And so, to the point, shall we?
I am persuaded that, in particular for the apostle Paul, as it is his use of the word "flesh" we're really talking about, the word signified everything pertaining to what you might call our human sphere of temporality, sentience, apprehension, capacity, strength, weakness, merit, shame, aspiration, striving, mortality and, ultimately, in and of ourselves, nothingness. It is all, all, part and parcel of that "flesh that is grass," here today, gone tomorrow, our fleeting moment on the stage called "vanity of vanities."
Paul wraps that all together under the trenchant rubric/metaphor "flesh," which always brings the prophet's cry to mind, that all flesh (all humanity) is as ephemeral as the grass in the field.
The metaphor is vastly and profoundly overarching. Yes, it includes a "worldly point of view" and a "sinful nature" and, need we point out, our very bodies, but it is always (possibly excepting--and I don't rush to concede this, either--references "literally" to the human body) a concept immensely greater than the sum of its parts.
Those who try to make his use of the word "flesh" more, shall we say, civilized inevitably paint themselves into hopeless conceptual corners, where hermeneutically disastrous compromises are made.
If, for instance, "flesh" is intrinsically "the sinful nature," then what nonsense Paul spouts when he confronts the Galatians over having begun in the Spirit and now attempting to perfect the matter via "the sinful nature." (Imagine the Galatians waking up in the morning thinking to themselves, "God sure started something great through the Spirit; now I'm going to finish what he started via my sinful nature!")
Of course, that's neither what Paul meant nor said, and no interpreter worth his or her salt would ever produce such nonsense. But since "almost anything is better" than translating sarx as "flesh," the interpreter scurries after yet another civilized rationalization of the apostle's primitive, clumsy metaphor.
Something perhaps like "human efforts," which kinda-sorta gets at something, a sliver, of the apostle's meaning but is a stringy, flavorless substitute for the richness (soteriological, eschatological and, yes, polemical) of the apostle's metaphor.
It's as if you rejected the metaphor "heart" and, so, had to come up with a "literal" term or phrase to substitute for it in each of these sentences (for fun, try it) :
She broke my heart.
I have set my heart upon it.
All we need to succeed is heart.
Let's try and get to the heart of the matter, shall we?
We had a heart-to-heart talk.
He had a heart of gold.
The alternative is to let the poor apostle use his metaphor intelligently, just as he wanted to, and to read him intelligently, just as we ought to!
One more installment to come.
