The Death of Adam

Issue 1: April 10, 2020

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Square Inch! 

I used to be one of those fastidious people who marked all of my emails as “read,” and made it a daily routine to send a vast bulk to the trash. One day I didn’t dispense with a dozen-or-so unwanted emails. Alas, that was all it took. My inbox is now an unmitigated mess. I get an embarrassing number of junk emails from mailing lists for which I never signed up, and they just accumulate by the day. It is a daily irritant, but—it must be admitted—a “first world” problem.

All of that to say, most of you signed up for this newsletter! * You have accorded me the honor of your inbox, and I promise to endeavor to be more worthy of it than, say, Bob’s Used Furniture Warehouse writing to inform you how very much they value your health and safety in these uncertain times, along with their thoughtful rundown of all the steps they are taking to keep you from contracting COVID-19.

* — This is not true of everyone. Some of you may be getting this because you were a follower of my old media company, Dead Reckoning. If you’d like to not be a part of The Square Inch, unsubscribing is very easy (all too easy, from my perspective—haha). Just go (er…read!) all the way to the bottom and click the “unsubscribe” link next to my name.

So what can you expect from this weekly missive? I can really only say one thing for certain: you can expect 100% honest writing from me. I will tell you what I think about things, completely unburdened from the expectations of an institution, guild, conventional wisdom, party line, or tribal identity. No, I am not some kind of autonomous individual pretending to be above all external influences—I am gratefully influenced by a vast web of people, institutions, and ideas, as you will undoubtedly discover in my writings. But I will nevertheless write what I think, not what others expect me to think. That is part of the freedom involved in writing a personal newsletter, and sadly it is something in short supply among pundits these days.

I did hear a nasty rumor that someone somewhere (you know who you are) was reluctant to subscribe because they thought The Square Inch was going to be an intellectual, academic, “heady” affair. Let me dispel the notion. Well, sort of. From time to time I may wade into more technical waters, but that is not my goal. My goal is to write something engaging each week for the average reader. This is not doctoral seminar on 19th century Dutch theology. It is a view of the “square inches” of human existence from the perspective of an alarmingly close-to-middle-age Christ-following, Montana-dwelling husband, father of three, writer, musician, and, yes, theologian. 

Speaking of theology, since it is Good Friday let’s get to our topic this week, shall we?

The Death of Adam

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman. —Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It

Have you ever stared at a tangled fishing line? It happens from time to time in a fly-fisherman’s life. If you haven’t, I shall describe it for you. In the event of a poorly executed cast or some other misfortune, the fly at the end of the line zigs and zags and loops endlessly in every direction—first one way, then underneath, back over, under again, looping around the rod three or four times one way, then underneath, through a loop, then over the rod the other way another half-dozen times—and so on in seemingly infinite variations. It is a disaster, and most fishermen will simply cut the line above the tangle (the literal meaning of “cut bait”) and start anew. But what if you want to save all of that line? It’s not exactly inexpensive stuff.

I will tell you what you cannot do. Do not yank or pull the fly this way and that, hoping that the mess will miraculously untangle itself. It won’t. You will make it ten times worse, and you will invariably end up wasting time and cutting bait anyway. No: the only way to untangle the mess is to carefully and painstakingly take our principal character—the fly—and retrace its every subtle movement. Over, under, around, and back through each and every confounded loop. The only way forward is precisely backward. To get things back to the way you intended them you must retrace the problem all the way back to its absolute source—that very first wrong turn. 

The Bible has a principal character, too, and we naturally meet him in the opening chapters of Genesis: Adam, the first man. God created Adam, and then Eve, as his Image, a creaturely replica of himself. Just as the Lord God fashioned, shaped, and filled creation, he tells Adam and Eve to be his deputies: Lords of creation, ruling and shaping (cultivating) and filling the earth. Things go terribly wrong. Adam and Eve fail, and the history of the human race from that time on is, shall we say, a very tangled mess (really: you could read the Bible or any history book and find out for yourself!). If God wanted to “cut bait” and start over, this was the time.

What does Adam have to do with Good Friday? Everything. I want you to notice something interesting about Luke’s gospel. In chapter 3, verse 22, he records what happened at Jesus’ baptism. A voice declares from heaven, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” Then comes one of those “boring” sections of the Bible you’re tempted to skip over: a genealogy. Except that it isn’t boring. Luke is answering the question of whose Son is Jesus? “He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph…” (v.23) and ultimately his lineage is traced all the way back to “Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God” (v.37).

