Schēma: A Semantic Puzzle—Some Hermeneutical and Translational Difficulties about Philippians 2:7d

Abstract

The occurrence of the term σχήμα in Phil 2:7d is analyzed in comparison with two other crucial Pauline occurrences: 1 Cor 7:31 and Phil 3:21 (here as a semanteme included in the verb μετασχηματίσει). This comparative study aims to provide a revision of the current interpretation of the word as designating the outward, sensory, accidental appearance in which Christ’s human nature was manifested to those who dealt with him. This traditional reconstruction is unsatisfactory in two respects: (1) it is tributary to a substantialist ontology that identifies corporeality as a mere spatial extension, unrelated to historicity and (2) it is fraught with highly problematic theological, potentially docetic, implications. As an alternative, the term σχήμα is here interpreted within the framework of the great Pauline theology of history: as a temporal–eschatological marker designating the peculiar temporal state of transience and suffering corruptibility inherent in physicality and corporeal life. This change also clarifies the conceptual articulation of σχήμα with the parallel expression μορφὴν δούλου. According to this interpretation, contrary to the prevailing view, the locution “slave form” does not designate ‘the’ or ‘one’ ‘human form’ but the ‘creature form’, as cosmic submission to temporal finitude.

1. Introduction

The pericope commonly referred to as the Christological hymn1 of Philippians 2:5-11, a text of great exegetical and theological importance, is at the center of an intense interpretative debate and of ever new translation proposals. The main challenge is the handling of a field of lexical indeterminacy carved out by the use of a particularly laborious terminology, in which Judaic–Old Testamentary and classical, mainly Hellenistic, semantic codes intersect. An auroral and magisterial station in that process of the inculturation of the proclamation of the historical Jesus, of which Paul is the protagonist and first apostle (Penna 2002, p. 57),2 the pericope reveals a dizzying genealogical–etymological complexity, entrusted to the formulation of a message of revolutionary novelty and originality, a bearer of some of the founding elements of a Trinitarian Christology (cf., Martin and Dodd 1998). The tension between the stratigraphic acuity of the lexical analysis and the broad theological perspective required by this handful of verses makes its reading and translation particularly difficult, inviting the interpreter to the very exercise of humility that is the main object of the appeal to the Christians of Philippi in which the pericope is embedded. No overall interpretation, no translation of Philippians 2:5-113 has yet arrived at an undisputed, universally accepted, and acceptable solution and version. It is therefore “regarding others as more significant than ourselves” (2:3)4 that this paper focuses on a specific lexical question, in the hope that such an analysis, while not providing new answers, will offer a useful critical key to further our understanding of this essential text.

2. An Elusive Word: σχήμα

The main objective of this reflection is indeed to reconstruct the peculiar semantic value that the Greek term σχήμα (schēma) (2, 7d)5 assumes in the Pauline corpus, to show that only through this comparative study can we determine its correct interpretation and translation in the body of the pericope.

Two converging options in the extensive exegetical literature on Phil 2:5-11 have so far undermined an adequate understanding of this word. First of all, there has been a clear conceptual subordination of it in relation to the term μορφὴ (morphē): the meaning of schēma is thus often ‘deduced’ from the interpretation of the former (in its main semantic core of “appearance, visible form”), sometimes even being reduced to a second-degree, weak synonym, in a misleading reading of the text.6 Second, it is not taken into account analytically (it is often barely mentioned) the Pauline occurrence of the word in 1 Cor 7:31, in a collocation of very strong semantic poignancy, commensurate with its conceptual significance in Philippians 2:7d, and consistent with the use of the semanteme (incorporated in the verb metaschēmatizei) in Phil 3:21 and Rom 12:2 (syschēmatizei).

An eloquent symptom of this exegetical chiaroscuro is the translational uncertainty associated with the locution σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος, attested by a discrepancy and variability of solutions that make this and the (much more studied but still not fully resolved) expression ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων (2, 7c) a real linguistic crux.

3. The Interpretation of σχήμα as “Outward Appearance”

Schēma, which the Latin of the Vulgate translates respectively with the term habitus in Phil 2:7d and with figura in 1 Cor 7:31, is a rare and ‘cultured’ term,7 gravitating in the philosophical and rhetorical area,8 whose import into New Testament Greek therefore has a ‘technical’ density that cannot be underestimated. The fact that Paul uses it in parallel as an identifying qualifier of the world and of the human being (“schēma of the cosmos” in Corinthians, “schēma of man” in Philippians), a general designation of a (physically marked) ‘phenomenological form’ common to both, seems intriguing and surprising. It suggests that such a pairing is indicative of a precise semantic connotation which is unexpressed and even concealed in current translations. With a philological background strongly conditioned by the substantivist–ontological categories of classical metaphysics,9 they read the term simply as external appearance;10 visible aspect;11 a sensory, material mode of manifestation12 (TDNT 1971, p. 956), possibly in contrast to an abstract, conceptual notion of form.

