BibleProject - Does the Church Supercede Israel? – Feat. Andrew Rillera

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

How can the book of Ephesians contribute to conversations surrounding modern race and justice issues? Tim and Jon interview New Testament scholar Andrew Rillera and discuss Ephesians 2 and the unified, diverse family of God.View full show notes from this episode →Timestamps Part one: (0:00–11:00)Part two: (11:00–19:45)Part three: (19:45–30:00)Part four: (30:00–43:30)Part five: (43:30–55:00)Part six: (55:00–61:15)Part seven: (61:15–64:30)Part eight: (64:30–end)Mentioned ResourcesPreston Sprinkle, Nonviolence: The Revolutionary Way of JesusAndrew Rillera, "Tertium Genus or Dyadic Unity? Investigating Sociopolitical Salvation in Ephesians"R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian TheologyWillie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of RaceTommy Givens, We the People: Israel and the Catholicity of JesusShow Music “Defender Instrumental” by TentsShow produced by Dan Gummel. Show notes by Lindsey Ponder.Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode. All right, Tim.

We finished a whole series on the theme family of God and we get to do an interview. Yes. With someone that you got to know recently. Yeah, tell us about that. Yeah. Yeah, so we've had this long series tracing the theme of the multi-ethnic, international family of Abraham and the Messiah

in the storyline of the Bible. And as I was reading, and actually it's true, a friend of a friend, I came across work of a New Testament scholar Andrew Rillera who has been pursuing like these very questions especially in Paul's letters which is where we ended our conversations for the podcast and so it just felt like a perfect fit to include an interview with Andrew about this. So Andrew Rillera he said a New Testament scholar who's finishing his PhD,

a Duke Divinity School. He's been an adjunct professor of biblical studies at Eternity Bible College. Some time ago he co-authored a book with another New Testament scholar, Preston Sprinkle, called Fight, a Christian case for nonviolence, though I just learned it's going to be retitled and re-released again under the title nonviolence, the revolutionary way of Jesus, which by the way, when I was a pastor, I took multiple book clubs through that book. It was awesome.

Yeah, I've never read it. It's a biblical theology of nonviolence. And a good chunk of it is from the Old Testament, which might surprise some people. But anyway, so that's awesome. He's published a number of academic articles, but the one that caught my attention is actually, you have to be published, at least as we're talking right now.

It's gonna be published in 2021 in a journal called Biblical Research. It's on Ephesians 2. The title of the article is Turtium Gainus, which is Latin. Sounds Latin. It's Toy. For third race.

And we'll talk about what that means. Turtium gainus or dyadic unity, investigating socio-political salvation in Ephesians. I learned a ton from this pact with SA and Andrew. It's great to have you on the podcast. We're really excited to talk with you. Honored to be on here. It's great. Thank you.

Totally. So before we even take another step, talk with you. Honored to be on here. It's great. Thank you. Totally. So before we even take another step, we're gonna have as our launching pad a really dense paragraph from Ephesians chapter two. Oh, but actually, you know what? Before we do that, Andrew, I would love for our listeners to hear a little bit more about who you are

and your story, then we'll get into the weeds. Sure. Yeah. I think one of the more important things to know about me, as far as like why I'm in this line of work, this weird place of difficult scholarship, trying to find gainful employment and all that. But it really has to do with me growing up, Jehovah's Witness. You can Google around, find more about them and I'm not going to take up some airtime just describing their beliefs.

But basically, one thing that will flag is, is they don't believe in the triune God. They think, the Trinity being one God, eternally existent, three distinct persons united in a divine essence. They're modern day Arians, if anyone knows church history with Arius, who did not believe Jesus was God, but rather the first created being from God, the word of God being a creature. They're with areas on this. They don't believe Jesus is God. And with the Holy Spirit, they don't believe the Holy Spirit, even a person, let alone God. It's kind of like Star Wars, active force type of thing. But my parents got divorced when I was younger. type of thing. But my parents got divorced when I was younger. My mother grew up in a reformed Jewish house, while she was adopted into it from birth, then became a josemaness, then became a Christian in a conservative evangelical context. And putting the trauma of divorce

to the side for a second, I mean, that in itself, it caused another crisis for me, which was a theological crisis. Because I had the rest of us at a very young age with profoundly different ways of interpreting scripture from two people who both love me, both more sincere, both representing whole communities of interpretive communities, my mom and my dad, both believing the Bible to be the inspired word of God, yet coming to drastically different conclusions about its meaning, its interpretation, the view of God, all these things. You're a little guy.

I was more around four fifths sixth grade of like really like, wait, all this stuff is super conflicting, but my parents were divorced when I was four. But around the age of seven, eight, it really started to sort of rock my world in that theological sense. I mean, again, there's all to sort of rock my world and that theological sense. I mean, again, there's all kinds of things going on with a young divorce and all that are being young and experiencing a parents go through the divorce.

But I was sitting the Bible very closely just as a matter of like survival and coping with a theological crisis that this divorce or kind of sprung upon me. So I've just been interested, almost as a matter like as a survival necessity in biblical studies and theology from a very young age. And so that's just kind of, I just happened to grow up basically. You know, time happens everyone and I was just keep having these questions, keep wanting to be able to be a responsible and thoughtful reader of scripture and teacher. And so I just kinda kept going with my, I did undergrad in Bible, did a Master's at Fuller

and now I'm at Duke, doing a PhD in New Testament and minor in theology and early Judaism and stay curious, you know? Yeah, so interesting, you know, John, you and I have had the Bible play different roles in our lives, our formative years, and then Andrew to think about you. And the encounters we have or don't have with the Bible, right, in those formative years, man, they really do set a trajectory even into our adult years, don't they?

Absolutely. Yeah, why do you think you decided to just keep doubling down on the Bible and investigate it versus just go, huh? My parents think different things, who knows, I'll leave it be. It's going to sound really pious. The calling of God, I don't know. I have two older brothers who did exactly what you just,

they just went whatever I don't care anymore. And to this day, one of them's kind of asking questions a bit more now. He's 10 years older than me. But yeah, I mean, I don't know why I was different for me. It just was. I didn't feel like I was deciding to do this. It just kind of felt like I said a matter of necessity. I got to figure this stuff out, type of a thing. And the further I got along, though, the further I started to notice some troubling patterns that have regrettably in real time come to a tragic climax in this nation. And namely, that the same sorts of patterns of thinking and interpretation that I inherited as Joe's witness and studied were replicated in my conservative evangelical context, just substituting out a couple bits. And I was really troubled

by that. I wanted to understand how to teach people who claim allegiance to God and to his word. And I wanted to wrestle with these questions of the Bible is used and wielded as a weapon of oppression and in some context, just look at some history. But how also it's been reclaimed as a tool for redemption and of setting things right of training in righteousness and justice. And so that's kind of why I kept going into my adulthood, is wanting to be a responsible reader and teacher of scripture to the church. Yeah, a sense of calling. I'm curious, how would you describe that? Was it just a conviction? Was it was it something more than that?

