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Introduction

The most striking thing I learned from the critical responses to my The Politics of Jesus2 has been the relatively low importance that the critics—even when they were Scripture scholars by profession—gave to basic questions of textual interpretation. My book was presented in 1972 as an exercise in reading the text of the New Testament with certain questions in mind. Those who disagreed with the book’s conclusions, however, very seldom found it fitting or necessary to differ on the grounds that I had not read the text of the New Testament correctly. They did not fault incorrect literary or historical interpretations. The critics’ differences were stated in a variety of ways but very seldom on the basis of the text.

The critics found it easy to disregard matters of direct textual interpretation, especially when the reading of the text calls into question one or another of the deeply believed axioms of Western Protestant culture. The ability to perceive that what the Bible says is different from what we have always assumed it meant is very difficult to acquire and to act upon. This problem is the same for people who consider themselves “liberal” as for those who consider themselves “evangelical.”

It is not simple for an author to deal with this kind of critical response. It rejects what had been argued without dealing with the textual and historical basis on which the argument rests. One can argue with the nonbiblical assumptions that the critic holds and that have kept him or her from reading the text straightforwardly without being conscious that they are nonbiblical. But to lift up and argue with the unavowed philosophy of one’s own culture is difficult.

The other path, which requires more patience, is simply to go back yet again to the text, to read yet again, still more modestly; with still less confidence that we already know all that it says; with still more attention to historical context and literary coherence; with still more concern to understand, from the inside, the mind of the writer(s); with still more trust that “the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his Holy Word.”

John Robinson, the Puritan pastor who first spoke the above words within his farewell sermon to the Mayflower “pilgrims” as they left Plymouth, may have had in mind the creation of a theocracy in New England. Congregationalists who have often quoted this text in recent generations may have read into the same words a too-modern openness to declare “ancient goods uncouth” and to ride with the currents of modernity. Nonetheless the confession, taken alone, states the quintessence of the “biblicism” of the radical reformation.

Scripture spoke in our past to Waldo and Wycliff, to Luther and Marpeck, to Edwards and Campbell, to Spurgeon and Rauschenbusch—to their present needs and mission, which are now our inspiring past. In like manner, in our present it can be Scripture itself that by the Holy Spirit can again say something more than to repeat, into a world to which it was not originally addressed, the witness of those predecessors. What is wrong with fundamentalism is not that it holds too tightly to the text of Scripture (although that is what it thinks it does). It is rather that it canonizes some postbiblical, usually post-Reformation formulation, equating it so nearly with the meaning of Scripture that the claim is tacitly made that the hermeneutic task is done.

I could properly argue that the hermeneutic task is never done, by appealing to the New Testament teaching about the continuing presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit. Or I could also quite properly argue that the hermeneutic task is never done by pointing out that our world puts to us questions that we have never faced before in the same shape. But for the present essay I propose to make the point by reading one chapter carefully. I propose to show it by expositing the simple fact that questions of language, vocabulary, syntax, and grammar are quite evident in 2 Corinthians 5 which are not dealt with directly by the major commentaries, and which, when taken seriously, undercut the cherished interpretations of the past. I cherish these past interpretations as much as my critics do. I study them more than many of my critics do. Yet that respect for the past and even the ability, personally, to find the formulations of the witness of the past inspiring, or even satisfying, is not the primary goal of the Scripture scholar.

Resources for Reading the Text

If we wish to reread critically a text with a very familiar meaning, so that it can say something new, there are several kinds of resources that can help reopen our eyes for a fresh reading. Sometimes they may be simple matters of grammar and lexicography. Such are present in 2 Corinthians 5, especially (as we shall see later) in the key text that is usually translated “he is a new creature,” where both the definition of the individual word “creature” and the construction of the sentence with “he is . . .” as usually rendered, are counter to standard grammatical rules.

A second resource for refreshing one’s reading is the broader question of literary coherence: how does one sentence lead into another? This test cannot always apply. Some kinds of texts do not claim to be literally coherent; this may be the case for collections of proverbs, and it may be the case if at some point the text we have is the result of editing which combined several earlier documents. Some people claim this is the case for 2 Corinthians, but even that kind of hypothesis would not cut every passage into small pieces. Thus it is fitting to ask this more holistic question of literary coherence. When we do this, we observe that the sequence of the first few sentences of the chapter does not yield an evident thought process if we presuppose, as is usually done without thinking about it, that all of the sentences are declarative. If, however, we take some of the sentences not as declarations but as questions, the thought process becomes evident and coherent.