The insurmountable difficulty associated with the exegetically unsatisfactory determination of schēma as the outward appearance of the human nature-form of Christ (of the ‘natural’, ‘earthly’ nature-form of the world?) is that it conceals and implies an insidious separation between the human, substantial nature of Jesus, and his accidental, “empirical manifestation”, as the vector of Jesus’ identification as a human being by other human beings. This split reappears insistently in translations, lexicons, and commentaries and is clearly the fruit of an ontological pre-comprehension, of a substantivist stamp,13 not free from a residual dualistic bias, and exposed to undesirable docetic drifts.14 Based on this lexical interpretation, the original text does indeed seem to circumscribe an intersubjective space of the identification of Christ’s humanity as outward appearance, which runs the risk of reading the “similarity” (homoíōma) invoked in the previous locution in a misleading way, that is as a parallel, an analogy, and not as the denotation of an essential sharing of human nature. If the text does say that Jesus was “identified as man in his outward appearance”, then it seems to suggest that this coming into the world “in the likeness of men” means a similarity and not an identity.15

The risk is not merely hypothetical. There are plenty of examples of translation disasters caused by this semantic interpretation, such as the unfortunate version adopted by CEI (2008) (and accepted by BG, the Italian edition of the Jerusalem Bible): “diventando simile agli uomini. Dall’aspetto riconosciuto come uomo” (“becoming like men. From the aspect recognized as man”, m.tr.), in which it is literally written that the Son of God did not become man but became “like men”, having (at least) their “aspect”. Does he look like us or is he one of us?16 To say that someone has the aspect of a man (that he looks like a man) does not imply that he might not be a man? The insidiousness of camouflage, which the semanteme also connotes in Pauline usage17 (the pagan idea of a God who takes on human appearance, like the ancient gods who visited the earth), is strongly evocated here, barely countered by exegetical distinctions that are not entirely effective.

See, for example, how TDNT entangles itself in this difficulty, by referring, in a petitio principii, to various exegetical commentaries (recalled in the footnotes: from Dibelius to Käsemann and Lohmeyer) for which it is supposed to provide the philological basis. It explains in a convoluted form that the “outward appearance” is not to be seen as separate from the rational, inner essence or, worse, as a disguise of it: “The reference is to His whole nature and manner as man. In this respect, the outward “bearing”, which He assumes corresponds to His inner being” (TDNT 1971, p. 956). If we are thus reassured that the meaning of the text is that Jesus was a real man and not just apparently so (he was not merely “taken” to be a man because of his outward appearance), it remains to explain why Paul18 would have used the awkward circumlocution σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος to assert this, rather than a more straightforward formulation. The argument spirals into a tautological circularity of frustrating inconclusiveness: “There is special stress on the fact that throughout His life, even to the death on the cross, Jesus was in the humanity demonstrated by His earthly form. The εὑρεθεὶς expresses the truth that this fact could be seen by anybody, σχήμα does not merely indicate the coming of Jesus, or His physical constitution, or the natural determination of His earthly life, or the shape of His moral character. It denotes the «mode of manifestation».” (ibid., p. 956, m.e.). What does it mean to say that Christ’s humanity was “demonstrated by His earthly form”? Should it not rather be said that Christ’s humanity “consists” in having the earthly form of a man? In what sense then does man’s being not coincide with “the mode of his manifestation”, which is designated by the word σχήμα?

4. The Occurrence of σχήμα in 1 Corinthians 7:31

In the light of these considerations, and of the relevant and theologically sensitive problems associated with the translation of schēma as “outward appearance, visible aspect, mode of manifestation”, we must ask ourselves whether this lexical interpretation is not vitiated by a fundamental misunderstanding and whether it is not necessary to radically reconsider the semantic value of the Greek term in Pauline usage. A comparative analysis is therefore recommended, starting with a comparison with the parallel verse 1 Cor 7:31, which concludes the famous sequence of the ὡς μὴ: as not, opened by verse 7:29 on the eschatological coming to an end of time:

29 Τοῦτο δέ φημι, ἀδελφοί, ὁ καιρὸς συνεσταλμένος ἐστίν- ºτὸ λοιπὸν ἵνα καὶ

 Hoc itaque dico, fratres: tempus breve est: reliquum est, ut

  I tell you, brothers, the time is running out. From now on

31 παράγει γὰρ τὸ σχῆμα τοῦ κόσμου τούτου.

  præterit enim figura hujus mundi.