I think it comes, you know, in a variety of ways. It's both something I get excited about, like a stuff I would do in my free time. I play hockey, still grew up playing ice hockey or roller hockey first. Ice hockey, you know, that's like normal kid stuff right in your bike, skateboarding, so I did all that stuff, but I didn't do it as often as my brother's and other friends. What I wanted to do for fun in my free time wasn't always just watch the hockey game or whatever, but was, you know, I want to read. I need to figure these questions out.

So it was something I liked to do. And then as I got older and you're kind of thrust into leadership roles, right? This Bible nerd guy. And it's like, oh, you should be a pastor. And I resisted that for a while. Because I was like, no, this is just what, to me, this is just what a normal person should be doing that's claiming, the claiming to believe these things. This should be something that everyone just does.

Like this is just a normal pattern of life for a Christian. It, this isn't something that's unique that's whatever. Yeah, so I think being kind of given opportunities to teach in various contexts and being affirmed by that in various ways, kind of over time, sealed that in my mind that whatever I'm going to do ultimately, it's going to have something to do with bringing the fruits of biblical scholarship in the time I've been given as a gift to devote most of my waking time hours to to be used in service for the church.

So yeah, I said, it's kind of sounds super pious. I get it. I totally get it. Andrew, everything you're saying, I really resonate with and understand. Yeah. And I've forced John, where he's willingly come along with me and let me take him down the rabbit hole of biblical studies. And it's wonderful. It's wonderful down here.

It's going to be. We're spulging. We're spulging is the medical abuse. So we're going to jump into Ephesians. You're going to read this paragraph because at the center of this paragraph is a difficult translation issue. And I'm actually kind of coming in a bit blind. So I'll ask the questions that everyone else is asking. This is a wonderful, what I loved about this essay, Andrew, was that it's a great example of the literally the

interpretation and translation of one verse in one of Paul's letters opens up how you think about the whole biblical story as it relates to ethnicity and race. And you know any there are just sometimes where like one sentence in the Bible becomes like a lightning rod for a whole bigger set of universal issues related to a passion of yours, which is why you wrote this essay in the first place. I guess we're gonna drill down and get nerdy, and then we're gonna keep expanding out to talk about why you think how we understand this paragraph and Paul's theology of the multi-ethnic family of God. Why this matters for the church right now.

I'll start. I'm gonna read this paragraph Andrew and then I'm gonna start asking you questions about it. Perfect. So this is from Ephesians chapter 2 verse 11, Paul says, therefore, remember that at one time you Gentiles, remember John that's our word, ethnos, ethna, which means nations, in Greek. The nations in the flesh, you who are called uncircumcised by those called the circumcised and then he breaks off his sentence and inserts a comment. The circumcision performed by hands in the flesh. Yeah, so if you're lost already, the circumcision made was a sign, a symbol

that you were in the covenant family of Abraham. Correct. Is your lights. And so the nations, they didn't do it. Yeah. So Paul's just basically saying, hey, all you in the nations, you didn't have this sign that said you were part of the family. Yeah, so yeah, he's addressing a majority non-Israelite,

non-messianic Jewish audience here. He's flagging that, a significant. And he says, remember that y'all were, in the past, apart from the Messiah, you were estranged from citizenship or the citizenry of Israel. You were foreigners to the covenants of the promise having no hope without God in the world. But now, in Messiah Jesus, y'all who were at one time far off have been brought near by the blood of the Messiah. He himself is our peace. He's the one who made the two into one, having destroyed the barrier of the wall, having exhausted in his flesh the hostility. That is, the Torah of commandments with decrees, so that he could create in himself the two into one new humanity making peace,

and that he might reconcile to God these two by means of one body through the cross having killed the hostility in himself. Last bit. And as he came, he announced good news of peace to all of you who were far off, peace to those who are near, because through him we both by means of one spirit have access to the father. Holy cow, that is a dense, as dense as sentence or paragraph is once that one sentence. Sorry, a dense paragraph as you could want. So, Andrew, you wrote this essay because paragraphs like this in Paul's letters, which are clearly relating to Israel and non-Israelites and how they come together

as the one. This is a big theme in Paul's writings. However, there's a lot of disagreement about what exactly Paul was saying and doing with this idea that God's creating one family out of all the nations. And there's actually an important fork in the road issue here about how people understand Paul's theology of God forming one family out of the nations. And there's a long theological word called sup recessionism that often comes into play here. So help us draw the map for us of the set of issues in Paul's theology and why it matters for how we us of the set of issues and policyology and why it matters for how we think about the family of God.

Sure. So I think, so let's talk about, we're saying it, supercessionism. I can't get into the weeds, but basically to supersede something is to replace it, to overtake it. You know, you're one up it. It's one up the. So supercessionism, because it's kind of nebulous like that can be applied in various ways. So to be clear about kind of what I'm talking about and what I see the issue is, is in the history

of Christianity, there's the theologian Kindle Solen who teaches over at Emory wrote a book called The God of Israel and Christian Theology. And he talks about two different kinds of supercessionism. One is punitive, supercessionism. And this is, so what we're talking about is Israel and the church, right? These two different groups, the circumcise, the uncircumcise. The question is, is Israel superseated by the church? And there's punitive supercessionism, which says that yes, answers yes, it is the church

for places Israel, completely, and it's punitive because they rejected their Messiah. This is God's punishment on them, and they are forever abandoned. Everything gets transferred over to the Church. Punitive supercessionism. They're superseded as punishment. Then there's economic supercessionism, which is softer. Sometimes they go hand in hand, but it's basically the idea that Israel, according to the flesh, kosher, all these things are now have become obsolete. They're kind of meaningless now in the church.

