Een andere kijk op oude en nieuwe mens

'In his Principles of Conduct, John Murray has rejected the idea that the believer is both old man and new man. It is just as wrong to call the believer both a new man and an old man, he argues, as it is to say that he is both regenerate and unregenerate (p. 218). Murray contends that since according to New Testament teaching the believer has put off the old man and put on the new, we must think of him as a new man - though a new man not yet made perfect, and still the subject of progressive renewal. This renewal, however, is not to be conceived of as the progressive putting off of the old man and putting on of the new (pp. 218-19).
In his study Paul, Herman Ridderbos offers an interpretation similar to Murray's. When Paul speaks about the old man and the new man, writes Ridderbos, he is not concerned primarily with the change which takes place in the life of an individual Christian after conversion, but with what took place once and for all in Christ (pp. 63-64). Christ, as the second Adam, died on the cross and arose from the grave for His people. Since Christ's people are one with Him in corporate unity, what happened to Christ has therefore also happened to His people. By His death on the cross Christ dealt a death-blow to sin as the power which had been enslaving His people; by His resurrection He opened up a new way of living for His people: the way of living associated with God's new creation.
The "old man" and the "new man," Ridderbos claims, ought to be understood in this salvation-history setting. They designate the great transition from spiritual death to spiritual life which came into existence through the death and resurrection of Christ, and which is now to be appropriated by faith. In other words, we may think of these concepts in both an objective and a subjective way. Objectively, "old" and "new" man mean that in Christ's death and resurrection the old, sinful way of living has once for all been done away with, having lost its power over Christ's people, whereas the new way of living associated with God's new creation has once for all been inaugurated. Subjectively, "old" and "new" man mean that believers enter into this new way of living as the appropriate by faith - not only initially but continually - what happened in the death and resurrection of Christ. Another way of putting this is to say that "old" man refers to the old age in which man as incorporated in Adam is a slave to sin, whereas "new" man designates the new age in which man as a member of the body of Christ is now liberated from the slavery of sin and is free to live to the praise of God.'

Anthony A. Hoekema, The Christian Looks At Himself (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), pp.43-44.