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