So the church is superseded, Israel, but not as a punishment, just kind of because of we've moved on to a different dispensation type of thing. And what I'm kind of mapping here is you get economic supercessionism creeping in either wittingly or unwittingly. Whenever we think that baptized Jews within the church that they should no longer be Jewish, they should no longer practice Judaism, they should no longer circumcise their sons, they should no longer pass on that Jewish identity generation after generation because it's been wiped out. Right? This passage in Ephesians, as Tim said, has become sort of the flashpoint for certain interpreters

for this view that Judaism is abolished in the church because of the syntax that goes on in a couple of those verses, which Jesus is abolishing something. And it's Torah's mentioned and commandments are mentioned. And so people just say, Jesus is abolishing something. And it's Torah's mentioned and commandments are mentioned, and so people just say, Jesus is abolishing the Torah and the commandments. And in the church, it's created this homogenous sameness, where there's no distinctions anymore in terms of ethnicity and all that.

We're all just this same thing. And therefore, Jews are becoming former Jews. They're becoming, they need to become Gentile. And if they don't, one famous New Testament scholar that I interact with in my article, explicitly flags this up as saying, you're re-arracting the border of hostility if you as a Jew continue these things in the church. And again, willingly or unwillingly, I think that's both wrong. Number one, exegetically and two, incredibly dangerous,

and is exactly the rhetoric that has been used throughout the centuries to not just promote anti-semitism, but to transfer that anti-semitism where the Jew then just becomes the symbol for everything that Christianity is not and everything that's wrong and evil in the world. So in medieval theology, legalisms, a big deal, oh, Jews are legalists, right? New perspective comes along and says, I don't know, it's not legalism, it's ethnocentrism.

They're nationalist, ethnocentric, all of Judy, that's all these markers that makes them guilty of ethnocentrism. And so those ideas then get transferred over. A book I was suggesting on this is Willie Jennings book, what is it called? The Christian imagination. I forgot the subtitle or if you Google Willie Jennings in the Christian imagination. And one of the students when my teachers, Tommy Givens, who teaches at Fuller, was a book called Israel and the Catholicity of Jesus deals with this issue of that superstitionism being transferred over in the church and in the colonial age to all others. Any difference, these would then be smoothed out and homogenized and assimilated. It's a project of assimilation.

So, mishiology gets wrapped up in assimilating people into a sameness. And this is why I think it's so I'm raising the stakes basically what I'm trying to do here both in terms of history. But then I chose this passage to discuss these things because I think this passage itself raises the stakes. It pushes these concerns into a so-tierological register. Is that too big of a word? I love it. It's a salvation issue, right? There's salvation being mentioned here and the only time we hear about Jesus' death and the fruit of it, what does Jesus' death do?

It's mentioned right here with all these, when I call sociopolitical concerns. And that's just a way of saying, hey, get out of our individualism and it's like going to heaven when he died thing. This is what we mean in our culture by social concerns, political concerns. This is exactly where this is located. And so we don't get this right. It's not just bad exegesis,

it's bad salvation theology, it's bad satiriology, and it has immense historical consequences. So this is just one passage though, right? I'm not trying to say that this is doing everything. There's a lot of work to be done is being done, but this is an important passage. Alright, Andrew, that's the whole package right there. There's so many good little nuggets you laid along a trail right there, so I'm going to go back. So let's start in this paragraph. In policyology, we got these two groups. And Paul here is saying these two have become one. And super sessionism, we're in the title of your article, Turtium Gainus, which is a Latin phrase that means third race.

Yeah. Third race. So this would be a view that says, if you're becoming a Christian, you're leaving whatever Gentile identity you had before. Jews are called to leave their Jewish identity and you become the new humanity. And in this interpretation, the new humanity is ethnically colorblind, that's what we're. Supposedly, supposedly. Supposedly. That's the problem is it's not just becomes Gentile, just Greek or whatever the dominant hegemonic culture is. In our day, it becomes a whiteness.

Yes. Okay, good. So in other words, that way of reading what the new humanity is, your convinced is both damaging and this had damaged throughout your history. But that also, if you pay close attention, that's not what Paul means. He doesn't envision the new humanity as erasing people's pre-existing ethnic or national identity, which by the way, John, when we started the series,

it's the first question you asked when we started talking about ethnicity and the family of God. What's the status of our existing national ethnic family identities? So let's get into why you think this is an incorrect reading. It's not what Paul meant. It is damaging, but let's talk about what Paul meant

for a moment. Well, can we first talk about why some people think Paul means there's supposed to be this? What's the word homogenous? Homogenous. Homogenous. Homogenous ethnicity. I want to register what you said. Just make sure I get it.

Because I think this is important. If your theology is saying, believe behind your nationality or leave behind your ethnicity, leave behind your traditions to become this new thing, then that might sound nice, but in reality, whatever the dominant tradition ethnicity is, that's the thing that will take over. And that's not a hypothetical. Like that's something you just look back that's provable. That's

just in fact, it's not just like, oh, this could happen. Right. And that's the Tower of Babel Project 2, a little bit of what we talked about, which is one thought and one language. Yeah. And so, how do you get to that reading? First, let me just help me understand how you get to that reading here. Like, why is that been the common reading? The one I think is the mistaken reading? Is that what you just say?

How do we get to that one? That's a great question. I think Tim Redd a version that incorporated our kind of, I don't want to call it a revision, because I think I'm translating the Greek properly. But it's a revision of most English translation. So if you're reading your English translation, for instance, the NRSV at Ephesians 2.15, it'll say that he might, he might create in himself one new humanity, then they add this, this isn't in the Greek, in place of the two, thus making peace.

So the condition of peace and reconciliation is predicated on that translation on replacing the two. The two being Jew and non-Jew, Israel and non-Israel. Yeah, what he calls the foreskin and the circumcised, or the nation's ethney and the Israel. So those are the two groups throughout. But I think, so yeah, so that's how this happened before there's English translations of the Bible.

There's a complicated set of historical circumstances that I think led up to this sort of reading of what the church is. Which verse was that again? Ephesians 2, 15. I'm going to get a traditional translation of what the church is. Which verse was that again? Ephesians 2.15. I'm gonna get a traditional translation in front of you here. He himself is our peace. We made the two groups into one, destroying the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.

By the way, the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, what's he referring to here? Exactly. That's the question. Okay. That's the question. Okay. That's a question. And so he set aside his flesh, the law with its commands and regulations. And his purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two. That's making peace. That's the new international version.

