previous post<\/a>, Paul had to make some deft moves to bring Israel\u2019s story into the story of Jesus.<\/p>\nWhat we\u2019ve got here is, for modern Evangelicals, a bit of a paradox: Paul no doubt deeply respected Israel\u2019s story as God\u2019s Word, but that Word now had to be re-read, because of what God did in and through Jesus did not follow the playbook.<\/p>\n
A messiah who died and then rose from the dead. Two problems here:<\/p>\n
1. The messianic hope of Judaism was basically (it\u2019s more complicated than this) of a king like the good\u00a0old days; a\u00a0military\u00a0leader who would rid the land of its current squatters, the Romans, so the people of God could get their independence back.<\/p>\n
2. This messiah would set an example for God\u2019s people by living according to God\u2019s Law, thus ushering in a new age of peace and communion with God.<\/p>\n
Land and Law. These were connected. Israel lost the land to the Babylonians in the 6th century BC because of their failure to be faithful to God\u2019s Law. Hence, to get it back\u2013I mean actually get it back fully, not just be guests of the Romans\u2013faithfulness to the Law was a big deal.<\/p>\n
But Jesus wasn\u2019t about getting back the land. He spoke of a different kingdom, the Kingdom of God, where chariots and bloodshed are out of place, and even kings bow the knee to a higher authority.<\/p>\n
And keeping the Law of Moses was not top on Jesus\u2019 to-do list. No, Jesus didn\u2019t advocate razor blading the law out of the Bible. But he clearly thought that some things were more important\u2013like loving God and others. Maybe that\u2019s why he thumbed his nose at some purity laws, like eating only clean foods, or touching corpses and menstruating women.<\/p>\n
Jesus didn\u2019t meet most people\u2019s messianic expectations (those who even had<\/em> such expectations). It didn\u2019t help his reputation that Jesus was killed by the Romans. A sure sign of messianic failure was to be executed as a criminal by the very people you are supposed to run out of town.<\/p>\nNo one was expecting a messiah to act like this. Now throw the resurrection into the mix, and you are bound to have some confused Jews running around Palestine in the first century.<\/p>\n
To make things even more confusing\u2013and infuriating\u2013the earliest Christians were convinced that Gentiles didn\u2019t have to become Jewish through circumcision before embracing the God who told Abraham that circumcision is non-negotiable. Gentiles could stay Gentiles.<\/p>\n
Enter Paul. Paul\u2019s letters can generally be explained this way: he is trying to wrap his arms around how all this Jesus stuff fits together with what one was led to expect from reading Israel\u2019s story. In other words, how can this<\/em> (a crucified and risen messiah) be the proper conclusion of a story that didn\u2019t have such a thing in mind?<\/p>\nFor Paul, his scripture was a non-negotiable element to help the first Christians understand what God was up to then and there. But to make that connection between then and now, Paul, without question, had to rethink some things, and more importantly had to learn to read Israel\u2019s story by (1) accenting those points that were more clearly joined to the gospel, and (2) read other portions of his Bible against the grain.<\/p>\n
How scripture was read, what scripture meant, was placed by Paul on a trajectory the church is meant to follow:<\/p>\n
the Old Testament is God\u2019s Word that has to be re-understood, re-thought, re-read in light of Jesus.<\/h2>\n
In a way, Jesus already said this: you can\u2019t put new wine in old wineskins. The old ways can\u2019t contain the new thing Jesus is about.<\/p>\n
So, yes, Paul had a high view of scripture. It just wasn\u2019t the final word. Jesus was.<\/p>\n
I know this sort of thing can make some\u00a0Evangelicals\u00a0nervous, but take it up with Jesus and Paul.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yes, of course he did. He was a Jew trained in the\u00a0traditions\u00a0of his people. In fact, he had such a high view of scripture, for a while there he was trying to put to death those annoying Christ-followers who undermined it. That high view of scripture was not abandoned when Paul became a follower of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[]},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14003"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cccfornews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}