Gift of Death<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"“Christian life is an impossible newness given as an unfitting gift,” writes John Barclay in his contribution to Apocalyptic Paul. Since\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/11\/gift-of-death\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Gift of Death\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"“Christian life is an impossible newness given as an unfitting gift,” writes John Barclay in his contribution to Apocalyptic Paul. 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{"id":16842,"date":"2014-11-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1667"},"modified":"2014-11-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-11-24T00:00:00","slug":"gift-of-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/11\/gift-of-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Gift of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

\u201cChristian life is an impossible newness given as an unfitting gift,\u201d writes John Barclay in his contribution to\u00a0Apocalyptic Paul<\/a>. Since it is a gift, the \u201cnew competence\u201d of believers \u201cis wholly dependent on the life of Christ, present within\u201d (73-74).<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s important to specify what that gift is. It is not \u201ca new set of competencies added to their previous capacities, nor an enhancement of their previous selfs.\u201d The gift is \u201crather a death, and the emergence from that death of a new self, essentially ectopic in dependence on the resurrection life of Christ\u201d (74).<\/p>\n

Given this fundamental structure to Paul\u2019s theology, he is not overworried about stressing the inability of human beings; he doesn\u2019t need to remind them at every turn that the \u201cbeliever\u2019s agency is really<\/em> the Spirit or Christ.\u201d Instead, \u201cHe gives genuine exhortations to genuinely freed agents who are urged to more than passive acquiescence in the work of another. In other words, Paul does not \u2018perfect\u2019 the efficacy of grace into a formula of monergism because it is clear for him from the baptismal event that the very life in which the believer acts and decides is a life sources, established, and upheld by Christ (a \u2018life from the dead\u2019). Within this frame and on this basis, plenty of statements can be made regarding believers as responsible agents, required to present their bodies in one direction rather than another\u201d (74).<\/p>\n

Which leads to two observations: First, this raises the question of whether Protestant anxiety about works, about exhortations and moral effort, is related to a faulty baptismal theology. Perhaps the need to stress monergism at every turn is a substitute for a strong doctrine of baptismal death and resurrection. And, second, the particular failure of baptismal theology might be the failure to see it as itself an act of God, a son of Adam\u2019s \u201cjustification from sin.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"