I began this series of posts about the old and new creations while coiled in a self-defensive posture. As a non-Christian, how do I respond to Andrew’s justification of the Yahwistic genocide recorded in Deuteronomy 7, a mass slaughter of Gentiles by Jews that harkens back to the Flood and foreshadows the Last Judgment? For Andrew this mass eradication of entire nations exemplified God’s ongoing project of separating the elect microcosm of the “new creation” from the corrupt macrocosmic “old creation.” While it’s possible to infer new/old creation distinctions in certain historical events and turns of phrase that appear in the Old Testament, only Paul actually uses the words and concepts explicitly. Does Paul draw the distinction between old and new creations the same way Andrew does?
I think he does not, based on three general inferences drawn from the Pauline texts outlined in prior posts here, here, here, here, and here. First, the new creation constitutes a radical departure from what preceded it. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the event that marks the end of the old and the beginning of the new. Second, perhaps the most important hallmark of the new creation is that the traditional distinctions between groups of people no longer hold. Jew or Gentile, circumcision or uncircumcision, male and female, freeman or slave – the “Christ event” has rendered these differences irrelevant. By implication, the Old Testament’s structural division of humanity into microcosm and macrocosm is an old-creation concept that died on the cross. Third, for Paul the old and new creations overlap not just in space and time but in the lives of individuals. The historical Christ event is binary: his death brought an end to the old creation, while his resurrection ushered in the new. But the individual’s subjective participation in the Christ event is always a matter of here and now, of continually and simultaneously dying to the old man and being renewed in the new man. Rather than going through the Scriptural evidence supporting these three general inferences here, I refer the reader to the passage-specific posts and discussions and especially to the Pauline texts on which they are based.
It must be acknowledged, however, that the breadth of Paul’s thought isn’t fully encapsulated in these five crucial but brief passages. It’s clear elsewhere that Paul does distinguish between believers and unbelievers. While believers may experience a chronic internal split between the old man and the new man, unbelievers presumably define themselves solely in terms of the old man. So, while Paul insists that the wall separating Jew from Gentile has been demolished in the cross, he seems to lay the groundwork for building a new division between Christian and non-Christian. Though the post-crucifixion entrance requirements may have changed, the practical upshot may be the same: a chosen microcosm arising from within a failed and dying macrocosm.
I think the most important question concerns the nature of the barrier separating inside from outside. (1) Following the Jewish precedent, is the division between Christianity and non-Christianity a structural one, marked by distinctly Christian confessions, worship rituals, creeds, moral codes, fellowship with one another, dedicated physical spaces, and so on? (2) Is the distinctive mark of the Christian primarily a matter of an ongoing subjective experience of dying to the old man and being renewed in the new man? (3) Do Christians distinguish themselves by their working together in filial love and resurrection hope to manifest collectively the new creation throughout the world? If I were to choose based on the Pauline new creation texts, I’d say that the second and third options more closely correspond to Paul’s expressed thoughts on the matter.
Relegating most of the human race to the status of a failed experiment, subject to termination at a moment’s notice by the Experimenter, might be okay if you happen to be one His laboratory assistants, but for us rats running through the maze the whole concept smacks of fascism. Having read, thought about, and discussed Paul’s descriptions of the new creation, I think it’s not only possible but Scriptural for Christians to disavow this sort of antagonistic us-versus-them mentality as a relic of the old-creation thinking that Jesus’s death and resurrection rendered obsolete. I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world, Jesus said (John 12:47). It would seem that, for Christ’s fellow-heirs and co-workers and participants in his death and resurrection, saving the world is the work that still needs to be done.
It would be wise for me to stop here, but I’m interested in the practical implications. What happens when Christians explicitly to regard themselves as participants in the new creation as Paul describes it? Not being a professing Christian I’m clearly not the best man for the job, but I’ll have a tentative go at it.
New-creation Christians break down structural differences between groups of people. Wars, racial and ethnic insulation, economic mechanisms maintaining the class divide between rich and poor, legal obstacles to the free movement of workers across national and regional boundaries – these sorts of antagonistic divisions would seem to be appropriate areas for intervention.
New-creation Christians make the boundary more permeable between sacred and secular realms. That some undertaking is a church project should be less important than the nature of the project itself. Just because Israel divided the calendar between the work week and the Sabbath doesn’t mean that the new creation is irrelevant in the workplace and the schools. Instead of buffering themselves inside the microcosm, Christians can leaven the dough of the world with resurrection life.