That's NIV. So you say, I said, set aside the law, right? Yeah, set aside the law. Yeah. So it's equating in that reading. It's equating the dividing wall with the law with the law, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, set aside the law, yeah. Yeah, so it's equating in that reading, it's equating the dividing wall with the law. With the law. And that's what needs to be removed. If there's going to be peace, you need to remove the law,

and you need to replace the two. Although that one didn't say replace, so good job on them. And that verse, and I'll say in place of the two. But just to make it crystal clear, the issue at stake here is that the law given to Israel, which in particular we're talking about circumcision, but there were other issues, kosher, Sabbath observance, that to become part of the new family, do you have to leave that behind? Or can you still participate in those traditions?

Because that's part of your tradition. And if Paul is saying here that the dividing wall of hostility, the thing that's keeping the family separated are those traditions, then you would have to say, well, then you have to get rid of them. Stop using them. That's what's dividing the family. Exactly. That is not just the danger, isn't just maybe anti-Semitism.

The danger actually is much bigger than that. It actually is. Now it's this idea of some sort of new superior race. That's just going to be the dominant race. Yeah. You got to respond to all these others because otherwise they're divisive, right? Essentially. Right. That's what these readers do. And to their credit, that's what a lot of these commentators actually say, which is why they're using Ephesians 214 to 15 to make these comments on Toro Observants. But the problem is, as you guys, I mean,

in real time, I just listened to the podcast, y'all released on X, right? Yeah. And as you say on X, right? Yeah. And as you say to him, right? So we're on a lot of the same page on all this that Peter's vision isn't about abolishing cash fruit and all this stuff. So I'm not gonna repeat what you said. The thing I want to say is that the whole problem in X-15, the question concerning whether

those from the nations, Gentiles, are obligated to observe Torah. You can't make sense of that problem. It's unintelligible unless it was taken for granted that baptized Jews ought to remain Torah observant. And part of that is continuing circumsize their sons that are born. And this is something that's represented in several places in the New Testament and Paul's letters of Corinthians,

first Corinthians 70 says, this is a law. I mean, a command. I lay down all the churches that, if you're circumcised, you're not to seek becoming uncircumcised. You're not to abandon that. And likewise, if you're not circumcised, you're not to think that you're obligated to become Jewish, to become circumcised. Paul goes through this elaborate thing in Acts 21, with James and several others to prove publicly his message about not circumcising has nothing to do with the Jewish people and everything to do with the Gentiles as obligating Gentiles to become Jewish. I want to be clear at this point though, because I get this all the time when I teach New Testament intro, or it comes up

in historical theology that I teach and stuff, I wanna be clear that it's not that I think or Paul, whichever way, however we wanna phrase this, it's not that I think Paul thinks that circumcision is necessary for salvation for Jews, and the Jews are saved in a different way than Gentiles. Jesus alone is necessary for salvation for Paul, creating the Paul. Both Jews, non-Jews alike, salvation is only through Jesus. However, the issue at hand has to do with ecclesiology, right?

That is, what's the nature of the church? Is it supposed to be this colorblind, new race thing that's superseding not just the Jews but all others? Or is it a union of all nations, especially, and it's core, the Jewish nation? You guys like the Babel and your podcast and here, earlier podcasts. I think what we need to realize is that having a kind of colorblind homogenous, non-Jewish, all these words, right?

This kind of community as a church, that's just a new Babel, it's a new Babel. Yeah. And so for Paul, it's important, it's very important. Not just the question of, is this individual in? And I would wanna say in what? If we're asking if Paul wants to, is this person in the thing

which demonstrates to the powers? This is Ephesians 3, 9 and 10, are you in the thing that demonstrates to the powers that they have been superseded by the Lord Jesus Christ and that you are seated with Jesus far above them. Are you in that thing? Well, for that answer, are you in that? You need to be in a community that looks like a community of diversity and of difference, of hospitable difference rather than hostile

difference. And so we too often, I think, get stuck on the individual level. Are you saying individual to be saved? I need to do this that and the other thing. No, and Paul's concern isn't that here. It's actually what demonstrates to the powers that there's a new Lord. And it's a certain sort of polis. It's a certain sort of political entity. And that entity cannot be colorblind.

Homogenous can't be that. So, that's good, actually, this was a whole section of the essay, it was really illuminating. You draw attention to the fact that this paragraph in Ephesians 2 is actually the second half of a much larger movement of thought, and that the paragraph right before it, so Ephesians 2 versus 1 through 10, is actually drafted. Paul drafted that paragraph to be a precise parallel progression of ideas that he comes back and runs through again from a different angle in the paragraph that we just read. And this was really helpful for me. This is where you get the phrase social, sociopolitical salvation. So can I just read how these two paragraphs are parallel? And then I want you to summarize kind of the conclusions

you drew from that. This was super helpful for me. So Ephesians 2 begins with some really famous words, actually, well known words. And if you're in Christian circles, it begins, and y'all were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which at one time you walked, doing the desires of the flesh.

He goes on to say that you were under the ruler of the authority of the heir, the spirit, now at work, among those who are disobedient, the powers, the powers. But then he says, but God, being rich in mercy, made us alive together with the Messiah. It's by grace that you've been saved. He made y'all alive together with the Messiah, raise you up together, seated you together in the heavenly realms in Messiah. You've been created in Messiah Jesus for good works. That whole line of thought and even the words are all repeated again.

So you were at one time dead, but then he says, in starting in the second paragraph, y'all were at one time Gentiles estranged from Israel. So being dead in your sins is equated with being estranged from the nation of Israel from the covenant promises of Israel. Yes, you were under the ruler of the authority of air. Paul says you were divided by this dividing wall, whatever that is, in angel, you'll talk about that. He says, but God was rich in mercy, saving us, making us alive with Messiah.

And then he says in the second paragraph, but now in Messiah Jesus, you've been brought near by the blood of the Messiah. And the previous paragraph, he made you alive together, raised you up together, seated you together with Messiah. And that's parallel to the verses we're talking about where he made the two one. He brought together those that were separate. So why is Paul drafted these two paragraphs alongside each other, Andrew?

Why do you think that's significant for our understanding of what it means to be saved in Paul's language? Well, yeah, it goes back to what I was trying to stumble over earlier, which is that participating in salvation is participating in a certain sort of political reality for Paul. And by the word political, maybe define what you mean, I think you mean the biblical word political, like the Greek word. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I'm also assuming, maybe I should, I'm also assuming listeners are tracking with all your previous stuff and work on these things that have hurt you.

