In the context of this statement [2 Corinthians 5:17] Paul located this transition from the old to the new at a single point: the death of all men in Christ’s death for all, and the living of all men for him who was raised for all. To the apostle, what had happened in Christ simultaneously transformed not only the status of creation but also the vantage point from which this creation must be viewed.
Paul S. Minear, Images of the Church in the New Testament
In all that, Christ was on the one hand so one with God that what he did, God did, for he was none other than God himself acting thus in our humanity. And therefore there is no other God for us than this God, and no other action of God toward us than this action in which he stood in our place and acted on our behalf. On the other hand, he was so one with us that when he died we died, for he did not die for himself but for us, and he did not die alone, but we died in him as those whom he had bound to himself inseparably by his incarnation. Therefore when he rose again, we rose in him and with him, and when he presented himself before the face of the Father, he presented us also before God, so that we are already accepted of God in him once and for all.
Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker
With the birth and resurrection of Jesus, with Jesus himself, the relation of the world to God has been drastically altered, for everything has been placed on an entirely new basis, the unconditional grace of God.
Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection
Our resurrection has already taken place and is fully tied with the resurrection of Christ, and therefore proceeds from it more by way of manifestation of what has already taken place than as new effect resulting from it.
Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection
He has made an end of us as sinners and therefore of sin itself by going to death as the One who took our place as sinners. In His person He has delivered up us sinners and sin itself to destruction. He has removed us sinners and sin, negated us, cancelled us out: ourselves, our sin, and the accusation, condemnation and perdition which has overtaken us…. The man of sin, the first Adam, the cosmos alienated from God, the “present evil world” (Gal 1:4), was taken and killed and buried in and with Him on the cross.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. G. W. Bromiley
He has ceased to be. The wrath of God which is the fire of His love has taken him away and all his transgressions and offences and errors and follies and lies and faults and crimes against God and his fellow men and himself, just as a whole burnt offering is consumed on the altar with the flesh and skin and bones and hoofs and horns, rising up as fire to heaven and disappearing. That is how God has dealt with the man who broke covenant with Himself.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics
When God comes to humanity in the history of Jesus Christ, humanity at the same time is brought to God in that history objectively. It is not faith which incorporates humanity into Jesus Christ. Faith is rather the acknowledgement of a mysterious incorporation already objectively accomplished on humanity’s behalf. “One had died for all; therefore all have died” (2 Cor. 5:14). That all have died in Christ (and been raised with him) is the hidden truth of humanity as revealed to faith. Our true humanity is to be found not in ourselves but objectively in him. God’s real presence to humanity in Jesus Christ (revelational objectivism) is paralleled by humanity’s real presence in Jesus Christ to God (soteriological objectivism).
George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth
We must not think of our salvation as less than a complete exchange, for there is nothing good in fallen Adam, he is totally and incurably corrupt in all his parts and passions. There is therefore no hope for him; death is the only “cure,” for it is by death only that Adam can be saved from his fallen self and become a new creation. This is what Christ has done for Adam. He took his place, not only as his Substitute to take way his sins, but as his Representative to crucify his fallen nature, that in his sinless body he might slay and remove the old, and by his resurrection replace it with the new.
The ground of this truth is in Romans 6:3-8. There, Paul repeats the truth verse after verse in varying forms of words: we are “baptised into his death”; “we are buried with him by baptism into death”; we are “planted together within the likeness of his death”; “our old man was crucified with him”; “he that is dead has been justified from sin”; we are “dead with Christ.” Could anything be more plain? Paul says that when Jesus died, we died with him.
William Still, Towards Spiritual Maturity
He was crucified: then what about us? Must we ask God to crucify us? Never! When Christ was crucified we were crucified; and his crucifixion is past, therefore ours cannot be future. I challenge you to find one text in the New Testament telling us that our crucifixion is in the future. All the references to it are in the Greek aorist, which is the “once-for-all” tense, the “eternally past” tense. (See Rom 6:6; Gal 2:20; 5:24; 6:14.)
Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life
When therefore the Lord Jesus was crucified on the cross, he was crucified as the last Adam. All that was in the first Adam was gathered up and done away in him. We were included there. As the last Adam he wiped out the old race; as the second Man he brings in the new race.
Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life
It does not depend on your feelings. If you feel that Christ has died, he has died; and if you do not feel that he has died, he has died. If you feel that you have died, you have died; and if you do not feel that you have died, you have nevertheless surely died. These are divine facts. That Christ has died is a fact, that the two thieves have died is a fact, and that you have died is a fact also. Let me tell you, You have died! You are done with! You are ruled out! The self you loathe is on the Cross in Christ.
Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life
Frequently the old man is taken in an individual sense and the crucifying and putting off the old man as the personal breaking with and fighting against the power of sin…. But we shall have to understand “old” and “new man,” not in the first place in the sense of the ordo salutis, but in that of the history of redemption; that is to say, it is a matter here not of a change that comes about in the way of faith and conversion in the life of the individual Christian, but of that which once took place in Christ and in which his people had a part in him in the corporate sense described above.
Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology
The unmistakable fact is passed over that in Paul dying, being buried, etc., with Christ does not have its ultimate ground in the ceremony of incorporation into the Christian church, but rather in already having been included in the historical death and resurrection of Christ himself. Of particular significance is the pronouncement of 2 Corinthians 5:14ff., where a clear transition becomes perceptible from the “Christ for us” to the “we with [or in] Christ.”… From this it is to be concluded that “having died,” “being in Christ,” “being new creation,” the fact that his own are no longer judged and “known according the flesh” (namely, according to the world mode of existence), has been given and effected with the death of Christ himself.
Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology
Lutherans generally treat the doctrine of the mystical union anthropologically, and therefore conceive of it as established by faith. Hence they naturally take it up at a later point in their soteriology. But this method fails to do full justice to the idea of our union with Christ, since it loses sight of the eternal basis of the union and of its objective realization in Christ, and deals exclusively with the subjective realization of it in our lives, and even so only with our personal conscious entrance into this union. Reformed theology, on the other hand, deals with the union of believers with Christ theologically, and as such does far greater justice to this important subject. In doing so it employs the term “mystical union” in a broad sense as a designation not only of the subjective union of Christ and believers, but also of the union that lies back of it, that is basic to it, and of which it is only the culminating expression, namely, the federal union of Christ and those who are His in the counsel of redemption, the mystical union ideally established in that eternal counsel, and the union as it is objectively effected in the Incarnation and the redemptive work of Christ.
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology
The old man is crucified; I take him with me to the tomb and, as I rise, it is you who rise in me. As I ascend to the Throne it is you who ascend with me. You are a new creation. Henceforth your life shall flow from me and from my Throne.
F. J. Huegel, The Enthroned Christian