The House and Its Tenant

Blind as they are, they run themselves onto the point of the old man and the new man all over again. The apostle tells us “to put off the old man, which is being ruined by its deceitful cravings, and to be made new in the spirit of your mind, and to put on the new man, who is created after God in righteousness and true holiness.” Here too, they say, he is drawing a line between two substances — the old one being the flesh and the new one the spirit — and so he is charging the old man, meaning the flesh, with a corruption that can never be undone. [a]

But if you are going by the order in which the two substances came, the soul cannot be the new man, since it is the later of the two; and the flesh cannot be the old man, since it is the earlier. What scrap of time was there, after all, between God’s hand shaping the man and God’s breath going into him? I will go further. Even if the soul had come a good deal before the flesh, the very fact that the soul had to wait to be finished off itself made the flesh the truly earlier one. For whatever puts the last touch on a piece of work and completes it comes later in the bare order of things, and yet holds the first place in its effect. And how much more truly first is that without which the things before it could not exist at all.

If the flesh is the old man, when did it turn old? From the beginning? But Adam was a new man from end to end, and no part of that new man could be an old one. And ever since the blessing pronounced on human generation, flesh and soul have come into being together, with no gap of time between them that anyone could measure: the two are even conceived together in the womb, as I have shown in my book On the Soul. Sharing the womb at one and the same time, they share the moment of birth as well. Two substances, yes, and both got from human parents — but not at two different times. They are so completely one that neither is ahead of the other by so much as an instant. It is nearer the truth to say that we are either the old man from head to foot or the new man from head to foot; I cannot see how we could be anything else.

And in fact the apostle gives a perfectly clear mark of the old man. “Put off,” he says, “as regards your former way of life, the old man” — he does not say “as regards the seniority of either substance.” It is not the flesh he tells us to put off, but its doings, which he shows in another place to be “works of the flesh.” He brings no charge against people’s bodies. About those he writes like this: “So put away lying, and let each of you speak the truth to his neighbor, because we are parts of one another. Be angry, and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger; and give no room to the devil. Let the thief steal no longer, but rather let him work, doing good with his own hands, so that he may have something to give to anyone in need. Let no rotten talk come out of your mouth, but only what is good for building up faith, so that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and rage and anger and shouting and abuse be taken away from you, along with every kind of malice; and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ forgave you.”

So why do the people who take the flesh to be the old man not hurry up and die, so that by laying the old man aside they may satisfy the apostle’s instructions? For our part, we hold that the whole of faith is carried out in the flesh — more than that, by the flesh, which has a mouth for saying every holy word, a tongue for keeping clear of blasphemy, a heart for staying clear of every provocation, and hands for working and for giving. And we hold that the old man and the new alike have to do with a difference in the way a person lives, not with any difference in nature. We grant that what was “the old man,” going by its former way of life, was indeed corrupt, and got that very name from its “deceitful cravings”; and in the same way we hold that it is “the old man in reference to its former way of life,” not in reference to the flesh through some permanent breaking down. In fact it is still whole in the flesh, and the same in that nature, even after it has become “the new man,” because what it has been stripped of is a sinful course of life, not its bodily substance.

You may notice that the apostle everywhere condemns the works of the flesh in a way that makes him look as though he were condemning the flesh. But nobody can suppose he means anything of the sort, since he goes straight on to offer another sense, however much it resembles the first. When he actually says that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God,” he pulls the statement back from a heretical sense to a sound one by adding, “But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit.” By denying that they were in the flesh when they plainly were in the flesh, he showed that they were not living in the middle of the works of the flesh; and so the people who could not please God were not those who were in the flesh, but only those who were living after the flesh, while the ones who pleased God were living in the flesh and yet walking after the Spirit. Again, he says that “the body is dead” — but it is “because of sin,” just as “the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” [g]

Now when he sets life over against the death that has been fixed in the flesh, he is certainly promising the life of righteousness to the very same thing for which he has laid down the death of sin. Otherwise the contrast he draws between the “life” and the “death” means nothing, if the life is not in the place where the thing it is set against is — the death, that is, which has to be rooted out of the body. And if life roots death out of the body, it can do it only by reaching the place where the thing it is throwing out is.

But why am I tying knots when the apostle handles the subject with perfect plainness? “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you,” he says, “then he who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies, because of his Spirit that lives in you.” So even a man who assumed that the soul is “the mortal body” would be driven to admit that the flesh is restored as well — since he cannot possibly deny that the flesh is a mortal body too, and so shares the same condition.

From what comes next you can see that it is the works of the flesh that are condemned and not the flesh itself: “So then, brothers, we are in debt — but not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if you live after the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the doings of the body, you will live.” Let me answer the points one at a time. Since salvation is promised to people who are living in the flesh but walking after the Spirit, it is no longer the flesh that stands in the way of salvation, but the flesh’s activity. And once that activity of the flesh is done away with, which is what causes death, the flesh is shown to be safe, because it has been freed from what causes its death.

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” he says, “has set me free from the law of sin and death” — the law, that is, which he had already spoken of as living in the parts of our body. So the parts of our body will no longer be under the law of death, because they have stopped serving the law of sin; they have been set free from both. “For what the law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and through sin he condemned sin in the flesh” — not the flesh in sin. The house is not to be condemned along with the man who lodges in it. He did say that “sin lives in our body.” But condemning sin is acquitting the flesh, just as leaving sin uncondemned puts the flesh under the law of sin and death.

