he perceives them all in the light of their being in the place of Christ.
This view is supported by all the parallel usages. The only other use of kainē ktisis, “new creation,” is in Gal 6:15, where it refers to the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile. To “create one new humanity” (Eph 2:15) is to reconcile Jew and Gentile. The “new humanity of God’s creating” (Eph 4:24) is the same; it is the unfolding of the call to unity (4:1–16) and it expresses itself in the communal virtues of telling one another the truth (4:25), working and sharing (v. 28), edifying one another (v. 29), and being kind (v. 32). Thus both the “new man” and the “new creature” are, to take the texts most literally, the new community. Still another juxtaposition of the same set of terms occurs in Col 3:9–11:
Do not lie to one another, since you have let yourselves be divested of the old humanity with its practices and have let yourselves be clothed with the new [humanity], which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator, where there is not Jew nor Greek. . . .
We note that the “new humanity” is defined directly as a state “where there is no Jew and Greek.” When, in four quite different literary contexts (Ephesians 2–3, Galatians 6, Colossians 3, and our own 2 Corinthians 5), responding to different immediate challenges in church life, we find the same themes juxtaposed:
old and new humanity;
no difference between Jew and Greek, slave and free;
a distinctive new kind of knowing;
identification of all of this with Christ himself;
we must conclude that the author is echoing a thought pattern that was frequent and fundamental in his mind.12
The particular text with which we have been dealing is by no means the only one that has traditionally been read with emphasis on the inward transformation of the person. It is the one that has been used the most simply and bluntly, because it seemed to make its affirmation the most literally. Other similar texts speak of having a “new heart” (Jer 31:31, quoted in Heb 8:10), or of “receiving the power to become the sons of God” (John 1:12) or of being “born again” (John 3). It may then be possible to grant that the interpretation of 2 Cor 5:16 given above is correct, and nevertheless to argue that the concentration upon the transformed individual is still supported by other biblical evidence.
The intention of the above rereading is thus not at all to deny in principle a personal or subjective or inward dimension to the experience of becoming a Christian, but to challenge the normative claim made for a view that would reduce it to only that dimension, or make that dimension the essential center, or permit it to stand in the way of the straightforward meaning of a particular passage.
The Constructive Alternative
If the focus is not, then, on a particular understanding of the individual standing alone and transformed alone, where does it lie? It lies in Jesus’s initial proclaiming the imminence of the kingdom. Persons must repent if they are to enter it. Repenting and entering it both have about them subjective dimensions, but they can best be described in terms that include the cognitive (dealing with awareness of ideas) and the social (dealing with the awareness of other persons and groups to which one is related). The description of the change that comes over a person who repents and believes will freely include elements of emotion and self-understanding; but it will not involve any need to demonstrate that the changed nature is self-contained or self-interpreting, or that its inwardness is prior to, or the sole and adequate cause of, or independent of, its social reality.
When we move from Jesus to Paul the same answer is clearer. The reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in the “new humanity” is first a community event. It cannot happen to a lone individual. The prerequisite for personal change is a new context into which to enter. A Gentile can only find Abraham by meeting a Jew. A Jew can only celebrate the messianic age by welcoming a Gentile. This is not to negate other dimensions—mental ideas, psychic self-understandings, feelings, etc. The issue is the sovereignty of the individualistic definition over other levels of interpretation.
All that is needed now is to have seen that both major texts we have tested are understood more fully and more roundly if their location in the ethnic policy debate of the early churches is given more attention than the agenda of modern Western self-doubt.
1. Originally entitled “The Apostle’s Apology Revisited.” Reprinted by permission, with minor editorial revision, from Klassen, New Way of Jesus, 115–34.
2. First edition, 1972; revised edition, 1994.
3. Some of these sources are cited in Politics of Jesus, 212ff. In addition, see Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Since these lines were first written, considerable additional scholarly opinion, which I do not seek here to cover, has further supported this line of interpretation.
4. This point was made by Markus Barth in “What Can a Jew Believe?” 382ff., esp. 395–98, but earlier and most directly by Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, 87ff., and confirmed by others. The opinion of the “Judaizers,” to whose criticism Paul responds, was not a representative Jewish view. They must have been making of the sign of the covenant a superstitious, ritualistic, noncovenantal use, which born Jews would not have supported, and which recorded rabbinic opinion does not support. No born Jew would have given circumcision the saving value Paul has to argue against. For born Jews, the law was to be kept, but its motivation and binding character have a different frame of reference. The “Judaizers” must then have been Gentiles making a superstitious and noncovenantal ritualistic use of the covenant sign.
5. Much recent discussion seeking to review Christian truth-claims seeks to disavow the triumphal provincialism of the past, and has with that intent played the “particular” and the “universal” over against each other. Such a formulation of the issue does violence to the New Testament witness, and is also confusing and un-ecumenical in our time. The revision proposed here is much more basic.
6. In 1 Cor 4:5 Paul affirms that when all secrets are revealed, “then each one will receive praise from God.” Martin, in Last Judgment, demonstrated how much modern Protestantism had changed the concept of a last judgment into a frightening one.
7. Strachan, Second Epistle of Paul, ad loc.
8. It is striking, in a way analogous to my comments at the beginning of this essay, how little attention the writing of commentaries pays to creative alternative readings.
9. Héring, Second Epistle of Saint Paul, ad loc.
10. [An incomplete and thus unintelligible footnote making reference to Paul Pruysser, “a theologically oriented staff therapist at the Menninger clinic,” has been deleted.—Ed.]
11. This section overlaps in substance with pages 212ff. of Politics of Jesus. Its phrasing is derived from a draft written earlier. A more recent parallel text is my “Social Shape of the Gospel,”