New-creation Christians acknowledge the dividedness of the Christian self. Death an resurrection are the two moments of the Christ event; both are part of the believer’s participation in that event. The urge to self-gratify and the urge to self-justify, the desire to obey and the desire to violate, the conflict between what we think and what we find ourselves doing, the compulsion to impose barriers between ourselves and others along with obsession to imitate and to compete – the death throes of the old man are continual and perpetual. But there’s also this other self, this new man, that is continually coming alive – what is he like, I wonder? Both are part of the Christ event; both are part of the Christian’s subjective participation in that event.
But that’s enough out of me.
Re: The New Creation in Paul: Summary and Implications
John - I thought your summary and conclusion reached a thoughtfully reflective terminus to your ponderings on ‘the new creation’. I wondered whether some consideration of the ‘new heaven and new earth’ - Revelation 21:1 would also be appropriate, as the destiny for which those participating in God’s ‘new creation’ now are heading.
Despite your protests in a previous post, I still think that one of your central preoccupations is the issue of ‘inside/outside’ or ‘them versus us’ in ‘the new creation’. I appreciate your desire, which you share with many today, to urge an understanding of the Christian faith in which the main focus is not who is in and who is out, but how the Christian faith, or ‘the new creation’, can benefit others.
My only difficulty with the way you have developed this line of thinking, whilst sharing fully the generous intentions which motivate it, is that it leads back, in a rather circular way, to the original ‘inside/outside’ problem it was seeking to circumvent. How can the Christian faith, or ‘the new creation’, benefit the world at large? Crucially, by inviting people to share in it. It is ‘in Christ’ that barriers of race, gender, oppression, are overcome. The ‘new earth’, which is the home of the ‘new creation’, is intended to be the home of those who have already made their home with the Christ who will inaugurate it.
Where I wish to fully agree with your overall argument, however, is that the church as we know it has probably tended to create boundary lines between itself and the rest of the world where they were never intended to be. Indeed, the church has created some of the strongest boundary lines between different factions of itself - Protestant/Catholic, Reformed/Pentecostal, Modern/Postmodern etc. While the church has often claimed exclusive proprietorial rights to Christ, and particular cultural expressions of him (for cultural is too often what it really is), Christ himself has quietly turned up somewhere else, not least among people who otherwise had no knowledge of him.
In this sense, the church itself has often created a false sacred/secular, them/us divide. The boundaries where God has created them are indeed permeable. The new creation was intended for the good of all humanity, not something that the church was intended to preserve for itself. Breaking down divisions was at the heart of this project, in a God whose very essence was love for the entire world.
So there is a ‘generous orthodoxy’. But at the heart of it is a God who chose to express this ‘orthodoxy’ in astonishingly particular ways:
He chose a particular people, Israel, and then the church, in which his purposes should find expression - rather than doing it through all nations equally
He chose to bring his purposes to light through one agent, not through a collection of agents who were distributed equally through all nations and cultures
He invited people everywhere to put their trust in this one representative of himself as a precondition of participation in the people of God as they were to be - not through a democratically fair and equal distribution of representatives throughout the world
There was one cross through which the death of the old creation was proclaimed, and one resurrection through which the new creation was demonstrated to have come about - not an assemblage of deaths and resurrections to all nations, cultures and people-groups
The boundary line became the visible expression of the eschatological Spirit on all those who put their trust this one representative of God, replacing through faith and Spirit in a worldwide context the previous boundary lines of law and Torah observance.
However, the generous intentions of this particular way of bringing things about are evident in the whole story of the people of God. It is with that generous intention that I find myself standing on common ground with yourself, in contrast with any who would seek to preserve the purity of what they believe by focusing on their separation from those who do not dot the same i’s or cross the same t’s as themselves.
Re: The New Creation in Paul: Summary and Implications
Thanks for your response, Peter. Against all probability, we again find ourselves in general agreement.
True. As I recall, you previously suggested that I wanted to read Paul’s texts as a message of universal salvation, where everyone is in and no one is out. I attempted to sidestep that issue, but I don’t think I denied my interest in understanding the in/out criteria in Paul’s texts about the new creation. Most importantly, I wanted to see whether Paul said that the pathway into the new creation passes through Israel, and whether he emphasized the "peculiar people" idea for separating the chosen people collectively and structurally from the macrocosm. I think it’s fair to say that he does not.
