Chapter 5 The "Nature" of Flesh

What is meant by "flesh?" and what is "nature?" Many Christians assume that the believer has two natures, one good and one bad and that life is an ongoing struggle to suppress the "evil nature." However, this is a
myth, man does not "have" a nature at all, he expresses a nature.

Matera is right to say that "the real problem is the flesh, not freedom from the law" but a still greater problem occurs when we fail to recognize that "flesh" is not sinful per se . However, it is weak, suggestible and susceptible to deception. Stott's eloquence cannot mask his miscreance in that whilst the flesh and the Spirit may well be "combatants in the Christian conflict" , locked in "irreconcilable antagonism" , this is not because they are the two indwelling natures which struggle for supremacy within Paul's allusion to Isaac and Ishmael [Gal. 4] (as opposed to having to manipulate an allusion to Jacob and Esau). Stott's two-nature view is widespread . Betz animates the flesh to the point of personification , an exaggeration observed by both Jewett and Barclay . Longenecker suggests that the struggle is not a commentary on an internal conflict of two natures but rather, Paul's concern that the Galatians are "in danger of shifting from one context to another" .

Although Paul's paragraph culminates in the warning that "those who do such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God" [5:21b], this, in the author's opinion, does not encourage the anti-security view. Paul writes in the present continuous tense which means that it is unlikely that he is giving a description of the believer. Martin's assertion that "fleshly works rob the doers of their inheritance in the Kingdom of God" is correct. Yet, it is too far reaching to argue that those "who yield to the passions of the flesh [5:13,24] will perish [6:8]" . The author concurs with Eaton that the warning in 5:21b applies to "one's present experience of God's blessing" . Certainly, "the Christian position is one of invincible assurance of salvation combined with awesome warnings concerning forfeiture of blessing (but not salvation itself)" . The fact that the New Testament is a mixture of great assurance plus earnest warnings has resulted in some dubious conclusions.

Fee views Paul's usage of the word "flesh" as one of "the more fluid words in his vocabulary" . The author rejects the idea that this fluidity extends to defining "flesh" as "sinful nature". Paul did not have a "two nature" view. It is doubtful if he believed that a believer had a nature at all. As Stone suggests:

"God's nature within us is single. He is our new nature. God killed our old sinful nature [Rom. 6:6] and imparted to us a new, righteous one. But we won't know without a revelation from the Holy Spirit because everything in this seen and temporal realm supports the lie that we have two natures."

Fee thinks that when Paul speaks of the flesh, he is referring to "one's life before and outside of Christ" . Dunn defines "flesh" as " the human condition in its belongingness to this world" . It is postulated that for Paul, " flesh" is the realm of "illusory independence" . Paul's contrast between "flesh" and "Spirit" is the distinction between "Christ consciousness" and "self-consciousness" as a source of life.

In the Spirit paradigm, the Spirit, not the bodily expression, is deemed to be the ultimate reality [2 Cor. 5:16]. Whether we live in the realm of the Spirit or the realm of appearances will inevitably inform our nature view . Grubb is correct to say that we "should never say that the natural man has two natures: one evil, one good" . Moreover, as he rightly asserts, the word "nature" does not appear in either Galatians 5:16-26 or in the corresponding passage in Romans 7.

The notion that the "good nature" will eventually subdue and eradicate the "old nature" is based on a misnomer, as is illustrated in the classic analogy of the man who had prize-fighting dogs and was always able to predict the winner because he would feed one and not the other. McVey reminds us that the analogy presupposes and perpetuates a lie - "What the story fails to tell you is that one of the dogs is dead. He was killed." This is depicted in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2

It is generally accepted that "those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires" [5:24] is true of all believers. Therefore, we may say that all believers, without exception, have been delivered from the kingdom of darkness [Rom. 5:12-21; Col. 1:13]. Accordingly, the power of sin as an indwelling principle is broken. However, Eaton adds to this the caveat that the said power is broken "in principle" because he says that it is self-evident that not all Christians fully appropriate the Romans 6 co-crucifixion. Be that as it may, this does not alter the fact that the power of sin has already been broken. In the author's opinion, Dunn's view that "Paul did not think that this human condition could be escaped" is pessimistic rather than realistic. In fact, the very text that Dunn cites [2:20] seems to be proof positive that Paul had escaped. Paul knew that the believer has been set free from the flesh. However, the degree to which that freedom is realised is in direct proportion to the degree with which it is recognised. Moreover, this operation of the Spirit is greatly compromised by the ingrained teaching that demands which behaviour constitutes identity.

Frank J Matera, Sarca Pagina Galatians (The Liturgical Press, 1992), p. 196.

John R W Stott, The Message of Galatians (Leicester: IVP, 1968), p. 146.

Stott, p. 146.

Howard F Vos, Galatians: A Call to Christian Liberty (Chicago: Moody Press, 1971), p. 100 is a good example of this view. Vos says, "Verse 17 [referring to Gal. 5:17] describes essentially the struggle within the believer as appears in Romans 6 and 7. Briefly, the idea is this. Within the believer, there are two natures, an old nature and a new nature, a fleshly nature and a spiritual nature. The first he receives at birth and the second, by regeneration".

Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), p. 278.

John Barclay, Obeying the Truth, A Study of Paul's Ethics in Galatians (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1998), p. 213.

Bruce W Longenecker, Until Christ Is Formed in You: Superhuman Forces and Moral Character in Galatians (The Catholic Bible Quarterly, 1999), p. 61.

Troy Martin, Whose Flesh? What Temptation? [Galatians 4:13-14] (JSNT 74, 1999), p. 81.

Martin, p. 81.

Eaton, p. 112.

Eaton, p. 37.

Fee, p. 430.

Dan Stone, The Rest of the Gospel (Dallas: One Press, 2000), p. 97.

Fee, p. 430.

Dunn, The Epistle to the Galatians , p. 287.

"Illusory" simply because the deception of sin is to convince us that we are independent of God, which we are not [Jn. 15:5; Acts 17:28b]. The deception of the Flesh-Torah realm [2 Cor. 5:16], where the presumption is that we are separate from God, is that man is a "free moral agent" when in fact, we are not autonomous persons at all.

The Union Life "no nature" view has been germinal in the author's own thinking (see www.thegraceproject.com articles - "Man Utd" and "False Self Syndrome").

Norman Grubb, The Liberating Secret (Pennsylvania: Christian Literature Crusade, 1971), p. 99.

Steve McVey, Grace Walk (Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 1995), p. 53.

Eaton, p. 112.

Dunn, The Epistle to the Galatians , p. 287.