What Matters Is . . . the New Creation

As the final part of his argument for the Galatians, Paul sums up his teaching with two words, new creation. Ultimately, what matters is the new creation. Let’s look at how Douglas Moo unpacks the concept of new creation in his volume on Galatians in the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament.

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1 Peter (2^nd edition) by Karen H. Jobes (new)       Revelation by Thomas R. Schreiner (new)

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Synopsis of Paul’s Argument

Paul wants the Galatians to recognize and take to heart the reality of the “new creation” in which they now live (v. 15). Christ’s death has broken the power of the old age, the world, and inaugurated God’s all-embracing work of making the universe new. Recognizing that Christians by faith are participants in this eschatological project should go a long way to helping them resist the claims of the agitators, bound as they are, according to Paul, to a past age and a world already in principle judged by God.

The Context of the New Creation

Verse 15 explains verse 14 (γάρ) by rephrasing it. The first and negative part of the sentence elaborates “world” in verse 14, and “new creation” in the second part describes what has taken the place of the world. “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything” (οὔτε . . . περιτομή τί ἐστιν οὔτε ἀκροβυστία) echoes a formula that occurs earlier in Galatians and in 1 Corinthians:

• For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value, but [ἀλλά] faith working through love. (Gal. 5:6)

• Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing, but [ἀλλά] keeping God’s commands. (1 Cor. 7:19 AT)

In each case, Paul dismisses any value in circumcision or uncircumcision and contrasts this lack of value with the very great value of something else. We are justified, then, in speaking of a kind of Pauline slogan here, with “circumcision and uncircumcision” standing for those “worldly” valuations that no longer matter in the new age. In a move typical of Paul’s polemics in Galatians, he dares to associate God’s old-covenant requirement of circumcision with this worldly system of values that has now been judged by Christ’s death and resurrection. Significantly, it is not only circumcision that has no value in this new “world,” but uncircumcision as well.

New Creation = A New Distinction

Paul has chosen these particular terms for specific mention here in Galatians because this contrast is at the heart of the issue in Galatia. In light of that situation, the claim that circumcision has no value makes perfect sense. But by adding “uncircumcision,” Paul broadens the idea to embrace all matters of purely worldly significance—an idea that comes to more particular expression in 3:28, with its reference to “Jew or Gentile,” “slave or free,” “male and female”. These texts together assert that the coming of Christ introduces a whole new state of affairs in the world. Distinctions of ethnicity, social class, and gender that are determinative for this world—they no longer matter. All “simply human” factors become meaningless in the face of God’s world-transforming work in his Son Jesus Christ. The old state of affairs is ended.

The other half of the contrast is stated very compactly: simply “new creation” (καινὴ κτίσις, kainē ktisis). The phrase occurs once elsewhere in Paul, in similarly brief form: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, new creation [καινὴ κτίσις]! The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor. 5:17 AT). The word κτίσις can mean either “creature” (Rom. 1:25; 8:39 KJV) or “creation” (Rom. 8:19, 20, 21, 22; Col. 1:15 [probably]; 1:23 ESV [probably]). Many interpreters either opt for “creature” (Gal. 6:15 KJV) or argue that, even if we translate “new creation,” the reference is to the individual believer, renewed by God’s transforming grace. Some think there is special attention to the community. But most interpreters think “new creation” refers generally to the new state of affairs that Christ’s death and resurrection has inaugurated.

Background to the New Creation

The phrase “new creation” itself never occurs in the OT, but its equivalent is found in several Jewish texts (see esp. Jub. 1.29; 4.26; 1 En. 72.1; 1QS 4.25; 2 Bar. 44.12 [“new world”]). As in the Pauline texts, “new creation” is introduced in these Jewish texts without explanation, but the concept seems to denote the final state of affairs after God’s climactic intervention on behalf of his people. Of course, we must check more than this handful of linguistic parallels when considering the possible background to Paul’s “new creation.”

Isaiah, especially in chapters 40–55, makes extensive use of creation language to compare and contrast God’s original “creation” of Israel at the time of the exodus with his re-creation of the people after the exile (see esp. Isa. 43:15–19, alluded to in 2 Cor. 5:17). And this vision of re-creation ultimately expands to include the whole cosmos: a “new heavens and earth” (Isa. 65:17–22; cf. 66:22–24).

 Other Jewish texts give “creation” language a more personal focus. Jeremiah and Ezekiel, for instance, predict that God will overcome Israel’s failure to follow God’s laws by giving his people a new heart (e.g., Ezek. 36:26). Joseph and Aseneth (e.g., 12.1–4) uses creation language to describe conversion from paganism to Judaism. And there is some evidence that the rabbis used “new creation” language to describe inner renewal and forgiveness. Yet on the whole the evidence from the background suggests, in the words of Adams, that “the expression ‘new creation’ was an established, technical term in Jewish apocalypticism, referring to the new or transformed creation expected to follow the destruction or renewal of the world.”

New Creation = New World

The context bears out this interpretation. “New creation” most naturally functions, in contrast to the “world” (v. 14) and the “present evil age” (1:4), as a designation of the new state of affairs that the cross signifies and inaugurates. Strictly speaking, as Theodoret notes, “new creation is the transformation of all things which will occur after the resurrection of the dead.” But, in a move fundamental to NT eschatology, Paul announces the inauguration of that new creation in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Foundational to this new state of affairs, of course, is the conversion of individuals; and central to it is the new community of Jew and Gentile (see Gal. 3:28 and the argument of Eph. 2:11–22). But “new creation,” while implicitly including these, is a wider concept, embracing the entire transforming work of God. It is a work that will ultimately have cosmic reverberations. Paul again draws a contrast between the more modest “newness” advocated by the agitators and the sweeping and all-embracing “newness” that Paul thinks is the outcome of Christ’s death and resurrection.

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