That Jesus was a Jew isn’t a mere matter of happenstance, inasmuch as he did play a pivotal role in Israel’s national project. However, in the aftermath of his death and resurrection Jesus’ Jewishness is irrelevant: in the new creation there is neither Jew nor Gentile, as Paul is repeatedly at pains to emphasize.
So now we have to think about a different way of characterizing the in/out distinction (again, presuming there is one). I agree fully with your contention that for Paul the way in passes through the person of Christ, and in particular through his death and resurrection. Jesus experienced these events personally, and it’s through personal identification with these events that the individual enters into the resurrection life of the new creation. In your succinct phraseology,
As you point out, the "Christ event" isn’t universal, happening to all nations through a multicultural array of different saviors. Rather, the specific event attains its universality by opening up a personal subjective possibility for everyone, a possibility that’s actualized by faith. On these matters I think we agree.
One can of course draw the inference that the subjective possibility is nullified by lack of faith, thereby establishing the in/out criteria of traditional evangelicalism. But Paul seems to emphasize the observation that even the people of faith often act in ways that are indistinguishable from those who have no faith. At the same time he emphasizes the idea that Christ died for all, that all might be saved. It seems that Paul wanted to exercise caution in erecting a new set of criteria for separating sheep from goats. As you say,
"However," you continue,
I think that I’ll always have difficulty with the ungenerous elements in the Old Testament story. Retaining a generally high view of Scripture seems to demand that the reader accept the editorial stance of the Biblical writers when they assert that Israel perpetrated mass genocides and enslavements on God’s explicit order. In the early days of Christianity the Marcionites, appalled by Yahweh’s vengeful bloodthirstiness, concluded that Jesus represented a different God altogether and that his mission was to save the world from Yahweh. (Marcion was condemned as a heretic and excommunicated by the elders in Rome, but his particular Christian variant enjoyed considerable popularity for a couple of centuries at least.) Even McLaren waffles on the issue, acknowledging his own revulsion at the Deut. 7 genocide without explicitly endorsing or disavowing it. I wonder whether your personal in/out criteria would accept believers who reject the ungenerous genocidal Scriptural passages as tragic misrepresentations of God’s intentions, or perhaps even as an ill-chosen strategy in God’s historic dealings with Israel. At least it should be clear that, following the "Christ event," this sort of divisive policy has no place in the new creation.
Thanks, brother.
New creation and new Law
Is it always the fate of iconoclasts that they in turn should become the new icons?
Paul follows the lead of Jesus in declaring that being god’s children does not depend upon either Jewishness or following Mosaic Law. Jesus is quite clear that living out lives of love is what sonship is. Paul places the legitimising break with the past in our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Then declares that we have already become a part of this new creation "in Christ".
In essence I think the identification of a supposedly orthodox understanding of Paul and Jesus with ‘real’ Christianity is a very original and perhaps fatal mistake. Jesus certainly did call for discipleship, but there is no doubt that that discipleship did not entail simply replacing one orthodoxy with another.
On the whole then I agree with John Doyle, I only wonder whether we have gone quite far enough? It would seem to me that the real heretics are precisely those that desire now a new law (orthodoxy) to replace the old one.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: New creation and new Law
The problem is, Sam, that you’ve just drawn up another boundary line and declared some inside of it, others out. You’ve just proposed your interpretation of where the lines of orthodoxy should be: with those who don’t draw lines of orthodoxy!!
Part of the resolution to this paradox lies in understanding how Paul approached Torah — from a Jewish perspective. Like Jesus, his goal was to show how Torah, whch means Teaching, not Law, was transformed by the Messiah, who reorientated it around himself and provided a new hermeneutic in so doing.
There will always be a cultural element to our hermeneutics — our way of reading scripture. The generous orthodoxy is to be agreeable on major points of agreement, with communities or representatives of whatever conviction. It doesn’t lie with trying to eschew our own convictions, but in tempering them by holding them in tension with what others believe.
With respect to your particular concern here then, Sam. those whose practices you hold in contempt are not to be regarded as heretics — to be rejected — but as "the Other" whether individual or community, who / which is in a much need of redemption as you and I / our faith community.
It is usually when we feel threatened by the Other that we feel the need to draw up boundary lines that keep people out. But as Peter intimates, it is possible to propose boundary lines that are intended not to keep people out but to clarify that which defines the new area into which they are invited.
shalom! - john (eternalpurpose.org.uk)