I was raised with a particular picture of what the terms “old man” and “new man” mean in the Bible. We took them to refer respectively to our continuing proclivity for sin, and our new nature in Christ. We would illustrate this (literally) as two tiny people fighting it out for dominance in the human heart. As it turns out, that picture was entirely wrong.
Colossians 3:9-10 says you already have put off the old man and put on the new. Ephesians 4:20-24 says the same thing: you already put off the old man, you are being renewed in the spirit of your mind, and you already put on the new man. (The grammar in Ephesians 4 is arguable, and it would be difficult to nail down if that were the only passage we had, but the grammar in Colossians is very clear, as is Romans, and Ephesians 2:15 nails it down nicely, as we’ll see below.) Romans 6:6 says the old man was crucified with Christ.
The renewing of your mind is an ongoing process, but the old man/new man transaction is not. Moreover, the old man and the new man are not inside of you; you are inside of them. Think of it like a jacket: when you take an old jacket off and put a new one on, you aren’t still wearing the old jacket. You were in the old man, but he was crucified with Christ and you put him off, and now you have put on the New Man, and you are in Him. It is helpful here to remember that “Adam” literally means “man.” You were in the old Adam, and now you are in the new Adam, Christ. The old man is your corporate identity in Adam, and the new man is the Body of Christ, as Ephesians 2:15 pointedly says.
So if I have put off the old man, Adam, and have put on the new man Christ, why I am still drawn to sin, and I still sin regularly? Ephesians 4:20-24 gives us a hint already — our mind is being renewed. Some part of the process is still under way, which means it’s not done yet. Romans fleshes it out a little more, and the best way to see it is to start with a puzzle. At the end of Romans 7, Paul–already a believer–cries out, “Wretched man that I am — who will deliver me from this dead body?” In the beginning of Romans 12, Paul challenges us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. So the question is, what happens between these two passages that transforms the dead body into a holy and acceptable sacrifice?
The answer is in Romans 8:10-11. Your body is dead, which is to say, unresurrected. The world still waits for the redemption of our bodies. Christ paid for it at the cross, but the reality for which He paid has not yet come to fruition. But in the meantime, the Holy Spirit is alive in you, and so God does something which is fundamentally impossible: He gives life (now!) to your dead body through the Holy Spirit. So you are a hybrid being. Your inner man is redeemed (“I delight in the law of God according to the inward man”), but your body is not yet redeemed. Your inner man is alive, and your body is dead. Therefore there is a struggle between the two. The struggle will one day be resolved by the resurrection of your body. Until then, your mind is being renewed, and God is working a miracle in your body, to allow your dead body to be a living instrument of righteousness. It makes no sense and it shouldn’t be possible, but there it is — a continual miracle.
The ascetics grasped the death of the body and the life of the spirit, but rushed to the wrong practical solution. Instead of trusting God to work the miracle of life, they attempted to be sanctified through what they could do, which was bring death. Unable to strengthen the spirit, they decided to weaken the body. But that is not the solution that Paul presents to us in the passage. The passage doesn’t say to put the body to death; it says to put the body’s deeds to death. And Colossians 2:16-23 tells us that the various artificial restrictions designed to weaken the body are actually of no value in our struggle against sin.
Of course there is a bodily discipline that profits, but it is discipline, not destruction. The ascetics got it fundamentally wrong. But we’re trying the same thing anyway — and I believe that’s why the two nature view is so popular. It gives us something to do: fight that sin nature! The only difference is, we have “spiritualized” the struggle by making it against an immaterial “sin nature” rather than our material flesh. But making the enemy less visible doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the error.
The thing most necessary for us is something which we cannot do for ourselves: for God to give life to our bodies, for God to work the continuing miracle in us that makes it possible for us to present our bodies to Him as a holy and acceptable sacrifice.
It is easier to fight against sin than it is to lean on God. (Actually, it’s not easier — it’s impossible. But it’s easier on our pride, which is the point.) We can fight against sin without involving God in any immediate way. Rather than admit my helplessness and cry out to God to deliver me right now, I can struggle, trying to whip my sins from sheer force of will. It’s a doomed effort, but it’s that or admit I can’t do it and become a mystic.
The miracle we’re talking about is not just an arrangement of mental furniture or a set of secret principles that I can choose to live by. Someone Who is not me shows up and does things in my heart that make it possible for me to live righteously, when otherwise I could not. That offends us. We hunger for the illusion that we can do it, that we have it under control. In the Protestant world, we’re more than happy to admit that we would be powerless to resist sin without the finished work of Christ in the past, so long as we are spared the humbling experience of moment-by-moment dependence on Him. But that is what we are called to: we put off Adam and put on Christ.
Only He can save us.
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Editorial note: if the discussion in the comments below intrigues you and you’d like to hear more, read Portraits of Righteousness.
Full Contact Christianity 
Ok, we just got through Rom 8:11 in our men’s group a few weeks ago. I hear what you’re saying about “what we are/were in” vs. “what is/was in us,” but Paul’s terminology may need further clarification here. He seems at times to interchange “body” and “flesh,” yet doesn’t Paul clearly assert in Rom 7 that the sin nature “camps out” in our flesh or “body of sin”?
In other words, while Paul seems to carefully distinguish his identity from activity in 7:17-18, he clearly asserts that he still retains something “in me” (= “the sin”) from his Adam heritage which Jesus also retained (cf. “sinful flesh,” 8:3), and the “body” or “flesh”—which seems more than purely physical—is precisely where “the sin” (= “the sin nature”) wreaks all its havoc. Is this not a picture of our “embodied soul”?
