Steiner's name, after Paul, for Christ as the new Adam whose incorruptible resurrection body reverses the Fall the first Adam set in motion.
The Second Adam in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term, taken directly from the Apostle Paul, for Christ understood as the new progenitor of humanity who reverses the Fall of the first Adam. The first Adam bequeathed the corruptible, mortal physical body that all people inherit and that decays in death. The Second Adam, Christ, carries the incorruptible, immortal body that rose from the grave on the third day. In the lecture cycle From Jesus to Christ (GA 131, 1911, Karlsruhe), Steiner reads Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians as teaching that human beings, through an inner relationship to the risen Christ, can trace spiritual lines of descent to a second ancestor and gradually put on this incorruptible body in place of the one inherited from Adam. He connects it to the restored human phantom, the uncorrupted original body-form lost at the Fall and renewed through the Mystery of Golgotha.
In Steiner's Own Words
The second Adam, Christ, is regarded by Paul as possessing, in contrast to the first, the incorruptible, the immortal body. Paul then affirms that through Christian evolution men are gradually made ready to put on the second Adam in place of the first Adam; the incorruptible body of the second Adam, Christ, in place of the corruptible body of the first Adam. What Paul seems to require of all who call themselves true Christians is something that violates all the old conceptions of the world. As the first corruptible body is descended from Adam, so must the incorruptible body originate from the second Adam, from Christ.
What it Means Today
The Second Adam is the hinge of anthroposophical Christology, and the tradition that carries it most directly today is esoteric Christianity. When Friedrich Rittelmeyer, a Lutheran preacher from Nuremberg, founded The Christian Community in 1922 with Steiner's guidance, its central sacrament, The Act of Consecration of Man, was built around exactly this idea: that the human being who unites with the risen Christ begins to receive a new, incorruptible body-form while still living. The Sunday service does not treat the Resurrection as a past miracle to be believed, but as a present working force, the Christ-impulse, that has been active in earthly life since the Mystery of Golgotha. Priests ordained in that lineage, which still trains at the seminaries in Stuttgart and Hamburg, speak of the second Adam not as doctrine but as the slow renewal of the bodily nature through communion.
Read against Paul's own letters, Steiner's reading restores a thread modern theology often softens. Where many contemporary readers take 1 Corinthians 15 as metaphor for spiritual hope, Steiner takes Paul literally on the point that matters most: a real body is at stake, lost at the Fall and recovered through Christ. The practical question he leaves the reader is concrete rather than devotional. What, in daily moral effort and inner work, actually builds the lines of descent to this second ancestor? For Steiner the answer is not assent to a creed but the patient transformation of the inherited nature, the corruptible Adam in each person, into something that can carry the incorruptible.
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