Continuing the series of posts on the new creation begun here, here, and here, we move on to Paul’s reference to the "new man" in Ephesians 4.
So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old man, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth. (Ephesians 4:14-24)
In Ephesians 2 Paul said that Christ had created the Jews and the Gentiles into one new man. Here Paul tells his readers that the new man is created in the likeness of God. But wasn’t the first man created in God’s image and likeness? Does this passage imply that man lost the imago Dei in the Fall, and that now it’s being restored? Or is it possible that the original imago wasn’t complete? Genesis 1 focuses exclusively on God’s creational activity, implying that man is like God specifically in being able to create. At the end of Genesis 3 God says that man, in acquiring knowledge of good and evil, has become even more godlike. Here in Ephesians 4 Paul links the likeness of God specifically to His righteousness and holiness — yet another aspect of the imago.
Paul tells his readers that they’re acting like the Gentiles: ignorant, hard-hearted, impure and greedy. This sort of behavior Paul associates with the old man. Is Paul contradicting himself from two chapters earlier by now saying that the Gentiles are the old man and that the Jews, or perhaps the Christ-following Jews, are the new man? I don’t think so. Paul addresses his readers as "Gentiles in the flesh" (2:13) who through Christ have been joined together with the Jews into the one new man (2:15). Now, however, Paul sees evidence of his readers relapsing into their old ways, as if they were still defining themselves according to the old fleshly distinctions between peoples. The old Gentile way of life is characterized by enmity, ignorance, and immorality — in short, it’s a life that doesn’t manifest God’s holiness. Presumably Paul would levy the same criticisms against those "Jews in the flesh" who slipped back into their old Jewish ways.
Apparently it’s possible for a follower of Christ to slip back and forth between the old man and the new man. Though Christ has already created the new man, the old man persists, even among those who follow Christ. Paul enjoins his readers to "lay aside" the old man and to "put on" the new man, as if the transition were as easy as changing one’s clothes. If Paul was talking here about a distinctly new human nature having been implanted in believers, one would expect him to use different imagery. For example, if the old man is a fleshly, surface-level identity whereas the new man is deeper and truer, then Paul might exhort the backslider to lay aside the old man in order that the new, true man might shine forth. Alternatively, if the old man is deeply engrained in human nature, then Paul might suggest that his readers put the new man over the top of the old man as a means of disguising or ritually purifying the old. Instead Paul seems to regard the old man and new man as interchangeable. He also assumes that the reader possesses an autonomy independent of the old man and the new man, a constant and continuous self that can take off the one and put on the other.
The old man and the new man are not static entitities: the one is "being corrupted," whereas the other is "being renewed" (Eph. 4:22f). More precisely, Paul encourages the reader to "be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man." It would seem that, in Pauline psychology, the mind has a spirit that can either be corrupted or be renewed. The old man and new man are envisioned as alternative life trajectories or mindsets, and the individual self can at any given time be guided by either the one or the other. A person who sets his life course by the new man must put aside the traditional intercultural enmities (2:15f) and the ignorance and callousness (in Greek it’s "analgesia," the numbness to pain) that lead to impurity and greed. Instead the person participates in the ongoing life of God (4:18), a way that leads in the opposite direction, toward peace, knowledge, sensitivity, purity, generosity.
Re: The New Man in Ephesians 4:17-24
The old man is aimed toward corruption and death; the new man, toward renewal and life. Paul isn’t enjoining his readers to assume a new personality or nature. He’s asking them to respond appropriately to the singular twofold event of Christ’s death and resurrection, to "walk in a manner of the calling with which you have been called" (Eph. 4:1). It’s possible not to respond appropriately, to "put on the old man" even if you’re already a participant in the "new man" that Christ created in the cross. Those believers who put on the old man act just like those who never responded to Christ’s calling in the first place.
