One New Humanity

Definition

A reading of Ephesians (and of the New Testament’s ecclesiology generally) in which the church is not a “third race” assembled out of two pre-existing races but a new humanity, a new anthropological category, created in Christ from people whose former divisions are now dissolved in him. The phrase is Paul’s: in Eph 2:15 the work of the cross is “to create in himself one new anthropos in place of the two.” The two are Jew and gentile, the deepest ethno-religious divide the ancient Mediterranean world knew. The new anthropos (the bare Greek noun: human, person) is not a fusion of the two cultures into a compromise hybrid but a new creation (cf. 2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15), Adam-language refigured around the Messiah and the Spirit, the corporate fulfillment of God’s purpose “to sum up all things in him” (Eph 1:10). The framework names what the church is, before it asks what the church does: it is the ethnic-and-class-dividing wall demolished (2:14), it is the new humanity being grown to “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (4:13), it is the body whose unity is the visible argument for the cosmic Christology of chapters 1 and 3 (“through the church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the rulers and authorities,” 3:10). The framework is distinct from Paul Within Judaism, which names Paul’s continued Jewish identity and his refusal to disown Torah, and from the cruciform hermeneutic, which names how the new humanity is formed (in the self-giving of the cross). This framework names what the new humanity is, and what it costs Christianity when the church forgets that it is a new humanity at all.

Key proponents

Modern

Markus Barth, Ephesians 1-3 and Ephesians 4-6 (Anchor Bible, Doubleday, 1974). The lane’s gold standard for this framework. Barth reads Eph 2:11-22 as the load-bearing chapter of the letter: the dividing wall, the abolition of the law-of-commandments as a separating barrier (not as Torah-as-such), the creation of one new anthropos, the reconciliation of both to God in one body through the cross, the access in one Spirit to the Father, the building together into a holy temple. Barth’s reading refuses to let the chapter be reduced to either “abolishing Judaism” or “individual salvation”; the cross creates a new corporate human reality whose existence is itself the gospel.
N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress, 2013), esp. ch 6 and 10; Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters (WJK, 2002), the Ephesians volume. Wright reads the new humanity as the fulfillment of Israel’s vocation, the people of God reconstituted around the Messiah as the international family Abraham was promised. The continuity is essential: the new humanity is not a new religion replacing Judaism but the goal Israel always pointed toward, with the dividing wall now removed.
Lynn H. Cohick, The Letter to the Ephesians (NICNT, Eerdmans, 2020). Careful exegesis of 2:11-22 and 4:1-16. Cohick reads “one new anthropos” against its Adamic background: Christ is the new Adam (cf. Rom 5; 1 Cor 15), and the new humanity is the Adamic family refounded in him.
Tet-Lim N. Yee, Jews, Gentiles and Ethnic Reconciliation: Paul’s Jewish Identity and Ephesians (Cambridge, 2005). A more recent work documenting the Jewish texture of Eph 2:11-22 and the rhetoric of boundary-marker abolition. Strong on the cultural-anthropological dimensions of the dividing wall.
Scot McKnight, A Fellowship of Differents (Zondervan, 2014), and his Ephesians and ecclesiology essays. McKnight’s image: the church is the “salad bowl” where the cultural-ethnic differences are not erased but brought to the same table in Christ. The image refuses both the melting pot error (assimilation that erases) and the parallel monoculture error (separation that segregates).
John H. Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Eerdmans, 1972) and Body Politics (Discipleship Resources, 1992). The Anabaptist reading: the church as a political reality of reconciliation, a visible alternative society whose existence preaches the gospel. Yoder’s later legacy is darkened by his abuse of women, which has to be named honestly when the work is cited; the work itself remains structurally important for this framework. (See the standalone treatment of this in our work elsewhere.)
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale, 2010) and After Whiteness (Eerdmans, 2020). Jennings names the historical betrayal: the church that was supposed to be the one new humanity has, in much of its modern history, functioned as the chief theological warrant for racial separation, white supremacy, and the colonial division of peoples. The framework’s contemporary stakes are clearest in Jennings’s work; Ephesians 2 is the chapter the modern American church has most badly failed to live.
Timothy Gombis, The Drama of Ephesians (IVP, 2010, in influences/). The new humanity is the staged display of God’s apocalyptic victory, the church’s existence as one body of former enemies is the visible argument that the powers have been defeated (3:10).
Marty Solomon (Bema podcast, Galatians and Ephesians, in influences/). The Hebraic context: the Second-Temple Jewish hope was always that the nations would come to Zion (Isa 2, 60; Zech 8, 14), and Ephesians says they have, into the Messiah, who is Zion’s new center.
Nijay Gupta, Tell Her Story (IVP, 2023), and earlier essays on women in the early church. The new humanity in Paul includes the abolition of the male/female barrier (Gal 3:28); Ephesians’ household codes (5:21-6:9) operate inside that frame even as they engage existing Greco-Roman household structures (see household codes).

