THE IMPACT
PAUL AND THE NEW CREATION
Two texts in particular serve as the proper starting point here. First, 2 Corinthians 5:14-17, where Paul argues with the Corinthians who are calling into question both his gospel of a crucified Messiah and his cruciform apostleship. He responds that the new creation brought about by Christ’s death and resurrection nullifies one’s viewing anything any longer from the old age point of view (Gk. kata sarka, “according to the flesh”). Christ’s death means that the whole human race has come under the sentence of death (v. 14), so that those who do live (in God’s new order) now live for the one who died for them and was raised again (v. 15). The result, he goes on, is that from this point on, to view either Christ or anyone/anything else from a perspective that is “according to the flesh” is no longer valid (v. 16). Why? Because being in Christ means that one belongs to the new creation: the old has gone, the new has come (v. 17). It doesn’t take much reading of Paul to recognize that this radical, new order point of view — life marked by the cross — lies at the heart of everything he thinks and does.
Which leads to our second text: Galatians 3:26-29. This passage offers the first of two conclusions25 to the theological-scriptural argument of Galatians 2:16-4:7, in which Paul is adamant that Gentiles do not have to conform to the old covenant boundary markers/identity symbols, in order to belong to the new covenant people of God. The three primary markers were circumcision, food laws, and the keeping of special days. Although each of these is mentioned at some point in Galatians,26 the major focus is on circumcision, because his opponents regularly appealed to it as the way Gentiles would also be included in the people of God (Gen 17:1-14).
To counter this argument and to recover his Gentile converts from further capitulation to the former covenant, Paul argues first from their experience of the Spirit (3:1-5), and then from Scripture regarding Christ (3:6-22). In his first conclusion Paul’s concern is singular: that the old order has given way to the new — promised by God even before the covenant of circumcision. The old order, which helped to distinguish Israel from its Gentile neighbors, was signaled by the law — the legislation of the former covenant that, as Paul makes clear, was designed for sinners and assumed human fallenness. Paul’s way of putting it in the present argument is that the law served to hem people in until the time for faith to come, with the appearance of God’s Messiah (w. 22-24). All of this because some Gentiles were being persuaded that to please God fully they had to adopt the identity markers of the former covenant as well.
“No,” Paul says, as he now appeals to the new creation. Over against former slavery (Jews to the law; Gentiles to idols), he says emphatically: “In Christ Jesus, all of you are children of God [not slaves] through faith” (v. 26), which is further evidenced by their “one baptism” (v. 27). All who have been baptized into Christ have thereby been clothed with Christ. Behind this sentence lies the baptismal theology of Romans 6, full of “new creation” eschatological presuppositions. Death and resurrection have taken place in Christ. As believers go through the waters of baptism, we assume our own role in that death and resurrection, thus dying to the old and rising into newness of life — into the new creation.
In verse 28 Paul comes to the conclusion that we have been led to expect, namely, that in the new creation there is neither Jew nor Greek. But right at that point, typically of Paul, he recognizes that the new creation obliterates all the old sociological categories that separated people. So he adds, what is true of Jew and Greek is equally true of “slave and free, male and female.” His point: In our baptism “into Christ” and through the work of the Spirit we enter the new order, the new creation; and where death and resurrection have taken place, the old distinctions have been obliterated.27
Paul, of course, does not mean that the three categories themselves cease to exist in the new creation, at least not in its present “already /not yet” expression. To the contrary, as part of the continuity between the old and the new, all of us are some combination of the three: e.g., Gentile, free, female. What has been obliterated is the significance of these distinctions and the (basically divisive) values — ethnic-racial (Jew/Gentile), socioeconomic (slave/free), and sexual-gender (male/female) — based on them.
Our difficulty with understanding the truly radical nature of Paul’s assertion is twofold. First, most contemporary Christians have very little sense of the fundamental eschatological framework which was common to the entire New Testament experience, and which in fact was the only way the earliest believers understood their existence. Second, Western culture in particular is quite foreign to that of these early believers at some fundamental points. In the culture into which Paul is speaking, position and status prevailed in every way, so that one’s existence was totally identified with and circumscribed by these realities. By the very nature of things, position and status gave advantage to some over others; and in Greco-Roman culture, by and large, there was very little chance of changing status.
Thus Gentiles had all the advantages over Jews, so Jews took refuge in their relationship with God, which they believed advantaged them before God over the Gentiles. The hatreds were deep and mutual. Likewise, masters and slaves were consigned to roles where all the advantages went to masters;28 and the same was true for men and women, where women were dominated by men and basically consigned to childbearing. In fact, according to Diogenes Laertius, Socrates used to say every day: “There were three blessings for which he was grateful to Fortune: first, that I was born a human being, and not one of the brutes; next that I was born a man and not a woman; thirdly, a Greek and not a barbarian.”29 The Jewish version of this, obviously influenced by the Greco-Roman worldview, is the rabbi who says that “everyday you should say, ‘Blessed are you, O God, ... , that I’m not a brute creature, nor a Gentile, nor a woman.”’30
It is especially difficult for most of us to imagine the effect of Paul’s words in a culture where position and status preserved order through basically uncrossable boundaries. Paul asserts that when people come into the fellowship of Christ Jesus, significance is no longer to be found in being Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. The all-embracing nature of this affirmation, its counter-cultural significance, the fact that it equally disadvantages all by equally advantaging all — these stab at the very heart of a culture sustained by people maintaining the right position and status. But in Christ Jesus, the One whose death and resurrection inaugurated the new creation, all things have become new; the new era has dawned.
The new creation, therefore, must be our starting point regarding gender issues, because this is theologically where Paul lived. Everything else he says comes out of this worldview of what has happened in the coming of Christ in the Spirit.