Biblical Salvation History as Mythic and Poetic Symmetry

There's a certain symmetry in the biblical canon, the elegance of which has inspired theologians for millennia. This symmetry is of course made explicit in the Bible itself, wherein Paul calls Christ the "second Adam". But it has found fuller expression in the writings of theologians and church fathers. The second-century bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, for example, expanded on the "second Adam" theme by arguing that Christ "recapitulated" Adam's life and reversed his acts of disobedience. As Roger E. Olsen describes it on p. 247 of The Mosaic of Christian Belief (Downer's Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 2002),

Christ, according to Irenaeus, was our "second Adam," the new head of a new human race. ["Recapitulate" = "re-" + kephale, the Greek word for head. Christ re-heads the human race.] Included in his redeeming work was the sacrificial death which Irenaeus compares with Adam's disobedience: Just as Adam disobeyed and fell from fellowship with God at a tree (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), so Christ faced a "tree" (the cross) and obeyed God even unto death.

Anselm of Canterbury stated this idea even more elegantly:

It was fitting, surely, that just as death had entered into the human race because of the disobedience of man, so by the obedience of man [Jesus], life should be restored. Further, just as the sin that was the cause of our condemnation had its origin in a woman, it was equally fitting that the author of our justification and salvation should be born of a woman. It is also fitting that the devil, who conquered man by tempting him to taste of the fruit of a tree, should be conquered by a man through suffering he endured on the wood of a tree. There are also many other things which, carefully considered, show a certain indescribable beauty in this manner of accomplishing our redemption.

[Anselm, "Why God Became Man," 3, in Why God Became Man and The Virgin Conception and Original Sin, trans. Joseph M. Colleran (Albany, NY: Magi, 1969), p. 68.]

Indescribable beauty, indeed. Still, the symmetry described by Irenaeus and Anselm is a regular parallelism, in which Christ and Adam each stand at the head of a parallel covenant or dispensation. In Hebrew poetry, we would call this a bicolon, meaning it is a parallel consisting of two ("bi" coming from the Latin bis, meaning "two") elements. Irenaeus' and Anselm's symmetry does not take into account the events of Revelation, including the Second Coming and New Jerusalem. One option, of course, is to treat this as a third parallel element: Christ's second advent stands at the head of a third dispensation, thereby adding a third parallel element and making the Christian Bible effectively a poetic tricolon ("tri" meaning "three"). But there is another option, which has been more fully explored by modern theologians: we could treat the Bible as an inverted parallelism, or what in Hebrew poetry is called a chiasm. A chiasm is a poetic structure that follows the pattern A-B-B-A, in which the two "A" elements parallel each other, as do the two "B" elements. The center of a chiasm serves as a focal, turning point. The key to seeing biblical history as a chiasm lay in seeing the pre-Christian era as a history of the kingdom of man and the Christian era as a history of the kingdom of God, with Jesus-- in whom the kingdoms of man and of God collide in a single person-- standing in the center as a turning-point.

One of the more powerful recent presentations of this idea of salvation history as an inverted parallelism was put together by Rob Bell. In one of his Nooma video productions, Bell highlights biblical passages that place the tree of life in both the Garden of Eden at the beginning of the Bible and in the New Jerusalem at the end of the Bible. The present Bell describes as the world "between the trees". This theme was also powerfully elaborated by Jacques Ellul in his book The Meaning of the City. Ellul argued that after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, humans sought security by banding together in cities. First Cain and then Nimrod were great city-builders, and early human history is the story of people seeking security through the acquisition of power and the construction of empires. In other words, the city is the ultimate icon of human rebellion and selfishness. Paradoxically, Jesus arrives in the center of the greatest empire of all-- the Roman empire-- and rather than rejecting it, he begins to transform it with his self-sacrificial love. At the end of the Bible the Garden has been replaced by a city-- one transformed and redeemed for God's purposes-- at the center of which stands the tree of life.

The mythic beauty and power of the biblical narrative continues to astonish, millennia after its composition and compilation. I do not take this as a literal telling of salvation-history, as some conservative Christians are wont to do. But I do take it as a powerful mytho-poetic narrative that expresses something fundamentally true about human existence and the human condition.

It is true that power, cities, empires, and technology can and have led to tremendous corruption and suffering for the human race. But it is also true that the transition from the relative innocence of our ancient agrarian, hunter-gatherer existence to the complexity of modern urban life is simply irreversible. It is true that cities and empires are massive loci of power, politics, and selfishness. But it is also true that they can be transformed into a tremendous force for good by the self-sacrificial love of their citizens. It is true that we are "fallen" from our ideal selves. But it is also true that we can be redeemed.

I do not believe that either bookend of the biblical narrative-- the Garden or the New Jerusalem-- is a literal reality. I believe, nevertheless, that they present us with vivid images of the human potential for peaceful and harmonious co-existence. Jesus, the central character-motif in the Christian narrative, is the ultimate image of man-in-harmony-with-divine-love. He is the pioneer of harmony and self-sacrifice whom all Christians strive to emulate. He is the iconic mediator between the kingdom of power and the kingdom of divine peace.