ExploCate. So, yeah, I mean, you can think about as your public life together, your common life together, what you do in public, which isn't as separable from what you do in private, because that impacts. It's just, I mean, yeah, so what I mean is the visible gathering of people around certain customs and commitments and liturgies and all these stuff. Yeah. And the life that exudes out of that. Yeah. What Paul is articulating is that certain that. Yeah. What Paul is articulating is that certain political gatherings are under the Lordship. I mean, he says this explicitly in verse two, chapter two, verse two, here under these powers that have been usurped by Jesus, or Jesus has been exalted over. So these powers

that rule over the systems and institutions of the world bring death and hostility to vision, all these things. Your participation in salvation, God's raising you up and seeding you together with Christ, it's actually another parallel that goes back even further with what God did for Jesus. Same verbs other than Paul puts a prefix, the width, co, even co-raised with've been co-raised with Christ,

and co-seated with Christ. These are the verbs God did to Jesus, raised them up, seated them, heavenly places. What Paul is saying is, what does that look like? What does that actually mean that you've been saved by this God in this way of being raised and seated? Well, it looks like participation in this new humanity in which former hostilities have

been abolished and you are together united before God. But there's a lot more to that that I want to unpack. But part of the reason I show the parallel is just to say, this is a salvation issue for Paul in the slutter. This isn't just like, oh, let's, I don't know, talk about application or something like that. This is he's explicating the salvation that he just talked about. And by salvation, you mean... Deposit, he talks about with the spirit, right? You've been given the spirit as a deposit.

What is that life? What is this anticipatory experience of a renewed humanity mean? You can have that now, only if you are part of this community. So that has nothing to do and that's going to annoy people. It annoys me. I'll admit it. That has nothing to do with a person's individual post-mortem fate. He's not concerned about that right here.

He's concerned about how do you participate right now in this world for all the coming ages? So he's anticipating this is going to go on for a bit. How do you share in the life of salvation right now? It looks like he says in chapter four, you have to be diligent to preserve the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. And the peace is only mentioned right here before this. So in Ephesians 4.3, you go, what peace are we supposed to do? It's this

peace. The peace that he said Jesus makes. And that peace is a certain sort of gathering, a certain sort of political entity that rejects the current powers in verse 2, Ephesians 2-2, because it's over them. So that's the thing that super-seated. The powers have been keeping humanity at odds with each other, at violence and injustice and tribalism, and Christ being raised above and us being raised with Him above the powers, there's this logic of now no longer is that the animating force that you live under. There's something new that you get to be a part of. And so then the question becomes, well, what is this new thing? Is it this third race or... yeah, what's the biblical vision for this unity?

Yeah, so it's, do we need to get rid of Jewishness? And then after that's gone, what other kinds of others and things that we consider to be too other, too exotic, to nest in our midst, how to weeks, expel those from us? That becomes a question if you have a third race eclizology, because difference starts to mean division rather than an opportunity for hospitality. Yeah, so one way to restate that is to say, you could read most contemporary translations and walk away from this paragraph thinking, Paul thinks that cultural customs, for example, the example here, the practices of Torah observance, are what divides the new humanity.

And so, Messianic Jews need to leave those cultural practices aside if we're gonna experience unity. Paul would break out in a rash, you're convinced of it. Because that's exactly not what he means, what will actually tell the powers that they are powerless is people who actually practice culturally different ways of life, but discover their unity in the Messiah. And so they gather together, but they keep practicing their communities. Yes.

Excuse me, to keep practicing their traditions, here it would mean Jews who keep practicing the Torah-observant way of life, but living at peace, in unity with their Gentile neighbors who practice their own different ways of life. And so this has to do, again, down to the Stintaks and grammar of one sentence. Verse 15 of Ephesians 2, what exactly is it that the Messiah is setting aside? Most of our translation to the read, he sets aside the Torah with its commands and decrees. But there are many reasons to conclude that that's an incorrect interpretation translation.

It's not what Paul means here. So walk us through what you think's going on in this verse, and what you do think is being abolished and set aside and how this fits into the large picture. Yeah, so there's several ways to go at this. The first one is to kind of do a argument, like a geometrical proof type of argument where you assume the wrong thing, you know,

and then played out, and if the conclusion's ridiculous, then you're like, okay, well, then you've just disproved that thing, right? So let's assume the opposite of what I'm saying. Let's assume that what's going on on what's being abolished is the law Right, that that's the problem the problem is Torah observance Within within the church and the problem is circumcision So it's a problem circumcision then the solution

How do you solve that problem? The solution would not be concentrated on the citizenship change that's occurring to the nations, to the Gentiles, right? But you go read the text, all the pressures on the citizenship change of the Gentiles, vis-a-vis the politia, the political, the commonwealth, politia and Greek of Israel.

The citizenship change is strangers, they're far. All the emphasis is actually on what's happening to the Gentiles in relation to them, not, it's a problem with circumcision on something occurring to Jews who would then have to be counseled, hey, stop being distinctively Jewish for the sake of peace and reconciliation. The text would be centered on dismantling Jewishness, if the problem was Jewishness. centered on dismantling Jewishness, right, if the problem was Jewishness. But in fact, it's on the text that centered on reimagining the sociopolitical relationship between Israel and the Gentiles. And so this is why the solution isn't to replace the polytheia of Israel with the church or something else, but rather to integrate apart from circumcision, these Gentiles, these strangers,

as now fellow citizens in to 19, soon pull it here, so the same prefix that Paul put on those verbs to join us with Jesus of raising and seeding, he puts on this word for citizen, polytace, which itself means fellow citizen. It's always like, fellow fellow, he adds another prefix on there in 219. What you would expect if the third race view is right is something completely absent from

the rest of the passage. Everything, all the changes happening, not with Israel, not with a circumcision, but from the Gentiles on that side of things, which tells you that the problem is exactly what he said the problem was the problem was You at the time you're dead in your sins, right? And then now you've been made alive and then the parallel you at the time were separate from all this now You've been brought near not you were separate because they were so ethnocentric and how dare they let's get them to stop that and now we're all the same So you can look at that way, right? So just to say like okay,, well, that views wrong.