Are they the same? In other words, is there anything that distinguishes the Christian from the non-Christian? Is it the initial statement of faith, or is it the walk, that identifies someone who has life in the Spirit? Or is neither of these subjective responses definitive? Is it instead the "Christ event" itself that creates the new man in the flesh and the new life in the spirit? Whether you acknowledge the event or not, whether you live inside the new man or not, is it the event itself that has already changed everything?
I think that for Paul the subjective response is determinative because the "Christ event" is itself the emergence of a new kind of subjectivity, a "subjectivation" that continually renews itself in spirit and in life. Paul’s injunction to lay aside the old man and to put on the new presumes the kind of free subjectivity that the resurrected life in Christ makes possible.
The "Christ event" has two parts to it: death and resurrection. The new man is one, but this unity participates in both parts of the event. There’s a continual dying of the old man and his concerns for fleshly distinctions, laws and desires; and there’s also a continual resurrection of the new man and his freedom to act in faith, hope and love. Is there something distinctive about the individual who participates in this sort of bivalent subjectivity, or does everyone engage in these same ongoing struggles to become a free subject in the world? Sometimes I see it one way, sometimes the other, but I’ll be damned if I know which is true.
Re: The New Man in Ephesians 4:17-24
John - maybe it’s a case of ‘damned if you do know, and damned if you don’t’.
Are you saying:
i. that the ‘Christ event’ changed things for everyone, not simply those who believe in him and that it’s up to each person to enter the good of what is already theirs?
Or
ii. that the ‘Christ event’ operates only in the lives of those who believe, those who do not believe being separated from him?
You also seem to be saying that whichever alternative may be the case, it is still possible for believers to slip out of ‘the new man’ and fall back into ‘the old man’, by ‘putting him on again’.
Also, you ask whether these realities may be experienced by anyone, not simply those who believe in Christ. Such questions, being essentially ontological in nature, are the bane of this site, and have driven some of the Voortrekkers to settle on the far side of the Jordan. However, I think they strike at the heart of some very traditional theological issues, which continue to apply whichever way your theological leanings take you. So to respond to each suggested interpretation in turn:
i. I’ve a feeling that the Greek Orthodox church says something very similar - but just to let us know that they do not intend universalism, they healthily anathematise large swathes of the human race who fail to grasp the intricate detail of what they believe.
ii. would be my interpretation - given that much of Paul’s teaching, for instance, is about the benefits to be found ‘in Christ’, which suggest that they are not freely distributed outside him. Assuming these benefits are for today’s believers as well as believers in the 1st century (which cannot be taken for granted on the site, so let’s put it as a hypothesis), there is the question of how we avail ourselves of what has been obtained for us by Christ, and can be ours too ‘in him’. Repentance and Faith seem to be the prerequisites outlined in Acts. Nowhere is it there suggested that these realities are already dormant within the unbeliever. Rather, the unbeliever is encouraged to look outwards and upwards to what Christ has done. The Holy Spirit then inspires faith in those who will believe. But unbelief, an unwillingness to believe, is also a possibility.
How easy is it then for believers to slip back and forth between ‘the new man’ and ‘the old man’? Terminology may be quite important here. The ‘old man’ is a specific phrase used, in this sense, only three times in the NT - Romans 6:6; Ephesians 4:22; Colossians 3:9. In Romans 6:6 in particular, it suggests a reality that was climactically dealt with when we were united with Christ in baptism. This baptism contains two parts: the baptism into Christ through faith, and the demonstration of this in the ceremony of baptism. This is probably (in my view) the context in which we should also understand the Ephesians and Colossians passages.
However, a passage which describes something like the phenomenon to which you allude occurs in 1 Corinthians 3, where those who have clearly become believers in Christ are behaving like those who do not know Christ. So Paul uses the word ‘sarkikos’ to describe them (from ‘sarx’ - the flesh).
