Gorman: "The Human Condition"

Human beings are under the power of an interlocking directorate of anti-human and anti-God realities and forces. These “forces” come under a host of names: sin, death, the world, this age, idols, cosmic powers, satan (“the god of this age”), the flesh, and the Self. This present evil age is characterized by evil and injustice; the “age to come” will be characterized by righteousness and peace. This interlocking directorate of hostile powers has rendered the human race spiritually and morally dysfunctional. The root dysfunctions are disordered relations with God and disordered relations with other people. Gentiles are marked by idolatry (disordered relations with God) and immorality (disordered relations with people.” Jews are marked by hardheartedness and pride, and hypocrisy. Both Jews and Gentiles are disobedient to the summons of God found in nature or the Law. Both fail to love God with all their heart, mind, and soul, and both fail to love their neighbors as they love themselves.

So far as God’s covenant goes, humans fail.

We lack both faith (loyalty and submission to God) and love (serving one another).

We’re powerless to break free from the grip of these disabling hostile powers and their ever-increasing effects. We’re in what’s been called a No-Exit situation: escape is both necessary and impossible, at least on our own accord. What’s needed is a solution that deals not just with “sins” but the enslavement of sin. Christ does exactly this: he deals with both sins and “sin” to restore and enable proper relations with God and with people. Those who have the Spirit of God share in this solution and are enabled to relate properly to God and others, in a word, faith and love.

The cross of Christ inaugurates the new age by liberating those who respond in faith from the powers of the present age. 1 Cor 10.11 refers to the “overlap” of the ages, when the promised Age to Come has reached back into the present evil age. This overlapping of the present and the future was inaugurated by the death of Christ, an eschatological and apocalyptic moment. Christ’s death was “to sin,” permanently ending the power of sin over those who respond to God in faith. Consequently, those in Christ can now “become” the righteousness they were not; in Christ, people are liberated from sin so that the formerly impossible is now possible: they are no longer covenantally dysfunctional.

Christ’s death likewise liberates human beings from their selves. Outside Christ, we are enslaved to ourselves, living a life improperly oriented towards ourselves rather than towards God and others. Christ liberates us from ourselves so that we can live for him; conversion is exchanging one “Lord” (our selves) for another, proper Lord. In 1 Corinthians 6.19-20, Paul says that we are “not our own,” i.e. we are not our own master or owner. Believers are redeemed from slavery unto themselves in order to belong to our rightful owner: we were once our own, but no longer. Our “old self” or “old person” has died.