midnattsfunderingar

"The replacement of Temple with Jesus and, secondarily and derivatively, with his people remains one of the Paul's central worldview-revisions, unniticed in an earlier generation that chose to forget the significance of the Temple within Paul's ancestral symbolic universe. He developed it further: the Messiah's people, and the tasks they perform 'in the Messiah', are described in terms which reflect the people at the centre of Jerusalem and the Temple and the tasks they performed there. They were priests, offering sacrifices, indeed offering themselves as sacrifices, or, in Paul's case, bringing the gentiles themselves as a quasi-sacrificial offering, with a kind of heavy irony, to Jerusalem. And Jerusalemn itself, the focus of the longed-for centripetal pilgrimage of the nations, has been replaced by Jerusalem as the centrifugal originating point of the world mission. The redeemer does not now come to Zion but from Zion, going out into all the world to 'gather the nations', not by their coming to the central symbol of ancient Jerusalem, but by their becoming the central symbol, as we shall we, of the transformed worldview."

 

"Paul's revising of the Jewish symbol of Torah in terms of food and tablefellowship, then, was clear, if necessarily complex. First, all those who belong to the Messiah, and are defined by Messiah-faithfulness and baptism, belong at the same table: this, as we shall see, is a constitutive part of his most central new positive symbol. Second, Messiah-followers are free to eat whatever they wish, with that freedom curtailed only (but strongly) when someone else's weak conscience is endangered. Third, Messiah-followers are free to eat ordinary meals with anyone they like, but not with someone who professes to be one of the family but whose behaviour indicates otherwise. Fourth (an extra but important point), Messiah-followers are not free to go into a pagan temple and eat there. To do so would be to stage a contest with the lord himself. All this is not just 'ethics'. It is a matter of a freshly crafted symbolic universe." (Ibid, s. 361).

 

"Paul could only write such things if he had long believed that the previously mandatory cultural symbol had become 'indifferent', because in the eschatological purposes of God the story of Israel had at last turned the great corner into Deuteronomy 30, the time of covenant renewal. This is not, then – the point had better be ,ade here at once though we shall return to it – a matter of Paul contrasting two types of religion and deeming something called 'Judaism' to be inferior to something called 'Christianity'. It is a matter of Paul believing, on the basis of the Messiah's resurrection, that God's covenant with Israel had been renewed, and that heart-circumcision was, as had always been promised, the proper mark of covenant membership to which physical circumcision had been a kind of advance signpost." (Ibid, s. 362).

 

"Once we grasp this larger picture – and, though quite clear in itself, it seems to have eluded many readers – it should also become clear that Paul's entire mission to the pagan world was part of the enactment of the revised and reborn symbol of the land. If God's original intention was to give Abraham the land as an advance sign, a foretaste, of an eventually intended justice-bringing rue over the whole creation (and that does seem to be what not only Paul but some other second-Temple Jews had in mind), then Paul clearly sees that ultimate aim as fulfilled in the Messiah on the one hand and implemented through his own mission on the other. The reason the symbol of land appears to be almost entirely missing in Paul is that it has been swalloed up in a much larger element of symbolic praxis. Paul's mission was aimed precisely at declaring the Messiah, Jesus, as the world's true lord, summoning people everywhere to believing allegiance to him. We note that here, as with other Jewish symbols, Paul's point was not that there was anything wrong with the original promise or symbol. Far from it. When you have arived at your destination, you switch off the engine and park the car, not becuase it has not done its proper job but because it has. It is eschatology, not religious superiority, that forms the key to Paul the apostle's radical revision of the symbolic world of Saul of Tarsus." (Ibid, s. 367). (Min kursivering i slutet).