These may be slender foundations on which to construct an interpretation, but it goes something like this: that whereas believers in Christ have already been set free from ‘the old man’, which is who they were in their whole way of life before they believed, they may still exhibit traits of that way of life through behaviour which is ‘sarkikos’ after they have believed. But while ‘sarx’ is something that we may fall back into, because the process of renewal is never complete in us until our full ‘adoption as sons’ (which includes resurrection bodies), ‘the old man’ is completely done away with when we believe.
Anyway, that’s how the theory runs, and is beloved of Reformed theology, and was given fresh life 30 years or so ago in the popular teachings of the Chinese ‘Watchman Nee’. Is it splitting hairs? Maybe. But even ‘falling back’ into the ‘flesh’ (sarx) is presented elsewhere as a terrible aberration by Paul, and not part of ‘the normal Christian life’. This is particularly evident in Romans 7, where ‘sarx’ is closely connected with living under the Law, and all the human failures which were there exhibited in the history of Israel.
Is this important for us today? Yes, I think it is, because believers in Christ need to know how much he accomplished for them. I don’t take the view that slipping back and forth between ‘the old man’ and ‘the new man’ is intended to be ‘normal’ for believers, (even if it were possible!).
I also don’t take the view that the realities brought to us by Christ describe realities which are at work in everybody’s lives even if they don’t believe in him. I take this view because these realities are made effective in us by the Holy Spirit (as declared in Romans 8, for instance), and the Holy Spirit is exclusively the gift of Jesus on those who believe in him - not on all and sundry (as set out in Acts 2, in particular).
These are my rather traditional views - but congratulations to you for raising the issues.
Re: The New Man in Ephesians 4:17-24
Peter, you caught me indulging in a moment of subjectivity in the midst of dispassionate exegesis. I have a sense that many, perhaps most, at least occasionally consider living a life concerned less with inconsequential distinctions and more with truth, beauty, justice, love. I also think that most people vacillate repeatedly and perpetually between the two. In this regard I’m not personally persuaded that those who proclaim themselves Christians are qualitatively different from those who do not. But this is idle speculation of one observer of the human condition and not a systematic treatment of Paul’s writings.
Besides avoiding excessive subjectivity, I’ve also attempted to avoid imposing any larger systematic theology on these individual Scriptural passages. OST is a systematic sort of venue so it’s difficult to sustain the more piecemeal, empirical, inductive approach that I’ve bee pursuing here. So I’m less concerned with importing standard Calvinism or what might be termed the ascetic charisma of Watchman Nee into the proceedings.
Ah but now I again lapse into subjectivity… In the vagabonding days of my youth my travels led me to Tangier Morocco and a mission compound jointly run by Youth With a Mission and an English hospital. On the hospital nursing staff was a young woman named Fiona Kinnear, daughter of Angus Kinnear, a missionary to the Far East who translated all of Watchman Nee’s books into English. I remember the Rev. Kinnear preaching once at the local chapel when his peregrinations brought him to town. And yes, I read probably all of Watchman Nee’s books, including Sit, Walk, Stand, his treatment of Ephesians — which brings us back to the subject at hand…
The other day I read contemporary continental philosopher Alain Badiou’s little book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, which explores issues we’ve been addressing here. Badiou contends that Paul offers not a universalist expansion of the traditionally exclusivist Jewish faith but rather "the possibility of universalism." Paul doesn’t point either to a universally true set of philosophical propositions nor to the universally commendable life that Jesus lived on earth, but rather to the distinctive event of Christ’s death and resurrection, an event that was in its very nature subjective, experienced by Christ alone. This intensely private event offers the possibility of universal truth and love not to those who abstract its truth or who testify to its miracle but rather to those who participate subjectively in the event itself. So, paradoxically, it’s a universalism that depends on subjective participation.
Drifting again, this time into sociology, it seems that Christianity — or is it Christendom? — has establish itself as a kind of universal cult, with its rituals of initiation, its creeds, its liturgies, its moral codes, its communitarian festivals, and other structural apparatuses for distinguishing inside from outside, Christian from non-Christian. It’s a sort of synthesis between Jewish excusivism and Greco-Roman inclusivism. While this is the use the church leaders made of Paul, and while Paul himself may have encouraged this sort of thing in the interests of rapid expansion, I’m not sure it’s what he really had in mind.