It's got to be something else. Well, then might lead you to believe that Paul mispoke then here when he called the dividing wall, the Torah and its commandments. Yeah. So that presses you into, okay, well, what in the world does that mean then? Right? So there's a few, another option that needs to be dismissed like pretty quickly, which is that the nullification of the mosaic commandments

can't be in view because just a few chapters later, I'll quote from one of the commandments, children obey your parents, or this is righteousness, this is justice. He says the first commandment that comes with a promise attached. And so obviously the community that Paul's dressing is still organized around the the commandments in the mosaic covenant. So he's not abolishing those commandments because he appeals to them just a couple of seconds later. So there's got to be again, there's got to be another what what is going on here?

Why is the Torah mentioned right there when he's talking about abolishing things and destroying things and making peace and all this. So we got those two, right? I think, I mean, this is probably too quick, right? It takes a while to work through, but at least in theory, we put away what it can't be saying. So then you want to, we want to figure out, okay, what is it say? One thing to insert is that in Greek word order is more flexible than in English. So if you're looking at your English translation and you're like, but the word order seems very clear. It's not clear in Greek. Actually, the Greek is capable of about three

different ways or more of translating and interpreting what is the dividing wall that gets destroyed. Yes, and I don't want to get really into the weeds in that right right now. Before we talk about the syntax for a second, I want to do a live exercise in hermeneutics. Once we've identified some problems and we've kind of ruled out some certain readings, how should we make sense out of the words, what are the clues we need to look for? Well, we need to see how the author, or in this case, right here in Ephesians, how are they using their words?

How are they building their own lexicon of what these words mean in this context? And so what we have is we have keywords in chapter two Dead made alive raised up Covenants of promise Torah and then covenant identity markers circumcision for skin Israel Ethnay the nation's so this to me says okay Paul speaking in within the drama of the covenant economy of Israel. So we need to go to the covenant to see if there's language there that helps us see

what he's talking about here. And lo and behold, he go to the covenant, specifically the blessings and cursings mentioned in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. And then at the end of Deuteronomy 30 Moses sums up the blessings and the cursings, the curses with life and death. I lay before you, life and death. Choose life, right? If not, all these things are all these curses are going to come upon you. So we know that already, okay, if Paul's flagging this up, hey, I'm talking about Torah, hey, I'm talking about Commandments, I'm talking about Israel and the nations. I'm talking about life, I'm talking about death. Maybe we should go to the covenants of promise that he mentions to figure out, you know, what these words mean.

And when you look at the curses, the curses don't happen in a socio-political vacuum. They implicate the nations. So when Israel's disobedient, the covenant curse of death are all about hostility with the nations. I mean, they're climaxes there, but it's first hostility kind of civil war type stuff. Like internal hostility, there's all kinds, there's there's famine, there's all sorts of bad things, but it climaxes and the nation's coming in and removing Israel from the land. That is death, right?

And then Ezekiel makes it even more clear. They're in exile and he's looking at this vision and they are the deadest, dead, dead community there ever was. Dry bones, valley of just death, right? And how is this covenant renewal pictured? It's pictured as a resurrection as being made alive again,

in a restoration of the unity of Israel itself between the North and the South and all this. And then later in Ezekiel, the nations themselves coming in, importantly, they remain the nations, right? And in Isaiah and all this stuff, they don't become Israelite. So we have in here this covenants of promise, right? This promise of renewal of all that is bound up in this language of life and death and of

socio-political hostility between Israel and the nations. And so what my argument is, is all that's there in Ephesians too. It's all that same exact language as there, and in fact in Deuteronomy, it says part of that exile, part of that when the nations come in, you're gonna serve their gods. You're gonna be under their power. And that's what I think is being flagged up with these powers that he says,

we too were under that. Because we were in the covenant curse of death. We were exiled under foreign rulers and therefore in the language of Deuteronomy, foreign gods and these spiritual powers. So the condition from which Jesus saves both the circumcised and the foreskinned Israel and the nations is the covenant economy of curses of mutual hostility and slavery to foreign gods to these powers, which is death to usher in the economy of blessing of mutual reconciliation and service to the God of life, to the God of Israel,

which is covenant life. So when you now, when you go back and look at the syntax, you go, okay, does this make grammatical? Does that kind of canonical context, not just canonical? Again, these words are actually the ones used in Ephesians too, so that when you're talking about life, death, Israel, Gentile, all those things, it kind of has this covenantal history behind it. Now, what we need to do is check that against the grammar

and say, okay, is it actually possible that what's being nullified is not the Torah itself, but the hostility, which is proclaimed or occasioned by the Torah, that is determined by the Torah. It's not just generic hostility, it's covenantal hostility, it's Torah hostility. Again, I hope you're catching the nuance there. It's not what my argument is, it's not that you're equating the Torah itself and Torah obedience itself with hostility and division and all that, but that within the Torah and its commandments, the logic of that covenant is that Israel and the nations are always tethered together for better or for worse.

It happens to be for worse right now, and Jesus is healing that covenantal curse of death to bring life. So the hostility that is being abolished is that which is prescribed within or stimulated by whatever sort of ways we want to put by the mosaics, covenants, commandments and ordinances. Now, when you look at the Greek, you'll find out, I mean, again, like this gets this is gets to the weeds part. A lot of translations

take destroyed, which is the Greek word, loose, I got to get the Greek before me. Otherwise, I'll lose my trance on some going of memory. So the it's a participle here, but it comes from the word lua means destroy. The way that a lot of translations take this verb as having to what they call direct object. So if that's already crazy and like, oh my gosh, direct objects, what's going on? Yeah, you lost me a participle. But an ing verb, just to simplify it simplify it. These are participles because grammatically they're dependent on the statement, he is our piece. And so now it's telling you how is that the case? And he uses a series of participles. Now these participles have direct objects. So

verb like I hit the ball, the balls of the direct object is the thing that receives the action of the verb. So what's receiving the action of destroyed? Well, everyone agrees this dividing wall of the fence is being destroyed. That's governed by loose us. In Greek, after loose us comes another, and in Greek, the nouns themselves have certain endings that tell you what function it has relative to the verb. Okay, so the next word after loose house is in the accusative case,

which marks it as being the direct object of a verb. So now the question is, is that belong with loose house or does that belong with another participle that follows? Again, like Tim said, there's debates all over the place on how to figure this out. What I'm saying is precisely because it's ambiguous, this is where all those negative arguments, what it can't be come in, because you can rule out on the basis of the context and coherence of just the flow of thought.