  For the present fashion of world is passing away.19

When Augustine, commenting on this text, emphasizes that for the Apostle, “it is not the nature of the world that is passing away but its figure” (“Figura enim praeterit, non natura”),20 the reader is perplexed to ask what is the nature of the cosmos that does not pass away in the fulfilment of the Parousia, in the passing (in the coming to an end) of time (of the καιρὸς). Can one speak of the physis of the cosmos as such (of its “imperishable essence”) freed from its, already ceasing, “natural appearance”? Can one speak so, given the biblical perspective, which presents creation, unlike the Greek cosmos, as an evolutionary process with a historical profile, rather than as an unchanging mythical/physical entity? In the Bible, the cosmos is a manifestation of the dynamics of a profound transformation of the creature through the intervention of both the Creator21 and the creature itself. As a matter of fact, human choices also have a radical effect on the state of creation: fallen in the fall of the “earthly man” Adam, redeemed in the gift of himself by the “heavenly man” Christ Jesus (1 Cor 15: 45–49), who inaugurates and makes possible the coming of the Kingdom of God and the messianic recapitulation of all things in the Son of God made man.

No, the “ceasing figure of the cosmos” cannot be biblically reduced to a mere “external manifestation”, a visible appearance, an accidental form of an unchanging essence, as if the coming of the Parousia implied nothing more than a restyling, a superficial change that does not affect the profound reality of beings, of creatures. The term σχήμα must therefore have a denser meaning than the commonly intercepted one of “external appearance”, a meaning that is highlighted by the opening verse of the eschatological discourse on the as not. If “the time is running out” (ὁ καιρὸς συνεσταλμένος), is coming to an end (whereby the countdown of its passing away has begun, by reckoning what is left of it: τὸ λοιπὸν), that which “is passing away” (παράγει) is nothing other than the passing away itself, time itself as passing away (σχήμα). What is “fading away” is not the visible, “sensory aspect” of the world but the temporal condition of creation as a “passing away, disappearing”, as a condition of being exposed to the end which affects all finite beings.

5. The Creaturely Condition and Its Redemption

We have some intertextual evidence that the Pauline use of the term and semanteme σχήμα innovatively privileges (in a kind of semantic neologism) the denotation of the dimension of becoming, of the passage and change of time, with its corrupting charge, inherent in the finitude of creatures, their contingency, and their exposure to loss and diminution (as the vector of evil). Although not absent from the semantic horizon of the letters (cf. 2 Cor 11:13–15), the connotation (generally prevalent in non-Pauline occurrences of the term) of the external, material, accidental appearance as opposed to the substantial, rational, and therefore unchanging nature (ousía, as manifested in the morphē) of entities is therefore secondary.

A crucial confirmation comes from the comparison with the Pauline description of the cosmic condition of creatures as radical contingency: the condition of that which is changing, passing, disappearing,22 subject to the law of corruption, which is together the law of death and sin.23 No creature is necessary; nothing that is and happens in the cosmos is necessary: everything can end; everything does nothing but end, become different, become less, decays in the corrosive power of evil, which is not a positive entity but a condition of subtraction and decline. Precisely this radical contingency is the sign of the creaturely finitude, which qualifies the cosmos and the human being in the sign of corruption, of mortality. Aristotle says so,24 expressing a classical, pagan, vision; the Bible says so (in the sequence of the sapiential texts, from Job to the Psalms to Ecclesiastes). Paul says so, when, in Romans 8:18–23, a cosmic fresco of extraordinary power, he describes creation as “suffering” the end and corruption, as being subject to becoming as a fatal engine of decay. Becoming, as the source of decline and destruction, ‘reigns’, even to the point of subjecting creatures to the supreme condition of slavery, that of death (“wages of sin”, Rom 6:23), in which the subject loses the availability of the indispensable condition for being considered as a subject: its status as a living being.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us. For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to vanity,25 not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labour pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies (m.e.)