A third kind of resource for refreshing one’s reading is to increase one’s empathy with the background within which the author was writing and with the overall purposes of the document. For centuries the writings of the Apostle Paul were read as if they were meant to be sources of finely coined phrases ready to be integrated into a system of theology. Then more recently, they were read by many as a series of statements about the self-understanding of the believer as he sees his life in the light of faith. Without denying the element of truth in each of those past (post-Renaissance) assumptions, scholars in recent generations have seen how much more helpful it is to begin at the beginning with the fact that a missionary who had planted some churches, and was concerned for the faithfulness of other churches that he had not planted (as at Rome), is writing letters to those churches because of his concern for how they deal with specific problems of being the church. He cares especially about the problems of being a missionary church that proclaims and incarnates a Jewish message in a Gentile world.3

This fact about the ministry of the Apostle Paul was never denied in the past, but it was thought to have little to do with the understanding of the particular concerns of particular paragraphs and propositions. To be more aware of the pervasive presence of the Jew/Gentile agenda brings to life many sections of the Pauline writings which otherwise seemed much less clear.

We might reasonably expect to be aided in our access to the meaning of our passage by being reminded that the particular criticisms against which the apostle is defending himself in chapter five as well as in much of the rest of the second letter to the Corinthians have to do with the fact that he is committed to bringing into being communities where Jew and Gentile alike confess the faith of Abraham. There were other Christians (including among them Hellenistic Jews) who wanted a more open attitude toward Gentile wisdom and culture. Such an attitude, they argued, should not go to the trouble of dragging along, as a part of the mission method and message, the burden of Jewish ideas, Jewish prayers, the Jewish Scriptures, and fellowship with the Jewish church in Syria and Jerusalem. There were other fellow believers (including among them very possibly some Gentiles whose conversion to Jewish practice was ritualistic, i.e., pagan in style)4 who insisted that what the Gentiles had to enter into was the totality of a pre-Messianic and less-than-missionary Jewish lifestyle. Under attack from both sides, the Paul whom we are now reading in 2 Corinthians—the Paul of Acts, and the Paul of Ephesians—has to be understood as doing a third and unheard-of thing, namely, creating a community that is at the same time aggressively open to the Gentile world and firmly committed to Abraham and to his children as the only way to know the God of Abraham. It is the defense of this missionary particularism that makes sense of all of the ministry of Paul, and specifically of his self-defense in our text.

The necessary rereading that this approach calls for would of course demand detail that a single essay cannot provide. In this essay I must limit myself to two specimens, neither of them conclusive, yet each of them quite significant standing alone, and, when combined, are certainly sufficient to sustain the thesis that a coherent picture of the thrust of the chapter fitting both of these observations could be developed that would make better sense of the text than do the traditional readings.

Is it “Terror” That Motivates Mission?

The Bible translation produced by James Moffatt, first copyrighted in 1922, with final revisions in 1934, was a pioneer in the realm of new Bible versions. Well before the paraphrase approach of Phillips and the “dynamic equivalent” theories of translators in the 1970s, Moffatt abandoned the notion of word-for-word and phrase-for-phrase equivalents, and tried to restate the argument or the narrative of a text in good contemporary English, even if this meant presenting different words in different sequence or changing the parts of speech. He did not, however, mean to be producing a paraphrase by adding new thoughts to what was already in the text.

Moffatt was also innovative in that he went out of his way to be open to alternative interpretations of the texts’ actual meanings, rather than giving the traditional interpretations the benefit of the doubt. His translation of 2 Cor 5:11–15 is a good example of this kind of innovation. Moffatt presents nothing that is not rooted in the literal Greek text. Yet he gives freedom to more imagination in choosing among the varied possible literal meanings of that text. Specifically, in this context, the innovation comes from his taking more seriously a fact that all scholars recognize, but few make much of, namely that the received Greek text does not provide the pointers to interpretation which for us are the punctuation marks, in this case the question mark or interrogation point (?) and the quotation mark or inverted commas (“ ”). Sometimes nothing in the Greek text indicates where one of these belongs. This does not mean that quotations do not happen, or that questions are not written in Greek, but only that the signal for what is to be taken as a quotation or as a question must come from the reader’s understanding of the context and the flow of the words, since there is no visible mark in the manuscript text. Sometimes an interrogative particle (e.g., “how”) or a pronoun (“who”) signals a question. Sometimes doubt is signaled by the particle mē, but not always. Thus it is always grammatically possible to consider any particular segment of a Greek text as being a quotation rather than the author’s own words, or as being a question rather than an affirmation. Moffatt made use of this possibility in a way that clarified considerably the thought pattern of this text. He placed quotation marks in significant places to show what others were saying, accusations to which Paul was responding, thus:

