Relocating To Elfland

I’m reading through David VanDrunen’s Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, and he keeps saying things that I think I must have misread, they’re so incredible to me. Our first father Adam, he writes, was given a royal task in the present world (the one you’re sitting on now while you read this), which task was to take dominion over the earth (p. 40). So far, so good; now here’s where things get a bit dicey. When Adam finished his royal task, the result was to be an immediate transfer to a new and entirely different “world-to-come” (or “new creation,” p. 40). That’s right: this “present creation . . . was never meant to be the final home of the human race” (p. 66), which was as true in Adam’s day as it is in ours. But that is not all, no, that is not all.

The means by which Adam was to finish his task in the world was his sustaining a probationary test of obedience in a particular garden, the garden of Eden (pp. 41–43, in which VanDrunen provides an exegesis of Genesis 2:15–17). Were Adam successfully to sustain his probation, he would immediately be transferred to the new (and totally different) creation or world-to-come, having “completed” his royal work on earth (p. 53). In VanDrunen’s words, “Adam was to have his entire obedience in the entire world determined through a particular test in a particular location [i.e., Eden]” (p. 50, emphasis in original).

[I should note parenthetically that this description of Adam’s task (take dominion), the intended outcome of his task (transfer to a different world), and the means by which his task was to be accomplished and the outcome attained (Eden probation), is based exclusively on VanDrunen’s reading of Hebrews 2:5–8. Whether his exegesis of the Hebrews text is accurate, and whether, if so, it can bear all the weight he wants it to, are questions I’m not prepared to address here.]

VanDrunen’s view of Adam’s task and the extremely circumscribed means by which it was to be “finished” leads to a particular view (which I must say I find utterly idiosyncratic) of Christ’s task as the Last Adam. Let’s begin with this:

“Before the second Adam no one accomplished the task of the first Adam, and after the second Adam no one needs to accomplish it. The last Adam has completed it once and for all.” (p. 50)

He goes on to assert that even as Adam’s obedience to the dominion mandate would have been exhausted in his sustaining his Eden probation, Christ’s obedience to the dominion mandate was exhausted when He finished His life of obedience (sustaining many temptations) and His work on the cross. There is nothing more now for Christ to do; His work (and the work given to the first Adam) is finished, once-for-all.

This, in turn, leads to a very definite answer to the question whether Christians (those in Christ) are still bound by the original dominion mandate given to Adam. Let me offer two quotes to show how serious VanDrunen is about his answer to this question:

“If Christ is the last Adam, then we are not new Adams. To understand our own cultural work as picking up and finishing Adam’s original task is, however unwittingly, to compromise the sufficiency of Christ’s work. Christ perfectly atoned for all our sins, and hence we have no sins left to atone personally. Likewise, Christ perfectly sustained a time of testing similar to Adam’s: he achieved the new creation through his flawless obedience in this world. He has left nothing yet to be accomplished.” (pp. 50–51, emphasis in original)

In another place he puts it even more strongly:

“Those who hold a traditional Protestant view of justification consistently should not find a redemptive transformationalist perspective attractive. As some of the Reformers grasped, a two-kingdoms doctrine is a proper companion to a Protestant doctrine of justification.” (p. 21, emphasis in original)

[For those unfamiliar with this terminology, by the “redemptive transformationalist perspective” VanDrunen means the view that Christians are to fulfill the dominion mandate, redeeming all of human life and seeking to transform the world in so doing. The “two-kingdoms doctrine,” by contrast, is the view VanDrunen himself is propounding.]

Follow the logic: the entire dominion mandate was to be fulfilled in Adam’s sustaining his Eden probation; he failed, but Christ fulfilled the entire dominion mandate in sustaining His probation; to say that Christians are in any sense bound by the dominion mandate is to say we need to finish the work of Christ, which undermines the sufficiency of His work and the traditional Protestant doctrine of justification.

All rather breathtaking, is it not? But there’s one more piece:

“Christians do not pick up and continue the task of Adam. Thanks to the finished work of Christ, Christians should view their cultural activities in a radically different way from the way that the first Adam viewed his. We pursue cultural activities in response to the fact [note this] that the new creation has already been achieved, not in order to contribute to its achievement.” (p. 57)

Now I’m probably just being a simpleton, but this dichotomy strikes me as a wondrous false. Are these really the only two options: either we “contribute to achieving” the new creation (in some sort of meritorious sense), or it has “already been entirely achieved”? I mean, substitute the word “atonement” or even “justification” for “new creation,” and I’m all in: we don’t contribute to Christ’s atoning work or our justification, because His atoning work is finished once-for-all, and we receive justification in the empty hands of faith. But the new creation? Somehow I’ve always had this compromised notion that the new creation is neither something once-for-all achieved nor something we merit by our own works, but rather something Christ has inaugurated and which is gradually being unfolding in the world under His lordship. But that, obviously, gets back to the whole simpleton thing.

I have an awful lot I would like to say about pretty much every point of VanDrunen’s thesis. In case you’re still wondering, I don’t like it. Not one little bit. But I’m out of time presently, so I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to ponder.