I find reading early church history sometimes feels like walking through tall weeds.  It’s easy to forget what’s at stake and how God is writing a larger story for His glory.   I have bushwhacked for a couple of weeks trying to develop context for two quotations from Dr. Wilken’s book, Early Christian Thought.  (This is not his fault as a writer, but my inadequacy as a communicator.)  The more I read and wrote the weedier it got.  So, at the risk of minimal context, I offer two excerpts from Dr. Wilken’s book that have caused me to consider anew what Christ has done for me and who He’s making me.

In the chapter discussing the Incarnation and the question before the early church regarding whether Christ had one or two wills (one divine and the other human), Wilken writes:

“When Cyril [of Alexandria] writes his commentary on the Gospel of John, he sees another dimension of the Resurrection.  The Resurrection was evidence that Christ was a unique kind of man.   Christ, he writes, “presented himself to God the Father as the first fruits of humanity….He opened up for us a way that the human race had not known before.”  Before Christ came into the world “human nature was incapable of destroying death,” but Christ was superior to the tribulation of the world and “more powerful” than death.  Hence he became the first man who was able to conquer death and corruption.  By showing himself stronger than death, Christ extends to us the power of his Resurrection “because the one that overcame death was one of us.”  Then Cyril adds the sentence, “If he conquered as God, to us it is nothing; but if he conquered as man we conquered in Him.  For he is to us the second Adam come from heaven according to the Scripture.”  This is an extraordinary statement and to my knowledge unprecedented.  Cyril asserts that Christ triumphed over death because of the kind of human being he was.  His human nature makes Christ unique.”  [Early Christian Thought, pp 120-121]

Continued . . . .