Humanity has one and only one enemy: Death. Death personified is biological death as the primary metaphor for the existential threat to all human meaning, value, and purpose. Unlike the biological death we encounter on the last day of our life, Death is aggressive throughout all human personal and corporate life and, by extension, throughout all living things. There are as many messengers and anticipations of Death as there are sufferings, tragedies, illnesses, famines, wars, failures, disappointments, treachery, and broken relationships in life.
The Atonement of God in Christ can be thought of as an ironic combat between God in Christ and Death where the aggression of Death in all its fury is absorbed in the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ and yet, in its moment of victory, God resurrects or transcends Death’s power over Jesus Christ in the Resurrection and, in the process, disarms Death such that Death becomes mere death and humanity is set free from that involuntary servitude to Death known as Sin. All human history before Christ is an anticipation of that clash and all human history following is the further illumination of the significance of that clash.
The Incarnation, on the other hand, evokes God in Christ’s explicit intervention in human affairs in Jesus of Nazareth as well as the implicit agitations of God in Christ throughout every single human experience throughout time: in the beginning, in a good Creation, to the pivot point of history in the Resurrection as a recapitulation of the goodness of Creation even in the midst of a corrupt human history seemingly inextricably bound to Sin and Death, and at the end of history where God in Christ’s rule will finally be uncontested.
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