Christ the Second Adam

The topic of this lecture is the reality of Christ Jesus as “the Second Adam.” The “collective” character of the Second Adam (as well as the First Adam) has often proven to be a moral challenge, particularly in much modern thinking that valorizes the individual self. How can a single individual—myself!—be “implicated” in the life of others such that morally substantive consequences obtain? And how can one person—Adam or Christ—influence a single individual (me)? This lecture addresses the theological meaning of human collective identity by attending to certain modern psychological and sociological understandings of the human person in all its entangled complexity. Within this framework, I will examine traditional understandings of the specifically redemptive character of Christ as the Second Adam.

Biography

Ephraim Radner (PhD Yale University ) is Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto and a priest in the Episcopal Church. His recent publications include A Profound Ignorance: Modern Pneumatology and Its Anti-modern Redemption (Baylor University Press, 2019), A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life (Baylor University Press, 2016), and Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures (Eerdmans, 2016).