in aggressive evangelicalism might be spoken of as the “Campus Crusade syndrome”—the expectation that the gospel has a special attraction for, or a special tendency to produce, beauty queens and sports heroes. The correlation of this temptation with this text was dramatized by a denominational church bulletin used in a church I once attended. The cover bore the words, “In Christ . . . a new creature.” In one corner of the page there was a skidrow face; wrinkled, bleary-eyed, unkempt and unshaven, staring pointlessly into empty blackness; contrasting with him was a healthy young Anglo-Saxon figure, well combed and shaven and dressed, with both feet confidently planted in an athletic pose, his chest swelled out and his eyes gazing at some distant star. Certainly the artist did not mean to promise that an ancient wino can become a young athlete. But the fact that this juxtaposition of images seemed to the editor of the bulletins to be appropriate to represent “newness of life” is sufficient documentation that “newness” is likely to be confounded with physiological or psychological image definitions that have little to do with the gospel.
It was, after all, in the same passage that the Apostle Paul had just spoken of having to bear in his body the suffering of Jesus. In the same Corinthian correspondence he spoke of living with a thorn in his flesh, and of the imminent passing away of the “tent” in which he was now living. Whereas much modern evangelicalism calls the individual from brokenness to wholeness, there is another deeper tradition (Keswick, Luther, going back to Paul, and to Ezekiel and Jeremiah), which calls the believer from the search for wholeness to the acceptance of brokenness. From this perspective, the American glorification of the healthy self appears unevangelical, even demonic.
The other side of this temptation is the concentration of gospel witness upon the down-and-outer. A middle-class Protestant would feel almost embarrassed about speaking to his middle-class neighbor about Christian faith, but can feel it somehow fitting to drive fifty miles to a rescue mission where there are people who, he can convince himself, are in need of the gospel. This is simply the flip side of the Norman Vincent Peale record with its promise of health and prosperity. It is what Bonhoeffer called methodism: conceiving of the gospel call as only able to be formulated in terms of a person’s being down; so that you must somehow get people down, or find people who are down, in order to have them listen.
New Creature or New World
This extended parenthesis may serve as background to show that the “new creature” language of 2 Cor 5:17 has been charged with a freight of argumentative meaning by which the apostle would have been very surprised. It has been the primary proof text for a doctrine of where the newness of being a Christian is located, namely in the very nature of the creature. This is the meaning which, as we observed, the paraphrase by Kenneth Taylor makes even more clear, with no basis at all, in the rendering, “he is a new person inside.” That the inside is what makes a person what he or she is, is a notion of human personality that is culturally very possible, but it is of no help with our question, and has to be brought to the text from our world.
It is obvious that, if we assume, on the basis of our late Western personalistic culture, that “inwardness” is the most fundamental definition of what it means to be who one is, then we will feel at home reading Paul’s description of the newness of the new creation as meaning a renewed inwardness. There are also non-Western and non-modern cultures that posit such a view of the person. There is, however, nothing in the text to ratify our prior assumption that inwardness is the most fundamental level of what it means to be human, and therefore the most natural location for what it means to be renewed as human.
When Paul says that Jesus took our place, he is not talking about inwardness, but about Jerusalem. The coming of Christ was not located in the soul. His teaching was not located in the soul. His crucifixion and his resurrection were public events with witnesses. Even his ascension (which is still far harder for us as modern Western materialists to imagine) is reported as the kind of event that people who saw it could report, not reduced to what it means within the self-understanding of the believing person.
Then it would be more fitting, if we wish to understand the change in the creation that Paul is talking about, to assume he means not first of all an inward change from which then some outward modifications are to be derived, but a real change, which needs to be stated and interpreted for its own sake rather than gaining anything by being boiled down to inwardness and then expanded out from that center. So now let us dare to put the test to the Protestant claim that Scripture, when looked to afresh with a clearly defined question, can speak afresh. Does the text itself sustain such an understanding as has been sketched here?11
The first observation that arises from the original text is that there are no words for he is. As the use of italics in the King James Bible indicated, these two words were supplied because it was felt that they are necessary to make a meaningful sentence in English. Now there is no problem with needing to add the copulative verb “is.” This is not needed as a distinct word in Greek, as it is in English. Therefore to supply it adds nothing to the meaning. But the question is quite different when we ask whether the pronoun “he” had to be added, with its implied reference to the “anyone” or “someone” of the preceding clause being its antecedent. Grammatically speaking it is more proper, and involves less addition to the text, if we supply the copulative without the pronoun, and read either “creation is new” or “there is a new creation.” On strictly linguistic grounds these interpretations should be attempted first, before resorting to a subject drawn in from another clause. A second consideration arises from study of the use of the noun ktisis (creation) elsewhere in the New Testament. Its most frequent usage is to refer not to a thing or a creature at all, but to the act of creation, in phrases like “before the creation of the world.” Its only use to refer to human “creatures” (1 Pet 2:13) is in a context where it is not sure whether it means “humans-conceived-as-creatures-of-God” or “institutions-conceived-of-as-creatures-of-humans.” In either case it does not speak of individuals, but rather of categories or institutions.
Never in the New Testament is the single noun ktisis used to refer clearly to an individual human person perceived as the object or the product of the creative activity of God. Since we do use the word creature that way in English, it is quite normal for us to consider this as one of the obvious interpretations of the passage, but we have no right to impose English connotations on a Greek text. Since the word does not have that evident meaning in the original language, we must ask what its most likely interpretation would have been for the apostle or for his readers. The most simple and literally direct interpretation, which we should therefore prefer, unless there is strong argument to the contrary, is the one that takes “creation” as referring to the action whereby God makes the world. Then we should translate “if anyone is in Christ, then God creates anew.” The closest to this, of the well-known translations, is the New English Bible: “there is a whole new world.”
A third parallel exegetical consideration is that which comes into this text from the context. The wider context is that the apostle needs to defend his apostolic ministry, especially the way in which he has served to bring together Jews and Greeks. The immediate narrower context is his statement that he does not “know anyone after the flesh” (v. 16 KJV), that is, he does not evaluate persons according to carnal criteria: “worldly standards have ceased to count in our estimate of any man” (NEB). Paul does not perceive people as Jew or Greek, but as the new community they have become in Christ. Because Christ has taken the place of all, now all can be seen in the image of Christ. Instead of seeing anyone as what they were, as what their past had made them, who they are ethnically,
I see them [he says] as what they became in the reconciliation worked by Christ. Consequently, I am no longer supposed to measure, or to perceive, or to evaluate persons by the [ethnic] standards I have brought with me from our fallen and divided past.
So what Paul says is not centered on the changes that take place within the constitution of the individual person, but on the changed way in which the believer is to look at the world, and especially on overcoming the