Premodern witnesses

John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians (c. 392), Hom. 5-6 on Eph 2:11-22. Chrysostom reads the dividing wall passage as a manifesto of cosmic reconciliation: “He made two one”, both with one another, and both with God. The earliest sustained patristic reading of the chapter.
Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.16-18, V (c. 180). The recapitulation doctrine: Christ as the new Adam in whom all the lines of broken humanity are gathered back together. Ephesians’ “one new anthropos” sits inside Irenaeus’s bigger Adamic frame.
Augustine, City of God, esp. Books XI-XIV, and On Christian Doctrine I. The doctrine of the totus Christus (the whole Christ, head and body), the church as inseparable from her Lord, and therefore as one body across every former division. Augustine’s North African church was already multi-ethnic; the framework’s pastoral pressure was already real for him.
John Calvin, Commentary on Ephesians (1548). On Eph 2:14-16 Calvin insists the abolition of the “wall” does not mean the abolition of Torah’s substance but the dismantling of the ceremonial markers that had separated Israel from the nations for the purpose of preservation; now, in Christ, those markers’ work is done and the unity they had protected can be opened outward. Calvin’s reading anchors the Reformed tradition’s account.

See How We Read for the longer lineage of this and the other frameworks on this site.

Core insights

Eph 2:14-16 is the demolition of the dividing wall. “He himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new anthropos in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross.” The image is concrete. The Jerusalem temple’s soreg, the low stone barrier separating the court of the gentiles from the inner courts of Israel, bore inscriptions warning gentiles that they would be killed if they passed it (Josephus, War 5.193-194; Antiquities 15.417; one of these inscriptions is in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum). Paul, writing from Roman imprisonment in part because of the riot triggered by the false accusation that he had brought a gentile past that wall (Acts 21:27-29), now declares that the wall has been broken down in his flesh. The Messiah’s body is the new architecture of God’s people.

The “abolished law” is the boundary-marker function, not Torah as such. The phrase “abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances” (2:15) is one of the most contested clauses in the New Testament. The site reads it with Wright, Cohick, and the New Perspective: what is “abolished” is the boundary-marker function of Torah, circumcision, the food laws, the sabbath, the temple-access regulations, that had legally and practically separated Israel from the nations during the time of Israel’s covenantal preservation. Torah’s ethical substance (love God and neighbor; the prophets’ justice) is not abolished but fulfilled in the new humanity. This reading preserves Paul Within Judaism, Paul is not anti-Torah and not anti-Jewish, while taking 2:15 with full seriousness. The wall is down; the Torah’s witness is not.

“One new anthropos” is the Adamic key. Anthropos is the simple Greek noun: “human.” Paul’s use of the singular for the new corporate reality (Eph 2:15; cf. 4:13) draws on the Adamic theology that runs through Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. Christ is the new Adam; the people in him are the new humanity. The first Adam’s family was broken across the original divisions (Cain and Abel, Babel’s scattering, Israel and the nations); the last Adam’s family is gathered back across those same divisions, as one new humanity. This is why Eph 4:13, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to the mature anthropos, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”, speaks of one mature anthropos in the singular: the church is one Adamic person growing up into Christ.

“Through the church… to the rulers and authorities” (3:10). The new humanity’s existence is the visible proof of the gospel’s cosmic claim. Eph 3:10: “so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” The unseen powers are shown the gospel by looking at the body. Gombis: the church is the theater in which the apocalyptic drama is publicly staged. When the church divides along the lines the cross dissolved, the apologetic argument collapses; when she lives as one new humanity, the powers are silenced by what they see.

The dividing wall was peace through hostility; the new humanity is peace through reconciliation. A wall makes a kind of peace, the peace of separation, where the conflict is managed by distance. The cross makes a different kind of peace, the peace of one body in which the former enmity has been killed in his flesh (2:16). The first is the pax Romana‘s logic; the second is the gospel’s. Markus Barth is especially good on this: the abolished wall is not just an inter-religious boundary but a political theology of peace, the pax Christou against the pax Romana, the body of the crucified Lord against the empire of the sword.

