As an example of the richness we lose by "civilizing" Paul's language....
When he asks the Galatians rhetorically whether they're going to bring God's Spirit-induced work to its fullness via the flesh, the apostle is talking about their flirtation with the "gospel" preached by the missionaries from the Law-devoted faction in the Jerusalem church. "Flesh" here entails everything alluded to above (the ephemeral human experience capable finally of nothing eternal) and, pointedly in this context, it characterizes this "other gospel" and the law it preaches as "flesh." That is, as belonging to the "present evil age" out of which God has rescued us by His Son (Galatians 1).
To embrace the Jerusalem missionaries' non-gospel and its law (not Moses' law in its proper theological-historical place but a distortion of it that can never accomplish what these missionaries claim) is very simply to return to "the flesh," i.e., to the present evil age.
The polemic is hardly subtle. Paul is calling this other gospel and its law, and by the way its preachers, relics of a condemned, dead world that have no place in the life of the Spirit. The genuine weight of the metaphor as the apostle develops it throughout his writings, and as he lands it stunningly right to the jaw of his opponents here, is simply and brutally dispatched, without so much as a how-do-you-do, by the polite-company Wonder-Bread "human efforts." Along with the fact that Galatians isn't about "faith vs. works" or "grace vs. (Moses') law"....
It's about a life-or-death to-the-finish conflict between two gospels and the very place and nature of Christ ultimately (was the law given to lead us to Christ, or was Christ given to lead the world to the law?). And all of that is implicit in the apostle's merciless dismissal of the other gospel and all its works as "flesh," part of a Christ-less world, the world we no longer belong to. (How we trivialize, monstrously, the depths of meaning here by turning Galatians into a convenient footnote to support our ephemeral preferences: "Oh, that church thinks they're holier because they don't have instruments--they should read Galatians, we're free from the law!" Good grief....)
Had the other gospel won the battle for the heart (!) of the Church...well, we'd likely have never heard of it (the Church, I mean, or Christ). It would have died out as just another obscure offshoot-sect of Judaism, like the Essenes. Yes, it's that big. The Jerusalem church's Law faction and its gospel could never have lasted--indeed, it didn't.
When Paul speaks of our once having known Christ according to the flesh but knowing him so no longer, I am convinced we must take into account the intense soteriological-eschatological weight the metaphor had for him, one that is hardly remote from his use of it in Galatians or anywhere else for that matter.
The "flesh" was the constraints and principles of the created order--yes, inescapably corrupted by sin but not only for that constraining or finally to be despaired of. It is not that we no longer "know" Christ according to "the flesh" (and here, by the way, is another instance where the old standby "sinful nature" would be a comically absurd translation), meaning once we could see and touch him and now we can't. The eschatological nuances of this word come roaring through here. We understand Christ by revelation, by the Spirit, by our citizenship in heaven, by the irruption of the "eschaton," so that we already have "the mind of Christ." We neither meet Christ nor dwell in Him with any thanks to "the present evil age" for a leg-up and a boost into the kingdom. (This is, of course, at the heart of everything Paul writes in Galatians 1.)
Once, "we" (the world) registered and processed this man Jesus by the "light" of its darkness ("Beware lest the light in your eyes be darkness"), i.e., "the flesh," the "present evil age." But now, to anyone who is in Christ, everything is new; the old things (the "flesh," the former and, indeed, still present age) have passed away; by the Spirit we know Christ in the Spirit Who translates us into the kingdom of light.
"All flesh is as the grass of the field," and yet "Death, where is your sting?" There lies the wonder.
Likewise when Paul refers, in the opening verses of Romans, to Christ's descent from David "according to the flesh" but the Spirit's "declaring" him Son of God by the resurrection. Translating "flesh" here as "according to his human nature" commits, in my opinion outrageously, the apostle to an assertion that is very likely (in my opinion, absolutely) not at all what he means.
(Again, why not just let the poor man say "flesh" and let the rest of us wrestle with what he means--isn't that the honest thing to do?)
It's far too early, IMHO, to expect Paul to dive--and fleetingly, and in a mere preamble at that--into a full-blown christological treatment of Christ's two natures. The Church wasn't anywhere near formulating the notions so facilely (almost glibly, really!), and it's even more ridiculous to suppose Paul's supposing his readers would get it even if he did intend that.
Moreover (like Joan Rivers always said, "Can we talk?"), if the opening verses of Romans were such a christological treatment, let's admit we all find them a bit awkward and more disturbing than affirming. What do you mean, Paul, that Jesus was "declared" by the Spirit to be the Son of God, and only at his resurrection? Are you implying that he wasn't the Son of God before that? That he only became the Son of God, by some act of the Spirit, after the resurrection? A simplistic reading of the passage as two-nature christology raises tons of problems, problems that are foolishly undergirded by the escapist translation of sarx as "human nature" (yet another place where "sinful nature" would have been absurd!).
Once more, how 'bout ya just let the apostle say "flesh" when he wants to say "flesh," huh?
If we start from Paul's "flesh" concept and his fiercely eschatological understanding of the inbreaking of the Spirit and our "translation" into His kingdom of light, then this puzzling passage is suddenly worlds clearer.
Under the rubric, the dictates even, of the flesh, the darkened mind of "the present evil age," Jesus is merely the Son of David. Not that it's bad to be Son of David, it's a fulfillment of the prophecies. But there were likely hundreds of thousands of sons of David, they can't all be Messiah or Son of God. As the "flesh that is as grass" would have it, Jesus is, at his most exalted, even allowing his Messiahship, Son of David. Note the very likely dig at the Jerusalem Church Law Faction, who hailed Jesus as Messiah and Son of David. It's as if Paul is muttering an aside at them, "Yes, and that's all you're capable of perceiving, because you are as of yet nothing but flesh, part of the present evil age, devoid of the Spirit."
But it was the Spirit who "declared" (revelation, the act that saved Paul, again compare Galatians 1) Jesus to be the Son of God by the worlds-transcending event of resurrection. It is the Spirit who declares the Son of God to the human heart, and that only because of the Son of God's resurrection. And so, the essential, crucial contrast here isn't between Christ's two natures. Set deeply in the historical context of the raging controversy between the competing gospels, it's a contrast between the flesh (the "present evil age") and the Spirit (the Promise, the revelator, the new birth, the power of the resurrection).
These terms, "flesh" and "Spirit" were signposts to Paul's whole theological horizon, the markers of his realized eschatology.
And we blithely decide that, well, since our muscles and organs aren't inherently evil, and we don't want to confuse people or come off like Puritans, we'd better correct Paul's clumsy bordering on cringeworthy use of such a primitive rubric.
Horrors!