The Constraint of the Love of Christ (5:11–15)

If I “appeal to the interest of men,” then, it is with the fear of the Lord before my mind. What I am is plain to God without disguise; plain also, I trust, to your own conscience. This is not “recommending myself to you again”; it is giving you an incentive to be proud of me, which you can use against men who are proud of externals instead of the inward reality. “I am beside myself,” am I? Well, that is between myself and God. I am “sane,” am I? Well, that is in your interests; for I am controlled by the love of Christ, convinced that as One has died for all, then all have died, and that he died for all in order to have the living live no longer for themselves but for him who died and rose for them.

The King James language says, for the first of these sections, “knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men.” The affirmations are all simple indicatives, each an outright statement either of what Paul himself holds (the “we,” of course, means first of all Paul) or of what is true for all Christians or all apostles.

There are two immediate reasons for not assuming that this simple indicative expression is adequate. One is that the word “fear” or “terror” in this passage would thereby be given a tone that is different from elsewhere. Nowhere else in the New Testament is the phrase “fear of the Lord” translated with the special sense of “terror.” It regularly means something much nearer to “awe,” “reverence,” or “respect” than to fright. This is a question not only on the level of word usage but also on that of meaning. It is not said generally in the New Testament that the motivation for mission is the fear of punishment, either for oneself or for the lost men and women to whom one preaches. Fear of hellfire is appealed to as a motivation of modern Western religion. It is for that reason that this meaning of the text appears to many of us to be so congenial and therefore so self-evident. This text, interpreted in this way, would however be the only proof text in the whole New Testament for the notion that the fear of perdition (either for oneself if one fails to be obedient in evangelizing, or for the hearers in case one does not win them) is the best way to state the missionary motivation. In other words, if it is equally possible to interpret this text in another way, then that entire doctrine, so questionable from the perspective of the rest of the New Testament, and yet so self-evident in Western culture, must be reevaluated.5

It is a fundamental reason for suspicion, with regard to any particular interpretation, if it states a meaning dependent on only that one text, or if we are not free to test it because of the fear that some cherished postbiblical preaching emphasis might have to be tested by the rest of Scripture.

The second question in the first sentence is the use of the word that the King James Version translates “persuade.” In modern English, “to persuade” others is generally thought of as a very good thing to do. But the verb peitho that it translates is, in the language of Paul and his critics, a term of reproach usually translated “to please.” A direct parallel is Gal 1:10: “Am I now seeking the favor of men or of God? Am I trying to please men? If I were still pleasing men, I should not be servant of Christ.” It is obvious that, for Paul, to please God is a good thing, but to please oneself or to please other people is not. How could Paul, who in Galatians 1 defends himself against his detractors by saying that he is not pleasing men, claim the same function here in his defense? On the basis of the general meaning of that verb, a usage in which the standard meaning of peithō could be respected is to be preferred to one in which it is given an otherwise rare affirmative meaning as a synonym evangelism.

I have referred to two specific terms that make questionable the King James interpretation. I must make one further literary observation about the entire paragraph. In the context of his defending himself against criticism of his ministry, Paul repeats other accusations that have been leveled against him: that he is recommending himself (v. 12) and that he is insane (“beside himself,” v. 13). Since these next two thought units deal with reproaches addressed to Paul and his defense against them, it would certainly be in order to think of the first unit of the paragraph (v. 11) as also playing back a reproach.

This much attention to background should suffice to explain why it would be credible to interpret the passage as a series of three responses to three parallel accusations directed against Paul by the critics of his ministry. The translation I now suggest is like that of Moffatt in substance, but I present it here in a phrase-by-phrase sequence, so that its literal basis in the text and its parallel to other translations can be more easily checked. I add question marks, as well as quotation marks, to make the dialogical style still clearer.

(11) [Do you say that] I, who know what it means to fear the Lord, am “pleasing men”? I am fully transparent before God, and I hope also to be transparent before your consciences.

(12) I am not [as they say] “recommending myself again,” but only giving you a basis for rejoicing on my behalf, so that you can answer those who pride themselves on a person’s appearance rather than on the heart.

