Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 28:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Christ The Last Adam: Elevated Human Nature In The Resurrected Christ
Author: Noah A. Hall

Christ The Last Adam: Elevated Human Nature In The Resurrected Christ

Noah A. Hall

Noah A. Hall is a PhD student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. He earned a BA from Montreat College and an MDiv from Southern Seminary. He teaches Bible and Latin at Christian Academy of Louisville since 2021. Noah is married to Ashley and they have four children: Esther, Eden, Micah, and Hosea.

Describing humanity is often an exercise of paradox. We were created good as God’s image-bearers and yet evil is commonplace in our lives as we misrepresent God’s likeness. We live and are even capable of reproducing life, yet inevitably we die. The contrasts could be multiplied. What is undeniably clear, however, is the fact that Jesus’ incarnation brings about a new reality in the human condition—Jesus’ humanity encompasses the fullness of what humanity was always intended to be. In this essay I want to ask the following question: To what extent does human nature become new in Christ? Does Christ’s humanity simply restore a prelapsarian state of innocence? Or is human nature elevated to something substantially new? Arthur Custance, drawing heavily upon the insights of C. S. Lewis’ classic work The Problem of Pain, describes redeemed humanity in terms of a radical new species:1

They are a new kind of species; in short, a ‘converted species.’ They are, in fact, the redeemed of God, the born-again, the people in whom the image of God has been recreated as it once was in Adam. These two segments of the human race are at opposite poles, they are basically in antithesis. They dwell together because they are both members of the Family of man. They are one Genus, to use the zoological term. But something has happened to cause them to separate into two Species within that Genus, and this separation is at a far deeper and more

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fundamental level than mere genetics. The division is the result of a spiritual transformation that really does constitute a new creation—nothing less, in fact, than a rebirth. It is not a symbolic rebirth, like that achieved by ritual in some pagan religions of antiquity and even of today. It is a fundamental change in human nature, so great a change that it amounts to a genuine form of speciation.2

The merits of utilizing a zoological metaphor may be disputed, but Lewis and Custance have landed upon an important biblical truth in their recognition of a radical and fundamental alteration to human nature, first with the introduction of sin, and to a greater extent with the resurrection and ascension of Christ in glory.

In thi...