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| The Old Man and the New Man of St. Paul Explained. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter
XLV.—The Old Man and the New Man of St. Paul
Explained.
But in their blindness they again impale
themselves on the point of the old and the new man. When the apostle
enjoins us “to put off the old man, which is corrupt according to
the deceitful lusts; and to be renewed in the spirit of our mind; and
to put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and
true holiness,”7580 (they maintain)
that by here also making a distinction between the two substances,
and applying the old one to the flesh and the new one to the
spirit, he ascribes to the old man—that is to say, the
flesh—a permanent corruption. Now, if you follow the order
of the substances, the soul cannot be the new man because it comes the
later of the two; nor can the flesh be the old man because it is the
former. For what fraction of time was it that intervened between the
creative hand of God and His afflatus? I will venture to
say, that even if the soul was a good deal prior to the flesh, by the
very circumstance that the soul had to wait to be itself completed, it
made the other7581 really the former.
For everything which gives the finishing stroke and perfection to a
work, although it is subsequent in its mere order, yet has the priority
in its effect. Much more is that prior, without which preceding things
could have no existence. If the flesh be the old man, when did it
become so? From the beginning? But Adam was wholly a new man, and of
that new man there could be no part an old man. And from that
time, ever since the blessing which was pronounced upon man’s
generation,7582 the flesh and the
soul have had a simultaneous birth, without any calculable difference
in time; so that the two have been even generated together in the womb,
as we have shown in our Treatise on the Soul.7583 Contemporaneous in the womb, they are also
temporally identical in their birth. The two are no doubt produced by
human parents7584
7584 We treat
“homines” as a nominative, after Oehler. | of two substances,
but not at two different periods; rather they are so entirely one, that
neither is before the other in point of time. It is more correct
(to say), that we are either entirely the old man or entirely the new,
for we cannot tell how we can possibly be anything else. But the
apostle mentions a very clear mark of the old man. For “put
off,” says he, “concerning the former conversation, the old
man;”7585 (he does) not
say concerning the seniority of either substance. It is not
indeed the flesh which he bids us to put off, but the works which he in
another passage shows to be “works of the flesh.”7586 He brings no accusation against men’s
bodies, of which he even writes as follows: “Putting away
lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor: for we are members one
of another. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your
wrath: neither give place to the devil. Let him that stole steal no
more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands (the thing
which is good), that he may have to give to him that needeth. Let no
corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good
for the edification of faith, that it may minister grace unto the
hearers. And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are
sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and
anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all
malice: but be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one
another, even as God in Christ hath forgiven you.”7587 Why, therefore, do not those who suppose the
flesh to be the old man, hasten their own death, in order that by
laying aside the old man they may satisfy the apostle’s precepts?
As for ourselves, we believe that the whole of faith is to be
administered in the flesh, nay more, by the flesh, which
has both a mouth for the utterance of all holy words, and a tongue to
refrain from blasphemy, and a heart to avoid all irritation, and hands
to labour and to give; while we also maintain that as well the old man
as the new has relation to the difference of moral conduct, and not to
any discrepancy of nature. And just as we acknowledge that that which
according to its former conversation was “the old man” was
also corrupt, and received its very name in accordance with “its
deceitful lusts,” so also (do we hold) that it is “the old
man in reference to its former conversation,”7588 and not in respect of the flesh through any
permanent dissolution. Moreover, it is still unimpaired in the flesh,
and identical in that nature, even when it has become “the new
man;” since it is of its sinful course of life, and not of its
corporeal substance, that it has been divested.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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