Then what happens? Jesus is led into the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by the devil. (Hmm: Adam and then temptation. Sound familiar?) Satan asks him, “If you are the Son of God, then…”? That is, if God really loves you, if that voice at your baptism was really telling the truth, then why are you starving? After all, he provided manna for his people of old; he promised to “prepare a table before you in the presence of your enemies” (Ps.23:5)—and surely Satan is thinking, “Here I am!”—yet you have nothing.

The devil is giving this “son of Adam, son of God” the same temptation as the original: to doubt God’s love and care and provision. But Jesus heard the voice, and he heeds the voice, and responds to the temptation with steadfast trust and conviction that he is, indeed, God’s beloved Son.

Jesus is, Paul tells us in other places, the “Second” and “Last Adam” (Rom.5:12-21; 1 Cor.15:45-47). Something very big is going on. Jesus is not just a random, run-of-the-mill individual—an inspiring Jewish rabbi or moralist. Something “world historical” is happening here. And here it is:

God is untangling the line. He is painstakingly retracing humanity’s steps back to the very roots. In one sense God is “starting over.” Jesus is taking Adam’s place and “redoing” things, obeying where Adam disobeyed, trusting where Adam doubted, etc.—the great 2nd century church father Irenaeus helpfully called this “recapitulation.” But just as I must with that tangled mess on my fishing rod, so to truly untangle the line God must start with the very last thing—the ultimate, final consequence of the sequence of events and work back from there. And that last thing is death, in its full and final profile—judgment, separation, and abandonment because of sin. That is the very thing Jesus faithfully walked toward during Holy Week, and here’s the best news of all: not because he needed it, but because we needed it. It was all “for us and for our salvation” (Nicene Creed). So St. Augustine expresses the beauty:

Christ was taking to himself flesh from you, and from himself gave salvation to you; was taking death to himself from you, and from himself gave life to you; was taking to himself insults from you and from himself conferred honors on you. —Enarrations on the Psalms, 61.3

Have you noticed that almost all the biblical words about salvation begin with the prefix “re”? Redemption. Reconciliation. Regeneration. God is retracing things, from back to front. And so Jesus’ story does not move from the garden to the wilderness, but from the wilderness to an empty garden tomb—indeed, he is ultimately mistaken for the very thing Adam was commissioned to be, the gardener (Jn.20:15)! Not from life to the judgment of death, but from the judgment of death on a cross to an empty tomb! Humanity’s story—our story—is being rewritten from back to front, inside-out, upside-down.

And because of Good Friday and Easter Sunday a new day has dawned—indeed, a new creation (2 Cor.5:17). We can be restored to fellowship with God and have our hearts and lives renovated to flourish in the newness of resurrected life.

Good Friday, indeed! Praise God that he didn’t “cut bait,” but instead patiently (the Bible uses the terms “faithfully,” “lovingly,” “steadfastly”) untangled our human mess.

Miscellany

I hope and trust you are doing well during your “shelter in place.”

Truthfully, our lives have not changed very much. But I’ve been roped into reading The Lord of the Rings aloud again (this is my third time), and we’ve held reading sessions every single evening. There is utter mutiny from the girls at any suggestion otherwise. My voices and accents have found their groove, but I must admit that I end up “performing” it rather robustly, and the range between, say, Gandalf and Smeagol is rather wide and I sometimes wonder if my sore throat is the product of Tolkien or COVID-19! (Relax, it’s just Tolkien.)

Speaking of, earlier this week my friend Andrew Sandlin asked me some theological questions about our current COVID-19 crisis. You can read my answers here.

Our daughter Bailey has been singing and playing the guitar this past year, and has put together quite a nice repertoire. On a (chilly) Sunday afternoon, we set up by the outdoor fire and put on a “Covid Concert” for the neighborhood cats and dogs. I’ve been posting a new song every day this week, and you can check them out on her YouTube channel here. In the meantime, here’s an appetizer of her singing a classic:

Thank you for reading this far! If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to all your friends and encouraging them to subscribe. I plan, Lord-willing, to be back next week!