“we shall be saved” (vv. 9–10), and there is nothing left to us but to glory in our existence. On the death of God’s Son there follows His life as the Risen One (v. 10). When we put our faith in God’s righteous decision carried out in Him, we immediately become sharers in Christ’s triumph—“how much more” (pollō mallon).
In this context Paul uses this phrase twice: “Since Christ died for us when we were yet sinners, how much more shall we”—on the ground of our justification which is already objectively complete—“be saved by Him” (vv. 8–9); and “Since, when we were yet enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, how much more shall we, as the reconciled, be saved in His risen life” (v. 10). Here it is explicitly made clear that this argument from reconciliation to salvation is logically based upon the fact that Christ has not only died but has also risen. Ahead of us lies salvation, and—since, having shared His death, we must now share His life with Him as well—we can do nothing but glory in it. In particular, the stupendous fact that the believer may and must glory in his existence has its ground and meaning here. We glory “in God” (v. 11) when we glory in our hope (v. 2). Put concretely, that means that we glory “through our Lord Jesus,” through His mouth and His voice, we glory in the glory which, as the resurrected from the dead, He proclaims. His risen life sets the seal upon the righteous decision of God effected in His death, and because He lives, this peace, and our reconciliation, and the pouring forth of the love of God in our hearts, mark a point in our journey beyond which there is no turning back, going on from which we have only one future, and in which we can only glory. His resurrection is the supreme act of God’s sovereignty; henceforth we are bound to live and think in its light.
It is clear that although Paul sees Christ as belonging together with God and His work, he also sees Him as distinguished from God, and speaks, too, of His human nature. It is clear that he puts the man Jesus in His dying and rising on the one side, and himself and all other men (here, in the first place, believers), with their past, present, and future, on the other side. It is clear that he speaks of Him as a human individual and describes Him as such with unmistakable emphasis. But the existence of this human individual does not therefore exhaust itself in its individuality. The very existence of this individual is identical with a divine righteous decision which potentially includes an indefinite multitude of other men, so as to be manifest and effective in those who believe in Him in a way that is absolutely decisive for their past, present, and future. He reconciles them with God through His death. That means that in His own death He makes their peace with God—before they themselves have decided for this peace and quite apart from that decision. In believing, they are only conforming to the decision about them that has already been made in Him. What matters most to them is that they are no longer the enemies of God that they once were; ahead of them is future salvation instead of certain condemnation in the judgment of God’s wrath; they have, also, the certain hope of sharing in God’s own glory and can only glory in existing in such a hope. All that is due, not to their resolving and disposing, which rather tended in precisely the opposite direction, but to the fact that it was settled without and in spite of them, when He died on Golgotha and was raised up from the grave in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea. In believing in Him they are acknowledging that when He died and rose again, they, too, died and rose again in Him, and that, from now on, their life, in its essentials, can only be a copy and image of His. It is He who is God’s love toward them, and when this love of God is poured forth in their hearts through the Holy Spirit, that can only mean that He is in them and they in Him—and that happens quite independently of any prior love toward God from their side. Afterward, and because this has happened, they are of course asked about that also. But this must be understood quite literally: they glory even now “through Him,” and only through Him (v. 11), in echo of the new glory of human existence proclaimed through His mouth. Apart from that, and of themselves, there would be nothing in human existence in which they could glory.
Such then is the status of this human individual. He is an individual in such a way that others are not only beside Him and along with Him, but in their most critical decision about their relationship to God, they are also and first of all in Him. His individuality is such therefore that with His being and doing, with His living and dying, a decision is made about them also, which at first is simply contrary to their own decision, and which afterward they can only acknowledge and carry out in their own decision. He pleads their cause, not merely as if it were His own, but, in and with His own cause, He in fact pleads theirs. He does that in such measure that it might well be asked how He Himself in His individuality could remain distinct from them. But it appears that His individual distinctness from them is preserved by the unique way in which He identifies Himself with them. And, at the same time, the precedence in origin and status between Him and them remains intact and irreversible. His function remains that of giving, theirs of receiving; His of leading the way, theirs of following. His position remains unchangeably that of original, theirs of copy. He remains unmistakably distinguished from any of them.
It is, however, first in vv. 12–21 that these relationships become quite clear. In this second half of the chapter, Paul goes farther than in the first half by setting the same material in a wider context. Here the new point is that the special anthropology of Jesus Christ—the one man for all men, all men in the one man—constitutes the secret of “Adam” also, and so is the norm of all anthropology. Paul now makes a fresh start with the question of the past out of which believers have come and in which they still have a part, and at the same time he takes up again the question of the totality of men whom, in vv. 6–10 he had first set over against Christ as weak, sinners, godless, enemies.
V. 12 has usually been taken as an anacoluthon.2 More probably it should be taken as a kind of heading to what follows. For this reason (dia touto) are we such as vv. 1–11 described us, for this reason shall we be saved by sharing in the risen life of Jesus Christ, for this reason do we glory in our hope through Him—namely, that already as weak, sinners, godless, and enemies, already as children and heirs of Adam, and so in the past from which we came, we were not completely beyond the reach of the truth of Jesus Christ, but stood in a definite (even if negative) relationship to His saving power. V. 12 sets out this negative relationship. “As through one man sin has broken into the world, and through sin death, and as death has spread to all men, for that all men have sinned”—in other words, the relationship between Adam and all of us then, in the past, corresponds to the relationship between Christ and all of us now, in the present. Because of that correspondence it is true, as Paul has already emphasized in vv. 6, 8, 10, that Christ died for us while we were still living in the unredeemed past with Adam. Because of it, even in that past we were not completely forsaken and lost. Because of it, we can now look back at that past with good cheer—and can therefore “so much the more” glory in our present, and in the future that opens out from it. We were not, even then, in an entirely different world. Even then, we existed in an order whose significance was of course just the opposite of that of the Kingdom of Christ, but which had the same structure.
When we look back we must and we may recognize the ordering principle of the Kingdom of Christ even in the ordering principle of the world of Adam. Even when we were weak, sinners, godless, enemies, though we were traveling in a very different direction, the rule of the road strikingly resembled—was indeed the same as—the one we know now. Between our former existence outside Christ and our present existence in Him there is a natural connection. Our former existence outside Christ is, rightly understood, already a still hidden but real existence in Him. Because of that, we dare to confess that we have peace with God, we dare to glory in our future salvation—we who still have that past, we who today are still the same men who were once weak, sinners, godless, and enemies. Our past cannot frighten us: in spite of it, and even taking it fully into account, we are still allowed and required to confess our reconciliation and glory in our salvation, just because our past as such—namely, the relationship between Adam and all of us—was already ordered so as to correspond to our present and future—namely, the relationship between Christ and all of us. That is what is made clear in the heading in v. 12.
The meaning of the famous parallel (so
