Last Adam
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!
[a] 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.
[3] 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.
If so, Paul would be thinking here of Christ as the ideal Adam, with his humanity perfectly expressing the divine image.
[c] One may likewise be less than fully convinced by those who find a reference to Adam in two hymnic or at least poetic passages: Colossians 1:15–20 and Philippians 2:6–11.
Further, it strains plausibility to argue that a mere Adamic model does justice to the language of "the fullness of God" dwelling in Christ (Col 1:19–20; cf.
Like the hymn or poem in Colossians, Hebrews also portrays Christ as the exact (divine) counterpart through whom the Father speaks and is revealed, and who is the one that sustains the entire universe: "He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power" (Heb 1:3).
Dunn suggest the author of the "Christ hymn" in Philippians 2:5-11 may be drawing a parallel between Adam and Jesus.
"[6] The Adamic interpretation of Philippians 2 stands in tension with the hymn's apparent affirmation of Christ as pre-existent deity before his incarnation.
Strimple writes, "For years I tried to maintain the view of Lightfoot that Paul here uses morphe with the sense it had acquired in Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotelian...
"[7] Likewise, Feinberg cautions, "the attractiveness of the Greek philosophical interpretation of morphe is that it gives the theologian about as strong an affirmation of the deity of Christ as is possible... One must, however, be careful that he does not read his theological convictions into the text when they are not there."
The Greek word harpagmon translated in Philippians 2:6 ("Something to be grasped after / exploited") is also a subject of much scholarly debate.
If harpagmon is rendered as "something to be exploited," as it is in many Christian Bible translations, then the implication is that Christ was already equal to God prior to his incarnation.
But Bart Ehrman and others have argued that the correct translation is in fact "something to be grasped after," implying that the pre-existent Jesus was not equal to God.
A study of harpagmon in other New Testament texts supports Ehrman's view, as the word is almost always used to refer to something that a person doesn't yet possess but tries to acquire.
[8] Scholars remain divided on whether the text affirms Christ's equality with God, nevertheless both sides acknowledge a possible Adamic parallel in Philippians 2.
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.