(13) Am I [as they say] “crazy”? It is for God’s sake. If on the other hand I am in my right mind, this works out for your good;

(14) for the love of Christ constrains me . . .

This translation has the advantage of leading the reader directly into the ensuing text of verse 15, but that is the point where it differs least from the King James interpretation. It also has the advantage of taking the form of three direct responses to three reproaches, roughly parallel but different in phrasing, each of them giving Paul the occasion for a different defense. In each case the reproach is addressed not to Paul’s message, but (ad hominem) to his personality style and his sincerity.

Paul’s first response is that the accusation is not credible because it does not fit either with his understanding of the fear of God or with his openness to others. The second time he responds by giving an alternative interpretation of what he is doing, when he does adduce arguments that may sound like his “commending himself.” The third time he responds rhetorically by saying, “So what? If I am unbalanced, it is for the sake of God, who is worth being crazy about.”

To “please people” is worthy of reproach not only or primarily because it indicates that the person who tries to please others is not being fully honest, independent, and driven only by the truth. It further suggests that the way he is trying to appeal to the others is not by serving their best interests or the interest of the truth but by appealing to their selfishness or their desire to be flattered. This is why Moffatt fittingly uses the phrase, “appeal to the interests of men.”

R. H. Strachan, author of the volume in question in the Moffatt Commentary series, supports this general pattern of interpretation, making an alternative proposal to understand verse 14. The Greek reads more briefly than above: “If I am crazy [that is] for God, if I am sane, [that is] for you.”6 Most translations, like mine above, take “for God” and “for you” as meaning in each case “for the sake of” or “in the interest of.” Strachan proposes rather that Paul must be asking who is to pass judgment on the matter.

If I am beside myself, it is to God that I am accountable for that. God should be the judge. If on the other hand I am behaving sanely, that is up to you to deal with, something you can judge. I am accountable to you.7

This alternative translation does not change the thrust of my general argument here. It still assumes that the accusation of insanity was addressed to Paul and that his response to it was not simply to try to ward it off with counter-argumentation but to turn it sideways by going on, “so what if it is the case that I am beside myself . . . ?”

The interpretation of the passage by commentators since Moffatt has not paid serious attention to this alternative punctuation pattern and to the simplification of meaning that it offers.8 The French commentator Jean Héring, without indicating any awareness of Moffatt, is one who reads with quotation marks as does Moffatt, without arguing the matter.9

In the absence of serious attention by commentators to the hypothesis stated here, it cannot be considered either as refuted by the fact that it has not been picked up by others, nor as sustained by the absence of negative response to Moffatt. It therefore must remain a worthwhile hypothesis, no more but also no less. We are free to continue to assume it as part of a larger hypothetical synthesis.

Is Conversion Mainly “Inward”?

Our first specimen question exemplifying the difference between our habitual assumptions and the simple meaning of the text in its context had to do more with Paul’s self-understanding than with the content of his message. A more critical specimen of this problematic, to which we now move, is the interpretation of verse 17 of this chapter, which is the locus classicus for a particular modern Protestant view of conversion. “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature,” the King James Version renders it. The “new creature” is then a new individual human person, made new at some very deep level of what it means to be a human person. This is so profoundly assumed to be the self-evident point of the text that it is very difficult for a conservative Protestant reader to let the text speak for itself.

What is then the traditional “standard” interpretation of the passage? We must restate it in order to clarify the challenge we must address to it. First of all it is clear that it is a statement about the individual. It is in the singular. It makes a statement about this one person, any person, “he,” who is “in Christ,” who is therefore “a new creature.”

Secondly, it is clear in the prevalent interpretation that this person in herself or himself has a new nature, is different in the root of what constitutes him or her as a human organism. Of course this transformed person is in some sense the same person she or he was before, but the weight of the affirmation is upon the newness that has been given. Not only is the newness located in the “‘nature” or “essence” of the individual: the “nature” is itself located within the person, away from any social or empirical tangibility. The “Living Letters” paraphrase puts it most pointedly: “When someone becomes a Christian he becomes a brand new person inside.” The individualizing change goes on: “the old things are gone” becomes “he is not the same any more,” and “they have become new” is changed to “A new life is begun.”

