The summing up, bringing together, recapitulation, or synthesizing of all things (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι) in Christ (Ephesians 1:10), in the earliest development of atonement theory by Irenaeus (A.D. 120-203) and several of the early church fathers, captures the New Testament picture and the early church’s understanding of the work of Christ. As in the context of Ephesians, this recapitulation is at once cosmic and directly concerned with personal salvation: “We have redemption” in Christ (Eph 1:7), but so too do “all things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph 1:10). The all-inclusive nature of recapitulation, includes elements such as the life of Christ, which will come to be neglected (Irenaeus is focused on Christ’s life of obedience as opposed to Adam’s disobedience). Later traditional theories of the atonement, and even early confessions (the Apostle’s creed) skip over the life of Jesus, to say nothing of the cosmic and the historical. The focus on the legal aspects of the death of Jesus tend to center on his birth and death, and the practical, experiential, and psychological, even in the nature of his death, are not addressed. In the developments of Anselm and Calvin, death is reduced to a payment, while in Paul, the obedience of the Son to death on the cross (Phil. 2:8) is not simply a legal condemnation nor a single historical fact, but it takes in the totality of what God has done in Christ through the whole movement from the incarnation of the gift of the Spirit.[1] Recapitulation plays out in the texture and details of the life of Christ, tying together the life of Christ with the manner of his death. Likewise, the believer in imitating and being joined to the life of Christ, is taking up the quality of eternal life (a lived reality and not simply a legal abstraction).
Being joined to Christ, the head of a new humanity, is not a consequence but the substance of salvation. Where legal theories separate the life of Christ, ethics, and the lived reality of the Christian life from salvation (focused as they are on divine satisfaction), recapitulation is a practical salvation, in that being in Christ, being joined to Christ, living the Christian life, putting on the mind of Christ, is the content of salvation. In turn, the problem or condemnation of sin, is not simply a future punishment but a present form of humanity, as in the first Adam (Romans 5, a focus of Irenaeus). Thus, the difference between the first and second Adam is one way of depicting the content of what it means to be saved, and what exactly one is saved from.
Repetition in the trinity of Self Versus Recapitulation in the Trinity
Though being in the first (Adam) or the second (Christ) type of humanity, entails a form of imitation and repetition, recapitulation describes a repetition with a difference rather than a repetition of sameness. In the simplest terms, Jesus did not repeat the failures of the race of Adam. He identified with sinful humanity, with suffering, pain, and death. He traversed birth, childhood, adulthood, Jewishness, maleness, and death, but he took this to a new place and experience, and did not repeat the failures of the former race, but summed it up, so as to become the head of a new race. The difference between these two is the difference between the trinity of ego, law, and the body of death, and entry into participation in the Father, through the Son by the Spirit.
Repetition captures the relationship to the law or the symbolic order, which Paul describes as an antagonism between the ego, the law, and death. Where the law is made primary, as in forbidden desire or in the notion that life is in the letter of the law, the relationship is to an object and the image it holds out (the ego or “I”) is one of lack. Not just that one cannot keep the law, but life or the self is lacking. Deceptive, death-dealing desire overtakes the will in compulsive repetition, attempting to obtain the object of desire. The trinity of law, absence or loss (“I”), and desire define the Subject of sin.
A key difference between living death and life in the Spirit, is that the death of the “I” divides and alienates, while life in the Spirit is a communion founded by the Father who has sent his Son (Ro 8.3) who leads by his Spirit (Ro 8.14). The Father is the primary agent who subjected creation in hope (Ro 8.20), who makes all things work to the good for those who love him (Ro 8.28), who has foreknown and predestined those he called (Ro 8.29) and these he has justified and glorified (Ro 8.31). This communion is “in Christ Jesus” who was sent to free from the law of sin and death (Ro 8.2,3) by condemning sin in the flesh (Ro 8.3), who gives his Spirit of life (Ro 8.9) so that those who suffer with him will be glorified together with him (Ro 8.17) and who died and was raised and intercedes so that nothing can separate from the love of God (Ro 8.34-35). Recapitulation founds the new race in life in the Trinity.
In the recapitulated form of this relation, the child of God relates directly to Abba, through the Spirit, with the image of the Son before him. The Trinity, fills in the trinitarian absence. Through the work of the Trinity, relation with the Father is no longer mediated through the law but through the Son, and the Spirit is the enabling power of righteousness (Ro. 8.10). The law marked a covenantal relationship fulfilled in Christ who makes it possible to keep the covenant relationship with God through participation in the Trinity.
The Power of Death in the word and Life in the Word
The stark difference in the two Adam’s of Romans 5, is that one introduced death, and the other introduces life. “For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ” (Ro 5:17).
The power of death to produce sin, has been largely obscured due to the Augustinian misreading of the problem, but the power of death is identifiable in multiple ways. The power to kill, to sacrifice, and to oppress is the obvious form of death’s power. But the law of sin and death can also be described psychologically, as mistaking the human word for the Word of life.
The power of death in the law, is death denied, obscured, or covered over. The law poses the possibility of an eternalizing repetition of the same, in which the inanimate letter, the law, language, does not suffer or die. Interpolating oneself into the law, being a law keeper or even identifying with the letter, poses an escape from death through extracting the self from life. This orientation to the law (or to death), is the drive behind destructive compulsions, addictions, or repetitions, which rely upon the letter, or the word, to repeat the self.
