O'Donovan: Resurrection and renewal

Wonderful O'Donovan quote
"It might have been possible, we could say, before Christ rose from the dead, for someone to wonder whether creation was a lost cause. If the creature consistently acted to uncreate itself, and with itself to uncreate the rest of creation, did this not mean that God's handiwork was flawed beyond hope of repair? It might have been possible before Christ rose from the dead to answer in good faith, Yes. Before God raised Jesus from the dead, the hope that we call 'gnostic', the hope for redemption from creation rather than for the redemption of creation, might have appeared to be the only possible hope. 'But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead...'. That fact rules out those other possibilities, for in the second Adam the first is rescued. The deviance of his will, its fateful leaning towards death, has not been allowed to uncreate what God created.
...
"The resurrection carries with it the promise that 'all shall be made alive'. The raising of Christ is representative, not in the way that a symbol is representative, expressing a reality which has an independent and prior standing, but in the way that a national leader is representative when he brings about for the whole of his people whatever it is, war or peace, that he effects on their behalf. And so this central proclamation directs us back also to the message of the incarnation, by which we learn how, through a unique presence of God to his creation, the whole created order is taken up into the fate of this particular representative man at this particular moment of history, on whose fate turns the redemption of all. And it directs us forward to the end of history when that particular and representative fate is universalized in the resurrection of mankind [sic] from the dead. 'Each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ'. The sign that God has stood by his created order implies that this order, with mankind [sic] in its proper place within it, is to be totally restored at the last."

- Oliver O'Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 14-15.

Usually, my quotes come with a caveat, but not this one. This expresses very much where I presently stand. The picture is from a hill to the south overlooking Firenze.