Christ the Fulfillment: The Doctrine of Recapitulation

It’s always a fascinating exercise to think about what it would have been like to be among the first Christians. For, unlike us, they did not have a ‘New Testament’. They did not have a Christian tradition to fall back on. What those first Christians had was their Jewish Scriptures and theological traditions and an experience of Jesus. The task for these first Christian theologians was to try to figure out how these two things came together. This meant, as I wrote in my post on how the New Testament interprets the Old Testament, “harnessing the language and stories of their religious and cultural heritage in order to understand, give meaning to, and articulate what they [had] experienced in Jesus.” This necessarily led to a creative re-reading of their Scriptures and tradition, a re-reading that understood that Jesus of Nazareth, whom they (and we following their lead) believed to be the Messiah, the Christ, was the key to all of it. But, they did this in an interesting way. Jesus was not simply an answer to the questions posed by the Hebrew Bible, thereby acting to supersede and erase those questions, but carried in his person and identity the questions and stories themselves. This is to say, they understood that Jesus fulfilled the Scriptures by embodying them, living them out, and, in a very real way, re-doing them. He was humanity’s and Israel’s great do-over, not erasing what had happened before, but bringing it to completion. This idea is known as “recapitulation,” and is the first important way of looking at the atonement I’d like to talk about in this series.

While the term recapitulation is odd, it has some New Testament precedent. In his prayer that begins Ephesians, Paul blesses God for the many things God has done in Christ, including letting us in on the “plans which reveal the Divine Mystery for the completion of history: For everything, in every aspect of the cosmos, to be brought together in Christ” (Ephesians 1.9-10, paraphrase mine). What I translated as ‘brought together in’ can be translated as ‘brought under the authority of’, ‘summed up in,’ or, literally, ‘recapitulated.’ As I wrote in my series on Ephesians last Summer:

“[T]his same idea is a helpful way of understanding how the first Christians understood how Jesus related to Israel’s salvation history. All of Israel is ‘recapitulated’ in Jesus’ own story: he ‘sums it up’ and brings it to its fulfillment. So, if Israel was God’s chosen (see, e.g., Isaiah 42.1), holy and blameless before God, Jesus is the fulfillment of Israel’s election and the calling to be truly holy and blameless — in fact, he becomes the one who shows us what true holiness and blamelessness look like.

This idea has two prongs in early Christian thought: Christ as a second Adam and a second Israel. Both of these are important for understanding the teaching’s meaning and legacy.

In the New Testament (though interestingly not really in the Old!), Adam is a symbol of humanity’s shared identity and common vocation, which is “to reflect God’s character in the world, to acknowledge, uphold, and sustain God’s image in others, to tend to and protect the rest of creation, and to live our lives, flourishing and fruitful, for the sake of others.” Adam, of course, failed to live out this calling, thereby introducing sin into the world and setting it on its present default trajectory. As Paul would put it, “sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned.” But, “ if just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5.13, 19). Jesus’ faithfulness undoes Adam’s faithlessness. To understand this conceptually, we might think of Jesus as a ‘patch’ which fixes a programming glitch that has caused humanity to malfunction. The patch restores humanity to its original programming — but you have to install the patch. This is the heart of Paul’s “in Christ” teaching, as exemplified in this passage from Romans 6:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. (Romans 6.3-8)

John’s theology of Jesus as the Word, or Logos, of God also fits in with this sensibility: Here, the Logos is Creation’s original programming, which becomes human and, essentially ‘plays through’ the whole program of human life and death, providing us with a path to play the game ‘to win’.

Outside the New Testament, this sense of recapitulation thought is most closely associated with the second-century theologian St. Ireneaus of Lyons. Here are a couple illustrative quotes to show how this giant of early Christian thought understood our salvation:

He was in these last days, according to the time appointed by the Father, united to His own workmanship, inasmuch as He became a man liable to suffering … he commenced afresh [or summed up in Himself] the long line of human beings, and furnished us, in a brief, comprehensive manner, with salvation; so that what we had lost in Adam — namely, to be according to the Image and likeness of God — that we might recover in Christ Jesus” (Against Heresies 3.18.1)

He has therefore in His work of recapitulation, summed up all things … And therefore does the Lord profess Himself to be the Son of man, comprising in Himself that original man … in order that, as our species went down to death through a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life again through a victorious one.” (Against Heresies 5.32.2)

