Tried With Fire

I like this explanation by Anthony Hoekema on how we should view ourselves in Christ. It clears up quite a bit of my past confusion re: "old man" vs. "new man" vs. a combo of the two. Paul says to the believers at Colossae (Col. 3:9-10), since you have become one with Christ you are no longer slaves to sin, for you have taken off the old man or old self that was enslaved to sin and have put on the new self ( neos anthropos ). After the analogy of what has just been said about the old man, we conclude that the new man or new self must mean the person in his unity ruled by the Holy Spirit. You ought not to lie, Paul is saying, because lying does not comport with the new self you have put on. But even the new self is not yet perfect, for, as Paul goes on to say, it "is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator" (v. 10). If something needs to be renewed it is not yet perfect. It is interesting to note the tenses of the Greek verbs used in thi...

Idealistic anthropologies consider the human being to be basically spirit, his physical body foreign to his real nature. We find this view in ancient Greek philosophy; according to Plato, for example, what is real about man is his or her intellect or reason, which is actually a spark of the divine within the person that continues to exist after the body dies. The human body, however, partakes of matter, which is of a lower order of reality; it is a hindrance to the spirit, and one is really better off without it... We must remember, however, that often non-Christian notions have crept into so-called Christian anthropologies. For example, the scholastic view of man prominent in the Middle Ages, though accepted as Christian, was actually more of a hybrid anthropology. It attempted to synthesize the idealistic view of man found in Aristotelian philosophy with the Christian view. The results of this mismating of two diverse anthropologies are, unfortunately, with us to this day. For e...