Given the title above I have set myself a challenge! What is the centre of Paul’s gospel? Fundamentally it has to be focused on ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’. He has a conviction that the hoped for Messiah – deliverer of Israel, God’s agent, had come and was to be identified with Jesus of Nazareth, and that he had been crucified; that the death as a criminal (political enemy of Rome?) that he had undergone was the means by which not simply Israel was to be delivered but that the world would be transformed.
His vision was bigger than that of ‘personal sins’ forgiven; it was bigger than a focus on the land known as Palestine; it was bigger than a freedom from an earthly power (Rome); it was bigger than a freedom for an ethnic people who were descended from Abraham. The power of sin (and death) could no longer rule; the power over nations (τὰ στοιχεῖα) could no longer shape (and he seems to suggest that the law functioned in that way for those of Israel – Gal. 4:3, 9); the God of Israel was the God of the cosmos; Israel’s Messiah was the Saviour of the world. Bigger… bigger than a specific people; bigger than a piece of land; bigger than personal. A cosmic vision – a new creation persepctive.
New Creation
Twice Paul uses that phrase – 2 Cor.5:17 and Gal. 6:15.
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! (2 Cor. 5:17).
There is an outside chance at translating it as ‘they are a new creature’ but the abruptness of Paul suggests otherwise… if anyone is in Christ, new creation (καινὴ κτίσις)… old things have passed away, new things are (he uses the neuter adjectives for ‘old’ and ‘new’). The context is of sight / perception (2 Cor. 5:16). The transformation is future but for those in Christ it is present now! Already we have been (Gal. 1:3) delivered from one age to another and the result is that we can no longer use human categories with regard to others. There is a major challenge, but this gospel is not tame and is beyond ‘me and my life’.
In Galatians he uses the term again:
For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything, but a new creation is everything!
Ethnicity (Jew / Gentile = non-Jew) nor adherence to the Torah has value! That is a bold statement from one who was (and continued to be) a Jew… In Christ that fundamental way of dividing the world was gone.It belonged to a former era. He finishes his ‘neither… nor..’ with (again) an abrupt phrase, ‘but new creation’ (ἀλλὰ καινὴ κτίσις)… the ‘but’ being strong.
The cross is central – the central part for Paul – though we must not dislocate it from the resurrection, but the effect of the cross is a major irruption into this world to such a level that there is new creation.
This brings me to a text that goes to the heart of the outworking. Gal. 3:28.
(But now that faith has come…) There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
Ethnicity / ‘chosen nation’ has gone; economic / class divide is no longer legitimate… and as translated above Paul changes the structure in the third part of the verse from no…nor to no… and… (οὐκ ἔνι Ἰουδαῖος οὐδὲ Ἕλλην, οὐκ ἔνι δοῦλος οὐδὲ ἐλεύθερος, οὐκ ἔνι ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ). He does this to quote Genesis, God creating them, ‘male and female‘, but there is something very deep going on here. Creation is ‘good’ but creation had within it dualisms (not ethically) but binaries such as ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ and the very fundamental human one of ‘male’ and ‘female’. Binaries that defined the spectrum but the ‘spectrum’ in the new creation is one. No longer ‘male and female’. The most fundamental divide in our world has gone. The implications are enormous.
Paul’s gospel pushes into how we inter-relate. It is not primarily about a community who are more holy than others (if we define ‘holiness’ by we don’t do x,y and z) but a community who relate differently to others because their conviction (and experience) is that a new creation exists now. I added the word ‘experience’ in the previous sentence because we are not there yet. Maybe we can accept the word ‘conviction’ but I think Paul pushes for ‘experience’ far more than we are comfortable.
The cross ends the domination by powers hostile to humanity; it ends binaries that categorise so that hierarchies continue.