Canter Bridge

Biblical realism is not given to flights of fancy. The biblical understanding of the human creature is tenaciously realistic about both his frailty and his enormous capacity for evil. The first chapters of the biblical anthology tell us that man and woman are glorious creatures, saturated with qualities that affiliate them more with the Creator than with the creation of which they are undeniably a part. It is this very grandeur that frames the fracturing of the divine image in humankind as tragedy rather than a merely regrettable accident.

If, as the old table prayer puts it, ‘God is great … God is good …’, the biblical witness might be paraphrased as claiming that ‘Humans are great … but humans are not good …’

So is the drama of redemption all the more compelling for the tragic context in which it finds its footing. Great and glorious things are at stake. The Book of Revelation, the culminating note of the biblical narrative, presents the Lord as both Creator and Author of a dramatically central new creation. It is hardly inconsequential that the book nicknames his adversary ‘Destroyer’.

Paul writes against the backdrop of this plot line. Ever the realist, he is also convinced that this world’s destiny is glory rather than ashes and that humankind as its appointed vassal lords will one day be known as the most glorious of all creatures. (His assessment of ‘the angels’ is correspondingly nuanced.)

Despite the apostle’s often bleak and traumatic experience at the hands of people whom he would consider resisters of God’s redemptive designs, he holds fast to the conviction that humanity’s destiny is more glorious than we are usually capable of imagining. Traces of this conviction emerge in his contest with the notion that the resurrection of the dead is somehow not entirely a corporeal matter:

There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable … Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

Paul considers that human being and experience correspond to two Precursors. One, the man Adam, by his rebellion binds all of humanity to a story line of defection, disintegration, death, and decay. The other, a kind of ‘new Adam’, Jesus Christ creates an alternative trajectory by which humanity—if and as it binds itself to this way and this hope—realizes its glorious destiny.

As one makes his daily rounds and bumps into his fellows of this human race, Paul would have us assume a penetrating angle of vision: each one of them—each one of us—bears the possibility of a horror too terrible to contemplate. Each one too, corralling his grocery bags into the back seat of a car, selling us our morning coffee with a snarl or a smile—carries about in her fragile body the potentiality of unspeakable glory.

Each one, for Paul, is on his way.