Like, okay, well, I know, like syntactically, grammatically, it could have these reference, but if it leads us down one of those roads that we already said no to, then we should prefer some other option. Okay, so this is, I realize that people are probably dying in their commute or something like that, or maybe not commuting nowadays, on their exercise bikes listening to this.

Basically, in favor of what I'm saying is Greek word orders, it's as as rigid as in English, but you typically don't have a verb that's taking two direct objects separating those two direct objects, which is what you would need to have happen for the way the NRSV translates it or the NIV or whatever else you've an ASB these translations do. What you're saying is that our common English translations are actually pulling a move in translating, but by actually violating some common Greek grammar rules. Yeah, you can't see it in English, but in Greek you can see like, that actually doesn't reflect what's going on here. And this is why it's important. It's because if you take enmity, hostility,

so Greek word, extra, if you take that as being the second direct object of loost us of destroyed, that leaves another accusative case, string of words that needs a verb. And that string of words is the law of commandments and ordinances. And then the verb attached to that one is a bit more of a forceful verb than Luot, Ketar Gell, and it means to abolish or nullify. And so then you have the only direct object for that participle is the law. So this is why it's at stake is because if you take enmity to belong to the verbal loose us to being part of the dividing hole, then you're forced into a translation that says

the law was abolished. But we've already said, well, that can't make sense. Just in this letter, itself, that doesn't, that doesn't make any sense. Because it uses these very commandments, just a couple of seconds later. So now, all right, so there's several states to this. So now, what we have is you say, okay, the wall and the fence, those are being lured, those are those are being destroyed. That the verb lured goes with that. Now you have the enmity, somehow related to the law of commandments and ordinances, that's being nullified or abolished. So the direct object of that verb abolish, catch or go, is x-ray or x-ray,

if you're using the accusative case, the hostility, the enmity. What I'm saying is the reason you get the law of commandments and ordinances tacked on, they're both in the same case and greet they're both accusative, is because it's specifying that this hostility is precisely that covenant hostility that we that I just tried to summarize, which is then exactly what we see being remedied, right? Israel, the hostility in the Torah that's

prescribed is a hostility between Israel and the nations that is summarized as death by Moses. So when you have the claim he is our peace, right? He's making us alive, this whole parallel structure, all that. He's abolishing the hostility. What hostility? The hostility, the Torah hostility. The one described in the Torah, the covenant hostility.

So it's used adjectively, I think, to describe what sort of hostility are we talking about here? 1 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 個 What I'm hearing is, and I couldn't follow all of the Greeks in text up, and that's fine. I'm sure a lot of people listening couldn't. But what I'm hearing is that one translation is that the law and its decrees were abolished. And that's kind of been the common translation. What you're saying is that what's being abolished is the enmity that was predicted by the law, or basically a foreshadowed, yeah, that the law was basically saying in Deuteronomy, Moses summing it up, like, look, this covenant promise gives you two paths, life and death, and this path of death is disunity amongst Israel and disunity amongst the nations, and this subjugation to powers, the gods. And that thing, having been, what's the word you just used? Occasioned by the law? Yeah, brought about. Because Moses says that

if you disobey, if you disobey the commands of the Torah, these other nations are going to come destroy you. The Torah itself is saying, the of yeah the Torah is is going to make this become this is a promise of the Torah. Yeah, it's a covenant curse is what it's called one of the curses of the Torah. Okay, and that makes and that makes sense. The thing it's being abolished is the thing that the Torah was. And what Paul saying is that the Messiah's death exhausted the power of that hostility. Can I think of a moment where Israel's Messiah put himself in between Israel and the nations,

and he died? Well, there's this moment where he's condemned to death by the high priest and put to death by Roman centurions. This where you go, Andrew, right? The point is that the cross is the moment where the Messiah stands in between and gets killed by the hostility between Israel where the Messiah stands in between and gets killed

by the hostility between Israel and the nations. And even intra-Jewish hostilities have had a relate to Rome and all that. So yeah, yeah. In the Gospels, what occasions Jesus' death itself is intra-Jewish hostilities culminating in hostility with the Gentile powers. That is exactly the kind of death Jesus dies as a crucified want to be insurrectionist revolutionary. And so it gets focused on his body that hostility in a very particular way. And he exhausted as Tim said. And so this is why I think also like in a side, but

is why I'm not saying that those covenant that life and death now? I think part of policyology is that Jesus has removed forever the conditionality of that covenant that no longer is the conditionality of, I said before you life and death contingent upon Israel's obedience to the commandments. This is part of the proclamation of the salvation of Jesus' death and how he's making peace, is that he's exhausted that hostility. Interesting. And that is part of the Torah. So in a way, he is abolishing something that the Torah was doing.

Would that be fair to say? This is why, when Jeremiah's proclaiming New Covenant, or Ezekiel with the restoration is as symbolized as resurrection and all that, part of both of those visions of renewal is a renewed capacity, something happening internally, which Paul, I think would identify with the spirit of Jesus in you, putting to death the deeds of the flesh

in the body, in your mortal body. Part of the blessing of that new covenant is a capacity for obedience. Because obedience isn't seen as the condition anymore of God's blessing, but as the result. Now as the result. Exactly. And so obedience is just a matter of, as you guys rightly pump on a lot of being image bears in this world. And you know, from Genesis 1 to Psalm 8, and all the Psalm 8s quoted in Ephesians 1, the end there, this is part of Jesus' exaltation with all things under His feet. So it's part of us living into that original human vocation.

And this is what I mean about being, you know, why this has so theological importance, is because part of that salvation is enabling us to participate in that sort of humanity, that sort of way of being with one another in this world, above these powers and structures that try to gather and separate us in various ways that are hostile rather than ways, like I said before, the occasion hospitality. So one way to think about this, that Paul also flags later, is the oneness of two being the marriage of husband and wife. And he says almost verbatim, the same thing

that the two become one, and he's quoting from Genesis and all this, we don't need to get into rabbit holes there, but the point for me, and for this conversation, is that this oneness doesn't obliterate the tunis of the husband and wife. Paul's not saying become androgynous, you know, and like forget about all this stuff. And that's exactly what I think he's saying earlier

about the two becoming one, is that the tunis isn't obliterated. You actually need the tunis for there to be any sort of visible and discernible reconciliation and peace and unity. That co-ness is exactly what Paul flags in chapter three as being what testifies to these rulers that they've been disironed. So you're no longer organizing the world the way you thought you

were. You're no longer keeping us different so that we could be divided. Instead, look at what the Messiah has done in uniting us all bringing us to God in one body while remaining two, while remaining both. 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh

1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh 1 tbh Let's get big picture again as we kind of draw the threads together, maybe with an illustration. If Paul were to see a group of Christians gathering and you can see that there are a bunch of different ethnic groups, but that all of them have just jettisoned their different uniquenesses and cultural uniquenesses and are all just adopting one cultural mode of living together.