The lie which the serpent tells in Genesis, and Paul’s explanation of that lie (Ro 7), pictures absence (of God) and presence (of the symbolic order or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) as its own kind of false power (attaining divinity). The negative (death, absence) does not take an obvious or conscious part in the binary of language (or the knowledge of good and evil), but symbolic features are dependent on presence and absence. To imagine the symbolic contains a real presence is to miss the absence upon which it depends.
Freud illustrates this with his grandson, who learned to talk while playing with a spool. In Freuds estimate the spool was functioning in place of relationship to mother. The boy could make it appear and disappear, accompanied by the German equivalent of “Here/Gone.” He was in control of the spool, but his mother continually left him. According to Jacques Lacan, words are always “a presence made of absence.”[2] The law, the knowledge of good and evil, or perhaps every child’s entry into language would produce life and being through absence.
Recapitulation entails at its heart, the recapitulation in and through the Word, which brings about life and presence through the Spirit. The Spirit can be equated with life (Ro 8:2,10-11), and with the introduction of the Spirit, Paul’s question of 7:24 is definitively answered: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”
The Law of the Father Versus Abba, Father
Rather than a relationship with a person, the impersonal law poses as father (in the role of God). The insistence to be through the law, is the repetition of death or the letter that kills. That is, the compulsion to repeat is a product of the attempt to establish the self like an object, to repeat the self, in and through a medium (the Scriptures, the letter, the symbolic) that is inherently impossible. There is no life in the law.[3]
The ego or I in the mirror of the law, is a false construct, and the father in this relation is the superego or the law taken up into the self. “The father, the name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of the law.”[4] In Freudian theory, the Subject arises from the self-negating activity of sacrifice (castration or passage through the Oedipus complex). “Sacrifice is a guarantee that ‘the Other exists’: that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of the sacrifice.”[5] In other words, there is an inherent hostility towards the Other of the law (the symbolic or superego or father) as this Other demands continual service and sacrifice.
The inheritance of life in the Spirit, is indicative of the ontological shift from being one’s own father to being a child of God. The former inherits alienation and death while the latter will be glorified with Christ (Ro 8:17). The former is a slave serving the law of sin while the latter is enabled to please God (Ro 8:8). This status of being the sons of God means that “you put to death the deeds of the body” (Ro 8.13). Pleasing God, and not simply serving the demands of the law, is the goal, but this entails true righteousness (and not simply the imputed kind).
Righteousness is not individual, but it is to be made right in relationship. God’s covenant faithfulness to his people is the fulfilment of his righteousness, and in turn the faithfulness of his children to this relationship is their righteousness. Righteousness is being brought into a right relationship with God and overcoming the alienation and hostility towards God, and this resolves the alienating conflict with the self and others. God is fulfilling and has fulfilled this righteousness in those he has called in Christ (Ro 8.30).
Paul’s cry at the end of Romans 7, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7:24), is followed by a cry of joy, “And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (8:15). The God who was known through the law previously (Ro 7) is “Abba” in the recapitulated relationship. This difference is wrought through “The Spirit himself” who “testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (8:15). Christ, as the firstborn son of this new family (8:29), provides the perspective of the successful outcome of a justification or righteousness already received. There is a recapitulation of relationship.
Recapitulation as Salvation
In recapitulation there is a positive repetition with a difference, and this allows for “following Christ”, or putting on Christ or being imitators of Christ. Repetition and imitation (as in Girard), may describe the seat of neurosis and violence, but in Christ imitation does not give rise to mimetic rivalry, and repetition is not focused on an object but on a person. The root cause of sin is addressed in the very term of salvation (recapitulation displaces repetition).
Recapitulation (anakephalaiōsasthai) is to change the head (kephalé), to sum up, synthesize, so as not simply to repeat but repeat with a different outcome.[6] The root word occurs in describing the summing up of the law in love (Mark 12:31), and those united under his headship are united with him in this loving recapitulation. Resolution to the alienation of the Subject of the law is to become a child of God. Where the sinful mind is “hostile to God” and cannot even recognize God, the one adopted as a child by the Spirit has overcome this hostility enacted against the law (Ro 8:7). As in Ezekiel’s prophecy, the heart of stone will be replaced with a heart of flesh and God’s Spirit will indwell his people and enable them to keep the law (Ezek. 36:26-27). Those who miss the summing up of love in Christ, get stuck on the letter, pitted against love.
Though fully human, Christ is obedient unto death, without sin, and with this comes peaceableness, love, non-violence, and a new ordering of the human psyche. To say he died for your sins, may miss that he lived and died to defeat evil, recapitulating human life so as to break the bondage of the law of sin and death. Christ incarnates a new form of human experience, and in being adopted into his family or joined to him, Christians enter into this alternative human experience.
[1] Theological dictionary of the New Testament Vol. 3, 1964- (G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley and G. Friedrich, ed.), 951 – 2.
[2] Ecrits: Selection, 65.
[3] Where Freud grounded the compulsion to repeat in a biological need to return to the stable material realm, Lacan explains the compulsion as arising from dissonance between the two registers (the imaginary and the symbolic). The image or ego is a visual static image, and the symbolic (the repeated “I”) is the means of establishing it.
[4] Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI , 34.
[5] Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom , 56.
[6] David T. Williams describes the various word studies of recapitulation in “Another look at recapitulation,” Pharos Journal of Theology (ISSN 2414-3324 online Volume 101 – (2020) Copyright: ©2020 Open Access/Author/s – Online @ http//: www.pharosjot.com) 3.