HIGHER EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

LEARNING MODULE 7 IN REED 2

(CHRIST THE KING/CHRISTOLOGY)
Module Number Module 7
Module Title Religious Education 2 –Basic Christ the King/Christology
Duration 4 hours per week
Week Number 7
Topic:
“Jesus, the New Adam”

Objectives:
At the end of lesson, the students will be able to:
1. Explain why did Jesus became the “New Adam”
2. Compare and contrast the Adam and Jesus in their participation of the history
of creation and salvation
3. Present different point of views that explains Jesus as the “New Adam”
4. Unlocked difficulty of words and have a simplified understanding of the content

Discussions:

● The Last Adam, also given as the Final Adam or the Ultimate Adam, is a title

given to Jesus in the New Testament. Similar titles that also refer to Jesus
include Second Adam and New Adam. Definitive

● Jesus, the New Adam “Being born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4), Jesus is thereby
necessarily a direct descendant of Adam.

● The perfect and sin-free Jesus, who said that he is the bridegroom in Matthew
9:15, also declared Himself to be “The Bread of Life” in John 6. He said that we
must eat His flesh and drink His blood to have eternal life. This reference to
eating, of course, is the antidote to overcome what Adam did. Jesus, who died
on the tree of life known as the cross, commands us to eat the fruit from that
tree known as The Eucharist (his flesh and blood), so as to give us eternal life,
and to overcome the two lies of the devil to Adam.

● The bookend parallels between Adam and Jesus don’t end there, though. Just as
Adam was ejected from Paradise into this world so that he could eventually be
saved from his disobedient sin, God Himself promised that he would come
down from Paradise to the new dwelling place of Adam (this world) as the good
shepherd in order to save us all from Adam’s original sin (Ezekiel 34:10-16).
Just as Adam’s disobedience to God allowed sin and damnation to enter the
world, the obedience of Jesus, the new Adam, to God, his loving Father, allowed
salvation to enter the world. Just as Adam threw away his sinless status
 through disobedience to God, Jesus kept his sinless status through obedience to
God the Father. Jesus said that the devil is the ruler of this world (John 14:30).
Jesus is the ruler of the everlasting world, in Heaven. Just the devil once
conquered man in Paradise, the dwelling place of God, now, Jesus, a true man
and who is also true God, conquers the devil in his dwelling place, this world.

● Jesus eventually had to undergo his holy and sorrowful passion to redeem
mankind. During His passion, some of the curses of Adam, namely sweat on his
brow to get his daily bread and thorns (Genesis 3:18-19), were placed squarely
on the head of Christ, the Bread of Life, first in the Garden of Gethsemane, when
he sweat blood, and then in Jerusalem, when he had a crown of thorns placed
on His head. Whereas Adam was naked and had to put clothes on as a result of
his disobedience, Jesus, through His obedience to God, was clothed on the way
to Calvary, and then stripped naked before crucifixion.

The Pauline Representation

● Paul the Apostle contrasted Adam and Christ as two corporate personalities or

representatives (Rom 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15:20–3, 45–9) and saw human beings as
bearing the image of both Adam and Christ (1 Cor. 15:49). Where Adam's
disobedience meant sin and death for all, Christ's obedience more than made
good the harm due to Adam by bringing righteousness and abundance
of grace (Rom 5:12–21). As a "life-giving spirit", the last Adam is risen from the
dead and will transform us through resurrection into a heavenly, spiritual
existence (1 Cor. 15:22, 45, 48–9). Thus Paul's Adam Christology involved both
the earthly Jesus' obedience (Rom. 5) and the risen Christ's role as giver of the
Spirit (1 Cor. 15).

● The same symbol, used to express Christ as the corporate, representative

personality (and Adam as his foreshadow or "type", per Rom. 5:14), was taken
up to express Christ's being: he is "the last Adam" (1 Cor. 15:45), or the "second
man from heaven", and one not made "from earth, of dust" (1 Cor. 15:47; see
Gen. 2:7). Some scholars detect an Adamic reference in several other New
Testament passages: for example, in the language about "the glory of Christ,
who is the image (Gr.:eikōn) of God" (2 Cor. 4:4).
Post-New Testament Symbolism

● Whether one accepts the wider circle of references to Adam or limits oneself to
the clear references in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, the New Testament
used Adamic language to express the being of Jesus and, even more, his task
and goal.

● In post-New Testament times, the symbol of Adam proved a valuable foil

for Clement of Alexandria, Origen , St Athanasius of Alexandria, St. Hilary of
Poitiers, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa and other Church
Fathers, when they presented and interpreted the person and work of Christ. 

St Irenaeus 

● In particular, did much to elaborate further Paul's antithetical

parallelism between Adam and Christ, the latter reversing the failure of the
first. In a typical passage of his Adversus haereses, he wrote:
- The Son of God... was incarnate and made man; and then he summed up in
himself the long line of the human race, procuring for us a
comprehensive  salvation, that we might recover in Christ Jesus what in Adam
we had lost, namely the state of being in the image and likeness of God" (3. 18.
1)

John Henry Newman 

● used the phrase "Second Adam" in his hymn "Praise to the Holiest in the
height", first appearing in The Dream of Gerontius:
O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
A second Adam to the fight
And to the rescue came.