You cite Romans 8 as evidence that the blessings made possible in "the Christ event" are reserved to those who appropriate those blessings through a subjective commitment of faith. But even in Romans Paul anticipates that this subjective response to Christ’s death and resurrection will be universal, among Jews (Rom. 11:26) as well as Gentiles (Rom. 11:32). Paul retains this tension between the objective universal efficacy of the Christ event and the individual subjective response to that event. In the first passages we’ve been looking at — Galatians 6, 2 Corinthians 5, Ephesians 2 — Paul has been emphasizing the universality of the event; now in Ephesians 4 he focuses on the reader’s response to the event. We’ll see what happens in Colossians 3.
Re: The New Man in Ephesians 4:17-24
Far more interesting to find you in a fit of subjectivity than in a mood of dispassionate exegesis, John. I read your comment, sent a response, which I then deleted and started again, as I felt I hadn’t quite caught the heart of your intent at first glance.
Actually, I don’t find the kind of systematising I was outlining in the previous comment sympathetic. I think Watchman Nee takes this systematising to illogical conclusions: that we are somehow all airlifted out of time and space and included historically within Christ himself as he died on the cross. That the ‘old man’ can somehow literally, decisively and effectually be disposed of, while we still nevertheless have on-going inner moral struggles which can create the nagging suspicion that maybe ‘he’ isn’t dead at all, and that putting it all down to ‘the flesh’ is just sophistry.
Nee takes this kind of systematising of the personality to extremes in books like ‘The Spiritual Man’ - now suggested not to have been written by him at all! However, his exposition of Ephesians in ‘Sit, Walk Stand’ is one of the finest I have read. A shame I lent my copy to someone and have never had it back. How interesting that you met the daughter of his translator, and the translator himself.
(To be continued)
(Later)
If we can all experience and practise the ethics of the Christian faith without a particular belief in Christ, what is distinctive about Christian faith? Maybe the ethics, important as they are, are not the heart of it. For me at any rate, the heart of the faith is eschatology, but in a particular sense, that Christ is all about ends and beginnings, old life and new life, and this being made real by the Holy Spirit in and through us. It’s about a phenomenon of history, which we live out in our lives daily.
I also notice in your posts that when you come to your own position on the things you describe, it nearly always comes back to a focus on the people (of God), and whether one is ‘in or out’. I wonder what difference it would make to you if your focus was instead on Christ? Is it possible to remain a sceptical and uncommitted observer in the light of his life, teaching, actions, death etc?
I agree with much that you say about forms of expression of Christian faith around the world resembling in different ways a cult, or cults. But I think that is a sociological phenomenon that is almost unavoidable where you have a common set of beliefs and practices identifying a group; where there are boundaries which mark whether a person is part of that group or not.
However, in cyberspace, we can model something different. A community of enquirers, journeying at least for a while together, or overnighting occasionally within a place of generously accepting and broadly forgiving hospitality - despite the plots and conspiracies which provide the underlying dramatic interest. Maybe this is a message to the church at large?
Have you noticed it has gone very quiet recently? Almost as if you and I were the only guests left in the parlour? As if, one by one, the others had quietly slipped out into the shadows, seeking the earliest travel bookings out of town? It’s almost eery.
Re: The New Man in Ephesians 4:17-24
I often find that whatever it is I decide to do, someone is sure to tell me that I ought to be doing something else instead. Is this a commentary on me or on other people?
Ethics is something akin to a universal law, which is I think more Greek or Roman than Christian. Paul envisions a different kind of life, don’t you think — a life governed not by fleshly concerns but by the Spirit. The flesh isn’t just a matter of immorality, since for Paul living either in conformity to the law or in opposition to it is to live according to the flesh. Being energized and directed by the Spirit, faith working through love — these seem closer to the core of Paul’s message wouldn’t you say?