He would see that as a failure. He would see that as a defeated church. As opposed to a community He would see that as a defeated church as opposed to a community That consists of all those and they are actually are discovering a new way of life together where there are differences including baptized Messianic Jews and Torah observants where their differences in rich each other They learn from each other's differences and adopt and cross-pollinate so to speak in peace That's the vision that Paul's painting here. I think so, and I think part of the reason it's so hard for us to get out of this is because of, and this is why important historical study and theological reading of history that Willie Jennings does

in both the Christian imagination and after whiteness and others do it, but he was the mentor of my mentor, so I gravitate to him, is what's happened with our race and ethnicity are so complex because today we've constructed race as kind of reducing to phenotype, and now I'm using other fancy language, but how your genes, like what color your skin looks like, what are the shape of your eyes and your nose, and stuff like that, and your skin color, if I haven't already said that. And so we think, because of that, we think, oh, what does it mean to be multi-ethnic? It means like, you know,

have people with different color skin around the room. That's part of the problem is we think about race and ethnicity in terms of skin color only, which is how the powers of this world organize us. So part of testifying to these powers is saying, no, it's not just about getting people with a bunch of different skin tones and nose shapes and eyes shapes and whatever air curly straight whatever together. And then that's good. But it's really fundamentally about custom and and practice and habit and and language and food and all this real nitty gritty stuff, that's a high, that's a tall order, trying to say, hey, let's do this.

And that's why we get the letters we get. But it sounds like a fun potluck. Yeah, I mean, organizing that sort of thing is exactly what Paul was struggling so hard to do because it is genuinely, I think, the work of the spirit when it happens. It's just not the way we typically tend to gather and separate from one another. So yeah, that's one way of taking the sort of the spirit when it happens. It's just not the way we typically tend to gather and separate from one another. So yeah, that's that's one way of taking the sort of like

diversity point in a wrong direction. So I'm guessing that your work on Ephesians is not going to be the end of this theme in your own research and learning. For you, what would you hope that scholarship that's trying to pursue this line of thought, just as a concluding thought from you? What do you hope the influence in the end game is for recovering this real sense of the multi-athetic family of God in New Testament theology. I think we can rediscover that God has sourced us with the resources necessary to actually embody a revolutionary vision of community of gathering. And this is happening in a lot of places in biblical studies right now, the presidential address of the society, biblical literature, it's like the big conference guild for scholars, junior scholars,

aspiring biblical studies scholars alike. I dealt Ryan Hartz in her presidential address with linking these issues of anti-judism, supercessionism and racist and concerns, which for a while have been separate. And now people are starting to see exactly how they're reinforcing one another for better, for worse. And so I think, you know, there's a book just recently came out by a Duke alum who I graduated before I got here, but his name is Matthew Tason. It's called Jesus and the Forces of Death.

Sorry, sorry, Matt. Forces of death, for sure, is in the title. And so it's dealing with these issues from the Gospels perspective about Jewish purity concerns where a lot of people say, well, Jesus abolished all this stuff. And he has a brilliant, well-researched book on that kind of addressing those concerns. I'd flag up to work of David Rudolph and Mark Kinzer and Paul Fredrickson and Pamela Eisenbaum, who are all showing in various ways that when we are beginning to be more patient, I guess, with our readings, you discover that the Paul that we've all inherited in the West is just that. So Western sort of conception.

And we're constantly in the, we as a humanity as a whole scholarship and specific, specifically are constantly having to reread and rediscover and check our own locations and how we are perceiving things. And those could be, again, for better or for worse, reading from a particular location helps you be sensitive to certain things that are there in the text. Other people just don't notice or can have you read things into the text that aren't there and so we need to be reading one another and to be hearing and listening to one another in order to push the conversation forward but I think it's when I initially wrote this it was actually in 2014 as a master student at four and then I decided to use it as a my writing sample to get into Duke a lot is actually well probably as a master student at four. And then I decided to use it as a my writing example

to get into Duke. A lot is actually, well, probably not a lot has changed. A lot, I became aware of a lot more in that intervening time, whereas of people in this same vein, trying to undo the supercessionist readings that don't actually have good historical, extrogeological basis. And so there is a lot more work to be done. This part of my dissertation

on Romans right now, there's a few things in there that I'm dealing with. Yeah. So I guess my hope is that people will start to see that this isn't as new as a may sound at first hearing it here or whatever, that it's actually conversations going on across several different types of scholars. And that I think for the church, though, again, I'm a confessing Christian. I want to serve the church with my scholarship for the church. I think reading these people or being familiar with their work is going to help us all rediscover the value that the New Testament has for addressing particularly pressing concerns facing the Church today in terms of race and ethnicity

issues. Yeah. Thanks, man. Thank you, Andrew. I know I'm a better reader of Paul. After reading your work, and it really re-inspired me with his already inspiring vision of the multi-ethnic family of Abraham. Telling the powers what's up. Yeah, telling the powers what's up.

So thanks for walking us through that. I know that was detailed, but in this case, the metaphorically speaking, the devil's in the details. And we want to flush, flush him out of the bushes to recover the unity of God's family. So thanks, Andrew, for helping us do that. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Of course, thanks for having me on.

Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to this episode of Bible Project Podcast. We are now at the end of this series on the Family of God. Thanks for coming along with us. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want to see the theme video that we're making on this theme, the family of God, well, you're gonna have to stay tuned, we're not done,

but this video will come out sometime in 2021. So keep your eyes out for it. Also, if you're interested in learning more about the things we talked about in this episode, we've linked to several works that were referenced and you can find those in the show notes. As we mentioned, Andrew Ralera is finishing up his PhD right now, so unfortunately, his article

that this whole conversation was based off of is not actually available right now, but when it does become available, we will update our show notes to link to it, so come back and check that out. Today's podcast was produced by Dan Gummel, the show notes this week by Lindsay Ponder and The Thee Music by the Band Tents.

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