Part I: Jesus the Human

1. Jesus of Nazareth raised bodily from the dead [resurrection accounts, post-resurrection appearances]
2. The bodily, human life of Jesus vindicated by his resurrection as enacting true humanity [all over the Gospels]

Part II: True Humanity, Creation, and Sin

3. Jesus: the true image of the invisible God [Colossians 1 and intertexts]
4. The image of God as royal status [Genesis 1 and the rest of the Bible]
5. Sin I — irresponsibility: rejecting the responsibilities that come with royal status [lots that can go here]
6. Jesus: the second Adam [1 Corinthians 15, Romans 8]
7. The Church: bride of the Lamb, second Eve [Revelation 21 and intertexts]
8. The first Adam and the first Eve [Genesis 2]
9. Sin II — idolatry: choosing knowledge of good and evil apart from life, leading to death and corruption [Genesis 3]
10. Jesus: the temple of the Holy Spirit [man, it’s just everywhere]
11. Christians: temples of the Holy Spirit [1 Corinthians 3 & 6, Romans 6]
12. Sin III — sacrilege: offending against the presence of God [Leviticus, Romans 6, 1 Corinthians 3 & 6, Ephesians 5]

Part III: The Shape of True Human Life

13. Human companionship: friendship and marriage
14. Human fruitfulness: discipleship and procreation
15. Unavoidably long excursus chapter on sexual behavior, human sexuality, and sexual bioethical issues which nevertheless has to be framed by (14) and (15)
16. Human vocation: rest and work
17. Human uniqueness: relation to other living creatures and to machines
18. Possibly (alas) another unavoidably long excursus chapter on technology and medicine
19. Human teleology: resurrection life and end-of-life bioethical issues

Obviously 3–5, 6–9, and 10–12 would be key individual units of argumentation. Having now made the sketch, it occurs to me that as a whole that section would map, albeit imperfectly, onto the traditional “threefold office” of Christ: 3–5 corresponds straightforwardly to the royal office, 6–9 (somewhat less straightforwardly) to the prophetic office, and 10–12 to the priestly office. Of course, the traditional order is prophet, priest, king, so maybe some reordering is called for. But the value of this order, I think, is that it anchors the whole testimony about humanity in the status with which it is created, the status that produces the subsequent vocations. That may be the wisest apologetic move, since most people (at least in the ex-Christian West), Christian or not, now come programmed with an intuitive sense of the dignity and worth of every person. That sense often lacks controls, but it may be the most natural starting point.

EDIT: Thinking more about this, it seems really important to have established multiple ways to talk about sin when we come to Part III and the different “ethical” topoi. Irresponsibility, idolatry, and sacrilege are far from perfect terms for Sin I, II, and III (for one thing, they aren’t all alliterative!), but they get at the need for multiple axes of evaluation. Some things that defy a Christian view of the human person in the realm of medicine, for instance, are not sacrilegious exactly… but still idolatrous and irresponsible. I want better terms for these categories. But one needs some such categories.