Third, this event is thought to have taken place at some precise time in the past. It is not clear whether it needs to be conceived as instantaneous or as a process that took some time; but it is definitely a process having been concluded in the past for any person who is “in Christ.” To be “in Christ” is not a matter of more or less, but of yes or no. Whether conversion is therefore a matter of several minutes or several months, in any case, it is now possible to speak of it as past and achieved. To be “in Christ” and to be a “new creature” is in some sense at least a finished happening.

Fourth, this change in nature involves a divine work in the personality of the new creature. This is the significance of the very word creature. It points to the divine intervention having created something new. It is not said in what relationship this novelty stands to other kinds of causation that make a person what he or she is (to this question we shall return), but in any case a distinct divine intervention is affirmed. For us to be able to affirm it as solidly as it is usually understood, it must be discernible, and not merely be an affirmation of faith with no visible evidence.

It should not be necessary to outline the strength or the attractiveness of this way of conceiving the gospel message. It has definite implications, many of them evidently positive, for the attractiveness of the gospel invitation for those to whom it is addressed, as well as for the appropriateness of the call to a fuller discipleship when this call is addressed to those who have affirmed that they are in Christ. It might further be pointed out (less definitely to be counted as an unequivocal advantage) that this individualistic view is very compatible with modern Western understandings of being human.

Before proceeding to identify the grounds for suggesting that the text in question, and perhaps the entire New Testament, might be making a somewhat different point, let us proceed beyond the self-evident strength of this interpretation to recognizing a few of its handicaps in contemporary thought. For the following reasons I suggest these handicaps before moving on to the alternative exegesis:

To make more visible by example the extent to which this thought pattern is predominant and sets the rules of the game for any other discussion;

To suggest some of the unanswered problems we may keep in mind when we come back to read the text anew;

To attempt to loosen up our settled axioms so as to be more able to read the text with open eyes.

Models of the Human

One kind of question that is especially important if the passage is to be interpreted in the traditional way, but also especially difficult, is how to relate this conception of the transformed believer to the way in which different kinds of discourse, sciences, and theories also try to understand the wholeness of the human being. If we say that a person is transformed at the root of what makes him or her what he or she is, that must certainly relate somehow to the tools of analysis used by those other people who also claim to be dealing with the roots of what makes someone what that someone is.

What makes a person what he or she is in terms of what we usually call “personality” is profoundly correlated with the nervous system. Who a person is can be influenced by electric shocks applied to that nervous system, by chemicals, by brain surgery, and other kinds of intervention in the personality that are not mental or spiritual at all in the traditional understanding. Whatever the relationship of the life of the nervous system and the life of the spirit may be, at least there has to be some kind of serious correlation. For example, there is biochemical physiology, according to which a man or a woman is made what he or she is by his or her DNA, and continues to become and remain what he or she is by virtue of electrochemical events in nerve cells. These are the ways the first creation worked to make humanity human. Does the “new creation” work this way? Would sufficient sophistication enable us to find how conversion changes a person’s DNA or his or her neural electrochemistry? If not, why not?

Another level of the reality of what it means to be a person is that which is dealt with by the various schools of psychology. There are behavior patterns that are learned and can be unlearned. There are complexes and syndromes that are the product of the interaction between the individual needs and appetites on one hand and the family and social environment on the other. Especially, certain major figures in the early life of a child and certain pivotal experiences in development through adolescence are generally understood to have much to do with defining who a person is. Does conversion change syndromes and complexes? If so, does it do so through experiences of learning and unlearning that are themselves subject to psychological interpretation? Or does it happen on some other level? Is the new birth a cathartic self-understanding? Does it provide one with a better father image (in God) or a better ego model (in Jesus) that thereby enables one to cope more adequately?10

There is also a pedagogical view of the nature of the whole person, who is seen as learner, acquiring skills and awarenesses. Is conversion a “learning?” Does it fit on a scale of “moral development?”

These questions could be asked with an intention that might be flippant or destructive. That is not my intent. The fact needs simply to be faced that if we do claim in any concrete sense that the new birth changes who a person really is, we cannot avoid the encounter with questions of the kind that are asked by the secular disciplines that also deal in their ways with what a person really is. Would we claim that conversion in the heart has no correlate in the biochemistry of the nerves or in the psychodynamics of the personality? Or do we argue a kind of correlation so that conversion could, with adequate tools, be measured by the psychologist or the neurologist?