I agree entirely that this is Paul’s central message. The source of new life isn’t traced to Christ’s earthly life before the crucifixion, which Paul barely mentions, but rather to His resurrected life. For Paul everything depends on the crucifixion and its aftermath.
This isn’t Paul’s emphasis, nor is it mine. During my tenure here at OST I’ve focused largely on the creation narratives. When I began paying attention to the new/renewed creation motif in Andrew’s expositions, I was struck especially by his characterization of Christianity as God’s chosen microcosm established in the midst of a failed and ultimately doomed macrocosm. This micro/macro distinction recapitulates the various Old Testament separations (e.g., Noah, Israel entering the promised land, prophecies of judgment and redemption for Israel) in which the microcosm acted with disregard, disdain, or outright violence toward the macrocosm. And so I became curious about how the new creation theme plays out explicitly in Scripture.
In reading these Pauline texts one by one we discover that, instead of reinforcing the boundaries between micro and macro, Paul insists that the boundaries have been torn down — neither Jew nor Gentile. The old and new creations overlap in the world; now in Ephesians 4 we find that they overlap even in the lives of individuals who have already declared their faith in Christ. For Paul it’s less a matter of in versus out and more a matter of how one lives one’s life that’s at stake.
Yes, that’s my hope as well. My concern with in versus out is perhaps inevitable or at least understandable. I don’t believe in God or the resurrection, so any distinction between Christian and non-Christian I regard as entirely sociological and psychological. Yet here I am posting and commenting on a Christian blog where people take the distinction to be a more foundational and transcendent one — there’s bound to be a dynamic tension even in the most cordial and good-natured discussion. I’ve consistently found that the tension is a creative one here at OST.
It’s like I said at the beginning of this comment: what interests me seems not to interest other people very much. Maybe exegesis is too old-fashioned for these young, hip, emerging types? Maybe we’re relics of the old creation who missed the last tram heading toward the new frontier?
the voice of one(s) crying in the wilderness
We seem in some ways to have run into the old emic vs etic in trying to figure Paul out.
I’m also not so sure that one can dismiss the importance of the earthly life of Jesus for Paul and Pauline teaching as part of the problem that seems to have arisen between Paul and the ‘Big Three’ centers on what gospel it was that Paul preached.
Certainly event wise, our concentration is more fixed on Jesus death and resurrection, but at the heart of Paul’s message is Jesus own praxis. Paul’s meditation on that praxis suggests to me that Paul certianly sees his own discipleship as walking towards just as inevitable a death (and eventual resurrection) precisely because he too is being ‘poured out’.
Paul resists Law and he also resists codifications, though he can’t resist sometimes listing out particularly obvious signs of not following and not putting on the new man. I get the feeling that his lists are more a sort of "come on, look at this, isn’t it obvious that it’s wrong?" While at the heart of his thinking is actually the continuous upheval of his ‘normal’ humanity by this sudden bursting-in of proximity, sonship, with God.
There can be no more rules or laws or even norms. All the old categories and classifications are nullified. The ongoing reality and the response to this reality are all consuming. Jesus is Lord. I am in Christ, and it makes me breathless.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: the voice of one(s) crying in the wilderness
"We seem in some ways to have run into the old emic vs etic in trying to figure Paul out."
I don’t know what that means, Sam, but if you combine the two do you get emetic?
emesis!
Sorry for being dense, but this was a result of my own confusion in trying to understand Paul. As I remember it the terms emic and etic came from (anthropologic?) phonemic and phonetic and indicate the difference between an extra cultural and intra cultural understanding (or something like that).
Incidentally John, you haven’t mentioned here your own fascinating peregrinations on Paul and Badiou at your own blog Ktismatics, the latest of which is HERE.
Live to serve : Serve to live