(April 29, 2014 at 6:08 am)Tonus Wrote: Your explanation doesn't really clear the issue up, Vicki Q. It seems as if you're saying that yes, it was overridden but no, it wasn't either. Like many other biblical messages, the question of whether the old testament law applies is muddled because there are texts that can be used to support either viewpoint. I think most Christians prefer the version where the old law is superceded by the "new pact" because forced adherence to old testament law would be onerous for them today, seeing as they'd have to massacre anyone who worked on the weekend, for starters.
I think you're right that most Christians don't appreciate the Jewishness of their faith. The divergence really came home to me a couple of Xmasses ago when I read the beginning of Luke. It is a Christian book about a definitively Christian occasion, yet it is so packed with Jewish commentary and perspective that I felt like a visitor to someone else's culture.
The OT was not overridden, but elements of the Torah were made optional. This is why it's OK to eat prawn underwear, and wear mixed fibre sandwiches*. The idea that the OT is part of an old to-be-forgotten story is wrong, as the regular quotation rate in the NT shows.
Xians are like actors in the fifth act of a play, who have to come to terms with what has already happened to play the part. There is only one story, but it moves on as time goes by.
Alternatively, to grasp Gollum's actions in LOTR, the reader refers back to The Hobbit. Gollum no longer has the Ring, but he once did. OT writing no longer defines the people of God, but it once did. In each case the earlier story remains essential to the later, and is not to be rejected.
The OT meta-narrative was a cycle of sin->exile->forgiveness/restoration. Israel once believed with the return from Babylon that the restoration phase had begun, but by C1 it was clear that wasn't the case. The ****ing Romans were running things, and C1 Israel was expecting God to sort it all out.
The Xian proclamation is that God acted, at the much greater whole-of-world level as originally promised to Abraham. An interesting question is- why would they think that?
*More fun that way. Trust me on that.