Even if not linearly interpretable, the correspondence of this grandiose eschatological picture with the scenario presented in 1 Cor 7:31, Phil 2:5-l1, and 3:21 is undeniable. In fact, the authentic meaning of these three Pauline pages can only be grasped by reading each text in the light of the other two. Romans 8:18–23 makes explicit the temporal sense of the passing away, of the passing away of this world, as the passing away of transience, as the stigma of becoming, the crucial dimension of the enslavement not only of human beings but of the whole cosmos to the power of evil, to the morally and physically destructive dynamic of corruption.26 The whole creation (πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις) “was made subject to vanity” (τῇ γὰρ ματαιότητι ἡ κτίσις ὑπετάγη), to the dynamics of consumption (of corruption) inherent in temporal becoming, and hopes to be liberated from this slavery (ἐλευθερωθήσεται ἀπὸ τῆς δουλείας τῆς φθορᾶς: ipsa creatura liberabitur a servitute corruptionis in libertatem gloriae filiorum Dei), which constitutes the figura/the schēma/the actual phenomenological form of the world. The universal creaturely hope is, therefore, that evil and endings, as subservience to the corrupting power of finitude, will disappear, that the passage of time and the creaturely powerlessness it implies will pass away, thanks to that redemption of bodies27 which is brought about as adoption as children of God. In this eschatological perspective, hope, not only human but cosmic, is the overcoming of one’s schēmatic condition of creaturely subservience to decay. It is hope in a “victory” of life over death, which is produced as the universal and definitive establishment and recognition of the sovereignty of Christ, the Risen One, over death:

Because of this, God greatly exalted him

  and bestowed on him the name

  that is above every name,

  that at the name of Jesus

 every knee should bend,

   of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

   and every tongue confess that

   Jesus Christ is Lord,

   to the glory of God the Father.

(Phil 2:9-11)

[The Lord Jesus Christ] will refigure our body of humiliation to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself.

ὃς μετασχηματίσει τὸ σῶμα τῆς ταπεινώσεως ἡμῶν σύμμορφον τῷ σώματι τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ, κατὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν τοῦ δύνασθαι αὐτὸν καὶ ὑποτάξαι ⸀αὑτῷ τὰ πάντα.

(Phil 3:21)

When the schēmatic time (the fallen time of subjugation to sin and death) will have passed away because the fullness of time, the Parousia, has been reached, then “all things, all creation, every knee, every tongue”, will submit to that God who by becoming a creature (by incarnating as a man, dying, and rising again), has overcome sin and death and set creatures free from them.

It is indeed evident that what Romans 8:21 as Alain de Lille in his famous Carmen Omnis mundi creatura. calls “corruption” (decay: φθορᾶς, corruptionis), as a synonym for “vanity” (vanitas: ματαιότητι), is the “death” of Phil 2:8, as the epitome of evil, as the culmination of that emptying humiliation, which is being the world and being in the world with the “status of a slave” (morphē doulou of Phil 2:7b),28 in a state of submission to loss and corruption. Redemption for Paul is liberation, in full fidelity to the vision of the biblical God as the liberator, and, just as biblically, it cannot be understood metaphysically but only historically.

On the Judeo-Christian horizon, evil is not a metaphysical entity but a historical–eschatological process, inscribed in schēmatic, pre-messianic temporality. The creaturely form of slavery (μορφὴν δούλου) cannot be thought of as a form in the Platonic–Aristotelian sense, as a rational architecture of being, but as a pre-historic universal state, mysteriously emerging between a present of destitution and a future of liberation (vanitati enim creatura subiecta est, non volens sed propter eum, qui subiecit, in spem, quia et ipsa creatura liberabitur) and coming to fulfilment as the “redemption of our bodies”. Liberation is not the Platonic emancipation of the immortal soul from the mortal body, of the idea from matter, of the rational form from the empirical appearance. It is not the exit of the individual from the physical world and its cosmic end (“it is not the world that is passing away but a figure of it”, a temporal dimension of it, a form of happening). Redemption, as liberation, is realized as bodily metaschēmatization. It is the transformation of the condition of the body-schēma, a “carnal”, animal body, humiliated by creaturely bondage (τῆς ταπεινώσεως) into a sovereign, spiritual, glorious body (τῆς δόξης), reshaped (σύμμορφον) by a condition of power (ἐνέργειαν) that frees him from submission, to make him filially participant in the cosmic sovereignty of the Son of God (τοῦ δύνασθαι αὐτὸν καὶ ὑποτάξαι ⸀αὑτῷ τὰ πάντα):

