If the Devil Won the Test, the World Would Not Be

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Mark 1:9-15

The New Testament scholar J. Louis Martyn refers to the apocalyptic announcement of the gospel as a watershed event. Either we will (re)interpret all reality from the starting point of Christ and him crucified, or we will retrofit Jesus and his work to our antecedent assumptions.

The Gospel passage with which the church begins the season of Lent is a clear example of what Martyn means by making Jesus Christ the starting point of all our thinking; in particular, Martyn would have us interpret the ostensibly general claims of the Old Testament in light of the creedal claims about Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim.

For instance—

The Book of Genesis confesses that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth ex nihilo. That is, the Lord simply spoke existence into being. He created using no pre-existing materials; therefore, every item of creation has no ultimate source for its being other than the Being of God.

Just so, all of life is contingent. It need not be so. And it would not be apart from the ongoing gratuity of God.

This is what we pray in the Prayer of Thanksgiving,“We bless you for our creation, our preservation, and all the blessings of this life…”

Now if the incarnation is a watershed event, as Martyn posits, then we must attempt to understand the contingency of our created lives in light of Jesus’s life. This we may do in connection with the lectionary Gospel passage for the First Sunday of Lent:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

The Father creating ex nihilo is not a starting point for our thinking.

The Father creating ex nihilo is rather a conclusion from the fact that the Son was truly tempted in the wilderness by the devil.

Creation is contingent because Jesus, by whom and for whom and in whom all things on heaven and earth were created, may have failed the Adversary’s tripartite test.

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As Robert Jenson writes:

Christianity's doctrine of creation presents a drastically revisionary ary metaphysics, a construal of reality that affirms an encompassing ing creaturely contingency: we and all our universe might not have been.

As high-medieval theology stated it with marvelous precision, no reality other than God has in what it is any reason that it is. We exist and exist as we do because God determines that we shall, and that is all there is to be said. Our human effort to avoid Scripture's metaphysical put-down continues still. The currently standard account of the origin of our universe seems to suggest that its existence is contingent, since the universe is thought to begin with an unpredictable and inexplicable event— a "singularity"— and with wildly improbable initial conditions for development.

We must ask:

Who is this God who appears as Creator at the beginning of both creed and Genesis? Who is it who provides being of which no trace or potential was there before? Who is it who tolerates no antecedents, of himself or his works?

The creed identifies him as "the Father" of the next to be introduced "Son," "Jesus Christ." Accordingly, the first article's doxology of the Father as "Almighty" and "Creator" is praise for his works, exemplified by those narrated in the article about the Son. Therefore we may gloss Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning the Father of Jesus created the heavens and the earth."

The move Jenson makes is crucial for understanding the triune identity and, with it, the glad fact of our lives. The Father’s relationship to Jesus, the Son’s relationship to the Father, their Spirit’s witness to their love is the presupposition to creation. The life of Jesus is not merely one we can plot chronologically on a timeline because it preexists creation itself.

What does this insistence mean for us?

Jenson continues:

Nor is this identification (“In the beginning the Father of Jesus created…”) without consequence.

On the contrary, it even suggests that the contingency of the world is founded in the contingency of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. It is because Jesus was truly tempted and so might have fallen…It is because the Father was not compelled to raise Jesus from the death to which his steadfastness brought him…It is because just this contingently faithful and rescued person is the eternal Son for whom all things were created (Col. 1:15-20) that all created being might not have been.

For nearly two millennia, Christian theology has been trying, if only by fits and starts and with major backslidings, to take this metaphysically revolutionary axiom seriously; the contingently particular story of Jesus is the universal truth of created reality; and therefore universal truth is itself a contingent fact and not an abstract necessity.

In other words—

It is not merely that the crucifixion of the Son of God is the turning of the ages; it is that any moment of his life could have meant the erasure of our own lives. At every juncture, his life is a watershed. Had the Devil won the testing in the wilderness, the world would not have been. If the Man for Others had concluded, “Yes, I will turn those stones into bread,” you and I would not be.

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