σάρξ

There are two famous verses in the New Testament that use the same Greek word, and on the surface they appear to be saying opposite things.

“And the Word became flesh.” (John 1:14)

“I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.” (Romans 7:18)

The word is sarx. John uses it about Christ. Paul uses it about himself. In John, the sarx is what the eternal Word willingly took on, in an act of love that orthodox Christology calls the incarnation. In Paul, the sarx is the part of himself he cannot trust — the resident of his own being that keeps producing what he does not want.

Same word. Different work. And the whole of Christian anthropology — what we are, what we became in Adam, what Christ took on, what is being saved, what is still being fought against — runs through how those two uses fit together.

The Word

σάρξ (sarx), pronounced SARX. One syllable. A feminine noun, third declension. The family includes the adjectives sarkikos (fleshly, of-the-flesh, characteristic of flesh) and sarkinos (made of flesh, fleshly in substance). Our English word sarcophagus descends from sarx — literally “flesh-eater,” a stone box that consumes the body inside it.

At its lexical baseline, sarx means the soft tissue of a living body — meat, in the most ordinary sense. Greek butchers used the word. So did Greek physicians. So did the Septuagint translators, when they needed a word for the Hebrew basar (בָּשָׂר), which carries a similar range from literal flesh to mortal humanity to the human kindred you share blood with.

The New Testament inherits the range and extends it. Sarx in the New Testament can mean any of several things — flesh as physical tissue, flesh as mortal embodied humanity, flesh as the human nature in its weakness, flesh as the human nature in its sinful bondage, flesh as ethnic descent, flesh as the realm of human achievement apart from God. Context governs which sense is in play. And in some passages — most of them Paul’s — more than one sense is operating at once.

This is the kind of word where translation philosophy makes a real difference, and we will come to that.

Range of Meaning

In its New Testament usage, sarx covers:

• Literal flesh, the soft tissue of a body. The medical sense.
• The body considered as physical, bounded, mortal. The contrast is often with pneuma (spirit), which we will meet in Chapter 36.
• Human nature in its created weakness — limited, dependent, mortal, but not in itself sinful. The sense John uses in John 1:14.
• Human nature in its sin-bondage — the sense Paul typically uses when he contrasts life “in the flesh” with life “in the Spirit.” Not a part of the person; the whole person under the dominion of sin.
• The sphere of human achievement apart from God’s gift — confidence “in the flesh” (Phil 3:3–4).
• Ethnic descent or biological family — “my kinsmen according to the flesh” (Rom 9:3).

Two of these senses do most of the theological work in the New Testament. The first is the neutral or honorable sense — flesh as the genuine human substance Christ assumed. The second is the negative sense — flesh as the bondage-state of humans apart from the Spirit. The first sense is required for the doctrine of the incarnation. The second sense is required for the doctrine of original sin. They are not in tension. They are looking at the same human reality from different angles.

Where You’ll Meet It

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14, ESV)

We have visited this verse before (Chapter 1 on logos, Chapter 4 on monogenēs, Chapter 8 on doxa). The fourth visit, here, is for the sarx. The eternal Word became sarx — real human flesh, not the appearance of flesh, not a phantasm, not a disguise. Whatever sense sarx is going to do later in Paul, the sense John reaches for here is the honorable one. The flesh is what God in the Son willingly took to Himself, that He might save it.

“I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.” (Romans 7:18, ESV)

Paul, speaking the Pauline sense at full volume. The sarx in him is the thing in him that produces what he does not want and cannot manage to produce what he does want. This is not Paul saying his body is bad. It is Paul saying that the totality of his existence considered apart from the gift of the Spirit is in bondage to a power he cannot escape on his own. The flesh is not a part of him. It is him, in his condition apart from rescue.

“For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” (Romans 8:5–6, ESV)

The contrast in shorthand. Sarx and pneuma — flesh and Spirit — are not two parts of the Christian. They are two ways of being human. To live “according to the flesh” is to live in the bondage Adam handed down. To live “according to the Spirit” is to live in the freedom Christ has given.

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20, ESV)

The verse where both senses sit in the same sentence. The life Paul lives “in the flesh” — the embodied, daily, ordinary life he is still living — he lives by faith. The flesh here is the mortal embodied existence; it is not bad. But the same Paul will say in the next chapter that flesh and Spirit are at war within him (Gal 5:17). One word; two senses; both present in adjacent paragraphs. Context tells you which is in play.

“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.” (Galatians 5:16–17, ESV)

The classic flesh-versus-Spirit text. Paul is not saying that you have a lower nature and a higher nature, and the trick is to feed the higher and starve the lower. He is saying that the Christian is in the middle of a fight between two ways of being human — the bondage-flesh of the old self and the freed-Spirit of the new self — and that the fight is real, and that the flesh is genuinely opposed to what you most want as a Christian.