Relocating To Elfland

Lately I’ve been thinking again about the relationship between soteriology and cosmology: what God does in Christ for sinners and what He does in Christ for the world. All of this is bound up, of course, with definitions of the “gospel”: is the gospel about God’s saving sinners, or is it about His saving the world? I, for one, would like to say “both”; and in some recent reading in Romans, it became freshly clear to me why. The gospel of God, says Paul, is “about” (peri in the Greek) the Son of God (Rom 1:3). If you want to talk about the gospel, you have to talk first about Jesus the Son of God – and from Jesus, scripture moves organically to how He stands related to sinners (“He will save His people from their sins”) and to the cosmos (one thinks here of the magnificent hymn in Colossians 1:15–20). To put it somewhat technically, the nexus between soteriology and cosmology is Christology (which is charged with eschatology, but that’s another story).

When the church thinks of the gospel restrictively, purely in terms of individual souls getting saved, this is because of a deficient Christology. What on earth might it mean, in such a gospel, that Christ is the Last Adam? (I suspect the answer might be that He is Last Adam at the head of redeemed sinners now, and that He will be Last Adam over the world to come, but this has little to do with the present dying world.)

Likewise, however, when the church thinks of the gospel as a cosmic restoration plan in which individual reconciliation to God is relatively unimportant, this too is because of impoverished Christology. Jesus died under God’s righteous wrath against the real sins of real sinners, after all; and without the good news of propitiation, forgiveness, justification, and adoption, there might be a new heavens and new earth one day, but it will be uninhabited.