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Re: New creation in Paul and scripture: a response to John Doyle

Re: New creation in Paul and scripture: a response to John Doyle

Recovering my equanimity somwhat, I’m prepared to respond to your 7-point summary in light of Paul’s five passages describing the new creation:

1. Of course Paul never addresses this point in the five passages in question, but extrapolating from them I disagree with your interpretation. God’s be-fruitful-and-multiply blessing to Abraham is entirely in keeping with the Genesis 1 creation — call it the "old creation" — and need not imply anything about how the original creation failed and needed to be restarted. Israel too is an extension of the old creation, as Paul says in Ephesians 2 and in Galatians 3. The old creation is shaped by national template; for Paul the new creation demolishes this old template.

2. Again, nothing in Paul’s 5 texts addresses this point. He ignores Israel except to point out that the Jew-Gentile distinction no longer means anything important. The importance of Israel died on the cross, says Paul; the subsequent destruction of the temple or the diaspora are not at all in Paul’s focus.

3. Again, the national template has already been destroyed in Christ’s death; the new template has already been established in Christ’s resurrection.

4. The promise to Abraham remained a promise until it was fulfilled in Christ’s death and resurrection and extended by faith to all nations; i.e., to the macrocosm of humanity which, in keeping with the Gen. 1 blessing, has been fruitful and multiplied on a grand scale.

5. The new template was already established at Christ’s death and resurrection, and Paul is already bearing testimony to its emergence. The old creation persists even as the new creation is continually being renewed.

6. I offer no opinion on the Anabaptists, Christendom, or post-Christendom.

7. I see nothing in Paul to suggest that the new template established in Christ’s death and resurrection would ever collapse.

In sum, based Paul’s description the new creation didn’t emerge gradually; it burst on the scene at the cross. The new creation definitively abolishes the distinctive importance of Israel, beginning from the crucifixion and moving forward in history from that event. Paul addressed the new-creation texts primarily to a Gentile audience, so his references to Israel are of secondary importance.

Again, I’m not interested in putting forward a systematic New Testament theology, nor even in critiquing yours. I wanted to exegete the only five texts in the whole Bible that explicitly refer to the "new creation." I’d say that, because Paul coined the phrase, his understanding should be definitive when applying the new-creation paradigm to Old Testament texts. I don’t think that it’s particularly appropriate for a reader to infer a new-creational theme in the Old Testament and then to impose that inference on what Paul explicitly states later.