We might say, then, that Jesus “shares our anthropology” when it comes to “sinful flesh,” and that it is therefore possible for us not to sin if we let the Spirit do His work to put to death what “the sin” is trying to do “in” us. So, the “fight” is between spirit and flesh over which deeds/attitudes are to prevail within our (sinful) bodies and not between two natures? And although this “sinful” component is not removed until the resurrection, having it “in us” until then is perfectly compatible with being “without [acts of] sin” (like Jesus) as long as the Spirit is allowed to do His thing?
May I then conclude that it is possible to have a “sin nature” inside of us yet not actually produce individual sins if/whenever we let the indwelling Spirit have His way?
Tim, I looked at the Colossians text you cited, but I don’t think you meant 2:9-10. Could you walk us through the grammar of the verses you meant to cite and show how you arrived at your conclusion?
Jim, you’re quite right! I meant 3:9-10. Aorist participle with a present tense controlling verb unambiguously means antecedent action. “Do not lie to one another, since you have (already) put off the old man….” The Ephesians passage is an aorist infinitive with an aorist controlling verb, which is open to either antecedent or contemporaneous action, but the parallel passage in Colossians clinches it.
I agree that Paul to some degree uses “body” and “flesh” interchangeably — those words certainly do not delineate rigidly defined and hermetically separate categories in the way that a systematic theologian might wish they would.
As you say, the “body” or “flesh” is more than purely physical, but there’s a much bigger reason for that than just Pauline terminology: in the worldview of the biblical authors, both Greek and Hebrew-speaking, absolutely nothing is purely physical. The trees clap their hands, the rocks could cry out, and there’s no reason to think of the physical body as any less immaterially involved than a rock or a tree. So the spirit is redeemed now in the new birth, and you have put off Adam and put on Christ, but the body, being as yet unredeemed, is still tainted with sin—and there’s no need to ask “where in the body” any more than we would look for a mouth on a stone.
When the Spirit takes our body in hand, that drive toward sin, whatever it is, is nullified—death is swallowed up in life, as it were—because the Spirit lusts against the flesh (as Paul says in Galatians). Under those circumstances, the body can be an acceptable sacrifice, not because it is resurrected and sinless, but because the Spirit is giving it life.
What do you think?
Yes, clearly tracking with you on this particular point about “who’s driving.”
I guess for me the more difficult issue has to do with whether “we” (redeemed Christians) have only one “nature” in light of Paul’s insistence on the presence of “the-dwelling-within-me-sin” in Rom 7:17-18, where he also states that “it is no longer I [who do what I don’t want].” In stark contrast, another famous Pauline “not I” in Gal 2:20 claims a quite different alien agency “within me” concerning a life also lived “in the flesh,” but in this case by faith.
This begs the question of exactly which “I/me” identity is in view in each instance. And that’s where the anthropology gets sticky. I guess I’ve resolved this in my own mind by defaulting to the tripartite view of both the redeemed and yet-to-be-redeemed components of our human nature. I can certainly claim biblically that “I” am a “new creation,” but as you pointed out, that new creation is a communal entity “in Christ,” and that is the “Christ in me” identity of Gal 2:20 and not “I,” whoever that is.
This “I” seems to be like a “center of volition” within our not-fully-redeemed mind or soul that can choose whether to submit to the indwelling Spirit or succumb to the temptation of the flesh, where “the sin [nature]” dwells. This is where the renewing of the mind is so critical if we are to “grow” into our fully redeemed identity in Christ. The sin nature is not our true identity, but there it is within our flesh, ready and willing to be appropriated as the driver of our actions, should that be what “I” choose.
So, I would say that Paul is vacillating in Romans 7 between two different “I/me” identities. When the soul-based “center of volition” chooses to succumb to the flesh, then “the sin” in our flesh takes over in driving behavior. When that same center of volition chooses to submit to “Christ in me” = the indwelling Spirit of Christ, then “it is no longer I” but Christ in me that drives the behavior.
Without belaboring the point too much further, I think we can see a parallel logic of behavior-based-on-birth in 1 John 1 and 3, so that the apparent contradiction is resolved of having both a born-of-God identity that “knows and has seen God” and does not sin, yet also a “we” that listens to “the father of lies” and can falsely claim not to have sin[ned]. Both “reside” in the same person but emerge with opposite result, depending on the “birth source,” as John so vividly asserts in Jn 3:6.
I think we’re basically on the same page (correct me if I’m wrong), but I might frame it a little differently. There’s a corporate identity issue that is settled at the point of the new birth, and there is also an ongoing struggle with the as-yet-unresurrected body, which is polluted by sin and its consequences in both its material and immaterial aspects. Paul both says “I sin” and “It’s not I who sin, but sin that dwells in me.” The part of him that sins is in some sense properly his, in that he can’t blame the sin on anybody else, or divorce himself from responsibility for the deeds of the body, gnostic-style. But it’s also not his in that it’s already condemned to die, and when he is raised on the last day, that part will be gone forever. He quite properly dis-identifies with it.
Loved this: “… already condemned to die … that part will be gone forever.” I was just going over the last clause in Rom 8:3, “… he condemned sin in the flesh …” I take Paul’s use of the articular form “THE sin” throughout Rom 7 and 8 as his representation of the sin nature housed in the flesh. And I read the verb katakrinō in 8:3 as a judge’s sentencing after a verdict, by comparison with its cognate katakrima as “[death] sentence” in 5:16, 18. This renders the clause as “…he sentenced the sin nature [to death] in the flesh.” I think this reading gives fresh insight into the separation between the “I” and “not I” within the same person whose new identity is in Christ, and it clarifies the dichotomous “alignments” in 8:4-11, depending on whether the choice is in tune with the flesh or the spirit.