Brandon Crowe, The Last Adam: A Theology of the Obedient Life of Jesus in the Gospels.
(Baker, 2017)
The title of Brandon Crowe’s book “The Last Adam” might set the reader’s expectation for a book based on those several passages in Paul’s letters which make an explicit contrast between Christ and Adam (Rom 5:12–21; 1 Cor 15:20–28, 42–49). However, the subtitle of Crowe’s book gives the game away, making it clear that his monograph represents a study in the “obedient life of Jesus in the Gospels.”
Crowe’s book sets out to answer the question as to how Jesus’ life—and not just his death—in the Gospels forms an important aspect of Christ’s work for our salvation, and he explores this against the backdrop of questions raised by many in and around evangelicalism, who suggest that Christians really do not have a developed answer to this question. While Crowe shares the view with these questioners that we must articulate a significance for the life and ministry of Jesus in the Gospels, and not just his death, as important a topic as that is, he is less convinced that Christians historically have had little to say on this subject. The main thrust of the book argues that Jesus’ life in the Gospels can be predominantly grasped as the work of the second Adam who comes to overturn the failure of the first Adam, conquering sin and Satan, and further to supply the obedience which Adam failed to render. This, he also demonstrates, is not a novel claim but one which finds representation in classical Protestant and Reformation thought and is further a theme which finds clear roots in the theology of the early Church, not least in figures like Irenaeus and Athanasius.
The structure of the book effectively argues the central thesis of the importance of Jesus’ obedient life as the undoing of Adam’s sin and supplying of Adam’s lacking righteous obedience, showing the way that the Gospels situate Jesus in Adamic terms against the backdrop of Israel’s history as similarly Adam shaped. With further chapters on the work which the Son has to do in John’s Gospel, and the relationship between Jesus’ own life and the inauguration of the Kingdom of God which he proclaimed, Crowe makes a compelling case that, not just Paul, but the four Gospels stress the salvific value of the obedient life of Jesus, the Messiah, as an act of vicarious obedience by which he rescues his people from those powers of sin and Satan that Adam brought down on his progeny.
Not only is the subject of this book one of deep theological and pastoral significance from which any Christian reader would benefit, encouraging us to reflect deeply on the whole ministry of Christ’s life in the Gospels and drawing us to worship him, it also does a remarkably good job of drawing together facets of Christian thinking which often operate in abstraction from one another, and in a way that shows their mutual necessity and complementarity: along the way reflecting on particular key texts in the Gospels with exegetical insight, developing the themes of the Gospels against their Old Testament backgrounds biblically theologically, and doing so in the light both of systematic theological connections and the thought of Christian theologians from the past.
All in all it is a book that is particularly worth reading, not just for its coverage of the important and joyful reality of Christ’s life lived redemptively for us, but also for the many added benefits along the way, in which Crowe enriches our understanding of how to read the Gospels in the light of Christian theology and the teachers of the Church whom God has given.