In the same way he called “the thinking of the flesh” first “death,” and then “hostility toward God” — but he never said any such thing about the flesh itself. “Then what is the thinking of the flesh to be put down to, if not to fleshly substance itself?” I will grant you the objection if you will prove to me that the flesh has any discernment of its own. But if the flesh has no notion of anything without the soul, then you must see that the thinking of the flesh has to be traced back to the soul, even though it is charged to the flesh now and then, on the ground that it is done for the flesh and through the flesh. And that is why the apostle says that “sin lives in the flesh” — because the soul, which is where sin is stirred up, is lodging for the time being in the flesh. The flesh is indeed doomed to death, but not on its own account: on account of sin. He says elsewhere too, “How is it that you behave as though you were still living in the world?” — and he is not writing to dead men, but to people who ought to have stopped living the world’s way.

For living the world’s way must be what he means by the old man, the thing he says has been “crucified with Christ” — crucified not as a bodily framework, but as a way of behaving. Besides, if we do not take it in that sense, then our bodily frame has not been nailed up at all, and our flesh has not gone through the cross of Christ. The sense is the one he adds himself: “so that the body of sin might be put out of action” — by a mending of life, not by the destruction of a substance. He goes on: “so that from now on we should not be slaves to sin”; and we are to believe ourselves “dead with Christ” in such a way that “we shall also live with him.” [n]

On the same principle he says, “In the same way, count yourselves also to be dead.” Dead to what? To the flesh? No — “to sin.” So as far as the flesh goes they will be saved: “alive to God in Christ Jesus,” and alive through the flesh, of course, since it is not to the flesh that they are dead. It is “to sin” that they are dead, not to the flesh. He presses the point further: “So do not let sin reign in your mortal body, so that you obey it, and do not hand over the parts of your body to sin as tools of unrighteousness; but hand yourselves over to God as men who are alive from the dead” — not simply alive, but alive from the dead — “and hand over the parts of your body as tools of righteousness.” And again: “Just as you handed over the parts of your body as slaves to uncleanness and to lawlessness piled on lawlessness, so now hand over the parts of your body as slaves to righteousness, leading to holiness. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free so far as righteousness went. What fruit did you have then from the things you are now ashamed of? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and made slaves to God, you have your fruit leading to holiness, and the end is everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

So all through this run of passages, as he pulls the parts of our body away from unrighteousness and sin and puts them to work for righteousness and holiness, and as he moves those same parts off the wages of death and onto the bounty of eternal life, he is beyond doubt promising the flesh the reward of salvation.

It would make no sense at all for a rule of holiness and righteousness to be laid down for the flesh in particular if the reward for keeping that discipline were out of the flesh’s reach. Nor could baptism be properly prescribed for the flesh if its rebirth did not start it on a road that leads to its being restored. The apostle himself puts the idea into our heads: “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? We were buried with him, then, by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we too should walk in newness of life.” And so that you will not suppose he means only the life we have to walk in the newness of, through baptism, by faith, the apostle looks ahead with the greatest care and adds: “For if we have been grafted together into the likeness of Christ’s death, we shall be in the likeness of his resurrection as well.” In our baptism we die as a figure; in the flesh we rise again as a fact, just as Christ did, “so that, as sin has reigned in death, so grace might reign through righteousness to life eternal, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

But how can that be, unless it happens equally in the flesh? Where the death is, there the life after the death must be too, because the life was there first, in the place where the death came afterward. And if death’s reign shows itself only in the breaking up of the flesh, then in the same way life, death’s opposite, ought to produce the opposite effect — the restoring of the flesh. Then, just as death once swallowed the flesh down in its strength, so the flesh, after this mortal thing has been swallowed up by immortality, may hear the challenge thrown at death: “Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory?” That is how “grace will overflow all the more, where sin once overflowed.” That is how, too, “strength will be made perfect in weakness” — saving what had perished, bringing back to life what had died, healing what had been struck down, curing what had gone weak, buying back what had been lost, releasing what had been enslaved, calling back what had strayed, lifting up what had fallen. And all of it from earth to heaven, where, as the apostle teaches the Philippians, “our citizenship is,” and “from there we are waiting for our Savior Jesus Christ, who will change our body of humiliation so that it is shaped like his glorious body” — after the resurrection, obviously, since Christ himself was not glorified before he suffered.

These must be “the bodies” that he “begs” the Romans to “present as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” But how a living sacrifice, if these bodies are going to perish? How a holy one, if they are foully soiled? How acceptable to God, if they stand condemned? Come, then, and tell me how our heretics, who keep out of the light of Scripture, understand that passage in the letter to the Thessalonians — a passage so clear that I would take it to have been written with a sunbeam: “And may the very God of peace make you holy through and through.” And as if that were not plain enough, it goes on: “and may your whole body and soul and spirit be kept blameless until the coming of the Lord.” There you have the whole substance of a human being marked out for salvation, and at no other time than at the coming of the Lord — which is the key to the resurrection.