I ask the question because it is impossible in our time to take the language of conversion seriously without asking it. But by asking it I have pointed out backhandedly that when the classic Protestant understanding of conversion developed in the first place, whether we think in the most precise sense of the most highly developed conversion theories of the revivalists of North America from Edwards to Finney, or whether we go back to the description of the faith that justifies (in Luther) or the vision of God (in the late medieval mystics), none of the people we would be trying to understand would have been saying then that conversion is an event in the field of psychodynamics or neurology. So whether we affirm some kind of positive correlation between the several levels or deny that there is any connection at all and thereby refuse to converse with the modern human sciences, in either case it raises questions of correlation that were not there before. The gospel promise of transformation talks about the human person as he or she really is; so do these other kinds of analysis. If they are all talking about the same person, then it would seem that we should expect that as they cover the same ground their measurements and descriptions would somehow connect. Do we want our phrasing of the claims and promises of the gospel to be tested by these other disciplines? Or do we rather mean to take the other approach, that of compartmentalization, saying that though we all deal with the same human being, the ways we deal with him or her are not at all on the same level? There are several classical ways to try to resolve this problem, and all of them seem to have serious logical and practical shortcomings.

If a Christian really believes that there has been physical healing, such as the lengthening of a leg or the removal by miracle of a cancer, it will be a part of the authenticity of that witness to claim that X-rays or other medical verification could be appealed to. In a similar way, it probably should be assumed that if there is concrete reality to conversion as a change of what the person really is, it could be measured by the scientists. The fact that one does not see many conversionist Christians doing that scientific work does not necessarily prove they would not believe in it, nor that it could not be done. The fact that traditional conversionist preaching and pastoring does go on without driving people into the interdisciplinary encounter does, however, leave the door open for an alternative interpretation, both of Paul and the operational validity of the conversion message.

Individual or Social?

A second broad area of difficulty is the relation between this conception of the transformed individual and the social dimensions of the gospel. One of the most clear and sweeping convictions of the mainstream of evangelical preaching is the promise that when an individual is transformed he or she will live differently in such a way as to transform society in its turn. It is fruitless, it is argued (or some even argue that it is evil) to attempt to change society in any other way, such as by education or by legislation; social change will come when the hearts of individual people are transformed.

Nevertheless, the same evangelical proclamation that promises a transformed society is often able to give very little help in defining how society must be transformed when people are changed. Will being born again make people become Democrats or Republicans or socialists, or will they withdraw from politics? Will they want a society that has more free enterprise or less? Will they work for racial integration or for segregation? As a matter of logic, the claim that the transformed person will automatically work socially in the right way does not lead us to expect much guidance as to how he should work. No less than the “inward change,” this thesis calls for empirical verification.

As a matter of record, this kind of evangelical theology has produced both very progressive and very reactionary social strategies. On the basis of both the record and the logic, we can affirm that the transformed person has a different motivation, but certainly it is not proven that the transformation carries with it univocal instructions about how society must change, when that transformation had been defined in terms of the individual’s constitution, self, or “heart.” The purpose of this observation is not to try to resolve the question of the basis or direction of social concern, but simply to record that to locate the saving work of God in the constitution of the person does not tend to throw a very precise light on these questions, even though it promises to.

A third drawback of the emphasis upon the novelty of the “new creature” is that it may undermine the capacity of the Church to speak in Christian education and pastoral care to those who have this event well behind them. The temptation is real to limit later religious experience to a reiteration of the meaning of the born-again experience, and to center Christian service and activity on trying to bring other persons to that same threshold. The promise of a miraculously given new nature in Christ may lead a sensitive believer to despair when he or she discovers how much of the “old man” is still within. At the same time the insensitive and self-satisfied person may insulate himself or herself against pastoral admonition and the call to growth in grace by the assurance that the most important event, that which happens back at the beginning of the Christian life, has all been taken care of and now needs only to be maintained.

I do not mean to suggest that these distortions are inevitable results of a strong emphasis on the transformation of a person. They are not even quite as logically necessary as are the other two limitations spoken of above; but that such distortions can happen is easily documented from anyone’s pastoral or counseling experience.

A fourth shortcoming, at least in contemporary American society, is the temptation to correlate the praise of the novelty of the new creature with the modern Western cult of youth, health, and beauty. This modern temptation 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 “carnal standards” in which he used to perceive people in the pigeonholes of categories and classes. Now 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,” 277–84.

12. Since this usage appears both in earlier and later letters, including some that many scholars call “deutero- pauline,” the meaning must have been present not only in Paul’s own mind, but also in his communities. He does not claim it as his original idea (as he sometimes does on other subjects).