Happy Easter! I've been reflecting on this quote by St. Paul, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has passed away, behold, the new has come" (2 Cor. 5:17). What does it mean to be a new creation? What does the Resurrection have to do with the Passion? These are the questions I want to ponder in this post, first philosophically, and then theologically.
Before I turn my attention to the idea of a new creation, what does it mean to be a creation? It is a realization first and foremost of what it means to be a human being in a philosophical context. Humans are both body and soul, both made of living matter and something more. We have a principle of life (the literal definition of a soul, present in all living things) that guides our reasoning and draws our will. What does this have to do with the act of creation? Everything. Think about it. Whenever we as human beings create something, we always have to make it out of other things that have already been made. This is true of music, art, and chocolate cake, to name a few things. Even this blog post wasn't made from nothing. It came from words I thought, which have in turn come from spiritual experiences I've had.
In the Old Testament, God is the only one who creates (in Hebrew bara). He is the only one who can bring anything into existence, because God's very essence is existence itself, as St. Thomas Aquinas articulates.
Why is the creation new then, as St. Paul says? Surely God does not obliterate us from existence! Well, no, but there's definitely a change present in a recent convert to Christianity, and I have to differ from my Protestant brothers and sisters in order to explain my point. Some, but not all Protestants, believe that when someone becomes a Christian, Christ's holiness is draped over the person's sins, covering it like a blanket. This is where we get the fake Martin Luther quote, "A Christian is just a snow-covered dunghill." An interesting image to be sure, but even a snow-covered dunghill is still a dunghill. Other Protestants believe that the Christian swaps their sinfulness for Christ's holiness. This is also connected to the idea that God saw our sin on his Son, and as a result poured all of his divine wrath on an innocent man, but this doesn't make sense either. Both the Father and the Son are love itself, the Father who is love would not pour out anger on his beloved Son. What do I think happens? (DISCLAIMER: I am NOT a professional theologian, just someone who likes learning about it.) For me, it goes back to the Garden of Eden. If Christ is both the New Adam, then his obedience is a reversal of Adam's sin. Just as he created humanity out of love, he recreates us for the same reason. Jesus, if we cooperate and assent to his grace, transforms our sinful nature and fills it with his divine life. There is no exchange of sin for grace, because by his death Jesus annihilated our sins through his sacrifice on the cross.
That is something worth celebrating!
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