I realise (and realised before reading Pete’s sample chapter) that I have more work to do, and could include in this Martin Buber’s book that I started and have not finished…

I know this because I am very good at noticing and remembering the colour of a person’s eyes.

I was trying to articulate what Paul’s words indicate he saw in Christ – that there can be no longer any single national group that is “chosen” by God.

Christ has destroyed the religio-political category of “the chosen.” In Christ, God freely chooses to dwell in and with all “nations.” But is a new religious category demanded by the destruction of the old by this light of infinite grace? I think yes, maybe something like “the Invited.”

I like “The Invited” because it is a category of tension, expectation, tempered by love. The invitation must be accepted.

Insofar as God chooses, God would choose all, but consumation awaits each one’s acceptance – to choose God, to “identify” as child and heir.

I like the point you make that it is not a “both/and” but a “neither/nor.” In many ways (before) when I read that verse, I still kept the categories of “Jew” and “Greek” on such people, but I somehow just act like those categories don’t exist for awhile. It seems that we must not just “act” like these categories don’t exist, but really BELIEVE THAT THEY DON’T. This draws us to pray for the Spirit to give us a humble understanding of each other so that we are enter this “suspended space” every day, every minute, every second and so on. These categories aren’t just “put on hold” but, by the Spirit’s power, they don’t exist anymore within us.

Great stuff!

Evan

Hi Dan. Great questions. I list last the one you rightly place first, because it goes deepest into the mystery. I have suggested that true identity is predicated thusly, “I am >>> a child of God.” Obviously there is more involved than the simple affirmation, but it’s my guess that all of what it entails cannot be shown to a soul before the kenotic event. I think we can, however, look at Paul, and ask the question again: “What were the identities into which Paul was “re-invested” after following Christ in the kenotic event?”

Allowing for this change in question (c) it’s answer can be illuminated by all of the possible answers to question (a) (the “where else” in Paul’s writings). My best current answer to (a) is Romans 3:29, where Paul asserts the premise of his new A/theology: “God is >>> a God of goyim.”

This heretofore unheard of identity statement for God serves us pretty well, not only because it perfectly represents the sense of Galatians 3:28 (“neither Jew nor Greek”) but because it also provides what you require in (b) – a “balance” to the religious eccentricity upon which Paul bases his identity in his famous genetic boast, “I am >>> a Hebrew of the Hebrews” (Phil 3:5).

In fact, Rom 3:29 applies such a counterbalance to Paul’s ethno-religious identity as to utterly overthrow the predicate of Phil 3:5, exposing the whole as a false identity. Because Rom 3:29 assigns predicates to God that are inconceivable in the context of any authentic identity predicated on a phrase containing the preposition “>>> of the Hebrews.” There is no longer the issue of “who’s chosen and who’s not.” None are chosen, because all are chosen, in the new light which Paul has found “in Christ.”

All of which Paul freely and quickly admits in Phil 3:8, in astonishing testimony that the deep structure of his “old” identity as a Jew remains nothing to him but loss, an empty shell in comparison to his new identity in Christ.

The equation of union with uniformity might constitute a logical fallacy, or a spiritual fallacy. My once-adolescent daughter used to argue this kind of equation against the concept of an everlasting life of eternal perfection. “Wouldn’t we all end up exactly the same?”

I can’t see how one could prevent the fallacy from entering into every scheme of transformation or perfection based on external rule-adherence and not based on a full appreciation of the very peculiar component which is transformed or saved – the God-identified human. God is indispensible in the transaction which yields both the new birth and ultimate salvation. But what is born and what is transformed and perfected is humanity and not deity, a unique child emergent from the material realms, whose personal reality perfects under “it’s own” sequence and formula without strict conformity to anything but God’s will.

I think it should be possible to use the concept of “identity” without swamping it with mental expectations of resultants that must be identical.

-John