The new humanity is not assimilationist. The Pauline vision is not that gentiles must become Jews or that Jews must become gentiles or that everyone must become the same cultural type. Eph 2:11-22 names the abolition of the dividing wall and the creation of one body, not the abolition of ethnic-cultural identity. McKnight’s image is right: a fellowship of differents, unified in Christ without erasing what each brings. (Gal 3:28’s “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male and female” is the same theology: the salvific significance of the categories is abolished, they no longer divide membership in Christ, while the categories themselves remain real and meaningful.) The melting-pot reading and the segregation reading are both betrayals of the chapter. The honest reading is the harder one: real differences brought to the same table, with the dividing wall down and the table’s grammar set by the One who hosts.

Eph 2:19-22 names the new humanity as a temple. “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is being joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” The new humanity is the new temple. The Jerusalem temple had a wall that kept the nations out; the new temple is built out of the formerly excluded. The architectural metaphor is exact. See tabernacle as cosmic temple.

The framework’s contemporary stakes are stark (Jennings). The chapter the modern American church has most badly failed to live is Eph 2. The same Protestant tradition that built its identity around Pauline grace built racially separated denominations, defended chattel slavery, segregated worship, and erected the apparatus that Jennings calls the theological imagination of race. The new humanity does not exist where the church remains organized along the lines the cross dissolved. The framework is therefore not abstract; it is a measuring instrument. Where the church looks more like the dividing wall than like the demolished wall, the church has stopped preaching Eph 2.

Where it shows up in Scripture

Ephesians 2:11-22, the dividing wall, the one new anthropos, the new temple
Ephesians 3:6, gentiles as “fellow heirs, fellow members of the body, fellow partakers of the promise”
Ephesians 3:10, “through the church” the manifold wisdom of God is made known to the powers
Ephesians 4:1-16, the unity of the Spirit, the one body, the mature anthropos
Galatians 3:26-29, “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male and female”
Romans 1:16; 3:21-30; 15:7-13, salvation for Jew first and also for the Greek; God is one; “receive one another, as Christ also received you”
Colossians 3:9-11, the new self being renewed “in the image of its creator,” “where there is no Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free”
1 Corinthians 12:12-13, “we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free”
Acts 10-11, 15, the Cornelius narrative and the Jerusalem council, the practical formation of the new humanity
Isaiah 2:2-4, 56:3-8, 60, the OT prophetic hope of the nations gathered to Zion
Revelation 7:9-10, the great multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language

Common misreadings to avoid

“Ephesians replaces Israel with the church.” No. This is supersessionism, and the lane refuses it. Eph 2:11-22 says the wall is broken, not that Israel is canceled. The new humanity is the international family Abraham was always promised (Gen 12:3; Gal 3:8), and Israel’s distinctive vocation as the witness through whom the nations are brought to God is fulfilled, not erased. See Paul Within Judaism and Abrahamic covenant.
“Ephesians erases ethnic, cultural, and gendered identity.” No. The salvific significance of the dividing categories is abolished (they no longer organize who is in or who is out), but the categories themselves remain real. The new humanity is a fellowship of differents, not a melting pot.
“The ‘one new humanity’ is invisible, a spiritual reality with no concrete shape.” No. Paul’s argument in Eph 2:11-22 is precisely that the new reality is concrete, it is the gathered body in which Jew and gentile, slave and free, eat at one table, pray with one voice, and share one bread. An invisible new humanity is not the one Ephesians preaches. (Yoder, Gombis, Jennings all press this.)
“The new humanity is the same as the kingdom of God.” Not quite. The kingdom is the reign of God breaking into all things; the new humanity is the people in whom that reign is taking historical shape. The two are inseparable but distinct. The new humanity is the body in which the kingdom is manifested in present history (cf. kingdom of heaven).
“Ephesians 2 is about individual salvation by grace.” It is also about that, 2:8-9 is unmistakable. But the chapter is primarily about the corporate reality that grace creates. Reading Eph 2:8-9 without 2:11-22 has been one of the great pastoral failures of modern evangelical preaching. The two halves are one chapter for a reason: the gift creates the body.
“The ‘wall’ is the moral law.” No. The 1st-century reference is the soreg of the Jerusalem temple, the boundary-marker function of Torah, and the cultural-religious barriers that separated Jew and gentile. The ethical substance of Torah (Exod 20’s commandments) is not “the wall”; the boundary-marker function is. Misreading this verse as “Christ abolished the moral law” has produced antinomian Christianity and unintentional Marcionism.

Definition

Key proponents

Core insights

Where it shows up in Scripture

Common misreadings to avoid

Further reading