So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown corruptible (ἐν φθορᾷ); it is raised incorruptible (ἐν ἀφθαρσίᾳ). It is sown dishonorable (ἐν ἀτιμίᾳ); it is raised glorious (ἐν δόξῃ). It is sown weak (ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ); it is raised powerful (ἐν δυνάμει). It is sown a natural body (corpus animale: σῶμα ψυχικόν); it is raised a spiritual body (corpus spiritale: σῶμα πνευματικόν). If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual one. So, too, it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became (ἐγένετο: factus est) a living being (εἰς ψυχὴν ζῶσαν),”; the last Adam a life-giving spirit (εἰς πνεῦμα ζῳοποιοῦν). But the spiritual was not first; rather the natural and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, earthly; the second man, from heaven. As was the earthly one, so also are the earthly, and as is the heavenly one, so also are the heavenly. Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one (εἰκόνα τοῦ χοϊκοῦ), we shall also bear the image of the heavenly one. (τὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ ἐπουρανίου).

(1 Cor 15:42–49)

If the schēma hōs anthrōpos is creaturely part of the schēma tou kosmou, then the messianic transformation of the schēma hōs anthrōpos brings about a transformation of the schēma tou kosmou itself, namely, precisely its passing, its fading away as schēma. The whole of creation awaits “the redemption of our bodies” (τὴν ἀπολύτρωσιν τοῦ σώματος ἡμῶν), which makes them “conform” (summorphon) with that of the Risen One and operates as a transfiguration (metaschēmatizei) of the “natural body” (schēmatic, ψυχικόν), “sown corruptible, dishonourable and weak”) into a “spiritual body” (πνευματικόν), which “raises incorruptible”, free from the destructive power of transience.

It is therefore in the light of this combined reading of its occurrences in the Pauline texts that we can grasp the authentic meaning of the word schēma in the Philippian pericope. It does not denote a visible aspect, an external appearance, but an intrinsic ‘physical condition’ of being part of the world, of being in the world (of “being born”) as a human being. Schēma is not the body (soma), nor its mere outward appearance, but the pre-messianic temporal condition of physicality (of man and the cosmos), to which Jesus subjected himself and which he eschatologically redeemed through his resurrection. Corporeality cannot be reduced to pure spatiality (res extensa) but must be recognized phenomenologically as temporality, a historical processuality capable of eschatological self-transcendence in the form of the new (glorious) temporality instituted by the Parousia. At the Second Coming of Christ as the expected Savior (3, 20), the process of redemption already initiated by his Resurrection will be finally and perfectly completed: the schēmatic, “caducous, enslaved” spatio-temporal present form of the world and of the human being, which is already receding, will then definitively overrun.29

6. Creatural Form, Human Condition

5τοῦτο ⸀φρονεῖτε ἐν ὑμῖν ὃ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, 6 ὃς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο   τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ, 7ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν   μορφὴν δούλου λαβών, ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος-   καὶ σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος 8ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν γενόμενος ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου,   θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ-       (NA 28, p. 606)

5 Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, 6 Who, while subsisting in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a booty to keep for himself. 7a Rather, he emptied himself, 7b taking the form of a slave 7c and in being born, in human likeness, 7d found in the human condition, 8a he humbled himself, 8b becoming obedient to death, 8c even death on a cross.30

Jesus, has always been (hyparchōn)31 God: he has always had a divine status. Morphē means here the form as the primary manifestation of being, its intrinsic “order”, a general status that qualifies its manifestation.32 But when he was born as a man, when he was “made” man (“in similitudinem hominum factus”, as the Vulgate translates), he assumed the form, the condition, of a slave (the one who is submissive, who must “obey” those who are stronger than him). He assumed the form, the status, of a creature.

Morphē doulou therefore does not yet designate the incarnation into man.33 This point is the subject of the utterance of 7c and 7d, as the emphatic reiteration of the word anthrōpōs makes clear, and it is conveyed by the binomial homoiōmati and schēmati. Morphē doulou denotes the general precondition of the incarnation as a human being, which is that of the spoliation of the divine statute in its eternity, and the acceptance of the statute, the creaturely form, of flesh (sarx) enslaved to the pre-messianic temporal law of caducity and the corruption of time, which is the schēmatic condition, the formal architecture of the cosmos in its contingency and finitude.

Kenotic emptying is “not to keep eternity as the supreme freedom (the intangibility of one’s own life) for oneself” as a precious and exclusive “booty”. It is to renounce it in order to enter the cosmos, the totality of creation that does not “include” its Creator,34 in its temporal dimension of “suffering”, vulnerability, loss, powerlessness, and decay. The eternal, the “ante saecula genitus”, enters “in the days of the flesh”,35 as the Letter to the Hebrews says. He learns the obedience proper to the condition of a slave, stripping himself of his condition as Son, submitting to all that this skhēmatic and earthly dimension of temporality entails: “In the days when he was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered” (Heb 5:7–8).

