Gift of Death

“Christian life is an impossible newness given as an unfitting gift,” writes John Barclay in his contribution to Apocalyptic Paul. Since it is a gift, the “new competence” of believers “is wholly dependent on the life of Christ, present within” (73-74).

But it’s important to specify what that gift is. It is not “a new set of competencies added to their previous capacities, nor an enhancement of their previous selfs.” The gift is “rather a death, and the emergence from that death of a new self, essentially ectopic in dependence on the resurrection life of Christ” (74).

Given this fundamental structure to Paul’s theology, he is not overworried about stressing the inability of human beings; he doesn’t need to remind them at every turn that the “believer’s agency is really the Spirit or Christ.” Instead, “He gives genuine exhortations to genuinely freed agents who are urged to more than passive acquiescence in the work of another. In other words, Paul does not ‘perfect’ the efficacy of grace into a formula of monergism because it is clear for him from the baptismal event that the very life in which the believer acts and decides is a life sources, established, and upheld by Christ (a ‘life from the dead’). Within this frame and on this basis, plenty of statements can be made regarding believers as responsible agents, required to present their bodies in one direction rather than another” (74).

Which leads to two observations: First, this raises the question of whether Protestant anxiety about works, about exhortations and moral effort, is related to a faulty baptismal theology. Perhaps the need to stress monergism at every turn is a substitute for a strong doctrine of baptismal death and resurrection. And, second, the particular failure of baptismal theology might be the failure to see it as itself an act of God, a son of Adam’s “justification from sin.”