“The whole content of [Paul's] preaching can be summarized as the proclamation and explication of the eschatological time of salvation inaugurated with Christ’s advent, death, and resurrection…The time of the world has come to a conclusion with Christ’s advent. However much this fulfillment still bears a provisional character…, nevertheless the [fullness] of the time or of the times is here spoken of as a matter that has already taken effect and thus in principle has been settled…’Behold, now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation!’ (2Corinthians 6:2) Here, too, what is to be understood by ‘the acceptable time’ and ‘the day of salvation’ is not merely a certain saving event or opportunity that one must embrace and which may perhaps presently disappear again. Nothing less is intended than that the decisive, long-expected coming of God has dawned, the hour of hours, the day of salvation in the fulfilling, eschatological sense of the word…’Wherefore if any man is in Christ, he is new creation; the old things have passed away; behold, the new have come’ (2Corinthians 5:17). When he speaks here of ‘new creation,’ this is not meant merely in an individual sense (‘a new creature’), but one is to think of the new world of the re-creation that God has made to dawn in Christ, and in which everyone who is in Christ is included” (p. 44-45).
Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology
Posted by Mike Wagenman 