Paradigm Shift

I've come more and more to see the New Testament not about meeting some conditions for the forgiveness of sin, since such conditions were already laid out in the Hebrew scriptures, but rather as the story of God extending a direct relationship with people beyond the boundaries of Israel and to the four corners of the Earth. I think of the Bible as the story of a war between God and the devil. God first created an outpost 'behind enemy lines' with the nation of Israel. He 'adopted' that nation. From there God worked outward until He extended His presence throughout the Earth. God offered to all people the chance to have a direct relationship with Him. Jesus sacrifice is a physical manifestation of the battle that God waged against the devil.

The Jews long before Jesus had come to believe that wars, for instance, were like physical expressions of a spiritual or rather cosmic war between cosmic forces of good and evil. This is clearest in the Book of Daniel. So the carnage, the destruction and the bloodshed that results from conquest and war are like 'incarnations' if you will of battles between angels and demons. In the same way, Jesus suffering is like a physical manifestation of a great battle between God and the devil, in which victory was finally achieved for the side of good. One difference would be that in this case, in the case of Jesus, what Jesus actually did here on Earth, the way He lived and died, was a part of that battle and did not just present it to us. Jesus is the victory of God over satan and the extension of God's full grace to the sum total of humanity. Now there are probably many aspects of the Jesus-event that played this salvific role, and forgiveness of sin is a part of that. I've also suggested political aspects to this, and also suggested that Rene Girard's work gives a clue to how all that works. But the main point of the whole thing is the defeat of the devil and the extension of God's grace.

This makes so much sense of so many passages found in the New Testament. Think about the parable of the worker and the vineyards, where the workers hired at the end of the day are paid the same amount as those hired at the beginning. Doesn't this passage make a heck of a lot more sense when you think about the gentiles and the Jews? The Gentiles receive the same reward as the Jews, given equal status before God, without the same level of suffering or the shared oppression. The resentment of the workers can be understood as the resentment of some Jews and even Jewish Christians at the removal of certain requirements (like identification with a particular oppressed minority and the sign of circumcision) for adoption into the people of God. The same thing is true of the story of the Prodigal Son. Doesn't this story make so much more sense if we think of the Prodigal Son as the Gentiles and the Faithful Son as the Jews?

There are so many places in Paul's letters where Paul lauds Judaism and marks off Jews as 'keepers of the promise' (Romans 3) and even derides Gentiles as 'sinful' (Galatians 2) even as he attacks any attempt to question equality before God between the two groups. I think if you re-read Paul's letters with this new paradigm in mind, you will find many mysterious passages illuminated.

Now, this new paradigm does create some new problems. Some passages that may have once made sense from a certain point of view become obscured. Yet I would suggest that there is more made sensical by this way of looking at the New Testament than by the alternative. The number of passages that are problematized are outnumbered by those that are de-problematized. No exegetical paradigm is going to be perfect, but I am convinced that this one is superior.