deference to the Father. This necessarily involves the much despised “form of the cross” (Phil 2:5-11). Before God Christ’s humiliation is however an “unutterable beauty” (G.A. Studdert Kennedy; JY Jerusalem) of a transcendent character visible only to the eye of faith. This transparent image (Rev 21:21 Gk: διαφανής, diaphanous David Bentley Hart) is manifest fully (to the eye of faith cf. Eph 1:18) in “the cry of dereliction” (Mark 14:36), the point at which God shows his power and glory to be when and where he will be in opposition to the fulness and totality of all evil. The resurrection of the Lamb (Rev 5:6) shows this beauty born of God is imperishable and, as claimed back by the Father it can never lapse into corruption (cf. Matt 19:28; 1 Pet 1:23). The pattern of Christ’s life, now living in the Church (Col 1:27), can never be accommodated by the world, but must be destroyed as it is so fiercely hated (John 15:18; 17:14; 1 John 3:13).
Recapitulation is limitlessly trans-cosmic (vs. modern cosmologists Prof. Brian Cox etc.) and it involves Christ (hypostatically) penetrating backwards in time to undo fallen existence in its naturally irreversible disobedience and memory and guilt, and penetrating forward into God in eternal glory. A “projection of human being into a new order of things in which its existence before God is finally made good.” (Torrance) Cf. The healing miracles of Jesus as a proleptic participation in resurrection life (James 5:16). Jesus’ resurrection restores and recreates humanity into a new order of being in himself. It actualises a new form of time which does away with the all-encompassing degenerative order of corruption and decay introduced by the Fall’s loss of glory (Rom 3:23; 8:20-21; 1 Cor 15:50ff; 2 Pet 1:4). Who but the all-triumphant Jesus could say, ““Fear not, I am the first and the last, 18 and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.” (Rev 1:17-18). In resurrection, the new creation has made an incursion into our sphere of existence, this is essentially a apocalyptic event. “Jesus’ expectation of the …end of the world … was certainly fulfilled in his own person’. This means that in the risen Jesus the end of the world has already begun” (W. Pannenberg). Resurrection is an historical event in the fulness of time, and not one within the privation of time. “he whom God raised up did not see corruption” (Acts 2:27, 31; 13:35, 37).
To be a Christian means to operate with a Christocentric view of time (and space). Our thinking (Rom 12:1-2) is stretched to the ultimate ends of God’s purposes in creation and redemption (cf. Rev 21:5). These things are accessible to us in our union with Christ in the Spirit (Rom 8:6). “the resurrection of the man Jesus, and his exaltation to the right hand of the Father, mean the taking up of human time [healed and fulfilled] into God.” (Torrance). This is not a speculative truth, but a Creedal reality, Cf. “one Christ. One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by assumption of the Manhood into God.” (Athanasian Creed).
The Church lives in two times and two spaces, that which is on earth and that which is in Christ. The earthly and the heavenly. As Jesus came into our time and space, he sends us forth in the power of his Spirit to “redeem the time” (Eph 5:16; Col 4:5) through his resurrection presence. (He is more than the bearded and sandalled one of the Gospels (Juan Carlos Ortiz). We live as people of a “new song” with a “new name” (Rev 2:17; 5:9; 14:3) signifying our participation in a new age in Christ (2 Cor 5:17).
Such things are especially realised in the real presence of the ascended Jesus in the Lord’s Supper (Eucharistic Parousia) where we taste “the powers of the age to come” (Heb 6:5). Meanwhile we await with patience the unveiling of the vast cosmic significance of all that has been effected in the Incarnation, crucifixion and glorification of the Son of God. We await with faith that great day (Zech 1:14; Jude 6; Rev 6:17; 16:14) when the destiny of all nations, peoples and times will be consummated in Christ as Lord of all (Rev 5:13-14).
If all these things are so wonderfully true, why are the mass of modern Christians so oblivious to them? The answer is not complex.
Suffering
Going back to the earliest theological reflections on recapitulation, in expounding John 12:32, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” Irenaeus comments on these words of Christ, “taking to himself the primacy and appointment himself the head of the Church, that he might ‘draw all things to himself’ in due time.” Since this text is about all lines meeting in Christ points to the cross, we should expect that the magnification (cf. Phil 1:20) of this truth in human testimony can only be achieved through “the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Ph 3:10 cf. Col 1:24; 2 Cor 12:1-10). Unsurprisingly therefore, all my favourite authors on the Incarnation, Irenaeus, Melito, Calvin, Owen, Staniloae, von Balthasar, Congar, Torrance had lives marked by great suffering. There is a deep sense that our participation in Christ, union with his hypostatic existence, must include much tribulation (cf. Acts 14:22).
As Jesus himself needed suffering to be “made perfect” (Heb 2:10; 5:9), as he personally testified, ““O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”” (Luke 24:26), we must accept that submission in faith to divinely appointed suffering is the means, rather than cost, of glory (cf. Heb 12:5-11). Suffering is God’s one method of sensitising us so that all our senses are centred in the Word himself.
Conclusion
The real clash of civilisations isn’t between the modern/postmodern world and “the rest” but between ways of life based on knowledge (including AI) and those whose foundation is divine heavenly wisdom. Despite the emphases of some modern Evangelicals (James 13-18), the unity of the Incarnation-Atonement (https://thesurprisinggodblog.gci.org/2013/03/incarnation-and-atonment.html) means that Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:21 cf. Eph 3:10)
In Ephesians (cf. # Colossians), Christ is Head over the Church (1:22; 2:16) so that the sovereignty of Christ exerted through her might be revealed to the nations and the powers in the heavenly places (Eph 3:8-10) on the way to the consummation of all things in him. The church needs to understand that she exists to become a counter history to the fallen decrepit story of the world. It is this counter story which must be presented again and again in our liturgies. The Eucharist pictures the story of the putting to death of the old Adam and the resurrection of the glorious new man in Christ (Rom 6:6; 2 Cor 5:17; Col 3:9-10).