Thus, the ante saecula genitus is genitus (“is made” in a birth) “in human likeness”, to find himself subdued in the earthly condition of a temporal carnal body (skhēma), “body of death” (σώματος τοῦ θανάτου) (Rom 7:24), “body of humiliation” (3:21), body of submission to that temporal skhēmatic condition which is proper to the world (cosmos), which is its figure: its phenomenological, physical, and historical form. This is why the text does not simply say, as we would expect, that Jesus was born in a human body (soma) but specifies that in being born, he came to find himself and therefore “to be found” (heuretheis)36 in a skhēmatic body. This is a pre-messianic body, the form of the body that is the object of our natural, earthly experience (the form in which we know each other). It is a transitory form, destined to be transfigured (metaskhēmatizei: ‘to come out of the skhēma’), shedding the humiliation of servitude to assume the glorious form of the sons of God (3:21).

It is precisely for this reason that the text literally emphasizes the parallel between the incarnation of Jesus and the creation of man, choosing the key term of likeness to describe the mode of generation, to highlight that salvation is a second creation. If, of all creatures, the human being was “made in God’s image, after God’s likeness” (Gen 1:26),37 the God who incarnates makes himself a creature in the “likeness of men”, choosing to “be made” like them,38 to “be born as a human being”.39 For Paul, the incarnation of Jesus constitutes the generation of the new Adam: whose creation is a figure (typos) of the incarnation of Jesus, the Messiah (the new and last Adam), in the parallel gesture in which God “makes the human beings” (after his likeness) and “becomes man” (“makes himself after human likeness”). By accepting to be born as men are born, Jesus accepts to die as men die, submitting himself to the cosmic law of time and sin. In this way, however, the schēmatic body in which He became man receives from him the life-giving (victorious over death) and sanctifying (victorious over sin) power of the Eternal. The risen Christ transfigures (metaschēmatizes) the flesh, the “form of the servant”, the “body of humiliation”, into the likeness (summorphon) of the form of God, the form of the Eternal (of glory). Through his incarnation and resurrection, Jesus Christ frees creatures from bondage and works a second creation: the first man, the earthly man (animal body: skhēmatic), is buried (dies) and is reborn as the second man, the heavenly man (spiritual body).

7. Conclusions

The conditions of the life of the human being, of all the human beings (their figure, the ‘schēmatic’ body of their “days of flesh”), of all creatures,40 are transformed (metaschēmatized) in the Risen One through their salvific incorporation into the conditions of the life of the Son of God (who abolishes all servitude, Jn 15:15).41 In the union with the Risen One, the figure of man (the schēma in which Jesus found himself in the world as a human being) is passing away exactly like the figure of this world (the shortening of time), in a common eschatological “transformation” (metaschēmatization). The Risen One is, actually, already the Parousia: the messianic overcoming of the figure of this world through the establishment of the Kingdom of God, the “world that is to come”, according to the traditional rabbinical distinction, accepted by the early Church.42 This ‘new world’, the Kingdom of Heaven, will last “in the ages of the ages” (εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων): a ‘forever’ that does not mean an indefinite duration as an unlimited protraction of time passage but the incorruptible actuality of the present (“subtracted from the schēmatic subtraction” of its actuality). The Kingdom of God is not a reign of pure spirits: at the Parousia, the figure of this world, the schēmatic form of creaturely temporality, ceases, not because corporeality fades but because its temporal form is transformed, gloriously enlivened by communion with divine eternity. The presence of the Lord is given as a presence that coincides with itself, that establishes the fullness of time as the fullness of a present, whose actuality is not schēmatically articulated in relation to the past and the future but is definitively fulfilled in itself.

The schēma, the bodily form in which Jesus became man through incarnation, is not the mere “outward appearance”, empirical, of a substantial and unchanging nature, but the changeable temporal condition that defines the pre-messianic existence and therefore the essence, of the human being and of the cosmos (τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ: huic seculo) before Redemption starts its saving work of a second creation. Creaturely enslaved to evil and death, to the physical and moral corruption, schēmatic corporeality is the transitional human and cosmic condition, awaiting the redemptive coming of the Kingdom of God, of the Parousia: the glorious communion of all creatures with the Eternal.