The second prong of the doctrine of recapitulation places the emphasis not on the restoration of humanity but on the perfection and fulfillment of Israel, which is understood to be God’s initial attempt at returning humanity to faithfulness. Unfortunately, as the story of the Hebrew Bible shows, this turned out to be a disappointment, with God’s people struggling as much with remaining faithful as their Gentile neighbours. To go back to the programming metaphor, here the idea is that Israel was God’s first patch, providing a further set of clarifying coding, but, history showed that this was not strong enough to completely fix the problem. Here, Jesus ends up being the perfection and fulfillment of the patch. We see this understanding at play often in the New Testament, which goes out of its way to frame Jesus’ life as a repetition of Israel’s history: He is named Jesus, which is an anglicization of the Greek version of Joshua, the leader who brought Israel into the Land of Promise. He is forced to seek refuge in Egypt and is brought back to the Land of Promise, just like Israel (Matthew 2.14-15, which quotes Hosea 11.1); he spends time in the wilderness, just like Israel (e.g., Luke 4); his baptism in the Jordan River mirrors Israel’s crossing the Jordan into the Land of Promise (Luke 3); Matthew frames Jesus’ teaching in five major discourses, mirroring the five books of the Law; and, of course, all four Gospel writers frame the story of Jesus’ death in terms of the Passover narrative (a major theme in early Christian thought that I will look at in the next post in this series). In the same way, the first Christians applied many of the titles given to Israel in the Scriptures to Jesus: He was “the Beloved” (Matthew 3.17, but see Deuteronomy 33.12, Isaiah 4.1, etc.), “the Chosen” (Luke 9.35, but see Genesis 12 and Exodus 19), and is described in ways that take on the role of the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 52), an image that clearly applies to the whole people in the original oracle, but which the first Christians saw as applying first and foremost to Jesus, who they believed embodied the people’s suffering within his own. This prong has a further element, which early Christians — and particularly the writers of the New Testament — were happy to exploit: that in recapitulating all of Israel’s history and identity in himself, those concepts now apply to all who are “in him.” So, even as the Son is the Chosen and the Beloved, so too are all who are in him “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (1 Peter 2.9).

I think from all this it’s clear that recapitulation was a major way the first Christians, and especially the New Testament writers, understood the saving work of Jesus. Here we again see the ancient Christian maxim, ‘We become by grace all that He is by nature’: We are chosen in him, the Chosen one, who has recapitulated the chosen people of God. This in turn leads easily to the common ancient understanding of salvation in terms of theosis, or union with God. But if it was so important and is so clearly biblical, why did it lose favour? Why is it not what immediately comes to mind for us? Before trying to answer these questions and assess it, first, let’s look at how it handles some important questions in a summary table, which I’ll include in every post in this series.

Reading through this table, a lot of the answers are strong and satisfying. But, I think there are two weak links and these are helpful in understanding why perhaps recapitulation was not thought to be sufficient for a full understanding of what God was doing in Jesus. These are what it has to say about the cross and the resurrection, namely that they are basically unnecessary for understanding salvation when looked at through this lens. This is really the weakness for all understandings of salvation that place a strong emphasis on the Incarnation: Jesus could have died a natural death and, not only would it not impair this understanding of his work, but it would have actually strengthened it, for in so doing he would have ‘sanctified’ the aging and dying process. In the same way, while the resurrection is an important sign here, it is not at all the major apocalyptic event it clearly is in the Scriptures. It’s clear in both Paul and especially throughout the Acts of the Apostles that the first Christians believed the resurrection changed everything. And the recapitulation way of understanding the atonement doesn’t quite capture that spirit. And I think that’s why it’s never really been used as a full ‘theory’ of the atonement like some of the others, but always held together with other images.

So then, recapitulation represents one of the earliest, and also one of the most powerful, ways Christians understood what it was God was doing in Jesus. It offers us a beautiful vision of salvation as humanity being restored to our original programming and thereby able to fulfill our original vocation to bear the image and likeness of God in the world. But, on its own, it is unable to capture the full drama and weight that the first Christians clearly understood Jesus’ death and the cross and resurrection to carry. And for that reason, it was never understood to be complete on its own, but was always held as one important part of a mosaic of images and metaphors.